>>Mhm. Hey, welcome to the cubes coverage of HP discover 2021. I'm lisa martin. I have two guests with me here today. We're gonna be talking to the walt. Disney company. Jason Abrahamson is here. The Director of infrastructure engineering. Jason. Welcome to the program. >>Hi, how you doing >>doing well. And James Irvine is here as well. Account chief technologist at H P. D. James. Welcome to the program. >>Yeah, I like to thank you. >>Okay, so we're gonna be talking about all things the HP supporting Disney relationship. But you know, things have been changing so much in technology, things have been very different for technologists in the last few years, Jason talked to us about how Disney has adapted as business needs have evolved. >>Uh you know, I think not just Disney but in general, as we've we've had to evolve, evolve as technologists. Right. And one of the ways we've done that is to focus a lot on automation and self service, enabling developers to move faster to meet the shift in business demand, business moves at the speed of light. Uh anybody that's been this business long enough knows. Uh There were years ago you could have email servers down for three hours and nobody would notice. Now if email went down for more than, you know, 35 seconds, everybody notices. Right? So in order to meet the change in demand, we've had to focus heavily on automation and self service, which has been a key strategy, is keep a key driver for as as part of private cloud. >>So Jason with infrastructure as such, a large part of your responsibilities and your job title, how has Disney been thinking about private cloud in the last few years? >>So I would say that we were probably one of the uh I don't wanna see bleeding edge, but certainly out in front when it came to private cloud, we had embarked on a cloud first strategy overall across the enterprise, uh, the goal there was to figure out how we could do more with less and be more agile and be able to flex for application developers and meet our shifts in demand. However, there are, you know, systems that for whatever reasons, business purpose or otherwise need to either span hybrid cloud or multi cloud or stay on premise. So in order to uh get a cloud like environment for application developers and whatnot, we decided to build out a robust, private cloud environment that allowed all of our application developers to be able to just bring their code or get a server and try to get as much of the public cloud functionality on premise as we possibly could >>James. Let's bring you into the conversation, talk to us about the H P E WAlt Disney company relationship and how HP is supporting walt. Disney. >>Yeah, HP and Disney have had a long standing relationship dating all the way back to HP and Disney as far as the audio oscillators concerned. So we've had an extraordinarily long history, the technology and co innovation partnership that we've worked on together through the years. And as Jason mentioned, you know, the journey around private cloud and working together in that technology relationship is just has been fantastic. And we've supported them with all the innovation and technology is needed for them to meet their bulls. >>Excellent. All right, Jason, let's go back to you. I want to dig into this private cloud strategy a little bit more. You mentioned this a minute ago, but as we look at and here so many discussions and strategies revolving around public, multi cloud, Why is private cloud so important to Disney? >>Well, we have a tremendous amount of applications. We are application portfolio as massive as you can imagine. And we find ourselves in unique situations because of all of the different uh, business challenges that we have that are unique to Disney, that we have to develop applications from the ground up far more often than we probably like to admit. So, uh, private cloud allows us to uh take advantage of the public cloud, like services and technology scalability and flexibility and agility, right? And bring those on premise and be close to the business where it's absolutely critical to our business. I don't want to comment on what specific, because their services that we have to run close to the business. But you can imagine with the uh, expansive footprint of our business and how we have to interact with guests, um whether it's from a movie or at a theme park, we do have to have some services that are close to our business. And so by having private cloud, we complement our public cloud strategy uh, and and allow us to keep those most critical services very close to the business. >>Got it. You just mentioned a number of the elements of Disney. There's been a lot going on, so much going on. It's actually kind of easy to forget how new Disney Plus is, but sitting in the center of a company that's doing so much digitally, how does the shared services play a part in the overall digital transformation of the business? >>Uh, that's a great question. So obviously technology is key to our business. If you look at all the different lines of business we have and you look at all the different technology that we have. It's absolutely critical in order for us to continue to invest in technology to meet all of our business demands. Were shared services comes in is we enable the business to focus on what is critical to their business. Right? We allow resorts and even the immediate media partners to just focus solely on the technology that is critical to driving those businesses to enabling the guest experience and keeping it great. We are focused on uh everything else that is not critical for their business. The underlying infrastructure, the underpinning infrastructure right? Such as the global network, global servers, emails and so on and so forth. So it's a great compliment where it freezes the business up to focus on what's really critical for them and we can get economies of scale and synergy across our entire enterprise by delivering core services at a much more efficient costs throughout the company >>and James. I want to ask you a question. You've been working as a with the walt Disney company for a long time. We've we've seen the evolution of h p e and we've seen the evolution of Disney. Can we ask you anything about kind of, give us your perspectives on how both companies have evolved in this relationship together? >>I would say that it's been it's been a great relationship. I would say that the uh, we have continued to lean on HP from an investment perspective for our servers in certain areas storage, but mostly servers, what are the big investments we've made recently was hB synergy which is composed all infrastructure, which has allowed us to continue to uh invest in our automation strategy and allows us deliver physical servers much, much faster James. Did you want to add anything there? >>Yeah, of course, Jason. Uh it's been great to partner with with Jason and the team walt. Disney company in particular and and through this experience of them trying to achieve their private cloud goals, we've been able to bring the right technology, the right set of services to achieve these technology outcomes that they've been after and the use of automation to improve life cycle management day to operations, all the goals and aspirations that they need to really automate infrastructure and make it intelligent and started achieving the goal of the intelligent data center. So it's it's been a great technology partners of relationship we've had there, >>Jason back to you. Let's, we've talked about Disney's private cloud strategy. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about how that integrates with the rest of Disney's cloud strategy. What can you share with us? >>Well, uh >>like, like anything you want the right tool for the right job And uh, certainly the multi cloud strategy in the public cloud strategy is a huge part of our overall strategic roadmap. Where again, we use the private cloud is to complement that for applications that need to either span or stay on premise. You know, one of the things that we're just getting into now is hybrid cloud while you have application teams that are like, hey, we really just need to focus on premises where we need to be close to the business, but we have workloads that need to burst to the public cloud or need to scale out to the public cloud, uh, and you really take advantage of that. So again, we don't look at it as it used to be, not just within Disney, but in general, and most cloud strategies, it was, it's kind of like an either or now we look at it as the right tool for the right job. What's the right fit for your application? And as we continue to look at how the application stack modernizes, right used to be. How do you get servers faster? Well, now I don't want to serve. I want a container. Now. It's, I just want to bring my coat and I don't even know if I need a container. Right. The application developers really want sort of this, They really want to just focus on application development and they want to focus more on what makes their applications great. Right. We want to focus more on commoditization and blurring the lines between public and private. Really, where does the workload run best? Where is it most efficient? And where is the best for the business? And so when we look at how we build out our private cloud environment, it was really to complement our existing public cloud strategy. >>Let's talk about people now, Jason for a second. I know, I love that. Disney calls there folks, Cast members, I see the pin on your lapel there. How are the cast members at the center of this technology strategy and how does the private cloud strategy play into that? >>Well, it's one of those things where our cast members are the most important aspect of our, of our brand. If you, if you were to look at what is r one of the most valuable asset, it would certainly be our cast members right there. The front line, whether it's helping a guest, whether it's working on a movie and our overall technology strategy is all about enabling cast members to do their job as most efficiently and effectively as possible. Um, uh, when it comes to how private cloud fits into that, it's again creating an environment where the application developers and our business partners can accelerate their application growth and the delivery of their services to support our back of house operations for our cast members. So that way it doesn't impact the guest experience. There's nothing more frustrating for a cast member is when they're impeded or have issues trying to get to a resource or unable to efficiently do their job. And so by having the private cloud, by having access to resources on premise. At times it gives them the ability to deliver those and consume those applications even faster, >>which I'm sure the guests love. One of the things that you mentioned, Jason and I want to James at your opinion on this too. It's a, it's a statement that we hear very often you need to do more with less in that situation. How does Disney navigate that? And a strategy that is cost effective while you're growing your public, your private cloud strategy? >>Uh huh automation, Right? Automate automation and self service. It really it's always comes back to, I know it's a buzzword, I know people go automate this, automate that you know, what are you automating if you look at just the investments we're making right now in the HP synergy line and having proposal infrastructure combined with pockets of three tier architecture as well as hyper converge. You are we're bringing a delivery model to application teams and business teams that they haven't that is just like public cloud, Right? But that they haven't seen before. So in order to manage massive scale, uh you you need to automate more and you need to automate more in order to make sure that you have self healing, right? So you can see you can look at things and understand things and see where you're having problems and try to predict them before they happen and increase your uptime and availability. I mean it all comes back to again, automation automation, automation uh >>James. Do you have the similar opinion when you talk with customers similar to the walt Disney company that are told we've got to do more but we've got less to work with is automation one of your key go to recommendations. >>Automation is at the center of everything that we're trying to achieve today, both on premise and in the public cloud. And hyper automation is really kind of where everybody is driving to the ability to be incredibly they are incredibly efficient um using infrastructure as code api driven and using all the tools to really automate that and make the seamless delivery of new products and services just that much quicker. And, and we've been focused on that, both not only from a technology and infrastructure standpoint, but also from a consulting and delivery standpoint. So we're able to really kind of meat all the different needs as it relates to automation, both in a private cloud, hybrid cloud or multi cloud scenario with all of the partnerships that we have across all the hyper scale hours. >>James sticking with you with that. Looking through that consultant lens, I want to get some thought leadership from you. What are some of the principles that you'd recommend for businesses that really are working hard to make their private cloud investment work as efficiently as possible for them? >>A lot of that comes down >>to >>consulting and understanding. So really kind of driving to what we referred to as the right mix, what is that right mix of hybrid cloud, private cloud um applications that have gravity that need to remain on premise and there's just no reason to move them. So, working with somebody and partnering with somebody that has the ability to be able to advise and consult in that capacity across the continuum of private public as well as Edge um is vitally important for people to consider as a part of their strategy. >>Jason Edge is absolutely in critical we're hearing about it more and more, especially as so much more data and machine data is generated there. I want to get your advice for the audience the same question that I asked James, what principles would you recommend for making the private cloud investment work as hard as possible? As efficiently as possible. >>I would say that, you know, it's gonna be a unique journey for every single company, but the number one advice is remember, right tool for the right job. Right, What is your application stack? What are the types of in that? What is the type of needs of the application owners? And when you start thinking about it, you start dissecting, Are you going to be investing more microservices? Can you go with more of a serverless, container based type of environment? Are you using shrink wrap software? You're gonna need more. I as right. It all comes down to the right tool for the right job. My father was an auto mechanic and I remember as a kid, he had 8000 tools and they say no, dad, why do you have five screwdrivers? To me? They all look the same right in the heart of mechanic because no, no, no, Jason you don't understand. It's the right tool for the right job. That was always his mantra. That would be my advice. >>I like that. I think my dad would have said the same thing, right tool for the right job. Absolutely critically important. So when we think about Disney, we know, generate a ton of data, how does the growth of the private cloud, Jason support that massive data growth? >>Well, as you can imagine, we have ebbs and flows in our data. There's times where we're taking a tremendous amount of data in and there's times where we're purging a tremendous amount of data for various different reasons. Right? So one of the beauties of private cloud and how it complements the public cloud is when you go to you think about data ingestion, right? And then storage and being able to efficiently can get it on premise and what not having the private cloud there to do those types of things to use more of those B I type of work clothes there, you're just Truncheon a bunch of data. Uh it's really nice to have the private cloud. So that way the application, he can add nodes at collectors of, you know, other other log aggregation type tools, right? Whatever the tool is, you know, being able to have the flexibility to add notes very quickly, just like they can in public cloud, public cloud but have it on premise so that you can do cost control and get the data in a more timely, more efficient manner. Again though, it comes down to the type of workload and what was best for that business. I would I would be remiss if I tried to sit here and tell you that all of our big data stuff were to only reside or only use on premise technology is of course it spans like I said, we've got hybrid cloud and multi cloud, so >>it kind of goes with the right tool for the right job. One more question for both of you and I want to go back to that thought leadership angle Jason when you are talking with peers of yours, what do you recommend that technology leaders look for when they're going to be partnering with a company on any type of cloud, initiative management or implementation project? >>I was a understand you understand the problem, trying to solve, understand the technology that you want to use and understand again, your application portfolio and perhaps because I'm insured services, a large company, I have a unique perspective of having to deal with very different problems at any given day on any given week. And you know, sometimes we forget about those, especially as technologists, we tend to forget that the decisions we make have wide and far reaching impact within our application stacks and within the individual businesses. And I think if if you uh look at what is my application stack, what are the types of technologies? How how is it going to be if you are doing just shrink wrap, then you probably shouldn't be investing in cloud technologies that are heavily focused on container ization. Right. If your custom developing applications, then your entire strategy should probably be focused on how do you build container farms? And if you're doing big data, you probably should bring deep use into the conversation with something nobody's talking about really yet. So, you know, Mhm >>Sounds like collaboration is really key. James the same question. Last question of our conversation. I'd love to get your perspective on what technology leaders should look for when you're talking with prospective customers when they're looking to partner for cloud implementation, growth management. What are some of those things that you say the technology leaders look for this? >>You really need to be working with people who understand your business that are passionate about your success and really having access to not only the advisory capabilities but the technology portfolio to help you realize all of your business and technology outcomes. And I think those are super important attributes that we HP can provide, you know, across the entire portfolio of technologies and services that most customers need to do. And I think that the business outcome, the business transformation is really key to what what the future holds for us. And having the visionary perspective of not only the customer but US in joint partnership allows for these great goals to be achieved. >>Its great goals in this business outcomes. Well, gentlemen, thank you for joining me on the program today. Talking to me about what Disney is doing with technology. How HP is supporting the Disney relationship. Jason and James. I appreciate your time. Thank >>you. Thank you lisa >>For Jason, Abrahamson and James Irvine. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of HP Discover 2021. Uh huh. >>Yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP. Discover Virtual Experience Brought to you by HP >>Hello and welcome back to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover Virtual experience. This is the Cube. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're here in the Palo Alto studio with remote interviews. We have a great innovation story here with Disney and HBO. ET Al is tailor vice president of content innovation with studio lab Disney. And so men do suck. Sarkar, distinguished technologist, director of AI at HP. Thanks for coming on, Alice. Someone do. Thank you for taking the time. >>It's great to be here. Hi, >>I love this story. I think it's the innovation story, and I think it's going to be one that will experience in our life going forward. That is media, video and experiences and this innovation in AI. It's a lot to do with the collaboration between Disney Studio Labs Alice that you're running and it's super super important and fun as well. Very relevant. Cool. So first, before we get started, Alice, >>take a minute >>to explain a little about yourself and how Studio Lab came about. Yeah, >>McGuinness Studio lab is just over in its second year of operation. It was an idea that was had by our CTO. I'm going to say, three years ago and at the time, just previously before that I had a start up company that came through the Disney accelerators. So I was already inside the building and, um, the team there said Felicity on the said, You know, we need to start up an innovation lab that will investigate storytelling through emerging technology, and that's basically being the majority of my background. So I said Yes on then. Since then, we'll be going a team. We opened the lab in May of 2018 and here we are in the middle of Pandemic. But it has grown like crazy. Its just a wonderful place to be and to operate. And we've been doing some amazing projects with some amazing partners, >>and it's not unusual that an entrepreneur has this kind of role to think outside the box. We'll get some of that talk about your experiences, and I wonder how you got into this position because you came in as an entrepreneur. You're doing some creative things. Tell us that story real quick. >>Yeah, Okay, well, so as you could sell on British. My actual background started. My whole career started in technology in the mid nineties. A Xai started as a training video editor but then switched very quickly and 95 building websites. And from there on, it was Internet all the way. But I've always focused on storytelling. And, you know, much of my background is working for broadcasters and media and content creators. So those five years of the BBC in there already department and, um actually out here is VP of digital media for them and then Channel four as well. And throughout the whole process, I was always interested in how to tell stories with new technology and the new mediums as they emerged. So yep, flights side story and doing a startup which was actually in toys and video games, but again, big digital storytelling environments for Children. And then I came round. Robin, if you like into Disney and here we are still looking at how to you make films and episodic content. Even Mawr. You name it faster, better, more exciting. Using the best and greatest in emerging tech as we find it, >>and the lab that you're doing is it's an accelerant, almost four new technologies. Your job is to what? Look out over the horizon next 10 years or so to figure out what's next. It's >>not a structure. I think you have >>some rain to be creative and experiment >>Well, yeah, I mean, in fact. So it's a studio live at the studios. We'll Disney has eight studios at the moment, and what we do is we look at actually the whole breath of storytelling. So right from the moment when a creative has an idea through to how our guests and fans might be receiving the end product out in the world and we segregate those that that whole breadth from into three categories i d. Eight. When you know the process of generating the idea and building it, make how we make it where we make it, what we make it with on that experience, how we experience it out in the world. So we have a whole SNU of projects. The studio level so works with some of the best technology companies in the world, and we call those are innovation partners on. We sign these partnerships really to bring what we like to call superpowers to the system we like to think. But the combination of those companies and what comes out of these projects is going to give our filmmakers superpowers, but also that combinatorial effect of Disney. You know, in this case, for instance, working with HP like produces something that Disney couldn't necessarily do on its own or the HP. He couldn't necessarily do it on his own, either. So, yeah, it's a huge remit, and we tend to look, we don't look quite so far out. Generally speaking as 10 years, it's more like three to now. We don't do day to day operational work, but we try to pick something up a couple of years before it's going to be operationally ready and really investigated then and get a bit of a head start. >>Well, it's great. Have HBs partner and And having that bench of technology software people is just a nice power source for you as well. Someone to talk about the relation HP relationship with Disney because, um, you got a lot of deep technical from the lab standpoint to resilient technology. How are you involved? What's your role? You guys sitting around you riff and put a white board together and say, Hey, we're gonna solve these big problems. Here is the future of consumption. That is the future of video. What goes on? Tell us your the relationship between you guys. >>Yeah, it's a good question at HP. We don't really make the service, but what we also do is we work quite a lot on optimizing some of the artificial intelligence solutions and algorithms on the DP use and scale it across servers. So So you don't have this opportunity came up from Disney, where this thing came up with a very innovative solution where they were solving the video quality problem. As as, you know, there are a lot of blemishes and in the video that can come up and didn't want to fix all of them. And they have great algorithm. But what happens is, but with better guards comes a huge amount of computational complexity, which needs a little bit of heterogeneous compute input in parallel processing and in sequential processing. So we thought that it's a perfect on, and it's a combination off the skill sets to make this video quality software execute at speed switch needed for production. Disney. >>So it's good to have a data center whenever you need it to. You guys have a great technology. We hear a lot more from the execs at HB on our reporting else. Want to get your thoughts? We're covering some of this new edge technologies. We're talking about new experiences. I gave a talk at Sundance a few years ago, called The New Creative Class, and it's really about this next wave of art and filmmakers who are using the tools of the trade, which is a cell phone and and really set of Asti studios and use the technology. Can you give us some examples of how Studio Lab collaborates with filmmakers and execs to push the push, the art and technology of storytelling to be fresh? Because the sign of the times, our instagram, tic tac, this is just very elementary. The quality and the storytelling is pretty basic dopamine in, but you can almost imagine the range of quality that's going to come so access to more people, certainly more equipment, cameras, etcetera. What's next? How do you guys see? What's some examples can you share? >>It's an amazing question. I mean, we're working on films and episodic. It's rather than very short form content, obviously, but you're absolutely right. There's a lot of consumer grade technology that is entering the production pipeline in many ways and in many areas, whether it's phones or iPads first using certain bits of software. One of the things that we're building at the moment is the ability Teoh generate vertical metric models, capturing with consumer drones or even iPhones, and then use it getting that data into a three D model as soon as possible. There's a really big theme. What we want to do is like make the process more efficient so that our creatives and the folks working on productions aren't having to slog through something that's slow and tedious. They want to get to the story, telling the art in the act of storytelling as much as possible. And so waiting for a model to render or waiting for their QC process toe finished is what we want to kind of get rid of so they can really get to the meat of the problem much, much faster and just going back to what Mandy was saying about the AI project here I mean, it was about finding the dead pixels on screen when we do our finished prints, which would you believe we do with humans? Humans at their best historically have been the best of finding dead pixels. But what a job I have to do at the end of the process to go through quality control and then have to go and manually find the little dead pixels in each frame of our print. Right? Nobody actually wants to be doing that job. So the algorithm goes and looks follows automatically. And then HP came in and spread that whole process up by nine X. So now it actually runs fast enough to be used on our final prince. >>You know, it's interesting in the tech trend for the past 10 15 years that I've been covering cloud technology. Even in the early days, it was kind of on the fringe them because mainstream. But all the trends were more agility, faster taking with ah, heavy lifting so that the focus on the job at hand when it's creative writing software. This is kind of a success formula, and you're kind of applying it to film and creation, which is still like software is kind of same thing, almost so you know, when you see these new technologies that love to get both your reactions of this. One of the big misses that people kind of miss is the best stuff is often misunderstood until it's understood. And we're kind of seeing that now. A covert our ones. From a way, I could have seen this. No, no one predicted. So what's >>an >>example of something that people might be misunderstanding that super relevant, that that might become super important very quickly? Any thoughts? >>That's great. Well, I can give an example of something that has come and gone and then coming, potentially gone. Except it hasn't it's VR. So it came, you know, whenever it was 20 years ago, and then 10 years ago, and everybody was saying VR is going to change the world And then it reappeared again six years ago again, everybody said it's going to change the world, and in terms of film production, it really has. But that's slightly gone unnoticed, I think, because out in the market everyone is expecting VR to have being a huge consumer success, and I suspect it still will be one day a huge consumer success. But meanwhile, in the background, we're using VR on a daily basis in film production. Virtual production is one of the biggest, um, emerging processes that is happening If you've seen anything to do with, um Jungle Book Line King Man DeLorean. Anything the industrial like magic work on. You're really looking at a lot of virtual production techniques that have ended up on screen, and it is now a technology that we can't do without. I'm gonna have to think two seconds for something that's emerging. Ai and Ml is a huge area, obviously were scratching it. I don't think anyone is going to say that it's going to come and go in this one. This is huge, but we're only just beginning to see where and how we can apply Ai and Ml and you did you wanna jump in on that one? So >>let me take it from the technology standpoint, I think it was also very cool trends. Now what happens is that your ML spaces people have come up with creative ideas. But one of the biggest challenge is how do you take those ideas for commercial, use it on and make and make it work at the speed, as Alice was mentioning, It makes it feasible in production. So accelerating your ML on making it in a form which is visible is super important. And the other aspect of it is just the first video quality that it was mentioning. That picture is one types, and I know the business is working on certain other video qualities to fix the blemishes. But there's a whole variety of these vanishes on with human operators. It's kind of impossible to scale up the production on to find all these different artifacts like, you know, especially now. As you can see, the video is disseminated in your forms in your ipads from like, you know, in that streaming. So this is a problem of scale on do stuff. This is also like, you know, a lot of compute on a very like I said, a lot of collaboration with complimentary skill sets that make it real. >>I was talking with a friend who was an early Apple employees, now retired good friend, and we're talking about all the Dev ops agile go fast scale up, and he made a comment I want to get your reaction to, he said. You know what we're missing is craft and software. You speak crafts game. So when you have speed, you lose craft, and we see that certainly with cloud and agility and then iterating. Then you get to a good product over time. But I think one of the things that's interesting and you guys are kind of teasing out is you can kind of get craft with the help from some of these technologies where you can kind of build crafting into it. Alice, what's your reaction to that? >>One of our favorite anecdotes from The Lion King is so Jon Favreau, the director, built out the virtual production system himself, Teoh with his team to make the film, and it allowed for a smaller production team acting on a smaller footprint. What they didn't do was shortened the time to make the film. What the whole system enabled was more content created within that same amount of time, so effectively John had more takes and more material to make his final film with, and that that's what we want people to have. We want them to have to know ever to have to say I missed my perfect shot because of I don't know what you know. We run out of time so we couldn't get the perfect shot. That's it. That's a terrible thing. We never want that to happen. So where technology can help gather as much material is possible in the most efficient way. Basically, at the end of the day, for our for our creatives, that means more ability to tell a story. >>So someone do. This is an example of the pixel innovation. The Video QC. It's really a burden if you have to go get it and chase it. You can automate that respect from the tech trends. Will automation action in there? >>Yeah, absolutely. And as Chris was mentioning, If you can bridge the gap between imagination and realization, then you have solved the problem that the people who are creative can think on implement something in a very short time, gone back for like, you know, some of these I'm just coming. >>Well, it's a very impressed that I'm looking forward to coming down and visiting studio labs when the world gets back to work. You guys are in the heart of Burbank and all the action and the Euro little incubates really kind of R and D meets commercial commercially. Really cool. But I have to ask you, with covert 19 going on, how are you guys handling? The situation certainly impacted people coming to work. How is your team? Have been impacted. And how are you guys continuing the mission? >>Well, yeah, The lab itself is obviously a physical place on the lot. It's in the old animation building, but it's also this program of innovation that we have with our partners. To be honest, we didn't slow down at all. The team carried on the next day from home, and in fact, we have expanded even because new projects came rolling in as folks who were stuck at home suddenly had needs. So we had editors needing to work work remotely. You know, you name it folks with that home connections, wondering if we had some five G phones hanging around that kind of thing. And so everything really expanded a bit. We are hoping to get back into physical co location as soon as possible, not least to be able to shoot movies again. But I think that there will be an element of this remote working that's baked in forever from here on in not least, cause it was just around. This kind of what this has done has accelerated things like the beginning of cloud adoption properly in the beginning of remote teller work and remote telepresence and then also ideas coming out of that. So ah, you know, again, the other day I heard holograms coming up. Like, Can we have holograms yet? So we don't do it That's going to cover out again. Yeah, but you know what? The team have all been amazing, would. But we'll miss each other. You know, there's something about real life that can't be replaced by technology >>has been a great leader in in accumulating. All HP employees work from removed and in the process. But we're also discovered is we have also, you know, maybe so. We discovered innovative ways where we can still work together. Like so we increase the volume of our virtual collaborations on. I worked with Erica from Disney is a tremendous facilitator and the technologists of mining one. You have this close collaboration going. Andi almost missed nothing, but yes, if you would like to, you know, on the field each other on to be in close proximity. Look at each app in each other's eyes are probably that's only missing thing, but rest off it, You know, we created an environment perfect, clever and work pretty well. And actually, at this point in the process, we also discovered a lot of things which can be done in remote, considering the community of Silicon Valley. >>You know, the final question I want to get your thoughts on is your favorite technology that you're excited about. But someone doing you know, we're talking amongst us nerds and geeks here in Silicon Valley around you know what virtualization server virtualization has done? An HP knows a lot about server virtualization. You're in the server business that created cloud because with virtualization, you could create one server and great many servers. But I think this covert 19 and future beyond it virtualization of life, Immersion of digital is going to bring and change a lot of things. You guys highlight a few of them. Um, this virtualization of life society experiences playing work. It's not just work. It's experiences so Internet of things devices how I'm consuming how I'm producing. It's really going to have an impact. I'd love to get your both of your thoughts on this kind of virtualization of life because certainly impact studio lab, because you think about these things. Alice and HP has to invent that the tech to get scaling up. So final question. What do think about virtualization of life and what technologies do you see that you're excited about to help make our lives better? >>Well, goodness, may, I think we're only beginning to understand the impact that things like video conferencing has on folks. You know, I don't know whether you've seen all of the articles flying around about how it's a lot more work to do video conferencing that you don't have the same subtle cues as you have in real life. And again, you know, virtual technologies like we are on day similar and not going to solve that immediately. So what we'll have to happen is that humans themselves will adapt to the systems. I think, though fundamentally we're about to enter a radical period. We basically have already a radical period of innovation because as folks understand what's at their fingertips. And then what's missing? We're going to see all sorts of startups and new ideas come rushing out as people understand this new paradigm and what they could do to solve for the new pains that come out of it. I mean, just from my perspective, I have back to back nine hours of BTC a day. And by the end of the day, I could barely walk Way gonna do about that. I think we're gonna see holograms like that. We're gonna see home exercise equipment combined. You know, really good ones. Like you've seen politicians shares going crazy. There's tons of that. So I'm just really excited at the kind of three years or so. I think that we're going to see of radical innovation, the likes of which we have always usually being held back by, um other reasons, maybe not enough money or not enough permission. Whereas now people are like we have to fix this problem. >>Well, you've got a great job. I want to come to quit. My job income joined studio left. Sounds like it's a playground of fun. There great stuff. Someone do close us out here. What? Are you excited about as we virtualized you're in the in the labs, creating new technology. You're distinct, technologist and director of AI. When you're on the cutting edge, you're riding the wave two. What's your take on this? >>Virtually? Yeah, you know the experience. What it has done is it has pushed the age to the home. So now if you really see home is one of the principal connectivity to the outside world restaurants. Professional goes on and on with that, What I also offers is like a better experience. Right now. We're all gather about Zoom being able to do a video conferencing. But as this was pointing out there is that here in that we are now consider combining the augmented reality and and the way that we do your conference and all the other innovations that we could begin in the East so that the interactions becomes much more really. And that is like, you know, I'd say that the world is moving to >>l Cool. Thank you very much for that comment and insight really enjoyed. Congratulations on studio lab. You've got a great mission and very cool and very relevant. And someone do. Thank you very much for sharing the insights on HP's role in that. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Okay, this is the Cube. Virtual covering HP Discover virtual experience. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube. Stay tuned for more coverage from HP Discover experience after this break. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

From around the globe. It's theCUBE covering HPE's Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. >> Hello and welcome back to the CUBE's coverage of HPE discover Virtual Experience. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host, we're here in the Palo Alto Studio for the remote interviews. We have a great innovation story here with Disney and HPE, Alice Taylor, Vice President of Content Innovation with studioLAB at Disney. And Soumyendu Sarkar, distinguished technologist director of AI at HPE. Thanks for coming on Alice. Samandiyu thank you for taking the time. >> No worries. Great to be here. Hi. >> Hi >> I love this story. I think it's an innovation story and I think it's going to be one that we'll experience in our life going forward, and that is media, video, and its experiences and these innovation about AI, It's a lot to do with the collaboration between Disney studioLAB, Alice, that you're running, and it's super, super important and fun as well and very relevant and Cool. So first before we get started, Alice, take a minute to explain a little about yourself and how StudioLAB came about. >> Oh my goodness. StudioLAB is just in its second year of operation. It was an idea that was had by our CTO. I'm going to say three years ago, And at the time, just previously before that, I had a startup company that came through the Disney accelerator. So I was already inside the building and the team there said well, the CTO there, and the boss said, you know, we need to start up an innovation lab that will investigate storytelling through emerging technology. And that's basically being the majority of my background. So I said, yes. And then since then we've been growing a team. We opened the lab in may of 2018 and here we are, in the middle of a pandemic, but it has grown like crazy. It's just a wonderful place to be and to operate. And we've been doing some amazing projects with some amazing partners, >> And it's not unusual that an entrepreneur has this kind of role to think outside the box. We'll get at some of that. Talk about your experience as an entrepreneur, how you got into this position, because you came in as an entrepreneur, you're doing some creative things. Tell us that story real quick. >> Yeah. Okay. Well, so as you can tell, I'm British. My actual background started, my whole career started in technology in the mid 90s. As I started as a trainee video editor, but then switched very quickly in 95 to building websites and from there on, and it was internet all the way. But I've always focused on storytelling and I, you know, much of my background is working for broadcasters and media and content creators. So I was five years at the BBC in their R and D department. And I'm actually out here as VP of digital media for them, and then Channel 4 as well. And throughout the whole process, I was always interested in how to tell stories with new technology and the new mediums as they emerged. So yeah, slight side story and doing a startup, which was actually in toys and video games, but again, big digital storytelling environments for children. And then I came round Robin, if you like into Disney and here we are still looking at how to make films and episodic content, even more, you name it faster, better, more exciting, using the best and greatest in emerging tech as we find it. >> The lab that you're doing, it's an accelerant almost for new technologies. Your job is to what? look out over the horizon next 10 years or so to figure out? >> Yeah >> what's next. It's not a structured thing. You have some reign to be creative and experiment? >> Well, yeah, I mean, the studioLAB, at the studios, well, Disney has eight studios at the moment, And what we do is we look at actually the whole breadth of storytelling. So right from the moment when a creative has an idea through to how our guests and fans might be receiving the end product out in the world, and we segregate that whole breadth into three categories; Ideate, when, you know, the process of generating the idea and building it, Make, how we make it, where we make it, what we make it with and then Experience. How we experience it out in the world. So we have a whole slew of projects, the studio level works with some of the best technology companies in the world. And we call those our innovation partners and we sign these partnerships really to bring what we like to call Superpowers to the system. We like to think that the combination of those companies and what comes out of these projects is going to give our filmmakers superpowers, but also that combinatorial effect of Disney, you know, in this case, for instance, working with HPE, like producing something that Disney couldn't necessarily do on its own or the HBE couldn't necessarily do on his own either. So yeah, it's a huge remit and we don't look quite so far out, generally speaking as 10 years, it's more like three to now. We don't do day to day operational work, but we try to pick something up a couple of years before it's going to be operationally ready and really investigate it then and get a bit of a headstart. >> Well, it's great to have HPE as partner and having that bench of technology, software, and people, and it's just a nice power source for you as well. >> Exactly So Soumyendu talk about HPE relationship with Disney, because you got a lot of deep technical from the lab standpoint to resilient technology. How are you involved? What's your role, you guys sitting around you riffing and put a whiteboard together and say, Hey, we're going to solve these big problems? ... Here's the future of consumption, here's the future of video... What goes on? Tell us the relationship between you guys. >> Yeah, it's a good question. At HPE We can not only make the servers, but what we also do is we work quite a lot on optimizing some of the Artificial Intelligence solutions and algorithms on the GPUs and scale it across Servers. So this opportunity came up from Disney where Disney came up with a very innovative solution where they were solving the video quality problem. As you know, there are a lot of blemishes in the Video that can come up and Disney wanted to fix all of them. And they came up with great algorithm, but what happens is, like with great algorithm comes a huge amount of computational complexity which needs quite a bit of heterogeneous input in both in Parallel Processing and in Sequential Processing. So we thought that it's a perfect, I'd say combination of two skillsets to make this video quality software execute at speeds which are needed for production in Disney. >> So it's good to have a data center whenever you need it to, you guys have some great technology. We'll hear a lot more from the Execs at HPE. On our reporting Alice, we want to to get your thoughts. We're covering some of those new edge technologies, we're talking about new experiences. I gave a talk at Sundance a few years ago called the new creative class, and it's really about this next wave of art and filmmakers who are using the tools of the trade, which is a cellphone, you know, really easy to set up a studios and use the technology. Can you give us some examples of how the studioLAB collaborates with filmmakers and the Execs to push the art and technology of storytelling to be fresh, Because the sign of the times, are Instagram and Tik Tok, this is just very elementary, the quality and the storytelling is pretty basic dopamine driven, but you can almost imagine that the range of quality that's going to come, so access to more people, certainly more equipment and cameras, et cetera. What's next? How do you guys see And what some examples can you share? >> Oh, that's an amazing question. I mean, where working on Films and Episodics rather than very short form content , Obviously. But you're absolutely right. There's a lot of consumer grade technology that is entering the production pipeline in many ways and in many areas, whether it's phones or iPads, using certain bits of software. One of the things that we're building at the moment is the ability to generate photometrical models, capturing with consumer drones or even iPhones, and then getting that data into a 3-D model as soon as possible. There's a really big theme of what we want to do. It's like make the process more efficient so that our creatives and the folks working on productions, aren't having to slog through something that's and tedious. They want to get to the storytelling and the art and the act of storytelling as much as possible. And so waiting for a model to render or waiting for the QC process to finish is what we want to kind of get rid of. So they can really get to the meat of the problem much, much faster. And just going back to what Soumyendu was saying about the AI project here, I mean, it was about finding the dead pixels on the screen when we do all finished prints, which would you believe we do with humans? Humans are the best, or historically have been the best at finding dead pixels, but what a job to have to do at the end of the process. To go through quality control and then have to go and manually find the little dead pixels in each frame of our print, right? Nobody actually wants to be doing that job. So the algorithm goes and looks for those automatically. And then HPE came in and sped that whole process up by 9X. So now it actually runs fast enough to be used on our final prints. >> You know, it's interesting in the tech trend for the past 10, 15 years that I've been covering cloud technology even in the early days, it was kind of on the fringe and then become mainstream. But all the trends were more agility, faster, take away that heavy lifting so that the focus on the job at hand, whether its creative or writing software. This is kind of a a success formula, and you're kind of applying it to film and creation, which is still, like software, it's kind of the same thing almost. >> Yeah >> So you know, when you see these new technologies, I'd love to get both of your reactions to this. One of the big misses, that people kind of miss is the best stuff is often misunderstood until it's understood. >> Yes >> And we're kind of seeing that now with Covid and everyone's like no way I could've seen this. No, no one predicted it. So what's an example of something that people might be misunderstanding. That's super relevant, that might become super important very quickly. Any thoughts? >> Gosh, that's a great one. Well, I can give an example of something that has come and gone and then come and potentially gone, except it hasn't. You'll see. It's VR. So it came whenever it was, 20 years ago and then 10 years ago, and everybody was saying VR is going to change the world. And then it reappeared again, six years ago. And again, everybody said it was going to change the world. And in terms of film production, it really has. But that's slightly gone unnoticed. I think, because out in the market, everyone is expecting VR to have been a huge consumer success. And I suspect it still will be one day a huge consumer success. But meanwhile, in the background, We are using VR on a daily basis in film production, Virtual production is one of the biggest emerging processes that is happening. If you've seen anything to do with Jungle Book, Lion King , the Mandalorian, anything that industrial light and magic work on, you're really looking at a lot of virtual production techniques that have ended up on the screen. And it is now a technology that we can't do without. I'm going to have to think two seconds for something that's emerging. AI and ML is a huge area. Obviously, we're scratching it. I don't think anyone is going to to say that it's going to come and go this one. This is huge, but we're already just beginning to see where and how we can apply AI and ML. >> Yeah. >> So Soumyendu, did you want to jump in on that one? >> Yeah, Let me take it from the technology standpoint. I think Alice sort of puts out some very cool trends. Now what happens in tHE AI and ML spaces, people can come up with creative ideas, but one of the biggest challenges is how do you take those ideas for commercial usage and make it work at a speed, as Alice was mentioning, makes it feasible in production. So accelerating AI/ML and making it in a form, which is usable is super important. And the other aspect of it is, just see, for instance, video quality, that Alice was mentioning. Dead pixel is one type, And I know that Disney is working on certain other video qualities to fix the blemishes, but there is a whole variety of these blemishes and with human operators, Its kind of impossible to scale up the production and to find all these different artifacts, and especially now, as you can see, the video is disseminated in your phones, in your iPads. Like, you know, in just streaming. So this is a problem of scale and to solve this is also like, you know, a lot of computers, and I'd say a lot of collaboration with complementary skillsets that make AI real. >> I was talking with a friend who was an early Apple employee. He's now retired, good friend. And we were talking about, you know, all the dev apps, agile, go fast, scale up. And he made a comment. I want to get your reaction to it. He said, "you know, what we're missing is craft." And software used to be a craft game. So when you have speed, you lose craft. And we see that certainly with cloud and agility and then iterate, and then you get to a good product over time. But I think one of the things that's interesting and you guys are kind of teasing out is you can kind of get craft with the help from some of these technologies, where, you can kind of build crafting into it. >> Yap Alice, what's your reaction to that? >> One of our favorite anecdotes from the lion King is, so Jon Favreau the director, built out the virtual production system with his team to make the film. And it allowed for a smaller production team acting on a smaller footprint. What they didn't do was shorten the time to make the film, what the whole system enabled was more content created within that same amount of time. So effectively Jon had more tapes and more material to make his final film with. And that's what we want people to have. We want them to not ever to have to say, Oh, I missed my perfect shot because of, I don't know what, you know, we ran out of time, so we couldn't get the perfect shot. That's it, that's a terrible thing. We never want that to happen. So where technology can help gather as much material as possible in the most efficient way, basically at the end of the day for our our creatives, that means more ability to tell a story. >> So Soumyendu, this is an example of the pixel innovation, the video QC, it's really a burden if you have to go get it and chase it, you can automate that. That's back to some of the tech trends. A lot of automation action in there. >> Yeah, absolutely. And as Alice was mentioning, if you can bridge the gap between imagination and realization then you have solved the problem. That way, the people who are creative can think and implement something in a very short time. And that's fair, like, you know, some of these scientists come in >> Well, I also very impressed and I'm looking forward to coming down and visiting studio labs when the world gets back to work, >> Alright. >> You guys are in the part of Burbank and all the action. I know you're a little sort of incubate. It's really kind of R and D meet commercially. Commercial is really cool. But I have to ask you what the COVID-19 going on, how are you guys handling the situation? Certainly impacted people coming to work. >> Yeah >> How has your team in been impacted and how are you guys continuing the mission? >> Well, the lab itself is obviously a physical place on the lot. It's in the old animation building. But there's also this program of innovation that we have with our partners. To be honest, we didn't slow down at all the team carried on the next day from home. And in fact, we have expanded even, because new projects came rolling in as folks who were stuck at home suddenly had needs. So we had editors needing to work remotely, you name it, folks with bad home connections, wondering if we had some 5G phones hanging around, that kind of thing. And so everything really expanded a bit. We are hoping to get back into physical co-location as soon as possible, not least to be able to shoot movies again. But I think that there will be an element of this remote working that's baked in forever from here on then. Not least, coz it was just a round, this kind of, what this has done is accelerated things like the beginning of cloud adoption properly, in the beginning of remote teleworking and remote telepresence, and then also ideas coming out of that. So you know, again, the other day I heard Holograms coming up, like, can we have holograms yet? >> Yeah, we can do that, we've done that, Lets do it. Bring that back. >> And so it's that kind of thing. Exactly, that's going to come around again. Yeah. But you know what? The team have all been amazing. But we'll miss each other, you know, there's something about real life that can't be replaced by technology. >> Well, You know, we were talking earlier on theCUBE last week about, the future got pulled to the present, not the present accelerated the future. Which exposes some of these things that are really important and you mentioned it. So I have to ask you Alice, as you guys got more work, obviously it makes sense. What have you learnt as adapting and leading your team through this change? Any learnings you can share with folks? >> Well, yes, that's a good one. But mainly resilience. It's been a nonstop and quite relentless and the news out there is extraordinary. So we're also trying to balance a very full pipeline of work with understanding that people are struggling to balance their lives as well at home, You know, kids, pets, BLM, like you name it, everything is affecting everybody. So resilience and empathy is really top of my mind at the moment as we try to continue to succeed, but making sure that everybody stays healthy and sane. >> Yeah. And in great news, you got a partner here with HPE, the innovation doesn't stop there. You still have to partner. How do you keep up with these technologies and the importance of partners, comments, and Soumyendu your comment as well. >> Yeah. So HPE has been a great leader in accommodating all HPE employees to work from remote and in the process, what we also discovered is, we humans are innovative. So we discover the innovative ways where we can still work together. So we increased the volume of our virtual collaborations, and I have worked with Erica from Disney, who is a tremendous facilitator and a technologist of mine, to have this close collaboration going, and we almost missed nothing. But yes, we would like to, you know the feel each other to be in close proximity, look at each other's eyes. Probably that's the only missing thing, a crest of it, You know, we created an environment where we can collaborate and work pretty well. And to Alice's point in the process, we also discovered a lot of things which can be done in remote considering the community of Silicon Valley. >> You know, I'd love. The final question I want to get your thoughts on is your favorite technologies that you're excited about. But some Soumyendu, you know, we were talking amongst us nerds and geeks here in Silicon Valley around, you know, what Virtualization... Server Virtualization has done. And HPE knows a lot about server virtualization. You're in the server business, that created cloud, because with virtualization, you could create one server and great many servers, but I think this COVID-19 and the future beyond it, virtualization of life, an immersion of digital is going to bring and change a lot of things. You guys highlighted a few of them. This virtualization of life, society, experiences, play, work. It's not just work it's experiences. So Internet of Things, devices, how I'm consuming, how I'm producing, it's really going to have an impact. I'd love to get your, both of your thoughts on this kind of "virtualization of life" because it certainly impacts studioLAB, because you think about these things, Alice, and HP has to invent the tech to get scaling up. So final question. What do you think about virtualization of life and what technologies do you see that you're excited about to help make our lives better? >> Wow. Goodness, me. I think we're only beginning to understand the impact that things like video conferencing has on folks. You know, I don't know whether you've seen all of the articles flying around about how it's a lot more work to do, video conferencing, that you don't have the same subtle cue as you have in real life. And again, you know, virtual technologies like VR and similar, are not going to solve that immediately. So what will have to happen is that humans themselves will adapt to the systems. I think though, fundamentally we're about to enter a radical period. We basically have already a radical period of innovation because as folks understand what's at their fingertips and then what's missing, we're going to see all sorts of startups and new ideas come rushing out. As people understand this new paradigm and what they can do to solve, for the new pains that come out of it. I mean, just from my perspective, I have back-to-back nine hours of etc a day. And by the end of the day, I can barely walk. What are we going to do about that? I think we're going to see, >> Holograms, I like that Idea. >> right, we're going to see home exercise equipment combined with like, you know, really good ones. Like you've seen pellets on the shares going crazy. There's going to be tons of that. So I'm just really excited at the kind of three years or so. I think that we're going to see of radical innovation, the likes of which we have always usually been held back by other reasons, maybe not enough money or not enough permission. Whereas now people are like, we have to fix this problem. >> Well, you got a great job. I want to come, just quit my job and come join studio lab, sounds like that's a playground of fun. They have great stuff. >> Ton of fun. >> Soumyendu, close this out here. What are you excited about as we virtualize. You're in the labs, creating new technology, you're a distinguished technologist and director of AI. I Wean, you're on the cutting edge. You're riding the wave too. What's your take on this virtual center? >> I think, you know the COVID experience, what it has done is it has pushed the edge to the home. So now, if you really see a home is one of the principle connectivity to the outside world, as far as professionalism goes. And with that, what AI also offers is like a better experience. Right now we are all Gaga about zoom being able to do a video conferencing, but as Alice was pointing out, there is that ER, and the VR. Now consider combining the augmented reality. And the way that we do review a conference and all the other AI innovations that we can bring in so that the interactions becomes much more real. And that is like, you know, I'd say, where the world is moving. >> I can't let this go. I have to go one more step in because you guys brought that up. Alice, you mentioned the fatigue and all these things. And if you think about just the younger generations, we have to invest in our communities and our young people. I mean, think about all the kids who have to go back to school in September, in the fall, what their world's like. And you talk about, you know, we can handle video, but learners? So the transformation that's going to come down the path really fast is how do you create an experience for education and for learning and connecting. This is huge. Thoughts and reactions to that. So it's something that I've been thinking a lot about, but I'm sure a lot of other parents have as well. >> My take on that, kids, I've worked a lot with kids and kids media. And over the years, you often find that when a new media does come in, there's a lot of fear around it, but kids are plastic and incredibly good at adapting to new media and new technology and new ways of working. The other thing is, I think this generation of kids have really had to live through something, you know, and it's going to have, with luck, taught them some resilience. I think, if there's one thing that teachers can be focusing on, it is things like resilience and how to cope under very unusual and very unpredictable circumstances, which is never good for things like anxiety. But it's also the reality of the world, you know, be adaptive and learn, keep learning. These are great messages to give to kids. I think if anything, they are the ones who'll figure out how to socialize online successfully and healthily. So we're going to have to learn from them. >> Yeah. They're going to want to make it to be fun too. I mean, you have to make it entertaining. I mean, I find my personal experience, if it's boring, it ain't going to work. Thank you so much, Alice. Well, thank you very much for that comment and insight really enjoy. Congratulations on studioLAB, you got a great mission and very cool and very relevant. Soumyendu thank you very much for sharing the insights on HPE's role in that. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. >> Thanks. It's nice. >> Okay. >> Thanks John. >> This is theCUBE virtual covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Stay tuned for more coverage from HPE Discover Virtual Experience after this break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we are back at NAB 2017 with a hundred thousand of our favorite friends doing everything about broadcast media. It's media, it's entertainment, it's technology, it's the M.E.T. effect, which is all the rage here at the show, because you can't really separate the three, they're all tied together. Really excited to be joined by our next guest, who's in the weeds, keeping an eye on this, trying to keep up with all the crazy trends. He's Avi Swerdlow, he's a Manager, Research and Development at the Walt Disney Company. Avi, welcome. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> Absolutely, so first off, we talked a little bit before we went live, your first time at the show, kind of general impressions of NAB? >> Yeah, it's big, a lot of walking, is my first impression. Aside from the tired feet, it's really exciting to see all the new tech out here. From talking to other people who have been in years past, it seems like things move really fast here. So what you were seeing last year is completely different of what you're seeing this year. But loving all the different sections, everything from hardware to some of the more data-driven stuff. Noticing that a lot more things are moving digital, that a lot of demos are now on laptops instead of physical. >> Right. >> Which is exciting to see. I've been impressed by some of the bigger company, like Microsoft's and IBM's machine learning efforts. And equally impressed by some of the hardware plays at DGI and GoPro, so really, really exciting stuff. >> Yeah, it's really interesting, kind of bifurcation of the market. On one hand, you've got all this crazy high end stuff with 4K and 6K and 8K and ultra HD and all these things and 360 and all these crazy cameras. At the other hand, you've got democratization of distribution with YouTube and Vimeo and all these tools being brought down in a price point, Samsung, 360 camera, where you can be a relatively small content creator and have amazing tools at your disposal. So the opportunities from a creative point of view have probably never been richer. >> Absolutely. I think a lot of what we're trying to focus on is moving in that digital direction for some of our content. Trying to implement some of those lower end or more cost efficient tools and those distribution points to get our content to people faster while at the same time trying to keep up on the higher 4K end. Something that's interesting I've chatted with my colleagues is that things move so fast that it's hard year to year to come here and see all the new things that are completely different from what you saw last year. >> Right, right. >> Now you have to start implementing those things. So I think it's a balance between all of that. I think, given that we're a big media company, some of those lower end tools are really interesting to us. In a sense that, take news for example. It's equally exciting to go live on Facebook video as it is sometimes to do it on a traditional broadcast. So I think learning how we integrate those and integrate those well are some of what we're trying to explore. >> Right. One of the topics we talked about before the cameras turned on was this virtual reality and augmented reality, VR and AR. It is pretty interesting because you talked specifically about data infusion on top of tech. And I remember the first time I ever saw a sports broadcast where, I think it was Fox maybe, that put the score bug on the upper left hand corner. You're like what is that, you're taking valuable real estate. Now we're so accustomed to this multi-layers of data on top of the broadcast. Take like a Bloomberg channel, where some of those things, where now they have multiple feeds that are constantly going. It's a very different way to consume data but that's what people really want these days. >> Absolutely. I think that last year was kind of this year of AR, VR. Where people thought there was going to be this massive revolution all of the sudden where everybody would be, would have headsets and VR would become ubiquitous. I think that will happen eventually, it's probably going to be a slower burn, mostly because people don't have devices yet. I think there's not enough content out there, not enough devices out there. Regardless, I think that if you distill down what AR and VR is at its core, it's the augmentation of information over something else. >> Right. >> So I think a lot of people are now starting to explore, what are the baby steps you take to implement some of that technology into your workflow. Assuming that people don't have devices yet, so I think, when I look at some of the virtual sets that we're seeing around this show and the implementation of information over, let's say, news or sports broadcasts, that becomes really interesting. If you use, we were talking about photogrammetry or volume capture, if you can use some of that and do interesting stuff for instance, if you're looking at a sports game and you're able to create in something like Unity or Unreal, an asset that represents the sports game, it becomes a much easier way to understand what's going on in the game then just a set of numbers. Yes, when you saw that score in the top left hand corner that was exciting. Now imagine seeing a live 3D version of the game same information unfolding, just in a different way. I think those are the baby steps towards this AR, VR implementation and eventually you might get to a point where everybody has a headset but baby steps for the average consumer. >> Right, right. In a lot of conversations about machine learning, you said you're excited about some of the machine learning, you've got the metadata and better metadata around the assets themselves, but now actually getting into the assets at the frame level to do more exploration so that people can, it's the age old adage, find, consume and share-- >> Absolutely. >> The stuff that they're most interested in. There's a lot of new opportunities because of the horsepower of these machines here that we're surrounded by, in terms of the massive capacity, and speed of the storage systems, to do things that you really couldn't do inside the assets themselves. >> Absolutely. I think our problem at somewhere like Disney is unique. It's different than at Google or at Facebook. We're not looking at this huge well of content like YouTube. We're looking at a smaller amount of content and what's really important to us is accurate metadata about our content more so than just having metadata. A lot of what we focus on is definitely metadata extraction but to the extent that we're going to use these machine learning tools we want to have really good training sets and get back really accurate data. So a lot of what we focus on is being able to have a QA layer on top of the machine learning efforts. Being able to use machine learning efforts that can be honed towards one show for instance. >> Right. >> So only extracting a certain set of characters. We really enjoy using these tools and enjoy finding ways that we can apply them to a unique problem which seems to be different than the problem that some of them are trying to address. >> Right. >> But regardless, they're working really well for us. >> So what are some of the use cases, or can you share any of how you're using machine learning to get and score that kind of metadata. >> Yeah. For instance, we're starting to use metadata in some of the ways other people are. Some of the stuff that I can talk about for instance is facial capture, location capture. Things that other people are doing but again, they're unique to one show. For instance, a Quantico on ABC might be something where we have a set of characters that we're looking for. We're starting to use machine learning to look at things like that. >> Interesting. Now Disney obviously, great company, been around forever, huge legacy. I'm just curious to the conversations in the hallway there's just this crazy wave of technology butting up against, we still have to tell great stories. Disney has a long history of telling great stories whether it's through the original animation studios or all the vast properties in which you guys have grown up. Is there still a creative ying and yang there-- >> Absolutely. >> Is there a thread and a rebalancing about technology versus let's not forget what should be-- >> A hundred percent. >> Job one. >> Absolutely. I think that's why I really enjoy working at Disney. It's always story first. My background is actually in creative development in the film industry so I always come at it from a story first point of view. I enjoy that the rest of the company does as well. But if you look at Disney's history, it's always been technology complimenting story. Think about the multi-plane camera in Snow White. The reason Snow White was able to be made was because Disney democratized animation. He figured out the technology that made animation possible at a feature film scale. Without that machine, that would not have been possible. I think in our core history you have these certain technologies that are put to use in the service of story. I think that's pretty much how we approach everything. We're looking for stuff that's going to augment our storytelling efforts. Not replace it, not degrade it in any way but only to enhance it. That's in our legacy. >> Right, right. That's interesting, I've never heard it explained that way but that is so much the trend that we continue to be on today. It's democratization of the data, democratization of the access to the data, democratization of the analytics of the data. And then operating at scale. Which requires, in today's scale, I'm not talking about a two hour movie scale, actually be able to set animation, but massive amounts of data that are flowing through the system. So how do you-- >> Absolutely. We want to use that data to empower our storytellers. To empower anybody at the company to tell better stories. But data management it's tough. I think a lot of what we had to do is first of all put in place the plumbing to make that data easily accessible. To make it easily searchable. To make it correct. To make it authoritative. To get people out of their spreadsheets that you had stored away somewhere. And unify that data so that it starts to tell a story. We've been very successful in those efforts. But it's a massive undertaking because you have companies that have not necessarily thought from a data first point of view and are now realizing that the actual value of this data. So part of what we're doing is extracting that metadata. Doing it in a way that's extremely accurate and authoritative. But also going as far upstream as possible to try to find are there other people that are already collecting this metadata and can we have them put it into a central database as opposed to everybody having their own little corner of data? >> Right, right. Is there an effort to reassess the value of the data? Where before just raw data in and of itself was a liability. Was expensive to store, expensive to keep and there was always trade off decisions about what you keep what you throw away. Now there really is the opportunity to keep it all and there's significant data outside, maybe beyond the box office gate of the feature film with all the various distribution channels and ancillary things. Obviously Disney is way ahead of the curve in terms of licensing and realizing value beyond just the core asset. But are there new ways now that those models are being worked in so that you can justify the additional expense of all this extra metadata and storage and infrastructure which, at the end of the day, you got to pay the bill-- >> Certainly. >> To the data center. >> Absolutely. I think to the extent that we can use our data to tell our stories to gain new insights it is extremely valuable. I think there are efforts around the company to, not necessarily store as much data as possible but to find what data is valuable and where it is. We're finding more and more data that is valuable. Because when you are able to unify it with other data it starts to tell a story. That's both data about our content, about our content performance, about our consumers, that what types of stories we should and shouldn't be telling. I think it's not just taking everything but it's figuring out what data is actually valuable and then trying to derive as much insight as possible from that. >> Right. Alright so, 2017, what are your top priorities for this year? Can't believe we're a third of the way through 2017- >> I know. >> It used to be like a stereo question, I guess it's not an end of the year question anymore. >> I would say one of our main goals is really to advance our automation efforts. I think also to the extent possible to advance our metadata tagging efforts as much as possible. I'd say that's top of mind at the moment. In addition to some other things but that's some of the stuff we're thinking about. >> Alright, great. Well Avi, thanks for-- >> Thank you for having me. >> For taking a few minutes and enjoy your first ever >> Thank you, yeah I will. >> NAB 2017. Alright Avi Swerdlow from Disney. I'm Jeff Frick from theCUBE, you're watching us like from NAB 2017 at the Las Vegas convention center. We'll be back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, brilliant humans and welcome back to theCUBE. We're live from Detroit, Michigan. My name is Savannah Peterson. Joined here with John Furrier, John, so exciting, day three. >> Day three, cranking along, doing great, final day of KubeCon, it wraps up. This next segment's going to be great. It's about WebAssembly, the hottest trend here, at KubeCon that nobody knows about cause they just got some funding and it's got some great traction. Multiple players in here. People are really interested in this and they're really discovering it. They're digging into it. So, we're going to hear from one of the founders of the company that's involved. So, it'll be great. >> Yeah, I think we're right at the tip of the iceberg really. We started off the show with Scott from Docker talking about this, but we have a thought leader in this space. Please welcome Matt Butcher the CEO and co-founder of Fermyon Thank you for being here. Welcome. >> Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Favorite thing to talk about is WebAssembly after that is coffee but WebAssembly first. >> Hey, it's the morning. We can talk about both those on the show. (all chuckles) >> It might get confusing, but I'm willing to try. >> If you can use coffee as a metaphor to teach everyone about WebAssembly throughout the rest of the show. >> All right. That would be awesome. >> All right I'll keep that in mind. >> So when we were talking before we got on here I thought it was really fun because I think the hype is just starting in the WebAssembly space. Very excited about it. Where do you think we're at, set the stage? >> Honestly, we were really excited to come here and see that kind of first wave of hype. We came here expecting to have to answer the question you know, what is WebAssembly and why is anybody looking at it in the cloud space, and instead people have been coming up to us and saying, you know this WebAssembly thing, we're hearing about it. What are the problems it's solving? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> We're really excited to hear about it. So, people literally have been stopping us in restaurants and walking down the street, hey, "You're at KubeCon, you're the WebAssembly people. Tell us more about what's going on." >> You're like awesome celeb. I love this. >> Yeah, and I, >> This is great >> You know the, the description I used was I expected to come here shouting into the void. Hey, you know anybody, somebody, let me tell you about WebAssembly. Instead it's been people coming to us and saying "We've heard about it. Get us excited about it," and I think that's a great place to be. >> You know, one of the things that's exciting too is that this kind of big trend with this whole extraction layer conversation, multicloud, it reminds me of the old app server days where, you know there was a separation between the back end and front end, and then we're kind of seeing that now with this WebAssembly Wasm trend where the developers just want to have the apps run everywhere and the coding to kind of fall in, take a minute to explain what this is, why it's important, why are people jazzed about there's other companies like Cosmonic is in there. There's a lot of open source movement behind it. You guys are out there, >> Savannah: Docker. >> 20 million in fresh funding. Why is this important? What is it and why is it relevant right now? Why are people talking about it? >> I mean, we can't... There is no penasia in the tech world much for the good of all of us, right? To keep us employed. But WebAssembly seems to be that technology that just sort of arose at the right time to solve a number of problems that were really feeling intractable not very long ago. You know, at the core of what is WebAssembly? Well it's a binary format, right? But there's, you know, built on the same, strain of development that Java was built on in the 90's and then the .net run time. But with a couple of little fundamental changes that are what have made it compelling today. So when we think about the cloud world, we think about, okay well security's a big deal to us. Virtual machines are a way for us to run other people's untrusted operating systems on our hardware. Containers come along, they're a... The virtual machine is really the heavyweight class. This is the big thing. The workhorse of the cloud. Then along come Containers, they're a little slimmer. They're kind of the middleweight class. They provide us this great way to sort of package up just the application, not the entire operating system just the application and the bits we care about and then be able to execute those in a trusted environment. Well you know, serverless was the buzzword a few years ago. But one thing that serverless really identified for us is that we didn't actually have the kind of cloud side architecture that was the compute layer that was going to be able to fulfill the promise of serverless. >> Yeah. >> And you know, at that time I was at Microsoft we got to see behind the curtain and see how Azure operates and see the frustration with going, okay how do we get this faster? How do we get this startup time down from seconds to hundreds of milliseconds, WebAssembly comes along and we're able to execute these things in sub one millisecond, which means there is almost no cost to starting up one of these. >> Sub one millisecond. I just want to let everyone rest on that for a second. We've talked a lot about velocity and scale on the show. I mean everyone here is trying to do things faster >> Yep >> Obviously, but that is a real linchpin that makes a very big difference when we're talking about deploying things. Yeah. >> Yeah, and I mean when you think about the ecological and the cost impact of what we're building with the cloud. When we leave a bunch of things running in idle we're consuming electricity if nothing else. The electricity bill keeps going up and we're paying for it via cloud service charges. If you can start something in sub one millisecond then there's no reason you have to leave it running when nobody's using it. >> Savannah: Doesn't need to be in the background. >> That's right. >> So the lightweight is awesome. So, this new class comes up. So, like Java was a great metaphor there. This is kind of like that for the modern era of apps. >> Yeah. >> Where is this going to apply most, do you think? Where's it going to impact most? >> Well, you know, I think there are really four big categories. I think there's the kind of thing I was just talking about I think serverless and edge computing and kind of the server class of problem space. I think IOT is going to benefit, Amazon, Disney Plus, >> Savannah: Yes, edge. >> And PBS, sorry BBC, they all use WebAssembly for the players because they need to run the same player on thousands of different devices. >> I didn't even think about that use case. What a good example. >> It's a brilliant way to apply it. IOT is a hard space period and to be able to have that kind of layer of abstraction. So, that's another good use case >> Savannah: Yeah. >> And then I think this kind of plugin model is another one. You see it was Envoy proxy using this as a way to extend the core features. And I think that one's going to be very, very promising as well. I'm forgetting one, but you know. (all chuckles) I think you end up with these kind of discreet compartments where you can easily fit WebAssembly in here and it's solving a problem that we didn't have the technology that was really adequately solving it before. >> No, I love that. One of the things I thought was interesting we were all at dinner, we were together on Tuesday. I was chatting with Paris who runs Deliveroo at Apple and I can't say I've heard this about too many tools but when we were talking about WebAssembly she said "This is good for everybody" And, it's really nice when technologies come along that will raise the water level across the board. And I love that you're leading this. Speaking of you just announced a huge series aid, 20 million dollars just a few days ago. What does that mean for you and the team? >> I mean there's a little bit of economic uncertainty and it's always nice, >> Savannah: Just a little bit. >> Little bit. >> Savannah: It's come up on the show a little bit this week >> Just smidge. and it's nice to know that we're at a critical time developing this kind of infrastructure layer developing this kind of developer experience where they can go from, you know, blinking cursor to deployed application in two minutes or less. It would be a tragedy if that got forestalled merely because you can't achieve the velocity you need to carry it out. So, what's very exciting about being able to raise around like that at this critical time is that gives us the ability to grow strategically, be able to continue releasing products, building a community around WebAssembly as a whole and of course around our products at Fermyon is a little smaller circle in the bigger circle, and that's why we are so excited about having closed around, that's the perfect one to extend a runway like that. >> Well I'm super excited by this because one I love the concept. I think it's very relevant, like how you progress heavyweight, middleweight, maybe this is lightweight class. >> I know, I'm here for the analogy. No, it's great, its great. >> Maybe it's a lightweight class. >> And we're slimming, which not many of us can say in these times so that's awesome. >> Maybe it's more like the tractor trailer, the van, now you got the sports car. >> Matt: Yeah, I can go.. >> Now you're getting Detroit on us. >> I was trying for a coffee, when I just couldn't figure it out. (all chuckles) >> So, you got 20 million. I noticed the investors amplify very good technical VC and early stage firm. >> Amazing, yeah. >> Insight, they do early stage, big early stage like this. Also they're on the board of Docker. Docker was intent to put a tool out there. There's other competition out there. Cosmonic is out there. They're funded. So you got VC funded companies like yourselves and Cosmonic and others. What's that mean? Different tool chains, is it going to create fragmentation? Is there a common mission? How do you look at the competition as you get into the market >> When you see an ecosystem form. So, here we are at KubeCon, the cloud native ecosystem at this point I like to think of them as like concentric rings. You have the kind of core and then networking and storage and you build these rings out and the farther out you get then the easier it is to begin talking about competition and differentiation. But, when you're looking at that core piece everybody's got to be in there together working on the same stuff, because we want interoperability, we want standards based solutions. We want common ways of building things. More than anything, we want the developers and operators and users who come into the ecosystem to be able to like instantly feel like, okay I don't have to learn. Like you said, you know, 50 different tools for 50 different companies. "I see how this works", and they're doing this and they're doing this. >> Are you guys all contributing into the same open source? >> Yep, yeah, so... >> All the funding happens. >> Both CNCF and the ByteCode Alliance are organizations that are really kind of pushing forward that core technology. You know, you mentioned Cosmonic, Microsoft, SOSA, Red Hat, VMware, they're all in here too. All contributing and again, with all of us knowing this is that nascent stage where we got to execute it. >> How? >> Do it together. >> How are you guys differentiating? Because you know, open source is a great thing. Rising Tide floats all boats. This is a hot area. Is there a differentiation discussion or is it more let's see how it goes, kind of thing? >> Well for us, we came into it knowing very specifically what the problem was we wanted to solve. We wanted this serverless architecture that executed in sub one millisecond to solve, to really create a new wave of microservices. >> KubeCon loves performance. They want to run their stuff on the fastest platform possible. >> Yeah, and it shouldn't be a roadblock, you know, yeah. >> And you look at someone like SingleStore who's a database company and they're in it because they want to be able to run web assemblies close to the data. Instead of doing a sequel select and pulling it way out here and munging it and then pushing it back in. They move the code in there and it's executing in there. So everybody's kind of finding a neat little niche. You know, Cosmonic has really gone more for an enterprise play where they're able to provide a lot of high level security guarantees. Whereas we've been more interested in saying, "Hey, this your first foray into WebAssembly and you're interested in serverless we'll get you going in like a couple of minutes". >> I want to ask you because we had Scott Johnston on earlier opening keynote so we kind of chatted one-on-one and I went off form cause I really wanted to talk to him because Docker is one of the most important companies since their pivot, when they did their little reset after the first Docker kind of then they sold the enterprise off to Mirantis they've been doing really, really well. What's your relationship to Docker? He was very bullish with you guys. Insights, joint investor. Is there a relationship? You guys talk, what's going on there? >> I mean, I'm going to have to admit a little bit of hero worship on my part. I think Scott is brilliant. I just do, and having come from the Kubernetes world the Fermyon team, we've always kind of kept an eye on Docker communicated with a lot of them. We've known Justin Cormack for years. Chris Cornett. (indistinct) I mean yeah, and so it has been a very natural >> Probably have been accused of every Docker Con and we've did the last three years on the virtual side with them. So, we know them really well. >> You've always got your finger on the pulse for them. >> Do you have a relationship besides a formal relationship or is it more of pass shoot score together in the industry? >> Yeah. No, I think it is kind of the multi-level one. You come in knowing people. You've worked together before and you like working with each other and then it sort of naturally extends onto saying, "Hey, what can we do together?" And also how do we start building this ecosystem around us with Docker? They've done an excellent job of articulating why WebAssembly is a complimentary technology with Containers. Which is something I believe very wholeheartedly. You need all three of the heavyweight, middleweight, lightweight. You can't do all the with just one, and to have someone like that sort of with a voice profoundly be able to express, look we're going to start integrating it to show you how it works this way and prevent this sort of like needless drama where people are going, oh Dockers dead, now everything's WebAssembly, and that's been a great.. >> This fight that's been going on. I mean, Docker, Kubernetes, WebAssembly, Containers. >> Yeah. >> We've seen on the show and we both know this hybrid is the future. We're all going to be using a variety of different tools to achieve our goals and I think that you are obviously one of them. I'm curious because just as we were going on you mentioned that you have a PhD in philosophy. (Matt chuckles) >> Matt: Yeah. >> Which is a wild card. You're actually our second PhD in philosophy working in a very technical role on the show this week, which is kind of cool. So, how does that translate into the culture at Fermyon? What's it like on the team? >> Well, you know, a philosophy degree if nothing else teaches you to think in systems and both human systems and formal systems. So that helps and when you approach the process of building a company, you need to be thinking both in terms of how are we organizing this? How are we organizing the product? How do we organize the team? We have really learned that culture is a major deal and culture philosophy, >> Savannah: Why I'm bringing it up. >> We like that, you know, we've been very forward. We have our chip values, curiosity, humility inclusivity and passion, and those are kind of the four things that we feel like that each of us every day should strive to be exhibiting these kinds of things. Curiosity, because you can't push the envelope if you don't ask the hard questions. Humility, because you know, it's easy to get cocky and talk about things as if you knew all the answers. We know we don't and that means we can learn from Docker and Microsoft >> Savannah: That's why you're curious. >> And the person who stops by the booth that we've never met before and says, "hey" and inclusivity, of course, building a community if you don't execute on that well you can't build a good community. The diversity of the community is what makes it stronger than a singular.. >> You have to come in and be cohesive with the community. >> Matt: Yeah. >> The app focus is a really, I think, relevant right now. The timing of this is right online. I think Scott had a good answer I thought on the relationship and how he sees it. I think it's going to be a nice extension to not a extension that way, but like. >> It probably will be as well. >> Almost a pun there John, almost a pun. >> There actually might be an extension, but evolution what we're going to get to which I think is going to be pure application server, like. >> Yep, yep. Like performance for new class of developer. Then now the question comes up and we've been watching developer productivity. That is a big theme and our belief is that if you take digital transformation to its conclusion IT and developers aren't a department serving the business they are the business. That means the developer workflows will have to be radically rebuilt to handle the velocity and new tech for just coding. I call it architectural list. >> I like that. I might steal that. >> It's a pun, but it's also brings up the provocative question. You shouldn't have to need an architecture to code. I mean, Java was great for that reason in many ways. So, if that happens if the developers are running the business that means more apps. The apps is the business. You got to have tool chains and productivity. You can't have fragmentation. Some people are saying WebAssembly might, fork tool chains, might challenge the developer productivity. what's your answer to that? How would you address that objection? >> I mean the threat of forking is always lurking in the corner in open source. In a way it's probably a positive threat because it keeps us honest it keeps us wanting to be inclusive again and keep people involved. Honestly though, I'm not particularly worried about it. I know that the W-3 as a standards body, of course, one of the most respected standards bodies on the planet. They do html, they do cascading style sheets. WebAssembly is in that camp and those of us in the core are really very interested in saying, you know, come on in, let's build something that's going to be where the core is solid and you know what you got and then you can go into the resurgence of the application server. I mean, I wholeheartedly agree with you on that, and we can only get there if we say, all right, here are the common paradigms that we're all going to agree to use, now let's go build stuff. >> And as we've been saying, developers are setting, I think are going to set the standards and they're going to vote with their code and their feet, if you will. >> Savannah: A hundred percent. >> They will decide if you're not aligning with what they want to do. okay. On how they want to self-serve and or work, you'll figure that out. >> Yep, yep. >> You'll get instant feedback. >> Yeah. >> Well, you know, again, I tell you a huge fan of Docker. One of the things that Docker understood at the very outset, is that they had an infrastructure tool and developers were the way to get adoption, and if you look at how fast they got adoption versus many, many other technologies that are profoundly impacted. >> Savannah: Wild. >> Yeah. >> Savannah: It's a cool story. >> It's because they got the developers to go, "This is amazing, hey infrastructure folks, here's an infrastructure tool that we like" and the infrastructure folks are used to code being tossed over the wall are going, "Are you for real?" I mean, and that was a brilliant way to do it and I think that what.. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> We want to replay in the WebAssembly world is making it developer friendly and you know the kind of infrastructure that we can actually operate. >> Well congratulations to the entire community. We're huge fans of the concept. I kind of see where it's going with connect the dots. You guys getting a lot of buzz. I have to ask you, my final question is the hype is beyond all recognition at this point. People are super pumped and enthusiastic about it and people are looking at it maybe some challenging it, but that's all good things. How do you get to the next level where people are confident that this is actually going to go the next step? Hype to confidence. We've seen great hype. Envoy was hyped up big time before it came in, then it became great. That was one of my favorite examples. Hype is okay, but now you got to put some meat on the bone. The sizzle on the stake so to speak. So what's going to be the stake for you guys as you see this going forward? What's the need? >> Yeah, you know, I talk about our first guiding story was, you know, blinking cursor to deployed application in two minutes. That's what you need to win developers initially. So, what's the next story after that? It's got to be, Fermyon can run real world applications that solve real world problems. That's where hype often fails. If you can build something that's neat but nobody's quite sure what to do with it, to use it, maybe somebody will discover a good use. But, if you take that gambling asset, >> Savannah: It's that ending answer that makes the difference. >> Yeah, yeah. So we say, all right, what are developers trying to build with our platform and then relentlessly focus on making that easier and solving the real world problem that way. That's the crucial thing that's going to drive us out of that sort of early hype stage into a well adopted technology and I talk from Fermyon point of view but really that's for all of us in the WebAssembly. >> John: Absolutely. >> Very well stated Matt, just to wrap us up when we're interviewing you here on theCUBE next year, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't say today? >> All this stuff about coffee we didn't cover today, but also.. (all chuckles) >> Savannah: Here for the coffee show. Only analogies, that's a great analogy. >> I want to walk here and say, you know last time we talked about being able to achieve density in servers that was, you know, 10 times Kubernetes. Next year I want to say no, we're actually thousands of times beyond Kubernetes that we're lowering people's electricity bill by making these servers more efficient and the developers love it. >> That your commitment to the environment is something I want to do an entirely different show on. We learned that 7-8% of all the world's powers actually used on data centers through the show this week which is jarring quite frankly. >> Yeah, yeah. Tragic would be a better way of saying that. >> Yeah, I'm holding back so that we don't go over time here quite frankly. But anyways, Matt Butcher thank you so much for being here with us. >> Thank you so much for having me it was pleasure.. >> You are worth the hype you are getting. I am grateful to have you as our WebAssembly thought leader. In addition to Scott today from Docker earlier in the show. John Furrier, thanks for being my co-host and thank all of you for tuning into theCUBE here, live from Detroit. I'm Savannah Peterson and we'll be back with more soon. (ambient music)

>> From every ISV to solve the problems. You want there to be tools in place that you can use, either open source tools or whatever it is that help you build it. And slowly over time, that building will become easier and easier. So my question to you was, where do you see you playing? Do you see yourself playing to ISVs as a set of tools, which will make their life a lot easier and provide that work? >> Absolutely. >> If they don't have, so they don't have to do it. Or you're providing this for the end users? Or both? >> So it's a progression. If you go to the ISVs first, you're doomed to starved before you have time for that other option. >> Yeah. >> Right? So it's a question of phase, the phasing of it. And also if you go directly to end users, you can demonstrate the power of it and get the attention of the ISVs. I believe that the ISVs, especially those with the biggest footprints and the most, you know, coveted estates, they have already made massive investments at trying to solve decentralization of their software stack. And I believe that they have used it as a hook to try to move to a software as a service model and rope people into leasing their infrastructure. So if you look at the clouds that have been propped up by Autodesk or by Adobe, or you name the company, they are building proprietary makeshift solutions for decentralizing or hybrid clouding. Or maybe they're not even doing that at all and all they're is saying hey, if you want to get location agnosticness, then what you should just, is just move into our cloud. >> Right. >> And then they try to solve on the background how to decentralize it between different regions so they can have decent offerings in each region. But those who are more advanced have already made larger investments and will be more averse to, you know, throwing that stuff away, all of their makeshift machinery away, and using a platform that gives them high performance parallel, low level file system access, while at the same time having metadata-driven, you know, policy-based, intent-based orchestration to manage the diffusion of data across a decentralized infrastructure. They are not going to be as open because they've made such an investment and they're going to look at how do they monetize it. So what we have found with like the movie studios who are using us already, many of the app they're using, many of those software offerings, the ISVs have their own cloud that offers that software for the cloud. But what we got when I asked about this, 'cause I was dealt specifically into this question because I'm very interested to know how we're going to make that leap from end user upstream into the ISVs where I believe we need to, and they said, look, we cannot use these software ISV-specific SAS clouds for two reasons. Number one is we lose control of the data. We're giving it to them. That's security and other issues. And here you're talking about we're doing work for Disney, we're doing work for Netflix, and they're not going to let us put our data on those software clouds, on those SAS clouds. Secondly, in any reasonable pipeline, the data is shared by many different applications. We need to be agnostic as to the application. 'Cause the inputs to one application, you know, the output for one application provides the input to the next, and it's not necessarily from the same vendor. So they need to have a data platform that lets them, you know, go from one software stack, and you know, to run it on another. Because they might do the rendering with this and yet, they do the editing with that, and you know, et cetera, et cetera. So I think the further you go up the stack in the structured data and dedicated applications for specific functions in specific verticals, the further up the stack you go, the harder it is to justify a SAS offering where you're basically telling the end users you need to park all your data with us and then you can run your application in our cloud and get this. That ultimately is a dead end path versus having the data be open and available to many applications across this supercloud layer. >> Okay, so-- >> Is that making any sense? >> Yes, so if I could just ask a clarifying question. So, if I had to take Snowflake as an example, I think they're doing exactly what you're saying is a dead end, put everything into our proprietary system and then we'll figure out how to distribute it. >> Yeah. >> And and I think if you're familiar with Zhamak Dehghaniis' data mesh concept. Are you? >> A little bit, yeah. >> But in her model, Snowflake, a Snowflake warehouse is just a node on the mesh and that mesh is-- >> That's right. >> Ultimately the supercloud and you're an enabler of that is what I'm hearing. >> That's right. What they're doing up at the structured level and what they're talking about at the structured level we're doing at the underlying, unstructured level, which by the way has implications for how you implement those distributed database things. In other words, implementing a Snowflake on top of Hammerspace would have made building stuff like in the first place easier. It would allow you to easily shift and run the database engine anywhere. You still have to solve how to shard and distribute at the transaction layer above, so I'm not saying we're a substitute for what you need to do at the app layer. By the way, there is another example of that and that's Microsoft Office, right? It's one thing to share that, to have a file share where you can share all the docs. It's something else to have Word and PowerPoint, Excel know how to allow people to be simultaneously editing the same doc. That's always going to happen in the app layer. But not all applications need that level of, you know, in-app decentralization. You know, many of them, many workflows are pipelined, especially the ones that are very data intensive where you're doing drug discovery or you're doing rendering, or you're doing machine learning training. These things are human in the loop with large stages of processing across tens of thousands of cores. And I think that kind of data processing pipeline is what we're focusing on first. Not so much the Microsoft Office or the Snowflake, you know, parking a relational database because that takes a lot of application layer stuff and that's what they're good at. >> Right. >> But I think... >> Go ahead, sorry. >> Later entrance in these markets will find Hammerspace as a way to accelerate their work so they can focus more narrowly on just the stuff that's app-specific, higher level sharing in the app. >> Yes, Snowflake founders-- >> I think it might be worth mentioning also, just keep this confidential guys, but one of our customers is Blue Origin. And one of the things that we have found is kind of the point of what you're talking about with our customers. They're needing to build this and since it's not commercially available or they don't know where to look for it to be commercially available, they're all building themselves. So this layer is needed. And Blue is just one of the examples of quite a few we're now talking to. And like manufacturing, HPC, research where they're out trying to solve this problem with their own scripting tools and things like that. And I just, I don't know if there's anything you want to add, David, but you know, but there's definitely a demand here and customers are trying to figure out how to solve it beyond what Hammerspace is doing. Like the need is so great that they're just putting developers on trying to do it themselves. >> Well, and you know, Snowflake founders, they didn't have a Hammerspace to lean on. But, one of the things that's interesting about supercloud is we feel as though industry clouds will emerge, that as part of company's digital transformations, they will, you know, every company's a software company, they'll begin to build their own clouds and they will be able to use a Hammerspace to do that. >> A super pass layer. >> Yes. It's really, I don't know if David's speaking, I don't want to speak over him, but we can't hear you. May be going through a bad... >> Well, a regional, regional talks that make that possible. And so they're doing these render farms and editing farms, and it's a cloud-specific to the types of workflows in the median entertainment world. Or clouds specifically to workflows in the chip design world or in the drug and bio and life sciences exploration world. There are large organizations that are kind of a blend of end users, like the Broad, which has their own kind of cloud where they're asking collaborators to come in and work with them. So it starts to even blur who's an end user versus an ISV. >> Yes. >> Right? When you start talking about the massive data is the main gravity is to having lots of people participate. >> Yep, and that's where the value is. And that's where the value is. And this is a megatrend that we see. And so it's really important for us to get to the point of what is and what is not a supercloud and, you know, that's where we're trying to evolve. >> Let's talk about this for a second 'cause I want to, I want to challenge you on something and it's something that I got challenged on and it has led me to thinking differently than I did at first, which Molly can attest to. Okay? So, we have been looking for a way to talk about the concept of cloud of utility computing, run anything anywhere that isn't addressed in today's realization of cloud. 'Cause today's cloud is not run anything anywhere, it's quite the opposite. You park your data in AWS and that's where you run stuff. And you pretty much have to. Same with with Azure. They're using data gravity to keep you captive there, just like the old infrastructure guys did. But now it's even worse because it's coupled back with the software to some degree, as well. And you have to use their storage, networking, and compute. It's not, I mean it fell back to the mainframe era. Anyhow, so I love the concept of supercloud. By the way, I was going to suggest that a better term might be hyper cloud since hyper speaks to the multidimensionality of it and the ability to be in a, you know, be in a different dimension, a different plane of existence kind of thing like hyperspace. But super and hyper are somewhat synonyms. I mean, you have hyper cars and you have super cars and blah, blah, blah. I happen to like hyper maybe also because it ties into the whole Hammerspace notion of a hyper-dimensional, you know, reality, having your data centers connected by a wormhole that is Hammerspace. But regardless, what I got challenged on is calling it something different at all versus simply saying, this is what cloud has always meant to be. This is the true cloud, this is real cloud, this is cloud. And I think back to what happened, you'll remember, at Fusion IO we talked about IO memory and we did that because people had a conceptualization of what an SSD was. And an SSD back then was low capacity, low endurance, made to go military, aerospace where things needed to be rugged but was completely useless in the data center. And we needed people to imagine this thing as being able to displace entire SAND, with the kind of capacity density, performance density, endurance. And so we talked IO memory, we could have said enterprise SSD, and that's what the industry now refers to for that concept. What will people be saying five and 10 years from now? Will they simply say, well this is cloud as it was always meant to be where you are truly able to run anything anywhere and have not only the same APIs, but you're same data available with high performance access, all forms of access, block file and object everywhere. So yeah. And I wonder, and this is just me throwing it out there, I wonder if, well, there's trade offs, right? Giving it a new moniker, supercloud, versus simply talking about how cloud is always intended to be and what it was meant to be, you know, the real cloud or true cloud, there are trade-offs. By putting a name on it and branding it, that lets people talk about it and understand they're talking about something different. But it also is that an affront to people who thought that that's what they already had. >> What's different, what's new? Yes, and so we've given a lot of thought to this. >> Right, it's like you. >> And it's because we've been asked that why does the industry need a new term, and we've tried to address some of that. But some of the inside baseball that we haven't shared is, you remember the Web 2.0, back then? >> Yep. >> Web 2.0 was the same thing. And I remember Tim Burners Lee saying, "Why do we need Web 2.0? "This is what the Web was always supposed to be." But the truth is-- >> I know, that was another perfect-- >> But the truth is it wasn't, number one. Number two, everybody hated the Web 2.0 term. John Furrier was actually in the middle of it all. And then it created this groundswell. So one of the things we wrote about is that supercloud is an evocative term that catalyzes debate and conversation, which is what we like, of course. And maybe that's self-serving. But yeah, HyperCloud, Metacloud, super, meaning, it's funny because super came from Latin supra, above, it was never the superlative. But the superlative was a convenient byproduct that caused a lot of friction and flack, which again, in the media business is like a perfect storm brewing. >> The bad thing to have to, and I think you do need to shake people out of their, the complacency of the limitations that they're used to. And I'll tell you what, the fact that you even have the terms hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, private cloud, edge computing, those are all just referring to the different boundaries that isolate the silo that is the current limited cloud. >> Right. >> So if I heard correctly, what just, in terms of us defining what is and what isn't in supercloud, you would say traditional applications which have to run in a certain place, in a certain cloud can't run anywhere else, would be the stuff that you would not put in as being addressed by supercloud. And over time, you would want to be able to run the data where you want to and in any of those concepts. >> Or even modern apps, right? Or even modern apps that are siloed in SAS within an individual cloud, right? >> So yeah, I guess it's twofold. Number one, if you're going at the high application layers, there's lots of ways that you can give the appearance of anything running anywhere. The ISV, the SAS vendor can engineer stuff to have the ability to serve with low enough latency to different geographies, right? So if you go too high up the stack, it kind of loses its meaning because there's lots of different ways to make due and give the appearance of omni-presence of the service. Okay? As you come down more towards the platform layer, it gets harder and harder to mask the fact that supercloud is something entirely different than just a good regionally-distributed SAS service. So I don't think you, I don't think you can distinguish supercloud if you go too high up the stack because it's just SAS, it's just a good SAS service where the SAS vendor has done the hard work to give you low latency access from different geographic regions. >> Yeah, so this is one of the hardest things, David. >> Common among them. >> Yeah, this is really an important point. This is one of the things I've had the most trouble with is why is this not just SAS? >> So you dilute your message when you go up to the SAS layer. If you were to focus most of this around the super pass layer, the how can you host applications and run them anywhere and not host this, not run a service, not have a service available everywhere. So how can you take any application, even applications that are written, you know, in a traditional legacy data center fashion and be able to run them anywhere and have them have their binaries and their datasets and the runtime environment and the infrastructure to start them and stop them? You know, the jobs, the, what the Kubernetes, the job scheduler? What we're really talking about here, what I think we're really talking about here is building the operating system for a decentralized cloud. What is the operating system, the operating environment for a decentralized cloud? Where you can, and that the main two functions of an operating system or an operating environment are the process scheduler, the thing that's scheduling what is running where and when and so forth, and the file system, right? The thing that's supplying a common view and access to data. So when we talk about this, I think that the strongest argument for supercloud is made when you go down to the platform layer and talk of it, talk about it as an operating environment on which you can run all forms of applications. >> Would you exclude--? >> Not a specific application that's been engineered as a SAS. (audio distortion) >> He'll come back. >> Are you there? >> Yeah, yeah, you just cut out for a minute. >> I lost your last statement when you broke up. >> We heard you, you said that not the specific application. So would you exclude Snowflake from supercloud? >> Frankly, I would. I would. Because, well, and this is kind of hard to do because Snowflake doesn't like to, Frank doesn't like to talk about Snowflake as a SAS service. It has a negative connotation. >> But it is. >> I know, we all know it is. We all know it is and because it is, yes, I would exclude them. >> I think I actually have him on camera. >> There's nothing in common. >> I think I have him on camera or maybe Benoit as saying, "Well, we are a SAS." I think it's Slootman. I think I said to Slootman, "I know you don't like to say you're a SAS." And I think he said, "Well, we are a SAS." >> Because again, if you go to the top of the application stack, there's any number of ways you can give it location agnostic function or you know, regional, local stuff. It's like let's solve the location problem by having me be your one location. How can it be decentralized if you're centralizing on (audio distortion)? >> Well, it's more decentralized than if it's all in one cloud. So let me actually, so the spectrum. So again, in the spirit of what is and what isn't, I think it's safe to say Hammerspace is supercloud. I think there's no debate there, right? Certainly among this crowd. And I think we can all agree that Dell, Dell Storage is not supercloud. Where it gets fuzzy is this Snowflake example or even, how about a, how about a Cohesity that instantiates its stack in different cloud regions in different clouds, and synchronizes, however magic sauce it does that. Is that a supercloud? I mean, so I'm cautious about having too strict of a definition 'cause then only-- >> Fair enough, fair enough. >> But I could use your help and thoughts on that. >> So I think we're talking about two different spectrums here. One is the spectrum of platform to application-specific. As you go up the application stack and it becomes this specific thing. Or you go up to the more and more structured where it's serving a specific application function where it's more of a SAS thing. I think it's harder to call a SAS service a supercloud. And I would argue that the reason there, and what you're lacking in the definition is to talk about it as general purpose. Okay? Now, that said, a data warehouse is general purpose at the structured data level. So you could make the argument for why Snowflake is a supercloud by saying that it is a general purpose platform for doing lots of different things. It's just one at a higher level up at the structured data level. So one spectrum is the high level going from platform to, you know, unstructured data to structured data to very application-specific, right? Like a specific, you know, CAD/CAM mechanical design cloud, like an Autodesk would want to give you their cloud for running, you know, and sharing CAD/CAM designs, doing your CAD/CAM anywhere stuff. Well, the other spectrum is how well does the purported supercloud technology actually live up to allowing you to run anything anywhere with not just the same APIs but with the local presence of data with the exact same runtime environment everywhere, and to be able to correctly manage how to get that runtime environment anywhere. So a Cohesity has some means of running things in different places and some means of coordinating what's where and of serving diff, you know, things in different places. I would argue that it is a very poor approximation of what Hammerspace does in providing the exact same file system with local high performance access everywhere with metadata ability to control where the data is actually instantiated so that you don't have to wait for it to get orchestrated. But even then when you do have to wait for it, it happens automatically and so it's still only a matter of, well, how quick is it? And on the other end of the spectrum is you could look at NetApp with Flexcache and say, "Is that supercloud?" And I would argue, well kind of because it allows you to run things in different places because it's a cache. But you know, it really isn't because it presumes some central silo from which you're cacheing stuff. So, you know, is it or isn't it? Well, it's on a spectrum of exactly how fully is it decoupling a runtime environment from specific locality? And I think a cache doesn't, it stretches a specific silo and makes it have some semblance of similar access in other places. But there's still a very big difference to the central silo, right? You can't turn off that central silo, for example. >> So it comes down to how specific you make the definition. And this is where it gets kind of really interesting. It's like cloud. Does IBM have a cloud? >> Exactly. >> I would say yes. Does it have the kind of quality that you would expect from a hyper-scale cloud? No. Or see if you could say the same thing about-- >> But that's a problem with choosing a name. That's the problem with choosing a name supercloud versus talking about the concept of cloud and how true up you are to that concept. >> For sure. >> Right? Because without getting a name, you don't have to draw, yeah. >> I'd like to explore one particular or bring them together. You made a very interesting observation that from a enterprise point of view, they want to safeguard their store, their data, and they want to make sure that they can have that data running in their own workflows, as well as, as other service providers providing services to them for that data. So, and in in particular, if you go back to, you go back to Snowflake. If Snowflake could provide the ability for you to have your data where you wanted, you were in charge of that, would that make Snowflake a supercloud? >> I'll tell you, in my mind, they would be closer to my conceptualization of supercloud if you can instantiate Snowflake as software on your own infrastructure, and pump your own data to Snowflake that's instantiated on your own infrastructure. The fact that it has to be on their infrastructure or that it's on their, that it's on their account in the cloud, that you're giving them the data and they're, that fundamentally goes against it to me. If they, you know, they would be a pure, a pure plate if they were a software defined thing where you could instantiate Snowflake machinery on the infrastructure of your choice and then put your data into that machinery and get all the benefits of Snowflake. >> So did you see--? >> In other words, if they were not a SAS service, but offered all of the similar benefits of being, you know, if it were a service that you could run on your own infrastructure. >> So did you see what they announced, that--? >> I hope that's making sense. >> It does, did you see what they announced at Dell? They basically announced the ability to take non-native Snowflake data, read it in from an object store on-prem, like a Dell object store. They do the same thing with Pure, read it in, running it in the cloud, and then push it back out. And I was saying to Dell, look, that's fine. Okay, that's interesting. You're taking a materialized view or an extended table, whatever you're doing, wouldn't it be more interesting if you could actually run the query locally with your compute? That would be an extension that would actually get my attention and extend that. >> That is what I'm talking about. That's what I'm talking about. And that's why I'm saying I think Hammerspace is more progressive on that front because with our technology, anybody who can instantiate a service, can make a service. And so I, so MSPs can use Hammerspace as a way to build a super pass layer and host their clients on their infrastructure in a cloud-like fashion. And their clients can have their own private data centers and the MSP or the public clouds, and Hammerspace can be instantiated, get this, by different parties in these different pieces of infrastructure and yet linked together to make a common file system across all of it. >> But this is data mesh. If I were HPE and Dell it's exactly what I'd be doing. I'd be working with Hammerspace to create my own data. I'd work with Databricks, Snowflake, and any other-- >> Data mesh is a good way to put it. Data mesh is a good way to put it. And this is at the lowest level of, you know, the underlying file system that's mountable by the operating system, consumed as a real file system. You can't get lower level than that. That's why this is the foundation for all of the other apps and structured data systems because you need to have a data mesh that can at least mesh the binary blob. >> Okay. >> That hold the binaries and that hold the datasets that those applications are running. >> So David, in the third week of January, we're doing supercloud 2 and I'm trying to convince John Furrier to make it a data slash data mesh edition. I'm slowly getting him to the knothole. I would very much, I mean you're in the Bay Area, I'd very much like you to be one of the headlines. As Zhamak Dehghaniis going to speak, she's the creator of Data Mesh, >> Sure. >> I'd love to have you come into our studio as well, for the live session. If you can't make it, we can pre-record. But you're right there, so I'll get you the dates. >> We'd love to, yeah. No, you can count on it. No, definitely. And you know, we don't typically talk about what we do as Data Mesh. We've been, you know, using global data environment. But, you know, under the covers, that's what the thing is. And so yeah, I think we can frame the discussion like that to line up with other, you know, with the other discussions. >> Yeah, and Data Mesh, of course, is one of those evocative names, but she has come up with some very well defined principles around decentralized data, data as products, self-serve infrastructure, automated governance, and and so forth, which I think your vision plugs right into. And she's brilliant. You'll love meeting her. >> Well, you know, and I think.. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead, Peter. >> Just like to work one other interface which I think is important. How do you see yourself and the open source? You talked about having an operating system. Obviously, Linux is the operating system at one level. How are you imagining that you would interface with cost community as part of this development? >> Well, it's funny you ask 'cause my CTO is the kernel maintainer of the storage networking stack. So how the Linux operating system perceives and consumes networked data at the file system level, the network file system stack is his purview. He owns that, he wrote most of it over the last decade that he's been the maintainer, but he's the gatekeeper of what goes in. And we have leveraged his abilities to enhance Linux to be able to use this decentralized data, in particular with decoupling the control plane driven by metadata from the data access path and the many storage systems on which the data gets accessed. So this factoring, this splitting of control plane from data path, metadata from data, was absolutely necessary to create a data mesh like we're talking about. And to be able to build this supercloud concept. And the highways on which the data runs and the client which knows how to talk to it is all open source. And we have, we've driven the NFS 4.2 spec. The newest NFS spec came from my team. And it was specifically the enhancements needed to be able to build a spanning file system, a data mesh at a file system level. Now that said, our file system itself and our server, our file server, our data orchestration, our data management stuff, that's all closed source, proprietary Hammerspace tech. But the highways on which the mesh connects are actually all open source and the client that knows how to consume it. So we would, honestly, I would welcome competitors using those same highways. They would be at a major disadvantage because we kind of built them, but it would still be very validating and I think only increase the potential adoption rate by more than whatever they might take of the market. So it'd actually be good to split the market with somebody else to come in and share those now super highways for how to mesh data at the file system level, you know, in here. So yeah, hopefully that answered your question. Does that answer the question about how we embrace the open source? >> Right, and there was one other, just that my last one is how do you enable something to run in every environment? And if we take the edge, for example, as being, as an environment which is much very, very compute heavy, but having a lot less capability, how do you do a hold? >> Perfect question. Perfect question. What we do today is a software appliance. We are using a Linux RHEL 8, RHEL 8 equivalent or a CentOS 8, or it's, you know, they're all roughly equivalent. But we have bundled and a software appliance which can be instantiated on bare metal hardware on any type of VM system from VMware to all of the different hypervisors in the Linux world, to even Nutanix and such. So it can run in any virtualized environment and it can run on any cloud instance, server instance in the cloud. And we have it packaged and deployable from the marketplaces within the different clouds. So you can literally spin it up at the click of an API in the cloud on instances in the cloud. So with all of these together, you can basically instantiate a Hammerspace set of machinery that can offer up this file system mesh. like we've been using the terminology we've been using now, anywhere. So it's like being able to take and spin up Snowflake and then just be able to install and run some VMs anywhere you want and boom, now you have a Snowflake service. And by the way, it is so complete that some of our customers, I would argue many aren't even using public clouds at all, they're using this just to run their own data centers in a cloud-like fashion, you know, where they have a data service that can span it all. >> Yeah and to Molly's first point, we would consider that, you know, cloud. Let me put you on the spot. If you had to describe conceptually without a chalkboard what an architectural diagram would look like for supercloud, what would you say? >> I would say it's to have the same runtime environment within every data center and defining that runtime environment as what it takes to schedule the execution of applications, so job scheduling, runtime stuff, and here we're talking Kubernetes, Slurm, other things that do job scheduling. We're talking about having a common way to, you know, instantiate compute resources. So a global compute environment, having a common compute environment where you can instantiate things that need computing. Okay? So that's the first part. And then the second is the data platform where you can have file block and object volumes, and have them available with the same APIs in each of these distributed data centers and have the exact same data omnipresent with the ability to control where the data is from one moment to the next, local, where all the data is instantiate. So my definition would be a common runtime environment that's bifurcate-- >> Oh. (attendees chuckling) We just lost them at the money slide. >> That's part of the magic makes people listen. We keep someone on pin and needles waiting. (attendees chuckling) >> That's good. >> Are you back, David? >> I'm on the edge of my seat. Common runtime environment. It was like... >> And just wait, there's more. >> But see, I'm maybe hyper-focused on the lower level of what it takes to host and run applications. And that's the stuff to schedule what resources they need to run and to get them going and to get them connected through to their persistence, you know, and their data. And to have that data available in all forms and have it be the same data everywhere. On top of that, you could then instantiate applications of different types, including relational databases, and data warehouses and such. And then you could say, now I've got, you know, now I've got these more application-level or structured data-level things. I tend to focus less on that structured data level and the application level and am more focused on what it takes to host any of them generically on that super pass layer. And I'll admit, I'm maybe hyper-focused on the pass layer and I think it's valid to include, you know, higher levels up the stack like the structured data level. But as soon as you go all the way up to like, you know, a very specific SAS service, I don't know that you would call that supercloud. >> Well, and that's the question, is there value? And Marianna Tessel from Intuit said, you know, we looked at it, we did it, and it just, it was actually negative value for us because connecting to all these separate clouds was a real pain in the neck. Didn't bring us any additional-- >> Well that's 'cause they don't have this pass layer underneath it so they can't even shop around, which actually makes it hard to stand up your own SAS service. And ultimately they end up having to build their own infrastructure. Like, you know, I think there's been examples like Netflix moving away from the cloud to their own infrastructure. Basically, if you're going to rent it for more than a few months, it makes sense to build it yourself, if it's at any kind of scale. >> Yeah, for certain components of that cloud. But if the Goldman Sachs came to you, David, and said, "Hey, we want to collaborate and we want to build "out a cloud and essentially build our SAS system "and we want to do that with Hammerspace, "and we want to tap the physical infrastructure "of not only our data centers but all the clouds," then that essentially would be a SAS, would it not? And wouldn't that be a Super SAS or a supercloud? >> Well, you know, what they may be using to build their service is a supercloud, but their service at the end of the day is just a SAS service with global reach. Right? >> Yeah. >> You know, look at, oh shoot. What's the name of the company that does? It has a cloud for doing bookkeeping and accounting. I forget their name, net something. NetSuite. >> NetSuite. NetSuite, yeah, Oracle. >> Yeah. >> Yep. >> Oracle acquired them, right? Is NetSuite a supercloud or is it just a SAS service? You know? I think under the covers you might ask are they using supercloud under the covers so that they can run their SAS service anywhere and be able to shop the venue, get elasticity, get all the benefits of cloud in the, to the benefit of their service that they're offering? But you know, folks who consume the service, they don't care because to them they're just connecting to some endpoint somewhere and they don't have to care. So the further up the stack you go, the more location-agnostic it is inherently anyway. >> And I think it's, paths is really the critical layer. We thought about IAS Plus and we thought about SAS Minus, you know, Heroku and hence, that's why we kind of got caught up and included it. But SAS, I admit, is the hardest one to crack. And so maybe we exclude that as a deployment model. >> That's right, and maybe coming down a level to saying but you can have a structured data supercloud, so you could still include, say, Snowflake. Because what Snowflake is doing is more general purpose. So it's about how general purpose it is. Is it hosting lots of other applications or is it the end application? Right? >> Yeah. >> So I would argue general purpose nature forces you to go further towards platform down-stack. And you really need that general purpose or else there is no real distinguishing. So if you want defensible turf to say supercloud is something different, I think it's important to not try to wrap your arms around SAS in the general sense. >> Yeah, and we've kind of not really gone, leaned hard into SAS, we've just included it as a deployment model, which, given the constraints that you just described for structured data would apply if it's general purpose. So David, super helpful. >> Had it sign. Define the SAS as including the hybrid model hold SAS. >> Yep. >> Okay, so with your permission, I'm going to add you to the list of contributors to the definition. I'm going to add-- >> Absolutely. >> I'm going to add this in. I'll share with Molly. >> Absolutely. >> We'll get on the calendar for the date. >> If Molly can share some specific language that we've been putting in that kind of goes to stuff we've been talking about, so. >> Oh, great. >> I think we can, we can share some written kind of concrete recommendations around this stuff, around the general purpose, nature, the common data thing and yeah. >> Okay. >> Really look forward to it and would be glad to be part of this thing. You said it's in February? >> It's in January, I'll let Molly know. >> Oh, January. >> What the date is. >> Excellent. >> Yeah, third week of January. Third week of January on a Tuesday, whatever that is. So yeah, we would welcome you in. But like I said, if it doesn't work for your schedule, we can prerecord something. But it would be awesome to have you in studio. >> I'm sure with this much notice we'll be able to get something. Let's make sure we have the dates communicated to Molly and she'll get my admin to set it up outside so that we have it. >> I'll get those today to you, Molly. Thank you. >> By the way, I am so, so pleased with being able to work with you guys on this. I think the industry needs it very bad. They need something to break them out of the box of their own mental constraints of what the cloud is versus what it's supposed to be. And obviously, the more we get people to question their reality and what is real, what are we really capable of today that then the more business that we're going to get. So we're excited to lend the hand behind this notion of supercloud and a super pass layer in whatever way we can. >> Awesome. >> Can I ask you whether your platforms include ARM as well as X86? >> So we have not done an ARM port yet. It has been entertained and won't be much of a stretch. >> Yeah, it's just a matter of time. >> Actually, entertained doing it on behalf of NVIDIA, but it will absolutely happen because ARM in the data center I think is a foregone conclusion. Well, it's already there in some cases, but not quite at volume. So definitely will be the case. And I'll tell you where this gets really interesting, discussion for another time, is back to my old friend, the SSD, and having SSDs that have enough brains on them to be part of that fabric. Directly. >> Interesting. Interesting. >> Very interesting. >> Directly attached to ethernet and able to create a data mesh global file system, that's going to be really fascinating. Got to run now. >> All right, hey, thanks you guys. Thanks David, thanks Molly. Great to catch up. Bye-bye. >> Bye >> Talk to you soon.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here, with Dave Vellante. We are covering day two of our coverage of Snowflake Summit '22. of Snowflake Summit '22. It's been a cannon of content coming your way, the last couple of days. We love talking with customers, with partners. We've got a partner on the program from ThoughtSpot. We're going to be diving into digital transformation with self-service analytics for the modern data stack. Please welcome Kuntal Vahalia, SVP of Channel and Alliances at ThoughtSpot. Welcome Kuntal. >> Thank you, Lisa. Dave, thank you for having us. >> Dave: Good to see you. >> Talk to the audience a little bit about ThoughtSpot. Give 'em an overview, and then de dive into the partnership with Snowflake. >> Yeah, absolutely. So ThoughtSpot is the, what we call live analytics, for the modern data stack, right? We want to be the experience layer for all the data that's getting modernized and moving into the cloud, right? And then specifically to Snowflake, we, of course, we have seen over the last two days here Snowflake has made tremendous innovations where they've accelerated a customer's journey into the cloud, especially the data cloud. Our job is to go really unlock that data, right? Generate that value, make it consumable at the at the experience level layer, right? So what we want to do here with Snowflake is here with Snowflake is make analytics self service for the end users, for the end users, on top of the Snowflake data cloud, right? And we want to empower everyone to create, consume, and operationalize data driven insights. We think if the end users can gender their own insights through live analytics, we could do have a completely different operating model for a business, right? And I think we can do that in accelerated fashion on, sitting on top of Snowflake data cloud. >> End users? Lines of business? >> It's line of business users, so we directly go to end users. That's one of our differentiation, not just IT, not just IT, but as end users as well, so we could be all things to all enterprise, to all enterprise, across our line of businesses. >> So what kind of impact are you seeing with your customers? You know, ones that are leaning into ThoughtSpot and Snowflake and sort of rethinking their data approach? >> Yeah. I mean the impact could be immense, right? As I said, this is not just about analytics. If we are successful in empowering end users, it completely changes the velocity of the business. We are now driving innovation at every node, at every layer in the organization. Not just IT, not just smaller segments in the organization, we are doing this anywhere, in any pocket, right? So I think the impact could be massive, if we do this right. And I think we are starting to see that, we have a lot of customers here actually, joint customers, Capital One, Canadian Tires, Walmart, they're all joint customers, where we have seen starting to see some of those impacts, where we have data getting modernized, the stack being ready, and then we're coming in at the top as the experience layer, which is driving that new digital operating model. >> Describe the maturity curve when you go, you mentioned some of the the the leaders, I mean, take a Walmart. I mean, they kind of invented the whole, you know, beer and diapers thing, right? So obviously a company with tremendous resources and and and advanced technology. Compare. Compare. So some of those leaders with sort of the other end of the spectrum, when you come into a company and you see, okay, here's, okay, here's, what does that spectrum look like? And and what's the upside for the, I don't want to call 'em laggards, but I'll call 'em laggards. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, this, this, I think we are still early on. I mean, as this is not just a exercise in getting the data ready, this is also an exercise in in change management, because now, as I said, we are going beyond IT. We are going to line of business users as well, so a lot of change management required, and we have seen companies that are actually putting this in front of the frontline workers, empowering frontline workers to consume analytics and to drive self-service via search and AI, and AI, they're on a different curve. They are actually being competitive in the market. That's an advantage for them, right? >> Right. >> So we are seeing a lot of companies, like Walmart, already ahead in that journey with us still early days, right? We got to go, land in one line of business, go from there to other line of business till we go enterprise wide. >> Can you, it sounds like you might be a facilitator of connecting heads of business with the IT and the tech folks at ThoughtSpot. >> Absolutely. I mean, that is the Holy Grail. How do we get IT And line of business work frictionless, where everyone has their roles defined, right? And still get to the outcome where innovation is happening now with IT on the data cloud and then go beyond IT into the broader business? So yeah, I think that's definitely one of the our goals and outcomes of what we do. >> So what are the roles there? So the business obviously wants to do more business. Okay. They put analytics in their hands and it helps them get there. What role does IT play? Making sure that those services are available? Are they a service provider? Is it more of a governance and compliance thing? >> Yeah, I mean, step number one is still to get the data ready and I think IT still owns the key to that kingdom, especially around governance, security, so I think IT still has to get the data stack ready, right? Step number two is for IT to really build a framework for how to consume analytics for how to consume analytics for the end users. Step number three then is, is the rule is, Hey, we don't need IT to now deliver dashboards or KPIs to the business every day that that's how traditional dashboards work. In our world, once IT does step number one and step number two the business can take over and they can now go operate the business on their own using live analytics. >> Creating self-serve >> Absolutely. Self-service analytics using service in AI. >> What have you seen, in terms of from the IT folks perspective, we talked about change management a minute ago, It's very challenging to do, but these days every company has to be a data company. >> Kuntal: Yeah. >> They don't have a choice. >> Yeah. >> What are you seeing from a change management perspective within the IT function across your customers and then be willing to let go in some cases? and then be willing to let go in some cases? >> Actually, >> Actually, what we have seen is, you know, think about the the technical debt that IT is owning over the last few years, it's just increasing, right? IT is looking for ways to A. cut cost, to A. cut cost, B. deliver more B. deliver more with probably the same amount of resources they have, so in some ways they welcome this new operating model, as long as they can keep the governance, they can keep the security, they can keep the framework around how business is run, as long as IT has a say in that, they're more than welcome to invite business, to really drive innovation at the edges through self-service analytics, so what we found is IT is a is a welcome partner, in this journey, especially when they have to get the data ready and modernize the data set for us. >> You guys announcing a partnership with Matillion this week, what? Tell us what that's all about. The one earlier. >> We did. So we did announce a partnership, so I think, as I said, step number one is getting the data ready, and I think we have heard from Frank and the rest of this team this week, even Snowflake is taking a best of breed approach on the data stack, right? So we want the computer So we want the computer and the storage to be ready, but for that, the data pipeline has to be ready, which is where Matillion comes in with the low code, no code approach, so we think between Matillion, Snowflake, and ThoughtSpot, we could be the accelerated best of breed approach for customers to realize value and and be live on the, on the modern data stack. >> Is that your, is that your stack? >> As we said, we, we meet the customers where they are, but we think this is accelerated path. >> What are the advantages of, you know, what are you optimizing on in that stack? in that stack? >> First with Matillion, we have, what we concept, we have this concept of Spot Apps, so this is ThoughtSpot's way to really capture the IP and the templates for customers to move fast, right? That's where we bake in a lot of the industry IP, a lot of functional IP around end sources, and and endpoints, so we have some of those spot apps built with Matillion, built with Matillion, so now customers able to ingest data into the so now customers able to ingest data into the into the cloud faster using Matillion, right? So that's, that's something we worked with, same thing with Snowflake, you know, we are now starting to go verticalize with Snowflake, So we are starting to build a lot of IP around financial services, healthcare and whatnot, which is where I think we are, again, accelerating customer's path on the modern data stack, all the way to the experience layer. >> A as a partner of Snowflake's, what does all the narrative around the data cloud, we've been talking about that for a while, a lot of conversation around the data cloud the last couple of days, where do partners fit into that overall narrative? >> Yeah, I think multiple places, right? First thing, First thing, First thing, every layer of the data cloud still needs innovation, still needs partners, and every partner adds a different set of value. Just like we add value at the, at the top layer, which is the experience layer, But I think, you know, we have channel partners we have a lot of SIs and GSIs here, and GSIs here, especially once we take a best of breed approach, to delivering customer outcomes, SIs are the neutral ground. They're the ones who are going to have the Matillion expertise, and the Snowflake expertise, and thoughts for expertise, all baked into one DNA practice, data analytics practice, so I think at every layer, partners have a role to play and every layer partners have role, have value to add. have value to add. >> What's the engagement process like for customers when you you're talking about the the the the three way partnership Matillion, Matillion, ThoughtSpot, and stuff like, how do customers get involved, what's your go to market look like? >> Right. I mean, obviously, I mean, we, we, we are humble, we know where we are. I mean, we, a little bit smaller than, than Snowflake Snowflake has a head start, so they've been about five years ahead of us, so we are largely targeting customers that are that are Snowflake ready, where there is some semblance of data cloud, where data seems to be organized and ready to go, right? so once we think the customer is at that point in the journey, we have very strong partnership across both, across entire organization, at a product level, at a field engagement level, and our field teams really understand the value the joint value between the two organizations, so we, we start to see Snowflake feel, and ThoughtSpot feel, starting to work together on key accounts, once we think the data is ready, and wherever we need to accelerate the data, that's where we bring in Matillion as well, to ingest more data into, into the data cloud, but that's largely been the engagement model between the three companies. >> How do you see the announcements that they made around applications affecting what you guys are doing and your ecosystem? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that's a validation. I think to us, I think to us, we always said step number one is to modernize the data, move into the cloud. That's step number one, but we still have to unlock the data. Like the data still needs to be consumed, And we always said, Hey, we are that app that could drive the consumption of data, but now with some of the announcement we have seen, I think the validation is there saying, "Hey, yes." There, even Snowflake is ready to move in a more accelerated fashion into the application world where they want to drive consumption, not just with the analytics layer, but with lot of other applications that's out there. >> Yeah. >> What are some of the things that you've heard this week, in the last couple of days, that really validate that really validate the the partnership with Snowflake, from your perspective? >> Yeah. I mean, I think the first thing is, is this concept of modern data stack, which is best of breed. I think we have been thinking about that for a long time, for the last year or so. We have seen this come through at this event here, right? We see Matillion, Snowflake, and then the SIs around it, all coming together, so I think to us, that's the biggest validation that the modern data stack is the right approach, especially best of breed, to drive the right customer outcomes, so to me, that's big. Second is this concept of really accelerating applications on top of the data cloud. I think that's, again a validation of what we've been trying to do over the last few years, which is, the data has modernized, let's now drive consumption and adoption of that data, so I think those are the two big take areas. >> So, so the modern data stack, to get to the modern data stack, you got to do some work. >> Yep. >> But so the, the play is to hold out the carrot, which you just kind of just did, 'cause once you get there, then you can really start to hit the steep part of the S-curve, right? >> That's right. >> What, what are the, what would you say are are the sort of prerequisites that customers need to think about to really jump on that modern data stack curve? >> Um, I think they they got to first have a vision around the outcomes, what outcomes we are driving. I think it's one thing to say, "Hey, we just going to move the data over from from legacy into the cloud." I mean, that's just, that's just migration, that doesn't drive the outcomes. To us, what makes sense is, let's start with the right outcomes around supply chain, around retail, around e-commerce, let's name it, right? I think, it starts there. From there on, let's figure out, what do we need? What's what, what technologies do we need in the stack to enable those outcomes, right? It could be ThoughtSpot at the top, it could be something else at the top, and same thing, it's Matillion, and Snowflake, right? But it really starts with what outcomes we going to drive in what industry and what KPIs are important for our customers. >> What's next for ThoughtSpot and Snowflake? I was just looking at the notes here. Over 250 plus joint customers, you mentioned some Disney+, Capital One, I've seen them around here. What's next for these two powerhouses? >> Well, I think we're just getting started, to be honest. I mean those 250 customers, first, we got to go drive success for them. I mean, we are a 10 year old company with a two year runway because we transferred our business transformed our business to cloud, less than two years ago, so this 250 joint logos are actually all happened in the last two years and that's driven us to be in the, probably in the top five adoption drivers for Snowflake, all in the last two years, So goal number one is to really, let's go drive customer success for these joint logos. Second, let's go expand them, right? Consumption is the key criteria, both for Snowflake, as well as ThoughtSpot. We are very well aligned, our pricing models aligned there, our incentives aligned there, We really want customers to go adopt and consume the stack, and then of course, really, we want to go verticalize ourselves, start speaking the language of the customers, and really just get bigger. I mean, we still got to build a machine around this. >> Lisa: Yep. >> Lisa, this is, this is all still early days for us. >> Early innings. A lot of, but a ton of potential. The, the field is ripe. >> The field is right open. I think in, and we will, I think we are, bottom of the third or bottom of the second, I think you still have a long game to play, right? >> Well good. Most people always use bottom the first. I'm glad to hear it's really bottom of the second or third. That's pretty good. >> Yeah, well, 250 logos are there. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> And it's further along 'cause of the, the I don't want to say it like this, but I'm going to say it anyway. The failure of the big data movement, it pushed us along quite, quite a ways, in terms of thinking, putting data at the core, the technology kind of failed us, you know and the, and the, you know and the, and the, the centralization of the architectures, the centralization of the architectures, it failed us, But then the cloud came along. >> That's right. >> We learned a lot and now, you know, technology's advanced I think people's thinking is advanced and they realize increasingly the importance of data >> And ecosystem is coming. I mean, I think you look around here, this is a secret sauce for the future. >> Dave: Yep. This is what's going to really get us moving faster over the next few innings because now the rest of the ecosystem is coming along. >> Yep. The momentum is here. That flywheel is moving. >> That's right. >> Definitely. Kuntal, thank you very much for joining David and me on the program talking about >> Kuntal: Lisa, Dave, thank you so much for your time. >> what ThoughtSpot's all about, what you're up to, a lot of momentum. We wish you the best of luck as you progress into those later innings. >> Thank you >> For Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube. We are live in Las Vegas at Snowflake Summit '22. Dave and I are going to be right back with our next guest, so stick around. (mellow techno music) (mellow techno music) (mellow techno music) (mellow techno music)

(ethereal music) >> Good morning, everyone, and welcome to theCUBE's day-two coverage of Snowflake Summit '22. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We are live in Las Vegas at Caesar's Forum, looking forward to an action-packed day here on theCUBE. Our first guest joins us, Bill Stratton, the global industry lead, media, entertainment and advertising at Snowflake. Bill, great to have you on the program talking about industry specifics. >> Glad to be here, excited to have a conversation. >> Yeah, the media and entertainment industry has been keeping a lot of us alive the last couple of years, probably more of a dependence on it than we've seen stuck at home. Talk to us about the data culture in the media, entertainment and advertising landscape, how is data being used today? >> Sure. Well, let's start with what you just mentioned, these last couple of years, I think, coming out of the pandemic, a lot of trends and impact to the media industry. I think there were some things happening prior to COVID, right? Streaming services were starting to accelerate. And obviously, Netflix was an early mover. Disney launched their streaming service right before the pandemic, Disney+, with ESPN+ as well. I think then, as the pandemic occurred these last two years, the acceleration of consumers' habits, obviously, of not just unbundling their cable subscription, but then choosing, you know, what services they want to subscribe to, right? I mean, I think we all sort of grew up in this era of, okay, the bundle was the bundle, you had sports, you had news, you had entertainment, whether you watched the channel or not, you had the bundle. And what the pandemic has accelerated is what I call, and I think a lot of folks call, the golden age of content. And really, the golden age of content is about the consumer. They're in control now, they pick and choose what services they want, what they watch, when they watch it. And I think that has extremely, sort of accelerated this adoption on the consumer side, and then it's creating this data ecosystem, as a result of companies like Disney having a direct-to-consumer relationship for the first time. It used to be a Disney or an NBC was a wholesaler, and the cable or satellite company had the consumer data and relationship. Now, the companies that are producing the content have the data and the consumer relationships. It's a fascinating time. >> And they're still coming over the top on the Telco networks, right? >> Absolutely right. >> Telco's playing in this game? >> Yeah, Telco is, I think what the interesting dynamic with Telco is, how do you bundle access, high speed, everybody still needs high speed at their home, with content? And so I think it's a similar bundle, but it takes on a different characteristic, because the cable and Telcos are not taking the content risk. AT&T sold Warner Media recently, and I think they looked at it and said, we're going to stay with the infrastructure, let somebody else do the content. >> And I think I heard, did I hear this right the other day, that Roku is now getting into the content business? >> Roku is getting into it. And they were early mover, right? They said the TVs aren't, the operating system in the television is not changing fast enough for content. So their dongle that you would slide into a TV was a great way to get content on connected televisions, which is the fastest growing platform. >> I was going to say, what are the economics like in this business? Because the bundles were sort of a limiting factor, in terms of the TAM. >> Yeah. >> And now, we get great content, all right, to watch "Better Call Saul", I have to get AMC+ or whatever. >> You know, your comment, your question about the economics and the TAM is an interesting one, because I think we're still working through it. One of the things, I think, that's coming to the forefront is that you have to have a subscription revenue stream. Okay? Netflix had a subscription revenue stream for the last six, eight, 10 years, significantly, but I think you even see with Netflix that they have to go to a second revenue model, which is going to be an ad-supported model, right? We see it in the press these last couple days with Reid Hastings. So I think you're going to see, obviously subscription, obviously ad-supported, but the biggest thing, back to the consumer, is that the consumer's not going to sit through two minutes of advertising to watch a 22 minute show. >> Dave: No way. >> Right? So what's then going to happen is that the content companies want to know what's relevant to you, in terms of advertising. So if I have relevancy in my ad experience, then it doesn't quite feel, it's not intrusive, and it's relevant to my experience. >> And the other vector in the TAM, just one last follow-up, is you see Amazon, with Prime, going consumption. >> Bill: That's right. >> You get it with Prime, it's sort of there, and the movies aren't the best in the world, but you can buy pretty much any movie you want on a consumption basis. >> Yeah. Just to your last quick point, there is, we saw last week, the Boston Red Sox are bundling tickets, season tickets, with a subscription to their streaming service. >> NESN+, I think it is, yeah. So just like Prime, NESN+- >> And it's like 30 bucks a month. >> -just like Prime bundling with your delivery service, you're going to start to see all kinds of bundles happen. >> Dave: Interesting. >> Man, the sky is the limit, it's like it just keeps going and proliferating. >> Bill: It does. >> You talk about, on the ad side for a second, you mentioned the relevance, and we expect that as consumers, we're so demanding, (clears throat) excuse me, we don't have the patience, one of the things I think that was in short supply during COVID, and probably still is, is patience. >> That's right. >> I think with all of us, but we expect that brands know us enough to surf up the content that they think we watched, we watched "Breaking Bad", "Better Call Saul", don't show me other things that aren't relevant to the patterns I've been showing you, the content creators have to adapt quickly to the rising and changing demands of the consumer. >> That's right. Some people even think, as you go forward and consumers have this expectation, like you just mentioned, that brands not only need to understand their own view of the consumer, and this is going to come into the Snowflake points that we talk about in a minute, but the larger view that a brand has about a consumer, not just their own view, but how they consume content, where they consume it, what other brands they even like, that all builds that picture of making it relevant for the consumer and viewer. >> Where does privacy come into the mix? So we want it to be relevant and personalized in a non-creepy way. Talk to us about the data clean rooms that Snowflake launched, >> Bill: That's right. >> and how is that facilitating from a PII perspective, or is it? >> Yeah. Great question. So I think the other major development, in addition to the pandemic, driving people watching all these shows is the fact that privacy legislation is increasing. So we started with California with the CCPA, we had GDPR in Europe, and what we're starting to see is state by state roll out different privacy legislations. At some point, it may be true that we have a federal privacy legislation, and there are some bills that are working through the legislature right now. Hard to tell what's going to happen. But to your question, the importance of privacy, and respecting privacy, is exactly happening at the same time that media companies and publishers need to piece together all the viewing habits that you have. You've probably watched, already this morning, on your PC, on your phone, and in order to bring that experience together a media company has to be able to tie that together, right? Collaborate. So you have collaboration on one side, and then you have privacy on the other, and they're not necessarily, normally, go together, Right? They're opposing forces. So now though, with Snowflake, and our data clean room, we like to call it a data collaboration platform, okay? It's not really what a data warehouse function traditionally has been, right? So if I can take data collaboration, and our clean room, what it does is it brings privacy controls to the participants. So if I'm an advertiser, and I'm a publisher, and I want to collaborate to create an advertising campaign, they both can design how they want to do that privacy-based collaboration, Because it's interesting, one company might have a different perspective of privacy, on a risk profile, than another company. So it's very hard to say one size is going to fit all. So what we at Snowflake do, with our infrastructure, is let you design how you create your own clean room. >> Is that a differentiator for Snowflake, the clean rooms? >> It's absolutely a very big differentiator. Two reasons, or probably two, three reasons, really. One is, it's cross cloud. So all the advertisers aren't going to be in the same cloud, all the publishers aren't going to be in the same cloud. One big differentiator there. Second big differentiator is, we want to be able to bring applications to the data, so our clean room can enable you to create measurement against an ad campaign without moving your data. So bringing measurement to the data, versus sending data to applications then improves the privacy. And then the third one is, frankly, our pricing model. You only pay for Snowflake what you use. So in the advertising world, there's what's called an ad tech tax, there is no ad tech tax for Snowflake, because we're simply a pay-as-you-go service. So it's a very interesting dynamic. >> So what's that stack look like, in your world? So I've pulled up Frank's chart, I took a picture of his, he's called it the new, modern data stack, I think he called it, but it had infrastructure in the bottom, okay, that's AWS, Google, Azure, and then a lot of you, live data, that would be the media data cloud, the workload execution, the specific workload here is media and entertainment, and then application development, that's a new layer of value that you're bringing in, marketplace, which is the whole ecosystem, and then monetization comes from building on top. >> Bill: Yes. >> So I got AWS in there, and other clouds, you got a big chunk of that, where do your customers add value on top of that? >> Yeah. So the way you described it, I think, with Frank's point, is right on. You have the infrastructure. We know that a lot of advertisers, for example, aren't going to use Amazon, because the retailer competes with Amazon, So they want to might be in Google or Azure. And then sort of as you go up the stack, for the data layer that is Snowflake, especially what we call first-party data, is sitting in that Snowflake environment, right? But that Snowflake environment is a distributed environment, so a Disney, who was on stage with me yesterday, she talked about, Jaya talked about their first-party datas in Snowflake, their advertisers' datas in their own Snowflake account, in their own infrastructure. And then what's interesting is is that application layer is coming to the data, and so what we're really seeing is an acceleration of companies building that application natively on Snowflake to do measurement, to do targeting, to do activation. And so, that growth of that final application layer is what we're seeing as the acceleration in the stack. >> So the more data that's in that massive distributed data cloud, the more value your customers can get out of it. And I would imagine you're just looking to tick things off that where customers are going outside of the Snowflake data cloud, let's attack that so they don't have to. >> Yeah, I think these partners, (clears throat) excuse me, and customers, it's an interesting dynamic, because they're customers of ours. But now, because anybody who is already in Snowflake can be their customer, then they're becoming our partner. So it's an interesting dynamic, because we're bringing advertisers to a Disney or an NBCU, because they already have their data in Snowflake. So the network effect that's getting created because of this layer that's being built is accelerated. >> In 2013, right after the second reinvent, I wrote a piece called "How to Compete with the Amazon Gorilla." And it seemed to us pretty obvious at the time, you're not going to win an infrastructure again, you got to build on top of it, you got to build ecosystems within industries, and the data, the connection points, that network effect that you just talked about, it's actually quite thrilling to see you guys building that. >> Well, and I think you know this too, I mean, Amazon's a great partner of ours as well, right? So they're part of our media data cloud, as Amazon, right? So we're making it easier and easier for companies to be able to spin up a clean room in places like AWS, so that they get the privacy controls and the governance that's required as well. >> What do you advise to, say, the next generation of media and advertising companies who may be really early in the data journey? Obviously, there's competition right here in the rear view mirror, but we've seen services that launch and fail, what do you advise to those folks that maybe are early in the journey and how can Snowflake help them accelerate that to be able to launch services they can monetize, and get those consumers watching? >> I think the first thing for a lot of these brands is that they need to really own their data. And what I mean by that is, they need to understand the consumer relationship that they have, they need to take the privacy and the governance very seriously, and they need to start building that muscle. It's almost, it's a routine and a muscle that they just need to continue to kind of build up, because if you think about it, a media company spends two, three hours a day with their customer. You might watch two hours of a streaming show, but how much time do you spend with a single brand a day? Maybe 30 seconds, maybe 10 seconds, right? And so, their need to build the muscle, to be able to collect the data in a privacy-compliant way, build the intelligence off of that, and then leverage the intelligence. We talked about it a few days ago, and you look at a retailer, as a really good example, a retailer is using Snowflake and the retail data cloud to optimize their supply chain. Okay? But their supply chain extends beyond their own infrastructure to the advertising and marketing community, because if I can't predict demand, how do I then connect it to my supply chain? So our media data cloud is helping retailers and consumer product goods companies actually drive demand into their reconstructed supply chain. So they both work together. >> So you have a big focus, obviously, on the monetization piece, of course, that's a great place to start. Where do you see the media data cloud going? >> Yeah. I think we'll start to expand beyond advertising and beyond marketing. There's really important sub-segments of media. Gaming is one. You talk about the pandemic and teenagers playing games on their phones. So we'll have an emphasis around gaming. We'll have an emphasis in sports. Sports is going through a big change in an ecosystem. And there's a big opportunity to connect the dots in those ecosystems as well. And then I think, to what we were just talking about, I think connecting commerce and media is a very important area. And I think the two are still very loosely connected today. It used to be, could I buy the Jennifer Aniston sweater from "Friends", right? That was always the analogy. Now, media and social media, and TikTok and everything else, are combining media and commerce very closely. So I think we'll start to see more focus around that as well. So that adds to your monetization. >> Right, right. And you can NFT that. (Lisa laughs) >> Bill: That's right, there you go, you can mint an NFT on that. >> It's the tip of the iceberg. >> Absolutely. >> There's so much more potential to go. Bill, thank you so much for joining us bright and early this morning, talking about what snowflake is doing in media, entertainment and advertising. Exciting stuff, relevant to all of us, we appreciate your insights and your forward-looking statements. >> Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Good >> Bill: Bye now. >> For our guest and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're up early with us watching theCUBE's day-two coverage of Snowflake Summit '22. We'll be back in a moment with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>>Okay. And welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco, California for 80 us summit 2022 Amazon web services summit 2020 New York city is coming up in the summer will be there. Check us out the cube.net. Our next guest here is Jim long. The CEO of dig also known as local. BTV a very interesting AWS customer doing some really progressive things around video and, uh, challenging the status quo in code cutting and all kinds of broadcast models. Jim, welcome to the cube. Great to see you. >>Thank you, John. Great to be here. Okay. >>So first of all, before we get into some of the disrupt option, take a minute to explain what is dig and local BTV. >>Uh, dig is all about, uh, providing, uh, edge video networking for broadcast television, basically modernizing local television and hopefully extending it to hyper local content like high schools and community government and community channels and things like that. So essentially free bringing, using the internet as an antenna to bring broadcast television to your phone, your laptop you're connected TVs. >>So if I understand it correctly, if I UN and I look at the, the materials of your site, you basically go into each market, Metro areas like New York Philly bay area, grab the tee signal out of the air. >>Yep. >>Local TV, and then open that up to everyone. Who's got, um, an >>Correct. And, uh, what, we've, where we're essentially building a hybrid network with AWS. Uh, I like to say we got all the smart and account stuff, you know, in the cloud at AWS. And we have all the dumb, fast stuff in the actual TV market. We have servers and transcoding there we work with, uh, of course, um, uh, AWS on that centrally as well. But basically that hybrid cloud allows us to be the fastest simplest and lowest cost way to get a local video. Any type could be an antenna or an IP stream to a local house. So we're, so are the local pickup and delivery people. We're not building a brand, we're not building content. We're delivering the local content to the local views. You >>Like the pipes. >>We are, we're essentially an infrastructure company. Um, we're right at that wonderful intersection of the, uh, the infrastructure and the content where I always like to play. >>I like, I love the store. I think the cost of that nature, how you're using Amazon, it's really impressive. Um, what are some of the cool things you're doing on AWS that you think's notable? >>Well, of course the, the standard issue stuff where you want to store all your data in the cloud. Right? So we, uh, and we use a quick site to, to get to that. And obviously we're using S3 and we're using media tailor, which we really like, which is cuz we first actual company on the planet. I believe that's inserting digital ads, impression based ads into local broadcast streams. So that's, that's fun because the advertisers, they like the fact that they could still do traditional TV buys and they could spice it up with digital impressions based, but ads on us. Yeah. And, and we're adding to it a real fun thing called clip it, which is user clipping. It's an app that's been running on AWS for years. It's had over half a million plays in social media. Yeah. We're combining those together and, and AWS makes it very simple to do that. >>Well, I've been using your app on my Firestick and uh, download local BTV on the app store. Um, I gotta say the calendar's awesome. And the performance is 10 times better than, than some of the other streaming apps because the other performance they crash all the time. The calendar's weird. So congratulations. Clearly you're running the cloud technology. I gotta ask you what's going on in the market? Netflix missed their earnings. The stock was down big time. Um, obviously competition what's up going on with Netflix? >>Well, what's, it's a big shift. >>What does it mean for the streaming market? >>Well, what it means is, is, is a consumer choice. It's really the golden age of consumer choice. Uh, originally back when I was a kid, it was all antenna TV. We didn't even have DBRS right. And then, uh, the cable companies and the satellite companies, the phone companies came in and took over and all of a sudden everyone started paying for TV for just linear TV. Right? And then the next thing, you know, streaming comes around, uh, Netflix shows up for, for VOD or, or SVOD, they call it cuz it's payt TV and uh, and the whole, uh, that ecosystem starts to melt down. And now you have a consumer choice market where you can pay, pay for VAD or pay for, for linear. And everyone does linear and everyone does VAD or you can use free TV. Now we correctly guessed that free TV was gonna have a huge comeback. You know, know what is it about free even obviously gen Z smarter than us boomers. They love free too. Uh, targeted advertising makes the ads less, uh, painful or less of a distraction. Uh, so we knew that free ad supported TV was gonna happen. Lots of stuff happened. And then, then the, uh, major media companies started doing their own subscription apps. Right? They're all cool. >>We like paramount plus >>Paramount plus Disney pluses, PN peacock, uh, time Warner's doing something. I mean, it's all cool, but you know, people only have so much of a big pocketbook. So what it's doing is pay TV has now become much more complicated, but also you, you know, you gotta trade off. So you saw it with Netflix, right? Yeah. Netflix is suffering from there's too much pay TV. So where are you gonna put your money on Comcast? On YouTube TV paramount plus Netflix. >>Yeah. I mean, I love the free thing. I gotta bring up something. I wanna get your reaction to a company called low cast went under, they got sued out of their deal. They were the free TV. Are you guys have issues like them? What's the cast most people don't know got was, was >>Doing same. So we started before low cast and we're uh, what we would call a permissions based system, legal system. The broadcast Mar industry, uh, is, uh, is the wild wild west. I mean, I like to say antenna TV is a direct to consumer. The antenna is a direct to consumer device and it's controlled by the channel. People it's not controlled by a platform like Comcast, right? It's not controlled by a stick. >>When you say channel, do you mean like CBS or >>Yeah, CBS or the local Korean religious cooking channel or, uh, Spanish channels or local independent to television, which is really a national treasure for us. The United States really should be making sure that local content, local channels, uh, do well local businesses, you know, with targeted advertising, Janes nail salon can, can now advertise just in San Jose and not the entire San Francisco TV market. Um, so you ha you have, have all that going on and we recognize, you know, that, that local content, but you have to have permission from the channel stuff. It's not easy because you got channels on stations. You have syndicators, it's hard to keep track of. And sometimes you, you, uh, you, you know, you have to shift things around, but, uh, low cast, uh, like another kind before it just went hog wild, illegal, trying to use a loophole, uh, didn't quite work out for 'em and, uh, >>You see, they have put out of business by the networks, the names, the big names. Yes. Content people, >>Correct. I mean the big, the big guys, but I mean, because they weren't following the rules, um, >>The rules, meaning license, the content, right. >>Well correct. Or yes, >>Basically they, they were stealing the content in the eyes of the, >>Well, there is, there is, it is a little of, a bit of a gray area between the FCC and the copyright laws that Congress made. So, um, there are people certainly out there that think there is a path there, low cast, didn't find it. We're not trying to find it. Uh, we just want to get all the free TV, uh, the bottom line. And you've seen fast channels explode recently, Pluto, uh, Samsung TV. >>And what does that all mean? >>Well, what it means is people love free TV and the best free TV out there is your local TV. So putting that on the internet and those comp, but the media companies, they have trouble with this new stuff. What's, >>What's your >>They're overthinking it. What's >>Some of this CBS, NBC, all these big guys. >>Well, those guys have a little less trouble than the people that actually, uh, they're affiliates, right? So there's 210 TV markets and the, uh, your major networks, you know, they have their own stations. And in a bit, you know, in about 39% of the population, which is about 15 to 20, is it >>Cultural or is a system system problem? >>No, it's a, it's a problem of all the, the media companies are just having trouble moving towards the new technology and, and they're, I think they're siloing it. >>So why not? You gonna let 'em die. Are you trying to do deals with em? >>Oh no, no, absolutely. For us, if we don't make money, unless stations make money, we want local TV to, to flourish. It is local TV is Neilson, just report yesterday, you know, uh, that, uh, local TV is growing. We're taking advantage of that. And I think the station groups are having a little trouble realizing that they have the original, fast channels before Pluto, before Tubi did it in movies. And, and, and what >>Are people understanding in the, in the industry? I know NA's coming up a show. Yeah, >>That's right. >>National associated of broadcasters. What's going on in that industry right now. And you're, if you get to put it down the top three problems that are opportunities to be solved, what would they be? >>Well, I think, you know, I think the, the, the, the last, the, the best one that's left is what we're doing. I have to say it, uh, I think it's worth billions. >>You free TV over the air free and stream >>O TV. Oh yeah. Over the air TV that also works with the internet, right. Public internet connected to public television stations so that everybody, including homeless people, et cetera, that, you know, they don't have a TV, they don't have an antenna, they can't afford comp. They got an >>IPhone though. >>They an iPhone. For sure. And, and so it's, it's, uh, it's a wonderful thing. It's, you know, our national broadcasting and I don't think the station groups or the major networks are taking advantage of it they're as much as they should. Yeah. And, and I don't think, you know, obviously NBC and CBS with their new apps, they're sort of done with that. They did mergers, they got, they got the virtual pay guys. I mean, YouTube TV off the ground, the only thing left is suck another shitload of good, uh, eyeballs and, and advertising. >>Well, I mean, yeah, I think that, that, and what you said earlier around subscription fatigue, I mean, nobody wants to have 20 subscriptions. >>Well, that brings up a whole new other war. That's going on that, thank goodness. We're not part of it's the platforms versus the cable companies. Right. Versus whatever. Right. Everyone's trying to be your open garden or your closed garden. They're trying to get your subscriptions in bundle self bundling it's. But I mean, it's wonderful for consumers, if you can navigate through it. Uh, we wanna, we think we'll have one of the gems in any of that everyone's want local TV. And so we'll supply that we're already doing that. We're supplying it to a couple companies, uh, free cast as a company, uh, app, a universal streaming, you know, manager, your all, all your, uh, streaming, a streaming aggregation, put your paid stuff in, put your free stuff in. They do that. And, and as, as does Roku try trying to do that fire TV, Xfinity's trying to do it. So it's all, it's a new war for the platform and hopefully we'll be on everyone. >>Well, you've been in this industry for a long time, you know, the streaming market, you know, the TV market. Um, so it's, it's good. I think it's a new battle, the shift's happening. Um, what should people know about dig local? BTV what are some of your goals for the next year or two? What are you trying to do? >>Well, what we're really trying to do is make sure that local, uh, local television thrives so that it can support wider communities. It could support hyper local content. So if you're, if you're, and we love the old paradigm and channel change, right? Forget, you know, every other app has all these boxes going by on different rows and stuff. And, and yeah, you can search and find stuff, but there's nothing like just changing channels, whether a commercial's on or, or you, you wanna see what else is on. You know, you're gonna go from local television and maybe all of a sudden, you'll see the local high school play over on another part of the, of the spectrum. And, and what we're trying to do is get those communities together. And the local high school people come over and find the local, you know, uh, Spanish, uh, Nova channel or something like that. >>So local is the new hot. >>It is. Absolutely. And by the way, it's where this high CPMs are gonna go. And the more targeted you get >>Ad revenue, >>I mean, that's for us is, is, is our number one, re we have a number of revenue streams, but targeted ads are really great for local, right? And, and so we're, we're gonna make an announce. We've >>Lost that we've lost that local, I've seen local things that local Palo Alto paper, for instance, just shut down this local sports high school coverage, our youth sports, because they don't budget, right? There's no TV community channels, like some Comcast throwaway channel. Um, we lost, we, we lo we're losing >>Local. No, I think that's a real national shame. And so I think if we can strengthen local television, I think it'll strengthen all local media. So we expect to help local radio and local newspapers. That's a bigger part of the vision. Uh, but I it's gonna happen. There's >>An education angle here too. >>There is an education angle because the bottom line is you can use linear television as a way to augment. Uh, we have a really exciting project going on in New York, uh, uh, with, uh, some of the housing, uh, projects, uh, in Harlem and, and, and the Bronx, uh, their I idea is to have the, the homework channel and they can, and literally when you have a, and both swiping and everything you can have, I mean, literally you can have a hundred schools that, that have things well, >>We know zoom schooling sucks. I mean, that didn't work. So I think you're gonna see a lot of augmentation, right. >>Amazon. >>I was just talking to some people here, AI training, machine learning, training, all here could be online in linear format. >>Yeah. And exactly. And then I think about the linear format is it's discovery television, and you can also, um, you know, you can also record it. Yeah. Right. If you see a program and you want to record it, you sit >>Record. So final minute we have left. I want to just get your thoughts on this one thing and, and ask your question. Are you looking for content? Are you, I outreach at the content providers who, >>Well, we're, we're PRI our primary mission is to get more channel local channels on which really means station groups and independence. We have a number, I mean, basically 50% of the channels in any market. When we move into it are like, this is a no-brainer. I want more eyeballs. We're Nielsen, uh, RA, uh, rated mean we support. And so we, >>How many markets are you in right now? >>We're in 21 now. And we hope to be in, uh, over 50 by the end of the year, covering more than half the United States. >>So, all right, Jim, thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate it. >>My pleasure. Good luck >>Recognition. Very disruptive disrupting media, um, combination of over the air TV, local with I internet. Obviously we love that with a cube. We want a cube channel anywhere possible. I'm John furry host of the queue here at AWS summit. Highing all the big trends and technologies in cloud and media back with more coverage after this short break,

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. This is the cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back, little smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event to his summit in new York's coming in the summer. We'll be there too with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the Groove's psych to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're can see a lot of virtual cube outta hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economists with duct bill, a group, he's the founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank >>You. Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe is shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at mark, Andrew's been doing a lot of shit posting lately. All a billionaires are shit posting, but they don't know how to do it. Like they're not >>Doing it right. There's something opportunity there. It's like, here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a midsize island to in doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. >>This shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on this side, I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what is shit posting? >>It's more or less talking about the world of enterprise technology, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream, but it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a jackass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't have have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, coupons coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you see the growth of cloud native Amazon's evolving Adams, especially new CEO. Andy's move on to be the chief of all Amazon. Just so I, the cover of was it time magazine, um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything. These folks do. They're they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble imagining the logistics. It takes to wind up handling the catering for a relat a downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. And it's, it's sprawling immense that dominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. Well, >>There's a lot of force for good conversations. Seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to port eight of us is trying to portray themselves as you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that. I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. It's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now it's saying kind of thing, as you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby race as a semi-pro race car driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. Either way, sounds like more exciting, like better >>Have a replacement ready <laugh> in case something gonna was wrong on the track, >>Highly available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in e-sports with, there are people in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and video graphics card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. >>Oh, it's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting into it because these things are basically rocket chips. When those cars go like they're sitting there, we cans instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going on in your world. I know you have a lot of great success. We've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter, check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's the blowback, any blowback lately? Has there been uptick? What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey or Corey, and then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's huh? I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They must not have heard me it. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters, that sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do that. >>We should do that. Actually. I think sure would call in. Oh, I, >>I think >>I guarantee we had that right now. People would call in and say, Cory, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised anything about how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the customer. >>You know, I always joke with Dave ante about how John Fort's always at, uh, um, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of Google from that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0 5, or we can't call, we >>Have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented SU uh, sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish. That's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So, you know, fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their >>Producting. So they're going in different directions. When they named Amazon Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonused on a number of words. They can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, session manager is a great one. I love the service ridiculous name. They have a systems manager, parameter store, which is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs my in a way that systems manage through parameter store does not. It's fun. >>What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination >>Of you got E Ks. You got EMR, you got EC two, you got S3 SQS. Well, RedShift's not an acronym. You >>Gots is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending into highly on the context of the conversation. They still >>Up Beanstalk or is that still around? >>Oh, they never turn anything off. They like the Antigo, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, well, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it, but while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it. John three <laugh>. Okay. Simple DV still haunts our dreams. >>I, I actually got an email on, I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C twos were being deprecated and I got an email. I'm like, couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me just like, give me something else. Right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you is that like, okay, so as Amazon gets better, so areas where do they need more work in your opinion? Because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database, Snowflake's got a database service. So, you know, Redshift, snowflake 80 is out there. So you got this co-op petition. Yes. How's that going? And what are you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with Amazon and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want. And they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multi-cloud cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word. Multi-cloud um, a lot of people are saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word. Like multi-cloud sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multi-cloud >>Multiple single, which >>Davey loves that term. Yeah. >>You know, you're building in multiple single points of failure, do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about multi-cloud either as industry leader, let's talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective. It doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of forms. Some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on context. But my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. >>Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question cause I know you we've been, you know, fellow journeymen in the, and the cloud journey, going to all the events and then the pandemic hit. Of course, we're now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna gonna end? Certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations. Community's gonna emerge. You've got a pretty big community growing and it's growing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing, or just big changes you've seen with the pandemic, uh, from your perspective. Cause you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. Seeing the event you circle offline, you saw the online piece, come in, you're commentating, you're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck bill group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, funny, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who can pony up two grand and a week in Las Vegas and get to Las Vegas and wherever they happen to be by moving virtually suddenly it, it embraces the reality that talent is evenly. Distributed. Opportunity is not. And that means that suddenly these things are accessible to a wide swath of audience and potential customer base and the rest that hadn't been invited to the table previously, it's imperative that we not lose that. It's nice to go out and talk to people and have people come up and try and smell my hair from time to time, I smell delightful. Let me assure you. But it was, but it's also nice to be. >>I have some product for you if you want, you know? Oh, >>Oh excellent. I look forward to it. What is it? Pudding? Why not? <laugh> >>What else have you seen? So when accessibility for talent, yes. Which by the way is totally home run. What weird things have happened that you've seen? Um, that's >>Uh, it's, it's weird, but it's good that an awful lot of people giving presentations have learned to tight their message and get to the damn point because most people are not gonna get up from a front row seat in a conference hall, midway through your Aing talk and go somewhere else. But they will change a browser tab and you won't get them back. You've gotta be on point. You've gotta be compelling if it's going to be a virtual discussion. Yeah. >>And also turn off your iMessage too. >>Oh yes. It's always fun in the, in the meetings when you're talking to someone and colleague is messaging them about, should we tell 'em about this? And I'm sitting there reading it and it's >>This guy is really weird. Like, >>Yes I am and I bring it into the conversation and then everyone's uncomfortable. It goes, wow. Why >>Not? I love when my wife yells at me over I message. When I'm on a business call, like, do you wanna take that about no, I'm good. >>No, no. It's better off. I don't the only encourager. It's fine. >>Kids texting you. That's fun. Again. That's another weird thing. And, and then group behavior is weird. Now people are looking at, um, communities differently. Yes. Very much so, because if you're fatigued on content, people are looking for the personal aspect. You're starting to see much more of like yeah. Another virtual event. They gotta get better. One and two who's there. >>Yeah. >>The person >>That's a big part of it too is the human stories are what are being more and more interesting. Don't get up here and tell me about your product and how brilliant you are and how you built it. That's great. If I'm you, or if I wanna work with you or I want to compete with you, or I wanna put on my engineering hat and build it myself. Cause why would I buy anything? That's more than $8. But instead, tell me about the problem. Tell me me about the painful spot that you specialize in. Yeah. Tell me a story there. >>I, I think >>That gets a glimpse in a hook and makes >>More, more, I think you nailed it. Scaling storytelling. Yes. And access to better people because they don't have to be there in person. I just did a thing. I never, we never would've done the queue. We did. Uh, Amazon stepped up in sponsors. Thank you, Amazon for sponsoring international women's day, we did 30 interviews, APAC. We did five regions and I interviewed this, these women in Asia, Pacific eight, PJ, they call for in this world. And they're amazing. I never would've done those interviews cuz I never, would've seen 'em at an event. I never would've been in Japan or Singapore, uh, to access them. And now they're in the index. They're in the network. They're collaborating on LinkedIn. So a threads are developing around connections that I've never seen before. Yes. Around the content. >>Absolutely >>Content value plus network >>Effecting. And that is the next big revelation of this industry is going to realize you have different companies. And in Amazon's case, different service teams, all competing with each other, but you have the container group and you have the database group and you have the message cuing group. But customers don't really want to build things from spare parts. They want a solution to a problem. I want to build an app that does Twitter for pets or whatever it is I'm trying to do. I don't wanna basically have to pick and choose and fill my shopping cart with all these different things. I want something that's gonna basically give me what I'm trying to get as close to turnkey as possible. Moving up the stack. That is the future. And just how it gets here is gonna be >>Well we're here with Corey Quinn, the master of the master of content here in the a ecosystem. Of course we we've been following up from the beginning. It's great guy. Check out his blog, his site, his newsletter screaming podcast. Corey, final question for you. Uh, what do you hear doing what's on your agenda this week in San Francisco and give a plug for the duck build group. What are you guys doing? I know you're hiring some people what's on the table for the company. What's your focus this week and put a plug in for the group. >>I'm here as a customer and basically getting outta my cage cuz I do live here. It's nice to actually get out and talk to folks who are doing interesting things at the duck build group. We solve one problem. We fixed the horrifying AWS bill, both from engineering and architecture, advising as well as negotiating AWS contracts because it turns out those things are big and complicated. And of course my side media projects last week in aws.com, we are it's more or less a content operation where I indulge my continual and love affair with the sound of my own voice. >><laugh> and you're good. It's good content it's on, on point fun, Starky and relevant. So thanks for coming on the cube and sharing with us. Appreciate it. No, >>Thank you. Fun. >>Okay. This cube covers here in San Francisco, California, the cube is back going to events. These are the summits, Amazon web services summits that happen all over the world. We'll be in New York and obviously we're here in San Francisco this week. I'm John fur. Keep, keep it right here. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.

More bottoms up and have more technical early adopters. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software and it starts with great technical founders with great products and great bottoms of emotions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background, super smart, but Myer of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is all companies there's no, I mean, consumer is enterprise now, everything is what was once a niche. No, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. <laugh> but remember, like right now there's also a tech and VC conference in Miami <laugh> and it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, >>Ts is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. >>Well, and, and I think all of us here that are, uh, may maybe students of history and have been involved in open source in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three >>Movement. The hype is definitely one web three. Yeah. >>But, >>But you know, >>For sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east of Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case now? And maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many measures over, uh, $500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30% a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast, well, >>Let's get, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant <laugh> but there's also the hype of like the web three, for instance, but you know, for, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Luman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, higher, a direct sales force and SAS kind of crushed that now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS is snowflake assassin or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, they own all my data and you know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of common across all successful startups and the overall adoption of technology. Um, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually like growth, right. They're one and the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving growth. >>You just pull the product >>Through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this, but maybe started with open source where users were contributors, you know, contributors were users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing. It's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the, and they're really the, the beneficiaries and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a gen Xer technically. So for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I have what been saying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit digital hippie revolution, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one other group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. You, we hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>During the mainframe days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home group. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on. Well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal it'll trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion yeah. Around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source, one example of that religion. Some people will say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? Yeah. It's so it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily caring >>About data. Data drives all decision making. Let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've been a VC for many years, but you also have the founder entrepreneurial mindset, but you can get empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of it's about believing in the person. So faking it till you make it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. >>Oh, AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur. Right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, so somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story, and I still think that that's important, right. It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. Yeah. But having said that you're right. The proof is in the pudding, right. At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it gonna it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in the new economy that we live in, really, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative of because their product begins exactly >>The volume you back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song is the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, like the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with. Right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the it's gotta speak to the, >>Speak to the user, but let me ask a question now that for the people watching, who are maybe entrepreneurial entre, preneurs, um, masterclass here in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine with you an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do, do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think something will become. Right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way. And we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be the, of more likely somebody is gonna align with your vision and, and wanna invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I, you gotta >>Show the >>Path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision. Uh, if you have the same vision, you can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle. The journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the latest trends because it's over before you can get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living, we'll say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. <laugh> so you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going in this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but some times it happens in six months. Sometimes it takes six years. Sometimes it takes 16 years. Uh, >>What's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Bel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There's three big trends that we invest in. And the they're the only things we do day in, day out one is the explosion and open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen, an alwa timeline >>Happening forever. >>But, uh, it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's, it's one big, massive wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now, a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally, it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is underinvested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a dessert do over, right? I mean, do we need you do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cybersecurity as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is run $150 billion. And it still is a fraction of what we're, >>What we're and national security even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital that's >>Right. You mean arguably, right? I mean, arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say, you gotta love your firm. Love. You're doing we're big supporters, your mission. Congratulations on your entrepreneurial venture. And, uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cuban. Uh, absolutely not. Certainly EU maybe even north Americans in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for helping me on the show. >>Guess be VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California. After this short break, stay with us. Everyone. Welcome to the cue here. Live in San Francisco. K warn you for AWS summit 2022 we're live we're back with events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube. Got a great guest here, Justin Kobe owner, and CEO of innovative solutions. Their booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us the story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. >>Yeah. <laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to mid-size businesses that are moving to the cloud, or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control security, compliance, all the good stuff that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is, but now we have offices down in Austin, Texas, up in Toronto, uh, Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago. And it's been a great ride. >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by a of us. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization, but obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? >>Yeah. It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small mids to size business. They're all trying to understand how to leverage technology better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech is really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're of like, listen, we gotta move to the cloud or we move some things to the cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then so, uh, progressively working through a modernization strategy is always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to mid-size businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. And they want to get set up. But the, the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is not it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem. And you guys solve >>In the SMB space. The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and our hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with, to technology staff that has traditional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether that's, we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to yeah. Feel like, listen, at the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's on primer in the cloud, I just want know that I'm doing that way. That helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. Good. >>How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I think there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start down your journey in one way and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's a, gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning, the projects that early, not worrying about it, you got it mean most people don't abandon stuff cuz they're like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. >>And they get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. >>Yeah. Frog and boiling water, as we used to say, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean, this, this is a dynamic. That's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you guys come in. I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talked to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did Andy jazzy announcer Adam? You know, the 5,000 announcement or whatever. They did huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just processes. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are >>Values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to midsize business leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a 10 a company in the process of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning they know that we have their back and we're the safety net. So when a customer is saying, right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand and dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going in alone. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say your high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attacks. If you have a partner that's offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products, uh, that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own. It, it would cost 'em a four, >>The training alone would be insane. A risk factor. I mean the cost. Yes, absolutely opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018. When, uh, when we, he made the decision to go all in on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious, it wasn't requirement. It still isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front >>Desk and she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I >>Love it. It's >>Amazing. >>But I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get >>The right people with. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point out SMBs and businesses in general, small and large it staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the buildout, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner, SMB, do I get to ROI? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cyber security issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one in the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Like critical issues. >>This is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about this, >>That's, that's what, at least a million in loading, if not three or more Just to get that app going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side. No. And they remind AI and ML. >>That's right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It it's incredibly difficult. And the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll do all that exactly. In the it department. >>Exactly. >>So like, can we just call up, uh, you know, our old vendor that's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like it, >>But that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I was a business owner starting a business today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. It's something that we talk about every, with every one of our small to mid-size >>Businesses. So just, I want get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative yeah. Award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, I was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduced other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. Yeah. I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months than I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at RT long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2000 and I was like, Hey, I'm growing the value of this business. And who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years? What do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner. But if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that were gonna also buy the business with me. >>And they were the owners, no outside capital, >>None zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons. They all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like, if we're own, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015 and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an earn out process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the BI cuz they cared very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting all going all in on the cloud was important for us. And we haven't looked back. >>And at that time, the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly the, uh, and those kinds of big enterprises. The GA I don't wanna say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to midsize business to migrate completely to the cloud is as infrastructure was considered, that just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing where the, a lot of our small to midsize business customers, they wanted to leverage cloud based backup, or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration. The, the Microsoft suite to the cloud. And a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on AWS at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plugin for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating into the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customer is not to be cash strapped and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so they can modernize. So >>Like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers and being empathetic to where they are in their journey. >>And that's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable win that's right. Seeing the value and ING down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate >>It. Thank you very much for having me. >>Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We're back with more great coverage for two days after this short break >>Live on the floor in San Francisco for Aus summit. I'm John for host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the actual back in person we're at AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube. Bring all the action. Also virtual. We have a hybrid cube, check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. >>So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to be back through events. It's >>Amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to, to in what two, three >>Years. That's awesome. We'll be at the, uh, a AWS summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and the big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything devs sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Benet, he's got cloud native. So the, the game is pretty much laid out. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's >>Right. Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions. The at our around, especially the edge public cloud for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give >>An example, >>Uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech data and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running or FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering Aw since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam slaps in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't wanna say trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listens to the customer. They work backwards from the customer. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does >>Computing. >>It >>Does. That's not centralized in the public cloud now they got regions. So what is the issue with the edge what's driving? The behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got five GM having. So it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data in is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always use the riff on the cube, uh, cause it's basically Amazon in a box, pushed in the data center, running native, all this stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of becoming standard. You're starting to see some standard. Deepak syncs group is doing some amazing work with opensource Raul's team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my datas center, do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outpost. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone now happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment. And it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. Right? So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. That's right. Innovative. Does that get the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in these new areas that you're helping out are they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is that they don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on what's making them money as a business. They wanna focus on their applications. They wanna focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and a AWS. You take the infrastructure, you take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. Uh, we help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. So >>Basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it >>Works? Right. And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy fin in the Caribbean, we're gonna talk about hurricanes. And we're gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that, that requirement. It makes total sense. We're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's a, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech. And in, in the islands there a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming. Uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a, uh, technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure, because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on >>It's interesting. I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, project going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart contract, we use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead and it's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain just for like smart contracts, for instance, or certain transactions. And they go to Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service. Well, what happened to decentralized? >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance issue. Yeah. And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through, uh, a use case of a customer Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my a, I also want all the benefit of the cloud. So I want the modern, and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer. >>Yeah. Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up, they don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with a regular commercially available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Inside of that manufacturing plant, we can do pre-procesing on things coming out of the robotics, depending on what we're manufacturing. Right. And then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard >>For data, data lake, or whatever, >>To the data lake. Yeah. Data lake house, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but a lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just time manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going to the data that saves that cost yeah. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data unless you have to. Um, but those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever, the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? There's a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe, maybe this decision can wait. Right. And then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot tube doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture on the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about customers are starting to talk about throwing away data. Uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And well, >>I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session this, but the one pattern we're seeing come of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retrain their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes co as we call it in our last showcase, we did a whole whole an event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw away. It's not just business benefits. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. There >>Are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are running petabyte level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a, kind of a, um, fun, I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, Aus cloud, and skydiving instructor. How does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? >>Yeah. Uh, I, >>You jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump >>Out kind of. So I was, you jumped out. I was teaching Scott eing, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a Scott I instructor. Uh, I was teaching Scott eing and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and how his customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, I started in the first day there, we had a, and, uh, EC two had just come out <laugh> um, and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that, and through being in on premises, migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services to premises. >>So it's such a great story. You know, I was gonna, you know, you know, the, the, the, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early days was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, uh, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and I, maybe it does still feel like that to some people, right. Yeah. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting stuff like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You guys, the right equipment, you gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Matthew, thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here, lot in San Francisco for AWS summit, I'm John for your host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look at this calendar for all the cube, actually@thecube.net. We'll right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube, a summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John furry host of the cube. We'll be at the, a us summit in New York city this summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco getting all coverage, what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dos car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor and a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you, Pam. Cool. How are you? Good. >>How are you? >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah so give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? First >>Of all, thank you for having me. We're back to be business with you never while after. Great to see you. Um, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. Um, we have raised close to a hundred million there. Uh, the investors are people like nor west Menlo, true ventures, coast, lo ventures, Ram Shera, and all those people, all known guys that Antibe chime Paul Mayard web. So a whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley vs are involved. >>And has it gone? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISR is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and ServiceNow to take it to the next stage? Well, >>I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, and Dave Valenti as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh>, >>You know, >>You >>Get, the comment is fun to talk to you though. >>You get the commentary, you, your, your finger on the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud out scale. You predicted that we talked about in the cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing Docker just raised a hundred million on our $2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from an enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control, plane emerging, AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded observability there's 10 million observability companies. Data is the key. This is what's your angle on this. What's your take. Yeah, >>No, look, I think I'll give you the view that I see, right? I, from my side, obviously data is very clear. So the things that room system of record that you and me talked about, the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud native, it'll be called AI. NA NA is a new buzzword and using the AI for customer service, it operations. You talk about observability. I call it AI ops, applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and AI service desk. What needs to be helped desk with ServiceNow BMC <inaudible> you see a new ALA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflows, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with AI workflows. So you'll see AI going >>Off is RPA a company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI S one will be at their event this summer? Um, or is it a product company? I mean, I mean, RPA is almost, should be embedded in everything. >>It's a feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company also, but that automation should be a, in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NA and AI NATO it'll become automation. NA yeah. And that's your thinking. >>It's almost interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kind having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle and it was software was action. Now you have all kinds of workflows abstractions everywhere. Right? So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed or they integrated. I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So don't about the databases become all polyglot databases. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area, like, as you were talking about, it should be part of ServiceNow. It should be part of ISRA, like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see MuleSoft and Salesforce buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies could cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also will have an automation as a layer <inaudible> inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind us, you got the expo hall. You got, um, we're back to vents, but you got, you know, am Clume Ove, uh, Dynatrace data dog, innovative all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right. Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Deibel later today. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen, we know all the, the VCs. What does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation. Cloud's bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's. Yes. Basically. Data's everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders, how Amazon created the startups 15 years back, everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be is people don't just build on Amazon. They're gonna build it on top of snowflake. Companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake. Right? So I see my old boss flagman try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer. Right? So I think that's the next level of <inaudible> trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis of a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your Mo is what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in, in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last reinvent, coined the term super cloud, right? He's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage, and guys, Charles Fitzgerald out there who we like was kind of shitting on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get it. Like, yeah, I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> cause he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Now. They say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist. And, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. It >>Is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer. Remember the middle layer pass will be snowflake so I can build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer if I really need to size build it on force.com Salesforce. Yeah. Right. So I think that's where you'll see. So >>Basically the, if you're an entrepreneur, the, the north star in terms of the, the outcome is be a super cloud. >>It is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. Yeah. >>Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales, the snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think they had Redshift. Amazon has got Redshift. Um, but Snowflake's a big customer in the, they're probably paying AWS, I think big bills too. So >>Joe on very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-optation will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with, uh, snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouses or data layer. So I think depending on the application use case, you have to use each of the above. I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that it comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, you know, foreclose, your, you that's right with some sort of internal hack. Uh, but I think, I think the general question that I have is that I, I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point, when does the rising tide stop and do the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth? So >>I think it's growth. You call it cloud scale, you invented the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's as long as there more movement from on, uh, OnPrem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations. It helpless, even the customer service service now and, uh, ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go >>Made. I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers are practitioners, not suppliers to the more market, feel free to text me or DMing. The next question's really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products, cuz you know, the big enterprises now and you know, small, medium, large and large enterprise are all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean I'm seeing some stuff, but why don't get your thoughts on that? What, >>No, it is. If I growing by or 2007 or eight, when I used to talk to you back then and Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or 1% today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a CIO or line of business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. >>Yeah. And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I reference the URL cause it's like, there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solutions that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there. Um, and goes back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure is code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share >>Yourself a lot of first is I see the AIOP solutions in the future should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app Dyna, right? Dynatrace, all this solution. We will go future towards predict to proactive solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service desk. Customers are give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can them, but I gotta train them, modify them, tweak them, make them >>Better, >>Make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to big data days back in 2009, you know, >>Look at, look how much data Rick has grown. >>It is. They doubled the >>Key cloud air kinda went private. So good stuff, man. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking at that growing customers and my customers are some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk McAfee, uh, grand to so all the top customers, um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on predict is one area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service. >>Great stuff, man. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of Aish summit 2022. And we're gonna be at Aus summit in San, uh, in New York in the summer. So look for that on this calendar, of course go to eight of us, startups.com. I mentioned that it's decipher all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This the cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back, little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit in new York's coming in the summer. We'll be there too with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the groove psych to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're can see a lot of virtual cube outta hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economists with bill group. He's the founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank >>You. Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe is shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at mark, Andrew's been doing a lot of shit posting lately. All a billionaires are shit hosting, but they don't know how to do it. Like they're not >>Doing it right? So there's something opportunity there. It's like here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a midsize island, do begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. >>This shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on this side I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what is shit posting? >>It's more or less talking about the world of enter prize technology, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream. But it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a jackass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, coupons coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you see the growth of cloud native Amazon's of all the Adams, especially new CEO. Andy's move on to be the chief of all Amazon. Just so I'm the cover of was it time met magazine? Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything. These folks do. They're they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble imagining the logistics. It takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. And it's, it's sprawling immense that dominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. >>Well, there's a lot of force for good conversations. Seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to port eight of us is trying to portray themselves as you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. <laugh> either way, sounds like more exciting. Like I better >>Have a replacement ready <laugh> I, in case something goes wrong on the track, highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in east sports with other people in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and videographic card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. >>Oh, it's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going on in your world. I know you have a lot of great success. We've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter, check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's the blowback, any blowback late? Has there been uptick? What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's high. I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They must not have heard me it. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do >>That. We should do that. Actually. I think you're people would call in, oh, >>I, I think >>I guarantee we had that right now. People would call in and say, Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised about anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the >>Customer. You know, I always joke with Dave Alane about how John Fort's always at, uh, um, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0, 0 5, or we can't call, we >>Have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And then there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented SU sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish. That's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their >>Producting. So they're going in different directions. When they named Amazon Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonused on number of words, they can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, session manager is a great one. I love the service ridiculous name. They have a systems manager, parameter store, which is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage your parameter store does not. It's fun. >>What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination >>Of gots. You got EMR, you got EC two, you got S3 SQS. Well, RedShift's not an acronym you >>Gets is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation, they >>Shook up bean stock or is that still around? Oh, >>They never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, well, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it, but while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it. John three <laugh>. Okay. Simple BV still haunts our dreams. >>I, I actually got an email on, I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C twos were being deprecated and I got an email I'm I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me? Just like, give me something else. All right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you, is that like, okay. So as Amazon better in some areas where do they need more work in your opinion? Because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database Snowflake's got out database service. So Redshift, snowflake data breach is out there. So you got this co-op petition. Yes. How's that going? And what do you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with, and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want. And they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multicloud. Cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word multicloud. Um, a lot of people though saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word. Like multicloud sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multicloud? >>Multiple single >>Cloudant loves that term. Yeah. >>You know, you're building in multiple single points of failure, do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about my multi-cloud either as the industry leader, let's talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective. It doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of forms. Some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on, but my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. >>Yeah, course. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question cause I know you we've been, you know, fellow journeyman and the, and the cloud journey going to all the events and then the pandemic hit. We now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna gonna end. Certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations. Community's gonna emerge. You've got a pretty big community growing and it's growing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing or just big changes you've seen with the pandemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece, come in, you're commentating, you're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck build group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, funny, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who can pony up two grand and a week in Las Vegas and get to Las Vegas from wherever they happen to be by moving virtually suddenly it, it embraces the reality that talent is evenly. Distributed. Opportunity is not. And that means that suddenly these things are accessible to a wide swath of audience and potential customer base and the rest that hadn't been invited to the table previously, it's imperative that we not lose that. It's nice to go out and talk to people and have people come up and try and smell my hair from time to time, I smelled delightful. Let me assure you. But it was, but it's also nice to be. >>I have a product for you if you want, you know? Oh, >>Oh excellent. I look forward to it. What is it? Pudding? Why not? <laugh> >>What else have you seen? So when accessibility for talent. Yes. Which by the way is totally home run. What weird things have happened that you've seen? Um, that's >>Uh, it's, it's weird, but it's good that an awful lot of people giving presentation have learned to tighten their message and get to the damn point because most people are not gonna get up from a front row seat in a conference hall, midway through your Aing talk and go somewhere else. But they will change a browser tab and you won't get them back. You've gotta be on point. You've gotta be compelling if it's going to be a virtual discussion. Yeah. >>And you turn off your iMessage too. >>Oh yes. It's always fun in the, in the meetings when you're ho to someone and their colleague is messaging them about, should we tell 'em about this? And I'm sitting there reading it and it's >>This guy is really weird. Like, >>Yes I am and I bring it into the conversation and then everyone's uncomfortable. It goes, wow. Why >>Not? I love when my wife yells at me over I message. When I'm on a business call, like, do you wanna take that about no, I'm good. >>No, no. It's better off. I don't the only entire sure. It's >>Fine. My kids text. Yeah, it's fine. Again, that's another weird thing. And, and then group behavior is weird. Now people are looking at, um, communities differently. Yes. Very much so, because if you're fatigued on content, people are looking for the personal aspect. You're starting to see much more of like yeah. Another virtual event. They gotta get better. One and two who's there. >>Yeah. >>The person >>That's a big part of it too is the human stories are what are being more and more interesting. Don't get up here and tell me about your product and how brilliant you are and how you built it. That's great. If I'm you, or if I wanna work with you or I want to compete with you or I want to put on my engineering hat and build it myself. Cause why would I buy anything? That's more than $8. But instead, tell me about the problem. Tell me about the painful spot that you specialize in. Yeah. Tell me a story there. >>I, I think >>That gets a glimpse in a hook and makes >>More, more, I think you nailed it. Scaling storytelling. Yes. And access to better people because they don't have to be there in person. I just did a thing. I never, we never would've done the queue. We did. Uh, Amazon stepped up in sponsors. Thank you, Amazon for sponsoring international women's day, we did 30 interviews, APAC. We did five regions and I interviewed this, these women in Asia, Pacific eight, PJ, they call for in this world. And they're amazing. I never would've done those interviews cuz I never, would've seen 'em at an event. I never would've been in pan or Singapore, uh, to access them. And now they're in the index, they're in the network. They're collaborating on LinkedIn. So a threads are developing around connections that I've never seen before. Yes. Around the content. >>Absolutely >>Content value plus and >>Effecting. And that is the next big revelation of this industry is going to realize you have different companies. And, and I Amazon's case different service teams all competing with each other, but you have the container group and you have the database group and you have the message cuing group. But customers don't really want to build things from spare parts. They want a solution to a problem. I want to build an app that does Twitter for pets or whatever it is I'm trying to do. I don't wanna basically have to pick and choose and fill my shopping cart with all these different things. I want something that's gonna basically give me what I'm trying to get as close to turnkey as possible. Moving up the stack. That is the future. And just how it gets here is gonna be >>Well we're here at Corey Quinn, the master of the master of content here in the a ecosystem. Of course we we've been following up from the beginning. His great guy, check out his blog, his site, his newsletter screaming podcast. Corey, final question for, uh, what are you here doing? What's on your agenda this week in San Francisco and give a plug for the duck build group. What are you guys doing? I know you're hiring some people what's on the table for the company. What's your focus this week and put a plug in for the group. >>I'm here as a customer and basically getting outta my cage cuz I do live here. It's nice to actually get out and talk to folks who are doing interesting things at the duck bill group. We solved one problem. We fixed the horrifying AWS bill, both from engineering and architecture, advising as well as negotiating AWS contracts because it turns out those things are big and complicated. And of course my side media projects last week in aws.com, we are, it it's more or less a content operation where I in my continual and ongoing love affair with the sound of my own voice. >><laugh> and you're good. It's good content it's on, on point fun, Starky and relevant. So thanks for coming to the cube and sharing with us. Appreciate it. No >>Thank you button. >>You. Okay. This the cube covers here in San Francisco, California, the cube is back going to events. These are the summits, Amazon web services summits. They happen all over the world. We'll be in New York and obviously we're here in San Francisco this week. I'm John fur. Keep, keep it right here. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Okay. Welcome back everyone. This's the cubes covers here in San Francisco, California, we're live on the show floor of AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube and remember AWS summit in New York city coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. And of course reinvent the end of the year for all the cube coverage on cloud computing and AWS two great guests here from the APN global APN Sege chef Jenko and Jeff Grimes partner lead Jeff and Sege is doing partnerships global APN >>AWS global startup program. Yeah. >>Okay. Say that again. >>AWS. We'll start >>Program. That's the official name. >>I love >>It too long, too long for me. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, >>Of course. >>Appreciate it. Tell us about what's going on with you guys. What's the, how was you guys organized? You guys we're obviously we're in San Francisco bay area, Silicon valley, zillions of startups here, New York. It's got another one we're gonna be at tons of startups. A lot of 'em getting funded, big growth and cloud big growth and data secure hot in all sectors. >>Absolutely. >>So maybe, maybe we could just start with the global startup program. Um, it's essentially a white glove service that we provide to startups that are built on AWS. And the intention there is to help identify use cases that are being built on top of AWS. And for these startups, we want to pro vibe white glove support in co building products together. Right. Um, co-marketing and co-selling essentially, um, you know, the use cases that our customers need solved, um, that either they don't want to build themselves or are perhaps more innovative. Um, so the, a AWS global startup program provides white glove support. Dedicat at headcount for each one of those pillars. Um, and within our program, we've also provided incentives, programs go to market activities like the AWS startup showcase that we've built for these startups. >>Yeah. By the way, AWS startup, AWS startups.com is the URL, check it out. Okay. So partnerships are key. Jeff, what's your role? >>Yeah. So I'm responsible for leading the overall effort for the AWS global startup program. Um, so I've got a team of partner managers that are located throughout the us, uh, managing a few hundred startup ISVs right now. <laugh> >>Yeah, you got a >>Lot. We've got a lot. >>There's a lot. I gotta, I gotta ask a tough question. Okay. I'm I'm a startup founder. I got a team. I just got my series a we're grown. I'm trying to hire people. I'm super busy. What's in it for me. Yeah. What do you guys bring to the table? I love the white glove service, but translate that what's in it for what do I get out of it? What's >>A story. Good question. I focus, I think. Yeah, because we get, we get to see a lot of partners building their businesses on AWS. So, you know, from our perspective, helping these partners focus on what, what do we truly need to build by working backwards from customer feedback, right? How do we effectively go to market? Because we've seen startups do various things, um, through trial and error, um, and also just messaging, right? Because oftentimes partners or rather startups, um, try to boil the ocean with many different use cases. So we really help them, um, sort of laser focus on what are you really good at and how can we bring that to the customer as quickly as possible? >>Yeah. I mean, it's truly about helping that founder accelerate the growth of their company, right. And there's a lot that you can do with AWS, but focus is truly the key word there because they're gonna be able to find their little piece of real estate and absolutely deliver incredible outcomes for our customers. And then they can start their growth curve there. >>What are some of the coolest things you've seen with the APN that you can share publicly? I know you got a lot going on there, a lot of confidentiality. Um, but you know, we're here a lot of great partners on the floor here. I'm glad we're back at events. Uh, a lot of stuff going on digitally with virtual stuff and, and hybrid. What are some of the cool things you guys have seen in the APN that you can point to? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can point to few, you can take them. So, um, I think what's been fun over the years for me personally, I came from a startup brand sales at an early stage startup and, and I went through the whole thing. So I have a deep appreciation for what these guys are going through. And what's been interesting to see for me is taking some of these early stage guys, watching them progress, go public, get acquired and see that big day mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, and being able to point to very specific items that we help them to get to that point. Uh, and it's just a really fun journey to watch. >>Yeah. I, and part of the reason why I really, um, love working at the AWS, uh, global startup program is working with passionate founders. Um, I just met with a founder today that it's gonna, he's gonna build a very big business one day, um, and watching them grow through these stages and supporting that growth. Um, I like to think of our program as a catalyst for enterprise is sort of scale. Yeah. Um, and through that we provide visibility, credibility and growth opportunities. >>Yeah. A lot, a lot of partners too. What I found talking to staff founders is when they have that milestone, they work so hard for it. Whether it's a B round C round Republic or get bought. Yeah. Um, then they take a deep breath and they look back at wow, what a journey it's been. So it's kind of emotional for sure. But still it's a grind. Right? You gotta, I mean, when you get funding, it's still day one. You don't stop. It's no celebrate, you got a big round or valuation. You still gotta execute >>And look it's hypercompetitive and it's brutally difficult. And our job is to try to make that a little less difficult and navigate those waters. Right. Where ever everyone's going after similar things. >>Yeah. And I think as a group element too, I observe that startups that I, I meet through the APN has been interesting because they feel part of AWS. Yeah, totally. As a group of community, as a vibe there. Um, I know they're hustling, they're trying to make things happen. But at the same time, Amazon throws a huge halo effect. I mean, that's a huge factor. I mean, you guys are the number one cloud in the business, the growth in every sector is booming. Yeah. And if you're a startup, you don't have that luxury yet. And look at companies like snowflake that built on top of AWS. I mean, people are winning by building on AWS. >>Yeah. And our, our, our program really validates their technology first. So we have, what's all the foundation's technical review that we put all of our startups through before we go to market. So that when enterprise customers are looking at startup technology, they know that it's already been vetted. And, um, to take that a step further and help these partners differentiate, we use programs like the competency programs, the DevOps competencies, the security competency, which continues to help, um, provide sort of a platform for these startups, help them differentiate. And also there's go to market benefits that are associated with that. >>Okay. So let me ask the, the question that's probably on everyone's mind, who's watching, certainly I asked this a lot. There's a lot of companies startups out there who makes the cut, is there a criteria cut? It's not like it's sports team or anything, but like sure. Like there's activate program, which is like, there's hundreds of thousands of startups out there. Not everyone is at the APN. Right? Correct. So ISVs again, that's a whole nother, that's a more mature partner that might have, you know, huge market cap or growth. How, how do you guys focus? How do you guys focus? I mean, you got a good question, you know, thousand flowers blooming all the time. Is there a new way you guys are looking at it? I know there's been some talk about restructure or, or new focus. What's the focus. >>Yeah. It's definitely not an easy task by any means. Um, but you know, I recently took over this role and we're really trying to establish focus areas, right. So obviously a lot of the ISVs that we look after are infrastructure ISVs. That's what we do. Uh, and so we have very specific pods that look after different type of partners. So we've got a security pod, we've got a DevOps pod, we've got core infrastructure, et cetera. And really, we're trying to find these ISVs that can solve, uh, really interesting AWS customer. >>You guys have a deliberate, uh, focus on these pillars. So what infrastructure, >>Security, DevOps, and data and analytics, and then line of business >>Line, business line business, like web >>Marketing, business apps, >>Owner type thing. Exactly. >>Yeah, exactly. >>So solutions there. Yeah. More solutions and the other ones are like hardcore. So infrastructure as well, like storage back up ransomware kind of stuff, or, >>Uh, storage, networking. >>Okay. Yeah. The classic >>Database, et cetera. Right. >>And so there's teams on each pillar. >>Yep. So I think what's, what's fascinating for the startups that we cover is that they've got, they truly have support from a build market sell perspective, right. So you've got someone who's technical to really help them get the technology, figured out someone to help them get the marketing message dialed and spread, and then someone to actually do the co-sell, uh, day to day activities to help them get in front of customers. >>Probably the number one request that we always ask for Amazon is can wish that sock report, oh, download it on the console, which we use all the time. <laugh> exactly. But security's a big deal. I mean, you know, ask the res are evolving, that role of DevOps is taking on dev SecOps. Um, I, I can see a lot of customers having that need for a relationship to move things faster. Do you guys provide like escalation or is that a part of a service or that not part of, uh, uh, >>Yeah, >>So the partner development manager can be an escalation for absolutely. Think of that. 'em as an extension of your business inside of AWS. >>Great. And you guys, how is that partner managers, uh, measure >>On those three pillars? Right. Got it. Are we billing, building valuable use cases? So product development go to market, so go to market activities, think blog, posts, webinars, case studies, so on and so forth. And then co-sell not only are we helping these partners win their current opportunities that they are sourcing, but can we also help them source net new deals? Yeah. Right. That's very, >>I mean, top asked from the partners is get me in front of customers. Right. Um, not an easy task, but that's a huge goal of ours to help them grow their top line. >>Right. Yeah. In fact, we had some interviews here on the cube earlier talking about that dynamic of how enterprise customers are buying. And it's interesting, a lot more POCs. I have one partner here that you guys work with, um, on observability, they got a huge POC with capital one mm-hmm <affirmative> and the enterprises are engaging the star ups and bringing them in. So the combination of open source software enterprises are leaning into that hard and bringing young growing startups in mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yep. So I could see that as a huge service that you guys can bring people in. >>Right. And they're bringing massively differentiated technology to the table. The challenge is they just might not have the brand recognition. The, at the big guys have mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so that's, our job is how do you get that great tech in front of the right situations? >>Okay. So my next question is about the show here, and then we'll talk globally. So here in San Francisco sure. You know, Silicon valley bay area, San Francisco bay area, a lot of startups, a lot of VCs, a lot of action. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so probably a big market for you guys. Yeah. So what's exciting here in SF. And then outside of SF, you guys have a global pro, have you see any trends that are geography based or is it sure areas more mature? There's certain regions that are better. I mean, I just interviewed a company here. That's doing, uh, a AWS edge really well in these cases. It's interesting that these, the partners are filling a lot of holes and gaps in the opportunities with a AWS. So what's exciting here. And then what's the global perspective. >>Yeah, totally. So obviously see a ton of partners from the bay area that we support. Um, but we're seeing a lot of really interesting technology come out of AMEA specifically. Yeah. Uh, and making a lot of noise here in the United States, which is great. Um, and so, you know, we definitely have that global presence and, and starting to see super differentiated technology come out of those regions. >>Yeah. Especially Tel Aviv. Yeah. >>Amy and real quick before you get into surge. It's interesting. The VC market in, in Europe is hot. They've got a lot of unicorns coming in. We've seen a lot of companies coming in. They're kind of rattling their own, you know, cage right now. Hey, look at us. Let's see if they crash, you know, but we don't see that happening. I mean, people have been predicting a crash now in, in the startup ecosystem for least a year. It's not crashing. In fact, funding's up. >>Yeah. The pandemic was hard on a lot of startups for sure. Yeah. Um, but what we've seen is many of these startups, they, as quickly as they can grow, they can also pivot as, as, as well. Um, and so I've actually seen many of our startups grow through the demo because their use cases are helping customers either save money, become more operationally efficient and provide value to leadership teams that need more visibility into their infrastructure during a pandemic. >>It's an interesting point. I talked to Andy jazzy and Adam Celski both say the same thing during the pandemic. Necessity's the mother of all invention. Yep. And startups can move fast. So with that, you guys are there to assist if I'm a startup and I gotta pivot cuz remember iterate and pivot, iterate and pivot. So you get your economics, that's the playbook of the ventures and the models. >>Exactly. How >>Do you guys help me do that? Give me an example of what me through. Pretend me, I'm a start up. Hey, I'm on the cloud. Oh my God. Pandemic. They need video conferencing. Hey cube. Yeah. What do I need? Search? What, what do >>I do? That's a good question. First thing is just listen. Yeah. I think what we have to do is a really good job of listening to the partner. Um, what are their needs? What is their problem statement? Where do they want to go at the end of the day? Um, and oftentimes because we've worked with, so how many successful startups that have come out of our program, we have, um, either through intuition or a playbook determined what is gonna be the best path forward and how do we get these partners to stop focusing on things that will eventually, um, just be a waste of time. Yeah. And, or not provide, or, you know, bring any fruit to the table, which, you know, essentially revenue. >>Well, we love startups here in the cube because one, um, they have good stories, they're oil and cutting edge, always pushing the envelope and they're kind of disrupting someone else. Yeah. And so they, they have an opinion. They don't mind sharing on camera. So love talking to startups. We love working with you guys on our startups. Showcases startups.com. Check out AWS startups.com and she got the showcase. So is, uh, final word. I'll give you guys the last word. What's the bottom line bumper sticker for AP globe. The global APN program summarize the opportunity for startups, what you guys bring to the table and we'll close it out. Totally. We'll start >>With you. Yeah. I think the AWS global startup programs here to help companies truly accelerate their business full stop. Right. And that's what we're here for. Love it. >>It's a good way to, it's a good way to put it. Dato yeah. >>All right. Thanks for coming out. Thanks John. Great to see you love working with you guys. Hey, startups need help. And the growing and huge market opportunities, the shift cloud scale data engineering, security infrastructure, all the markets are exploding in growth because of the digital transformation of realities here, open source and cloud. I'll making it happen here in the cube in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, your host. Thanks for >>Watching Cisco, John. >>Hello and welcome back to the Cube's live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, two days of coverage, AWS summit, 2022 in New York city coming up this summer will be there as well. Events are back. The cube is back of course, with the cube virtual cube hybrid, the cube.net. Check it out a lot of content this year more than ever a lot more cloud data cloud native, modern applic is all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, Cub alumni, uh, CEO of observe Inc in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data observability, Jeremy. Great to see you. Thanks. >>Coming on. Always great to come and talk to you on the queue, man. It's been been a few years, so, >>Um, well you, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, uh, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability Smith hot area, but also you've been a senior executive president of Dell EMC. Um, 11 years ago you had a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. Um, yeah. And it's here, you predicted it 11 years ago. Um, look around it's cloud meets big data. >>Yeah. I mean the, the cloud thing I think, you know, was, was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for, for sort of catching that bus early, um, you know, we, we were on the, the, the bus early and, and I think it was only inevitable. Like, you know, if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you, you could find out things you could never possibly imagine. >>So you're close to a lot of companies that we've been covering deeply snowflake, obviously you involved, uh, at the board level, the other found, you know, the people there, uh, cloud, you know, Amazon, you know, what's going on here? Yeah. You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, uh, chief of observ, Inc, which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data engineering, large scale integrations, um, data as code integrating into applications. I mean, it's a whole nother world developing, like you see with snowflake, it means snowflakes is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's your, what's this wave we're on what's how would you describe the wave? >>Well, a couple of things, I mean, people are, I think right in more software than, than ever before are why? Because they've realized that if, if you don't take your business online and offer a service, then you become largely irrelevant. And so you you've got a whole set of new applications. I think, I think more applications now than any point. Um, not, not just ever, but the mid nineties, I always looked at as the golden age of application development. Now, back then people were building for windows. Well, well now they're building for things like AWS is now the platform. Um, so you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data. And the, you know, there's sort of the transactions, you know, what you bought today are something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry, all the exhaust fumes. And I think people really are realizing that their differentiation is not so much their application. It's their understanding of the data. Can, can I understand who my best customers are, what I sell today. If people came to my website and didn't buy, then why not? Where did they drop off all of that? They wanna analyze. And, and the answers are all in the data. The question is, can you understand it >>In our last startup showcase, we featured data as code one of the insights that we got out of that, and I wanna get your opinion on our reaction to is, is that data used to be put into a data lake and turns into a data swamp or throw into the data warehouse. And then we'll do some queries, maybe a report once in a while. And so data, once it was done, unless it was real time, even real time was not good anymore after real time. That was the old way. Now you're seeing more and more, uh, effort to say, let's go look at the data, cuz now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once mm-hmm <affirmative> they're iterating. Yeah. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting. Yeah, that's a Silicon valley story. That's like how startups work, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have another, this data concept that's now yeah. Part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole, this whole new cycle of >>Yeah. >>Data being reused and repurposed and figured out and yeah, >>Yeah. I'm a big fan of, um, years ago. Uh, uh, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee at the MIT C cell labs I spent time with and he, he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look I'm I'm. He said I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you have enough data, you can answer any question. And, and this is going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and, and certainly, you know, research is on the forefront. But I think, you know, starting to see that mindset of the, the sort of MIT research be mainstream, you know, in enterprises, they they're realizing that. Yeah, it is about the data. You know, if I can better understand my data better than my competitor, then I've got an advantage. And so the question is is, is how, what, what technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to, to allow me to do that. >>So let's talk about observing you the CEO of, okay. Given you've seen the ways before you're in the front lines of observability, which again is in the center of all this action what's going on with the company. Give a quick minute to explain, observe for the folks who don't know what you guys do. What's the company doing? What's the funding status, what's the product status and what's the customer status. Yeah. >>So, um, we realized, you know, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago that, um, look, the way people are building applications is different. They they're way more functional. They change every day. Uh, but in some respects they're a lot more complicated. They're distributed. They, you know, microservices architectures and when something goes wrong, um, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not gonna fly because you had SA so much change going into production on a daily basis. It was hard to tell like where the problem was. And so we thought, okay, it's about time. Somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and all the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot and make sense of the problems that they're seeing. So, I mean, that's observability, it's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was a guy called, uh, Rudolph like, like everything in tech, you know, it's, it's a reinvention of something from years gone by. >>Um, there's a guy called, um, Rudy Coleman in 1960s coiner term and, and, and the term was being able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for, uh, the best part of four years now. Um, it took us three years just to build the product. I think, I think what people don't appreciate these days often is the barrier to entry in a lot of these markets is quite high. You, you need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. Um, so yeah, this last year we, we, we did our first year selling, uh, we've got about 40 customers now. Um, we just we've got great investors for the hill ventures. Uh, I mean, Mike SP who was, you know, the, the guy who was the, really, the first guy in it snowflake and the, the initial investor were fortunate enough to, to have Mike and our board. And, um, you know, part of the observed story is closely knit with snowflake all of that time with your data, you know, we, we store in there. >>So I want to get, uh, yeah. Pivot to that. Mike SP snowflake, Jeremy Burton, the cube kind of, kind of same thinking this idea of a super cloud or what snowflake became. Yeah. Snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of snowflake. Yeah. So that's become an entrepreneurial story that we think that to go big in the cloud, you can have a cloud on a cloud, uh, like as Jerry, Jerry Chan and Greylock calls it, castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you, you're doing some stuff with snowflake. So as a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a snowflake or an AWS, because again, you gotta go where the data is. You need all the data. >>Yeah. So >>What's your take on that? I mean, >>Having enough gray hair now, um, you know, again, in tech, I think if you wanna predict the future, look at the past. And, uh, you know, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a, a smaller company called Oracle and an Oracle was the database company. And, uh, their, their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms, one, one windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operating system was the platform. And, and then that was the, you know, ecosystem that you would compete on top of. And then there were companies like SAP that built applications on top of Oracle. So then wind the clock forward 25 years gray hairs. <laugh> the platform, isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, you know, Google cloud. I gotta probably look around if I say that in. Yeah, >>It's okay. Columbia, but hyperscale. Yeah. CapX built out >>That is the new platform. And then snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generated data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. And I think they they've done an amazing job are doing for the, I'd say, say the, the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world, you know, way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and, and of course my ambition would be, look, if, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of snowflake, uh, as, as they were on top of Oracle, then, then we'd probably be quite happy, >>Happy. So you're building on top of snowflake, >>We're building on top of snowflake a hundred percent. And, um, you know, I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that that's a risk. You're >>Still on the board. >>Yeah. I'm still on the board. Yeah. That's a risk I'm prepared to take. I am more on snowing. >>It sounds well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board, then you'll know what's going on. Okay. No, yeah. Serious one. But the, this is a real dynamic. It is. It's not a one off its >>Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS is in order of magnitude, more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so I've believe the opportunity for folks like snowflake and, and folks like observe it. It's an order of magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old world. >>Yeah. And I think this is really, I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you gotta be on a platform. Yeah. >>It's quite easy >>Or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how seats were at that table left >>Well value migrates up over time. So, you know, when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, you know, rack space and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure, a service platform as a service. My, my old, uh, um, employee EMC, we had pivotal, you know, pivotal was a platform as a service. Don't hear so much about it these days, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to, to like extract, uh, a real business, you gotta move up, you gotta add value, you gotta build databases, then you gotta build applications. So >>It's interesting. Moving from the data center of the cloud was a dream for starters within if the provision, the CapEx. Yeah. Now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on, on top of that, you got snowflake. Now you got on top of that. >>The assumption is almost that compute and storage is free. I know it's not quite free. Yeah. It's almost free, but you can, you know, as an application vendor, you think, well, what can I do if I assume compute and storage is free, that's the mindset you've gotta get >>Into. And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm gonna get a series us multiple of value in what I'm paying. Yeah. Most people don't even blanket their Avis pills unless they're like massively huge. Yeah. Then it's a repatriation question or whatever discount question, but for most startups or any growing company, the Amazon bill should be a small factor. >>Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, um, ask me, uh, like, look you build in on snowflake. Um, you, you know, you, you, you're gonna be, you're gonna be paying their money. How, how, how, how does that work with your business model? If you're paying their money, you know, do, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. I, we could build a database as well and observe, but then I've got half the development team working on something that will never be as good as snowflake. And so we made the call early on that. No, no, we, we want a eight above the database. Yeah. Right. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and, and the same is true of something like Amazon, like, like snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >>Yeah. And what's interesting is that Dave <inaudible> and I have been pointing this out and he's obviously a more on snowflake. I've been looking at data bricks, um, and the same dynamics happening, the proof is the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, if you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and data bricks it's exploding. Right. I mean, the shows are selling out the floor. Space's book. That's the old days at VMware. Yeah. The old days at AWS. >>Well, and for snowflake and, and any platform from VI, it's a beautiful thing because, you know, we build on snowflake and we pay them money. They don't have to sell to us. Right. And we do a lot of the support. And so the, the economics work out really, really well. If you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of >>Ecosystems. Yeah. And then also you get, you get a, um, a trajectory of, uh, economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of snowflake integrations, right. New product, you're scaling a step function with them. >>Yeah. I mean, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. Right. When I, when I, when I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had, we had one petabyte customer. And, and so at observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so been able to rely on a platform that can manage that is inve >>You know, well, Jeremy great conversation. Thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. Uh, we got a couple minutes left, um, put a plug in for observe. What do you guys know? You got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your, your, your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You getting in traction. >>Yeah. Yeah. Scales >>Around the corner. Sounds like, are you, is that where you are scale? >>We've got a big that that's when coming up in two or three weeks, we've got, we've got new funding, um, which is always great. Um, the product is, uh, really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, you know, which is at which point can you just start hiring salespeople? And the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. Um, we've got about 40 SaaS companies that run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, uh, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting, um, enterprise type customers. We're, we're, you know, F five networks we're POC in right now with capital one, we got some interest in news around capital one coming up. I, I can't share too much, but it's gonna be exciting. And, and like I said, so hill continue to, to, >>I think capital one's a big snowflake customer as well. Right. >>They were early in one of the things that attracted me to capital one was they were very, very good with snowflake early on. And, and they put snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. And, and today that, that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts, >>Capital, one, very innovative cloud, obviously Atos customer, and very innovative, certainly in the CISO and CIO, um, on another point on where you're at. So you're, Prescale meaning you're about to scale, >>Right? >>So you got POCs, what's that trajectory look like? Can you see around the corner? What's, what's going on? What's on, around the corner. That you're, that you're gonna hit this straight and narrow and, and gas it fast. >>Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the key thing for us is we gotta get the product. Right. Um, the nice thing about having a guy like Mike Pfizer on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage. His questions that the board are always about, like is the product, right? Is the product right? Is the product right? Have you got the product right? And cuz we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and, and the revenue will take care of itself. Yeah. So right now all the attention is on the product. Um, the, this year, the exciting thing is we we're, we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that by in the day you could do with the new relics and AppDynamics, the last generation of, of APM tools, you're gonna be able to do that within observe. And we've already got the logs and the metrics capability in there. So for us this year is a big one, cuz we sort of complete the trifecta, you know, the, the >>Logs, what's the secret sauce observe. What if you had the, put it into a, a, a sentence what's the secret sauce? >>I, I, I think, you know, an amazing founding engineering team, uh, number one, I mean, at the end of the day, you have to build an amazing product and you have to solve a problem in a different way. And we've got great long term investors and, and the biggest thing our investors give is it actually, it's not just money. It gives us time to get the product, right. Because if we get the product right, then we can get the growth. >>Got it. Final question. While I got you here, you've been on the enterprise business for a long time. What's the buyer landscape out there. You got people doing POCs on capital one scale. So we know that goes on. What's the appetite at the buyer side for startups and what are their requirements that you're seeing? Uh, obviously we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their, this restructure. So, so a lot of happening in cloud, what's the criteria. How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >>Yeah. I mean, enterprises, they know they've gotta spend money transforming the business. I mean, this was, I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but, um, what, what we were saying five years ago is happening. Um, everybody needs to figure out a way to take their business to this digital world. Everybody has to do it. So the nice thing from a startup standpoint is they know at times they need to risk or, or take a bet on new technology in order to, to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that a have money, uh, B it prepared to take risks and it's, it's a race against time to you'll get their, their offerings in this, a new digital footprint. >>Final, final question. What's the state of AWS. Where do you see them going next? Obviously they're continuing to be successful. How does cloud 3.0, or they always say it's day one, but it's more like day 10, but what's next for Aw. Where do they go from here? Obviously they're doing well. They're getting bigger and bigger. Yeah, >>Better. It's an amazing story. I mean, you know, we're, we're on AWS as well. And so I, I think if they keep nurturing the builders and the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They, they have an early leads. And if you look at where, you know, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the, in the late nineties, it was, they stopped, uh, really caring about developers in the folks who were building on top of their ecosystem. In fact, they started buying up their ecosystem and competing with people in their ecosystem. And I see with AWS, they, they have an amazing headstart and if they did more, you know, if they do more than that, that's, what's gonna keep this juggernaut rolling for many years to come. >>Yeah. They got the Silicon and got the stack. They're developing Jeremy Burton inside the cube, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called observing in the middle of all the action on the board of snowflake as well. Um, great startup. Thanks for coming on the cube. Always a pleasure. Okay. Live from San Francisco. It's to cube. I'm John for your host. Stay with us more coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. >>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here live in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cubes cube coverage of AWS summit 2022 here in San Francisco. We're all the developers are the bay air at Silicon valley. And of course, AWS summit in New York city is coming up in the summer. We'll be there as well. SF and NYC cube coverage. Look for us. Of course, reinforcing Boston and re Mars with the whole robotics, AI. They all coming together. Lots of coverage stay with us today. We've got a great guest from Bel VC. John founding partner, entrepreneurial venture is a venture firm. Your next act, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Good to see you, man. I feel like it's been forever since we've been able to do something in person. Well, >>I'm glad you're here because we run into each other all the time. We've known each other for over decade. Um, >>It's been at least 10 years, >>At least 10 years more. And we don't wanna actually go back as bring back the old school web 1.0 days. But anyway, we're in web three now. So we'll get to that in a second. We, >>We are, it's a little bit of a throwback to the path though, in my opinion, >>It's all the same. It's all distributed computing and software. We ran each other in cube con. You're investing in a lot of tech startup founders. Okay. This next level, next gen entrepreneurs have a new makeup and it's software. It's hardcore tech in some cases, not hardcore tech, but using software to take an old something old and make it better new, faster. So tell us about Bel what's the firm. I know you're the founder, uh, which is cool. What's going on. Explain >>What you, I mean, you remember I'm a recovering entrepreneur, right? So of course I, I, >>No, you're never recovering. You're always entrepreneur >>Always, but we are also always recovering. So I, um, started my first company when I was 24. If you remember, before there was Facebook and friends, there was instant messaging. People were using that product at work every day, they were creating a security vulnerability between their network and the outside world. So I plugged that hole and built an instant messaging firewall. It was my first company. The company was called IM logic and we were required by Symantec. Uh, then spent 12 years investing in the next generation of software companies, uh, early investor in open source companies and cloud companies and spent a really wonderful years, uh, at a firm called NEA. So I, I feel like my whole life I've been either starting enterprise software companies or helping founders start enterprise software companies. And I'll tell you, there's never been a better time than right now to start an enterprise software company. >>So, uh, the passion for starting a new firm was really a recognition that founders today that are starting an enterprise software company, they, they tend to be, as you said, a more technical founder, right? Usually it's a software engineer or a builder mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, they are building that are serving a slightly different market than what we've traditionally seen in enterprise software. Right? I think traditionally we've seen it buyers or CIOs that have agendas and strategies, which, you know, purchase software that is traditionally bought and sold tops down. But you know, today I think the most successful enterprise software companies are the ones that are built more bottoms up and have more technical early adopters. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software. And it starts with great technical founders with great products and great bottoms of motions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background. You're super smart admire of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is, is all companies there's no, I mean, consumer is enterprise now. Everything is what was once a niche, not, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. But remember, like right now, there's also a giant tech in VC conference in Miami <laugh> and it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, well, >>MFTs is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. >>Well, and, and I think all of us here that are of may, maybe students of his stream have been involved in open source in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three >>Movement. The hype is definitely web >>Three. Yeah. But, >>But you know, >>For sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east to Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case and maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many measures over, uh, $500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30 a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast >>Let's getting, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant <laugh> but there's also the hype of like the web three, for instance, but you know, for, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Lutman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, hire a direct sales force and sass kind of crushed that now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS? Is snowflake a SAS or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, and they own all my data. And you know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of commonalities across all six of startups and the overall adoption of technology. Uh, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually user like growth, right. They're one in the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving. >>You just pull the product >>Through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this movement may be started with open source where users were contributors, you know, contributors were users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing and it's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the users. And they're really the, the offic and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a gen Xer technically. So for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I've, I've been saying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit a digital hippie Revolut, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one of group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. We hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>During the mainframe days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home brew club. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on like, well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source. One example of that religion. Some people say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? It's, it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily. I mean, >>The data drives all decision making. Let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've been a VC for many years, but you also have the founder entrepreneurial mindset, but you can empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of is about believing in the first. So faking it till you make it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. Oh, >>AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur, right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story. And I still think that that's important, right. It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. Yeah. But having said that you're right. The proof is in the pudding, right. At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it's gonna, it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in this new economy, that're, we live in really, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative because their product begin for exactly >>The volume you back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song is the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, like the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with for right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the it's gotta speak to the, >>Exactly. Speak to the user. But let me ask a question now that for the people watching, who are maybe entrepreneurial entre entrepreneurs, um, masterclass here is in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur to come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine. Whether you're an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think will become, right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way, and we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be, the more likely somebody is gonna to align with your vision and, and want to invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I, you gotta show the path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision. Uh, if you have the same vision, you can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle of the journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the, the latest trends because it's over before you even get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living will say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. So you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but sometimes it happens ins six months. Sometimes it takes six years. Sometimes it takes 16 years. Uh, >>What's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Tebel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There there's three big trends that we invest in. And then the, the only things we do day in day out one is the explosion at open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen an alwa timeline happening forever, but it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's its one big mass of wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is underinvested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a do over, right? I mean, do we need a do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cyber security as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole like economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is around 150 billion and it still is a fraction of what >>We're, what we're and even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital >>That's right. You mean arguably, right. Arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say you gotta love your firm. Love who you're doing. We're big supporters of your mission. Congrat is on your entrepreneurial venture. And uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cuban. Uh, >>Absolutely >>Not. Certainly EU maybe even north America's in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for helping me on the show. >>Des bell VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California, after the short break, stay with us. Hey everyone. Welcome to the cue here. Live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022 we're live we're back with events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, 80% summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube. Got a great guest here. Justin Colby, owner and CEO of innovative solutions they booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us the story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. Yeah. >><laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to midsize businesses that are moving to the cloud or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control, cost, security, compliance, all the good stuff, uh, that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is. But now we have offices down in Austin, Texas up in Toronto, uh, Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago. And it's been a great ride. >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by AWS. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization and obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? Yeah. >>It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small to mid-size business. I'll try and understand how to leverage technology better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech is really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're like, listen, we gotta move to the out or we move some things to the cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then, uh, progressively working through a modernization strategy is always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to midsize businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. They want to get set up. But the, the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is. And it's not, it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem you guys solve >>The SMB space. The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and are hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with technology staff that has additional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether that's, we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to, yeah, they're like, listen, the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's OnPrem or in the cloud. I just want to know that I'm doing that in a way that helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. Good. >>How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I think there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start the, on your journey in one way, and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's a, gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning, the projects that early and not worrying about it, you got it. I mean, most people don't abandon stuff cuz they're like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. >>And they get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. Yeah. >>Frog and boiling water as we used to say so, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean this, this is a dynamic that's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you guys come in. I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talk to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did Andy jazzy announcer Adam, you know, five, a thousand announcement or whatever they did with huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just product. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are >>The values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to mid-size business, leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a tech company in the pro of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning know that we have their back and we're the safety net. So when a customer is saying, all right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going on loan. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say you're high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attack. If you have a partner that's offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own, it would cost 'em a fortune. If >>It's training alone would be insane. A risk factor not mean the cost. Yes, absolutely. Opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. Yeah. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018, when, uh, when we made the decision to go all on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious decision. It wasn't requirement isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front desk >>And she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I >>Love it. It's amazing. So I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get the right >>People involved. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point about SMBs and BIS is in general, small and large. It staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the build out, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner or SMB, do I get the why? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cyber security issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one in the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Like critical issues. This >>Is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about this, that's, >>That's what, at least a million in bloating, if not three or more Just to get that going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side now. Yeah. No. And nevermind AI and ML. That's >>Right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It's incredibly difficult. And the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll do all that exactly. In the it department. >>Exactly. >>Like, can we just call up, uh, you know, our old vendor that's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like >>It, >>But that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I were a business owner starting a business today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. And it's something that we tell, talk about every, with every one of our small to mid-size >>Businesses. So just, I wanna get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative yeah. Award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, I was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduce other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. And I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months that I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at RT long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2010 and I was like, Hey, on the value of this business and who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years, what do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner, but if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that were gonna also buy into the business with me. >>And they were the owners, no outside capital, none >>Zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons, they all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like if we're owners, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015, and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an early now process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the business, cuz they cared very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting going all in on the cloud was important for us and we haven't looked back. >>And at that time the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly. And those kinds of big enterprises, the GA I don't wanna say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to mid-size business, to migrate completely to the cloud as, as infrastructure was considered. That just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing where a lot of our small to mid-size as customers, they wanted to leverage cloud-based backup or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration, the Microsoft suite to the cloud. And a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on AWS at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is it the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plug in for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking to migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating to the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customers not to be cash strap and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so that they can modernize. >>So like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers and being empathetic to where they are in their journey. >>And that's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable wind. That's right. Seeing the value and Ling down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much for having me. >>Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We're back with more great coverage for two days after this short break, >>Live on the floor and see San Francisco for a AWS summit. I'm John ferry, host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the action we're back in person. We're at a AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back. Events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube. Bring all the action. Also virtual. We have a hybrid cube. Check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad to be >>Here. So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to have to be back through events. >>It's amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to and what two, three years. >>It's awesome. We'll be at the UHS summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and a big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything dev sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the game is pretty much laid out mm-hmm <affirmative> and the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's right. >>Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around, especially the edge public cloud for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give an example, uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, it's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering a, since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam's in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't wanna say trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listen to the customers. They work backwards from the customer. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does computing. It >>Does. That's not centralized in the public cloud now they got regions. So what is the issue at the edge what's driving the behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see that the data at the edge, you got 5g having. So it's pretty obvious, but there's a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation where today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always used to riff on the cube cause it's basically Amazon and a box pushed in the data center, running native, all the stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of becoming standard. You're starting to see some standard Deepak syncs. Group's doing some amazing work with open source Rauls team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW, he was giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my data center, do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outposts. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere or in your VMware environment. And it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. Right? So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. That's right. Innovative as that you get the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in, in these new areas that you're helping out are, they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is it. They don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on, what's making them money as a business. They want on their applications. They want to focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS, you take the infrastructure. You take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. Uh, we help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping of these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. So >>Basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it works? Right. >>And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy FinTech in the Caribbean, we talk about hurricanes and we're gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where you now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that, that required. It makes total sense. We're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech. And in, in the islands there a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what's your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming a, uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a, uh, technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure, because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on it's >>Interesting. I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, projects going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart concept. We use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead and it's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain, just for this like smart contracts for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service, but what happened to decentralized. >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance issue. Yeah. And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through, uh, a use case of a customer, um, Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud. Um, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my ad. And I also want all the benefit of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer. Yeah. >>Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment inside that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with, uh, regular commercial available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Uh, inside of that manufacturing plant, uh, we can do pre-procesing on things coming out of the, uh, the robotics that depending on what we're manufacturing, right. Uh, and then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard for >>Data, data lake, or whatever, to >>The data lake. Yeah. Data lake house, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but a lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just in time, manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going to the data that saves that cost yep. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data, unless you have to, um, those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever, the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? This is a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud out? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe maybe decision can wait. Right? Yeah. Uh, and then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot too, doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture on the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are. And, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about customers are starting to talk about throwing away data, uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And >>Well, I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this, but the one pattern was income of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retrain their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes code, as we call it our lab showcase, we did a whole, whole, that event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw away. It's not just business benefits. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. There >>Are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are run petabyte level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, uh, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to the AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a kind of a, um, fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, a cloud and skydiving instructor. <laugh> how does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? Yeah. >>Uh, you >>Jumped out a plane and got a job. You, you got a customer to jump out >>Kind of. So I was jump, I was teaching Scott eing, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a Scott I instructor. Yeah. Uh, I was teaching Scott eing and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and, and how his cus customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, uh, I was living in a tent in the woods teaching scout. I think I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, uh, I started in the first day there, uh, we had a, a discussion, uh, EC two, just come out <laugh> um, and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that and through being an on premises migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services to >>It's. So it's such a great story, you know, I was gonna, you know, you know, the, the, the, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early day was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, um, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and I, maybe it does still feel like that to some people. Right. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days, AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's pretty much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting edge stuff, like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You guys, the right equipment, you gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Matthew, thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here live and San Francisco for summit. I'm John Forry host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. look@thiscalendarforallthecubeactionatthecube.net. We'll be right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube a be summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John fury host to the cube. We'll be at the eight of his summit in New York city. This summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco, getting all the coverage what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dudes, car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor and a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you, sir. Chris. Cool. How are, are you >>Good? How are you? >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah. So give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? First >>Of all, thank you for having me back to be business with you. Never great to see you. Um, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. Um, we have raised close to a hundred million there. Uh, the investors are people like Norwes Menlo, Tru ventures, coast, lo ventures, Ram Sheam and all those people, all well known guys. The Andy Beckel chime, Paul Mo uh, main web. So a whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley VCs are involved >>And has it come? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISR is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk, uh, the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and ServiceNow to take it to the next stage? >>Well, I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, Dave Valenti as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a GE, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh> >>You know who you >>Get to call this fun to talk. You though, >>You got the commentary, you, your, your finger on the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud scale. You predicted that we talked about on cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing DACA just raised a hundred million on a 2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from an enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control, plane emerging, AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded, observability there's 10 million observability companies. Data is the key. What's your angle on this? What's your take. Yeah, >>No, look, I think I'll give you the view that I see right from my side. Obviously data is very clear. So the things that remember system of recorded you and me talked about the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud NA it'll be called AI, NA AI native is a new buzzword and using the AI customer service it operations. You talk about observability. I call it, AIOps applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and service desk. What needs to be helped us with ServiceNow BMC G you see a new ELA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflow, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with a AI workflows. So you'll see AI going >>Off is RPA a company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI pass? One will be at their event this summer? Um, is it a product company? I mean, I mean, RPA is almost, should be embedded in everything. It's >>A feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company, or, but that automation should be embedded in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NA and AI NATO it'll become automation. NA yeah. And that's your thinking. >>It's almost interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kinda having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it. It was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle, and it was software abstraction. Now you have all, all kinds of workflows, abstractions everywhere. So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed or they integrated. I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So don't about the databases become called poly databases. Yeah. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area like you were talking about. It should be part of service. Now it should be part of ISRA, like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see MuleSoft and Salesforce buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies, cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also have an automation as a layer <inaudible> inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind us, you've got the expo hall. We got, um, we're back to vents, but you got, you know, AMD, Clum, Ove, uh, Dynatrace data, dog, innovative, all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right. Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Bel later today. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen. We know all the, the VCs. What does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation, clouds bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's code. Yes. Basically data is everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders of Amazon created the startups 15 years back. Everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be is people don't just build on Amazon. They're going to build it on top of snowflake. Companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake. Right? So I see my old boss flagman try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer. Right? So I think that's in the of, <inaudible> trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your moat is, what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last reinvent, coined the term super cloud, right? He's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage. And guys like Charles Fitzgeral out there, who we like was kind of shit on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get it. Like, yeah. I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> if he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Yes. Now they say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist. And, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. >>It is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer. Remember the middle layer pass will be snowflake. So can build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer. If I really need to size, I'll build it on four.com Salesforce. So I think that's where you'll see. So >>Basically if you're an entrepreneur, the north star in terms of the outcome is be a super cloud. >>It is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. >>Yeah. Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales? The snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think got Redshift. Amazon has got red, um, but Snowflake's a big customer. They're probably paying AWS think big bills too. >>So John, very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-option will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with, uh, snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouse as a data layer. So I think depending on the application use case, you have to use each of the above. I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, You know, foreclose your value that's right. But some sort of internal hack, but I think, I think the general question that I have is that I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point. When does the rising tide stop >>And >>Do the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth cycle? I >>Think it's growth. You call it cloud scale. You invented the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's, as long as there are more movement from on, uh, OnPrem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations. It helpless, even the customer service service now and, uh, ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go made. >>I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers or practitioners, not suppliers to the market, feel free to, to XME or DMing. Next question's really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products. Cause you know, the big enterprises now and, you know, small, medium, large, and large enterprise are all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or a growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean I'm seeing some stuff, but why don't we get your thoughts on that? What, no, it is. >>If I remember going back to our 2007 or eight, it, when I used to talk to you back then when Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or 1% today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a CIO line business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can double in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. >>Yeah. And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I reference the URL cause it's like, there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solutions that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting left for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there, um, and gives back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure as code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share >>Yourself? No, I have a lot of thoughts that plus I see AIOP solutions in the future should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app Dyna, right? Dynatrace, all this solution will go future towards to proactive solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service that customers are give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can come the best algorithm, but I gotta train them, modify them, tweak them, make them better, make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to our big data days back in 2009, you know, >>Look at, look how much data bricks has grown. >>It is uh, double, the key >>Cloud kinda went private, so good stuff. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking at that growing customers and my customers are some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk, Mac of fee, uh, grandchildren, all the top customers. Um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on predict S one area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service, >>Great stuff, man. Doing great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of 80 summit, 2022. And we're gonna be at 80 summit in San, uh, in New York and the summer. So look for that on this calendar, of course go to eight of us, startups.com. I mentioned that it's a site for all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This to cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back a little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit new York's coming in the summer. We'll be there too with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the groove, psyched to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're gonna see a lot of virtual cube, a lot of hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economists with duck, bill groove, he founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe as shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at Mark's been doing a lot of shit posting lately, all a billionaires are shit posting, but they don't know how to do it. Like they're not >>Doing it right. Something opportunity there. It's like, here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a mid-size island to begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. This >>Shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on the other side, I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what is shit posting? >>It's more or less talking about the world of enterprise tech, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream. But it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a jackass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, coupons coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you can see the growth of cloud native Amazons, all, all the Adams let see new CEO, Andy move on to be the chief of all. Amazon just saw him. The cover of was it time magazine. Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything these folks do. They they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble imagining the logistics. It takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. It's, it's sprawling, immense that dominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. Well, >>There's a lot of force for good conversations, seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to port and he was trying to portray themselves as you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now it same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. Either way, sounds like more exciting >>Replacement ready <laugh> in case something goes wrong. I, the track highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in e-sports with other, in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and video graphics card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. >>Oh, it's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going in your world. I know you have a lot of great success. We've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter. Check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's back any blow back late there been uptick. What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's high. I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They must not have heard me it. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do that. >>We should do that. Actually. I think sure would call in. Oh, I, >>I think >>Chief, we had that right now. People would call in and say, Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the customer. >>You know, I always joke with Dave ante about how John Fort's always at, uh, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0 5, or we can't, >>We have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish. That's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their >>Producting, they're going in different directions. When they named Amazon Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonused on a number of words. They can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, session manager is a great one. I love the service, ridiculous name. They have systems manager, parameter store, which is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage your parameter store does not. It's >>Fun. What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination of you >>Got Ks. You got EMR, you got EC two. You got S three SQS. Well, Redshift the on an acronym, you >>Gots is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation. >>They still up bean stalk. Or is that still around? Oh, >>They never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, wow, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it. But while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it. John three <laugh>. >>Okay. >>Simple BV still haunts our dreams. >>I, I actually got an email. I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C two S were being deprecated and I got an email I'm like, I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me just like, give me something else. Right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you is that like, okay. So as Amazon gets better in some areas, where do they need more work in your opinion? Because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database, Snowflake's got a database service. So Redshift, snowflake database is, so you got this co-op petition. Yes. How's that going? And what are you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with Amazon and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want and they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multi-cloud cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word. Multi-cloud um, a lot of people are saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word, like multi sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multi-cloud >>Multiple single points? >>Dave loves that term. Yeah. >>Yeah. You're building in multiple single points of failure. Do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about multi-cloud either as the industry leader, talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective, it doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of forms. Some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on context. But my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing, because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. Yeah. >>Cool. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question, cause I know you, we you've been, you know, fellow journeymen and the, and the cloud journey going to all the events and then the pandemic hit where now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna gonna end. Certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations. Community's gonna emerge. You got a pretty big community growing and it's throwing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing, or just big chain angels. You've seen with the pandemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece, come in, you're commentating. You're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck bill group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, fun, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who can pony up two grand and a week in Las Vegas and get to Las Vegas from wherever they happen to be by moving virtually suddenly it, it embraces the reality that talent is even distributed. Opportunity is not. And that means that suddenly these things are accessible to a wide swath of audience and potential customer base and the rest that hadn't been invited to the table previously, it's imperative that we not lose that. It's nice to go out and talk to people and have people come up and try and smell my hair from time to time, I smell delightful. Let make assure you, but it was, but it's also nice to be. >>I have a product for you if you want, you know. >>Oh, excellent. I look forward to it. What is it putting? Why not? <laugh> >>What else have you seen? So when accessibility for talent, which by the way is totally home run. What weird things have happened that you've seen? Um, that's >>Uh, it's, it's weird, but it's good that an awful lot of people giving presentations have learned to tighten their message and get to the damn point because most people are not gonna get up from a front row seat in a conference hall, midway through your Aing talk and go somewhere else. But they will change a browser tab and you won't get them back. You've gotta be on point. You've gotta be compelling if it's going to be a virtual discussion. >>Yeah. And also turn off your IMEs too. >>Oh yes. It's always fun in the, in the meetings when you're talking to someone and their co is messaging them about, should we tell 'em about this? And I'm sitting there reading it and it's >>This guy is really weird. Like, >>Yes I am and I bring it into the conversation and then everyone's uncomfortable. It goes, wow. >>Why not? I love when my wife yells at me over I message. When I'm on a business call, like, do you wanna take that about no, I'm good. >>No, no. It's better off. I don't. No, the only encourager it's fine. >>My kids. Excellent. Yeah. That's fun again. That's another weird thing. And, and then group behavior is weird. Now people are looking at, um, communities differently. Yes. Very much so, because if you're fatigued on content, people are looking for the personal aspect. You're starting to see much more of like yeah. Another virtual event. They gotta get better. One and two who's there. >>Yeah. >>The person >>That's a big part of it too is the human stories are what are being more and more interesting. Don't get up here and tell me about your product and how brilliant you are and how you built it. That's great. If I'm you, or if I wanna work with you or I want to compete with you, or I wanna put on my engineering hat and build it myself. Cause why would I buy anything? That's more than $8. But instead, tell me about the problem. Tell me about the painful spot that you specialize in. Tell me a story there. >>I, I >>Think that gets a glimpse in a hook and >>Makes more, more, I think you nailed it. Scaling storytelling. Yes. And access to better people because they don't have to be there in person. I just did it thing. I never, we never would've done the queue. We did. Uh, Amazon stepped up in sponsors. Thank you, Amazon for sponsoring international women's day, we did 30 interviews, APAC. We did five regions and I interviewed this, these women in Asia, Pacific eight, PJ, they called for in this world. And they're amazing. I never would've done those interviews cuz I never, would've seen 'em at an event. I never would've been in Japan or Singapore to access them. And now they're in the index. They're in the network. They're collaborating on LinkedIn. So a threads are developing around connections that I've never seen before. Yes. Around the content, >>Absolutely >>Content value plus >>The networking. And that is the next big revelation of this industry is going to realize you have different companies. And in Amazon's case, different service teams, all, all competing with each other, but you have the container group and you have the database group and you have the message cuing group. But customers don't really want to build things from spare parts. They want a solution to a problem. I want to build an app that does Twitter for pets or whatever it is I'm trying to do. I don't wanna basically have to pick and choose and fill my shopping cart with all these different things. I want something that's gonna give me what I'm trying to get as close to turnkey as possible. Moving up the stack. That is the future. And just how it gets here is gonna be >>Well we're here with Corey Quinn, the master of the master of content here in the a ecosystem. Of course we we've been following up in the beginnings. Great guy. Check out his blog, his site, his newsletter screaming podcast. Cory, final question for you. Uh, what do you hear doing what's on your agenda this week in San Francisco and give a plug for the duck build group. What are you guys doing? I know you're hiring some people what's on the table for the company. What's your focus this week and put a plug in for the group. >>I'm here as a customer and basically getting outta my cage cuz I do live here. It's nice to actually get out and talk to folks who are doing interesting things at the duck build group. We solve one problem. We fixed the horrifying AWS bill, both from engineering and architecture, advising as well as negotiating AWS contracts because it turns out those things are big and complicated. And of course my side media projects last week in aws.com, we are, it it's more or less a content operation where I indulge my continual and ongoing law of affair with the sound of my own voice. >><laugh> and you good. It's good content. It's on, on point fun, Starky and relevant. So thanks for coming to the cube and sharing with us. Appreciate it. No, thank you. Fun. You. Okay. This the cube covers here in San Francisco, California, the cube is back at to events. These are the summits, Amazon web services summits. They happen all over the world. We'll be in New York and obviously we're here in San Francisco this week. I'm John furry. Keep, keep it right here. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Okay. Welcome back everyone. This's the cubes covers here in San Francisco, California, we're live on the show floor of AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube and remember AWS summit in New York city coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. And of course reinvent the end of the year for all the cube coverage on cloud computing and AWS. The two great guests here from the APN global APN se Jenko and Jeff Grimes partner leader, Jeff and se is doing partnerships global APN >>AWS global startup program. Yeah. >>Okay. Say that again. >>AWS global startup program. >>That's the official name. >>I love >>It too long, too long for me. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, of course. Appreciate it. Tell us about what's going on with you guys. What's the, how was you guys organized? You guys we're obviously were in San Francisco bay area, Silicon valley, zillions of startups here, New York. It's got another one we're gonna be at tons of startups. Lot of 'em getting funded, big growth and cloud big growth and data security, hot and sectors. >>Absolutely. >>So maybe, maybe we could just start with the global startup program. Um, it's essentially a white glove service that we provide to startups that are built on AWS. And the intention there is to help identify use cases that are being built on top of AWS. And for these startups, we want to provide white glove support in co building products together. Right. Um, co-marketing and co-selling essentially, um, you know, the use cases that our customers need solved, um, that either they don't want to build themselves or are perhaps more innovative. Um, so the, a AWS global startup program provides white glove support, dedicated headcount for each one of those pillars. Um, and within our program, we've also provided incentives, programs go to market activities like the AWS startup showcase that we've built for these startups. >>Yeah. By the way, start AWS startups.com is the URL, check it out. Okay. So partnerships are key. Jeff, what's your role? >>Yeah. So I'm responsible for leading the overall F for, for the AWS global startup program. Um, so I've got a team of partner managers that are located throughout the us, uh, managing a few hundred startup ISVs right now. <laugh> >>Yeah, I got >>A lot. We've got a lot. >>There's a lot. I gotta, I gotta ask the tough question. Okay. I'm I'm a startup founder. I got a team. I just got my series a we're grown. I'm trying to hire people. I'm super busy. What's in it for me. Yeah. What do you guys bring to the table? I love the white glove service, but translate that what's in it. What do I get out of it? What's >>A good story. Good question. I focus, I think. Yeah, because we get, we get to see a lot of partners building their businesses on AWS. So, you know, from our perspective, helping these partners focus on what, what do we truly need to build by working backwards from customer feedback, right? How do we effectively go to market? Because we've seen startups do various things, um, through trial and error, um, and also just messaging, right? Because oftentimes partners or rather startups, um, try to boil the ocean with many different use cases. So we really help them, um, sort of laser focus on what are you really good at and how can we bring that to the customer as quickly as possible? >>Yeah. I mean, it's truly about helping that founder accelerate the growth of their company. Yeah. Right. And there's a lot that you can do with AWS, but focus is truly the key word there because they're gonna be able to find their little piece of real estate and absolutely deliver incredible outcomes for our customers. And then they can start their growth curve there. >>What are some of the coolest things you've seen with the APN that you can share publicly? I know you got a lot going on there, a lot of confidentiality. Um, but you know, we're here lot of great partners on the floor here. I'm glad we're back at events. Uh, a lot of stuff going on digitally with virtual stuff and, and hybrid. What are some of the cool things you guys have seen in the APN that you can point to? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can point to few, you can take them. Sure. So, um, I think what's been fun over the years for me personally, I came from a startup, ran sales at an early stage startup and, and I went through the whole thing. So I have a deep appreciation for what these guys are going through. And what's been interesting to see for me is taking some of these early stage guys, watching them progress, go public, get acquired, and see that big day mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, and being able to point to very specific items that we help them to get to that point. Uh, and it's just a really fun journey to watch. >>Yeah. I, and part of the reason why I really, um, love working at the AWS, uh, global startup program is working with passionate founders. Um, I just met with a founder today that it's gonna, he's gonna build a very big business one day, um, and watching them grow through these stages and supporting that growth. Um, I like to think of our program as a catalyst for enterprise sort of scale. Yeah. Um, and through that we provide visibility, credibility and growth opportunities. >>Yeah. A lot, a lot of partners too. What I found talking to staff founders is when they have that milestone, they work so hard for it. Whether it's a B round C round Republic or get bought. Yeah. Um, then they take a deep breath and they look back at wow, what a journey it's been. So it's kind of emotional for sure. Yeah. Still it's a grind. Right? You gotta, I mean, when you get funding, it's still day one. You don't stop. It's no celebrate, you got a big round or valuation. You still gotta execute >>And look it's hypercompetitive and it's brutally difficult. And our job is to try to make that a little less difficult and navigate those waters right. Where everyone's going after similar things. >>Yeah. I think as a group element too, I observe that startups that I, I meet through the APN has been interesting because they feel part of AWS. Yeah, totally. As a group of community, as a vibe there. Um, I know they're hustling, they're trying to make things happen. But at the same time, Amazon throws a huge halo effect. I mean, that's a huge factor. I mean, yeah. You guys are the number one cloud in the business, the growth in every sector is booming. Yeah. And if you're a startup, you don't have that luxury yet. And look at companies like snowflake, they're built on top of AWS. Yeah. I mean, people are winning by building on AWS. >>Yeah. And our, our, our program really validates their technology first. So we have, what's called a foundation's technical review that we put all of our startups through before we go to market. So that when enterprise customers are looking at startup technology, they know that it's already been vetted. And, um, to take that a step further and help these partners differentiate, we use programs like the competency programs, the DevOps compet, the, the security competency, which continues to help, um, provide sort of a platform for these startups, help them differentiate. And also there's go to market benefits that are associated with that. >>Okay. So let me ask the, the question that's probably on everyone's mind, who's watching. Certainly I asked this a lot. There's a lot of companies startups out there who makes the, is there a criteria? Oh God, it's not like his sports team or anything, but like sure. Like there's activate program, which is like, there's hundreds of thousands of startups out there. Not everyone is at the APN. Right? Correct. So ISVs again, that's a whole nother, that's a more mature partner that might have, you know, huge market cap or growth. How do you guys focus? How do you guys focus? I mean, you got a good question, you know, a thousand flowers blooming all the time. Is there a new way you guys are looking at it? I know there's been some talk about restructure or, or new focus. What's the focus. >>Yeah. It's definitely not an easy task by any means. Um, but you know, I recently took over this role and we're really trying to establish focus areas, right. So obviously a lot of the fees that we look after our infrastructure ISVs, that's what we do. Uh, and so we have very specific pods that look after different type of partners. So we've got a security pod, we've got a DevOps pod, we've got core infrastructure, et cetera. And really we're trying to find these ISVs that can solve, uh, really interesting AWS customer challenges. >>So you guys have a deliberate, uh, focus on these pillars. So what infrastructure, >>Security, DevOps, and data and analytics, and then line of business >>Line of business line, like web marketing >>Solutions, business apps, >>Business, this owner type thing. Exactly. >>Yeah, exactly. >>So solutions there. Yeah. More solutions and the other ones are like hardcore. So infrastructure as well, like storage, backup, ransomware of stuff, or, >>Uh, storage, networking. >>Okay. Yeah. The classic >>Database, et cetera. Right. >>And so there's teams on each pillar. >>Yep. So I think what's, what's fascinating for the startup that we cover is that they've got, they truly have support from a build market sell perspective. Right. So you've got someone who's technical to really help them get the technology, figured out someone to help them get the marketing message dialed and spread, and then someone to actually do the co-sell, uh, day to day activities to help them get in front of customers. >>Probably the number one request that we always ask for Amazon is can we waste that sock report? Oh, download it, the console, which we use all the time. Exactly. But security's a big deal. I mean, you know, SREs are evolving, that role of DevOps is taking on dev SecOps. Um, I, I could see a lot of customers having that need for a relationship to move things faster. Do you guys provide like escalation or is that a part of a service or not, not part of a, uh, >>Yeah, >>So the partner development manager can be an escalation point. Absolutely. Think of them as an extension of your business inside of AWS. >>Great. And you guys how's that partner managers, uh, measure >>On those three pillars. Right. Got it. Are we billing, building valuable use cases? So product development go to market, so go to market activities, think blog, posts, webinars, case studies, so on and so forth. And then co-sell not only are we helping these partners win their current opportunities that they are sourcing, but can we also help them source net new deals? Yeah. Right. That's >>Very important. I mean, top asked from the partners is get me in front of customers. Right. Um, not an easy task, but that's a huge goal of ours to help them grow their top >>Line. Right. Yeah. In fact, we had some interviews here on the cube earlier talking about that dynamic of how enterprise customers are buying. And it's interesting, a lot more POCs. I have one partner here that you guys work with, um, on observability, they got a huge POC with capital one mm-hmm <affirmative> and the enterprises are engaging the startups and bringing them in. So the combination of open source software enterprises are leaning into that hard and bringing young growing startups in mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yep. So I could see that as a huge service that you guys can bring people in. >>Right. And they're bringing massively differentiated technology to the table. Mm-hmm <affirmative> the challenge is they just might not have the brand recognition that the big guys have. And so that it's our job is how do you get that great tech in front of the right situations? >>Okay. So my next question is about the show here, and then we'll talk globally. So here in San Francisco sure. You know, Silicon valley bay area, San Francisco bay area, a lot of startups, a lot of VCs, a lot of action. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so probably a big market for you guys. Yeah. So what's exciting here in SF and then outside SF, you guys have a global program, you see any trends that are geography based or is it sure areas more mature? There's certain regions that are better. I mean, I just interviewed a company here that's doing, uh, AWS edge really well in these cases. It's interesting that these, the partners are filling a lot of holes and gaps in the opportunities with AWS. So what's exciting here. And then what's the global perspective. >>Yeah, totally. So obviously a ton of partners, I, from the bay area that we support. Um, but we're seeing a lot of really interesting technology coming out of AMEA specifically. Yeah. Uh, and making a lot of noise here in the United States, which is great. Um, and so, you know, we definitely have that global presence and, and starting to see super differentiated technology come out of those regions. >>Yeah. Especially Tel Aviv. Yeah. >>Amy real quick, before you get in the surge. It's interesting. The VC market in, in Europe is hot. Yeah. They've got a lot of unicorns coming in. We've seen a lot of companies coming in. They're kind of rattling their own, you know, cage right now. Hey, look at us. We'll see if they crash, you know, but we don't see that happening. I mean, people have been projecting a crash now in, in the startup ecosystem for at least a year. It's not crashing. In fact, funding's up. >>Yeah. The pandemic was hard on a lot of startups for sure. Yeah. Um, but what we've seen is many of these startups, they, as quickly as they can grow, they can also pivot as, as, as well. Um, and so I've actually seen many of our startups grow through the pandemic because their use cases are helping customers either save money, become more operationally efficient and provide value to leadership teams that need more visibility into their infrastructure during a pandemic. >>It's an interesting point. I talked to Andy jazzy and Adam Leski both say the same thing during the pandemic necessity, the mother of all invention. Yep. And startups can move fast. So with that, you guys are there to assist if I'm a startup and I gotta pivot cuz remember iterate and pivot, iterate and pivot. So you get your economics, that's the playbook of the ventures and the models. >>Exactly. How >>Do you guys help me do that? Give me an example of walk me through, pretend me I'm a startup. Hey, I am on the cloud. Oh my God. Pandemic. They need video conferencing. Hey cube. Yeah. What do I need? Surge? What, what do I do? >>That's a good question. First thing is just listen. Yeah. I think what we have to do is a really good job of listening to the partner. Um, what are their needs? What is their problem statement and where do they want to go at the end of the day? Um, and oftentimes because we've worked with so many successful startups, they have come out of our program. We have, um, either through intuition or a playbook, determined what is gonna be the best path forward and how do we get these partners to stop focusing on things that will eventually, um, just be a waste of time yeah. And, or not provide, or, you know, bring any fruit to the table, which, you know, essentially revenue. >>Well, we love star rights here in the cube because one, um, they have good stories. They're oil and cutting edge, always pushing the envelope and they're kind of disrupting someone else. Yeah. And so they have an opinion. They don't mind sharing on camera. So love talking to startups. We love working with you guys on our startup showcases startups.com. Check out AWS startups.com and you got the showcases, uh, final. We I'll give you guys the last word. What's the bottom line bumper sticker for AP the global APN program. Summarize the opportunity for startups, what you guys bring to the table and we'll close it out. Totally start >>With you. Yeah. I think the AWS global startup program's here to help companies truly accelerate their business full stop. Right. And that's what we're here for. I love it. >>It's a good way to, it's a good way to put it Dito. >>Yeah. All right, sir. Thanks for coming on. Thanks John. Great to see you love working with you guys. Hey, startups need help. And the growing and huge market opportunities, the shift cloud scale data engineering, security infrastructure, all the markets are exploding in growth because of the digital transformation of the realities here. Open source and cloud all making it happen here in the cube in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, your host. Thanks for watching >>John. >>Hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, two days of coverage, AWS summit, 2022 in New York city. Coming up this summer, we'll be there as well at events are back. The cube is back of course, with the cube virtual cube hybrid, the cube.net, check it out a lot of content this year, more than ever, a lot more cloud data cloud native, modern applic is all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, Cub alumni, uh, CEO of observe Inc in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data observability Jeremy. Great to see you. Thanks >>Always great to come and talk to you on the queue, man. It's been been a few years, so, >>Um, well you, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, uh, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability hot area, but also you've been a senior executive president of Dell, uh, EMC, uh, 11 years ago you had a, a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. Um, yeah. And it's here. You predicted it 11 years ago. Um, look around it's cloud meets big data. >>Yeah. I mean the, the cloud thing I think, you know, was, was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for, for, for sort of catching that bus out, um, you know, we, we were on the, the, the bus early and, and I think it was only inevitable. Like, you know, if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you, you could find out things you could never possibly imagine. >>So you're close to a lot of companies that we've been covering deeply. Snowflake obviously are involved, uh, the board level, you know, the founders, you know, the people there cloud, you know, Amazon, you know, what's going on here? Yeah. You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, uh, chief of observ, Inc, which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data engineering, large scale integrations, um, data as code integrating into applic. I mean, it's a whole nother world developing, like you see with snowflake, it means snowflake is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's your, what's this wave we're on what's how would you describe the wave? >>Well, a couple of things, I mean, people are, I think riding more software than, than ever fall. Why? Because they've realized that if, if you don't take your business online and offer a service, then you become largely irrelevant. And so you you've got a whole set of new applications. I think, I think more applications now than any point. Um, not, not just ever, but the mid nineties, I always looked at as the golden age of application development. Now back then people were building for windows. Well, well now they're building for things like AWS is now the platform. Um, so you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data and the, you know, the sort of the transactions, you know, what you bought today or something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry data, all the exhaust fumes. And I think people really are realizing that their differentiation is not so much their application. It's their understanding of the data. Can, can I understand who my best customers are, what I sell today. If people came to my website and didn't buy, then I not, where did they drop off all of that they wanna analyze. And, and the answers are all in the data. The question is, can you understand it >>In our last startup showcase, we featured data as code. One of the insights that we got out of that I wanna get your opinion on our reaction to is, is that data used to be put into a data lake and turns into a data swamp or throw into the data warehouse. And then we'll do some query, maybe a report once in a while. And so data, once it was done, unless it was real time, even real time was not good anymore after real time. That was the old way. Now you're seeing more and more, uh, effort to say, let's go look at the data cuz now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once mm-hmm <affirmative> they're iterating. Yeah. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting. Yeah, that's a Silicon valley story. That's like how startups work, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have another, this data concept that's now yeah. Part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole, this whole new cycle of >>Yeah. >>Data being reused and repurposed and figured out and >>Yeah, yeah. I'm a big fan of, um, years ago. Uh, uh, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee at the MIT C cell labs I spent time with and he, he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look I'm I'm. He said I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you, of enough data, you can answer any question. And, and this is going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and, and certainly, you know, research is on the forefront. But I, I think, you know, starting to see that mindset of the, the sort of MIT research be mainstream, you know, in enterprises, they they're realizing that yeah, it is about the data. You know, if I can better understand my data better than my competitor than I've got an advantage. And so the question is is, is how, what, what technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to, to allow me to do that. So >>Let's talk about observing you the CEO of, okay. Given you've seen the wave before you're in the front lines of observability, which again is in the center of all this action what's going on with the company. Give a quick minute to explain, observe for the folks who don't know what you guys do. What's the company doing? What's the funding status, what's the product status and what's the customer status. Yeah. >>So, um, we realized, you know, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago that, um, look, the way people are building applications is different. They they're way more functional. They change every day. Uh, but in some respects they're a lot more complicated. They're distributed. They, you know, microservices architectures and when something goes wrong, um, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not gonna fly because you had SA so much change going into production on a daily basis. It was hard to tell like where the problem was. And so we thought, okay, it's about time. Somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and all the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot and make sense of the problems that they're seeing. So, I mean, that's observability, it's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was a guy called, uh, Rudolph like, like everything in tech, you know, it's, it's a reinvention of, of something from years gone by. >>But, um, there's a guy called, um, Rudy Coleman in 1960s, kinder term. And, and, and the term was been able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for, uh, the best part of the all years now. Um, it took us three years just to build the product. I think, I think what people don't appreciate these days often is the barrier to entry in a lot of these markets is quite high. You, you need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. Um, so yeah, this last year we, we, we did our first year selling, uh, we've got about 40 customers now. <affirmative> um, we just we've got great investors for the hill ventures. Uh, I mean, Mike SP who was, you know, the, the guy who was the, really, the first guy in it snowflake and the, the initial investor were fortunate enough to, to have Mike on our board. And, um, you know, part of the observed story yeah. Is closely knit with snowflake because all of that time data know we, we still are in there. >>So I want to get, uh, >>Yeah. >>Pivot to that. Mike Pfizer, snowflake, Jeremy Burton, the cube kind of, kind of same thinking this idea of a super cloud or what snowflake became snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of snowflake. Yeah. So that's become an entrepreneurial story that we think that to go big in the cloud, you can have a cloud on a cloud, uh, like as Jerry, Jerry Chan and Greylock calls it castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you're doing some stuff with snowflake. So a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a snowflake or an AWS, because again, you gotta go where the data is. You need all the data. >>Yeah. So >>What's your take on that? >>I mean, having enough gray hair now, um, you know, again, in tech, I think if you wanna predict the future, look at the past. And, uh, you know, to many years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a, a smaller company called Oracle and an Oracle was the database company. And, uh, their, their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms, one, one windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operator and system was the platform. And, and then that was the, you know, ecosystem that you would compete on top of. And then there were companies like SAP that built applications on top of Oracle. So then wind the clock forward 25 years gray hairs. <laugh> the platform, isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, you know, Google cloud. I gotta probably look around if I say that in. Yeah. It's >>Okay. But hyperscale, yeah. CapX built out >>That is the new platform. And then snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generator data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. And I think they they've done an amazing job doing for the, I'd say, say the, the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world, you know, way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and, and of course my ambition would be, look, if, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of snow snowflake, uh, as, as they were on top of Oracle, then, then we'd probably be quite happy. >>So you're building on top of snowflake. >>We're building on top of snowflake a hundred percent. And, um, you know, I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that that's a risk. You >>Still on the board. >>Yeah. I'm still on the board. Yeah. That that's a risk I'm prepared to take <laugh> I am long on snowflake you, >>Well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board, then you'll know what's going on. Okay. No know just doing, but the, this is a real dynamic. It is. It's not a one off it's. >>Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS is an order of magnitude more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so I believe the opportunity for folks like snowflake and folks like observe it's an order of magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old >>World. Yeah. And I think this is really, I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you gotta be on a platform. Yeah. >>It's quite >>Easy or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how many seats are at that table left. >>Well, value migrates up over time. So, you know, when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, you know, Rackspace and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure, a service platform as a service, my, my old, uh, um, employee EMC, we had pivotal, you know, pivotal was a platform as a service. You don't hear so much about it, these, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to, to like extract, uh, a real business, you gotta move up, you gotta add value, you gotta build databases, then you gotta build applications. So >>It's interesting. Moving from the data center of the cloud was a dream for starters. Cause then if the provision, the CapEx, now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on top of that, you got snowflake you on top of that, the >>Assumption is almost that compute and storage is free. I know it's not quite free. Yeah. It's >>Almost free, >>But, but you can, you know, as an application vendor, you think, well, what can I do if I assume compute and storage is free, that's the mindset you've gotta get into. >>And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm gonna get a serious, multiple of value in what I'm paying. Yeah. Most people don't even blanket their Avis pills unless they're like massively huge. Yeah. Then it's a repatriation question or whatever discount question, but for most startups or any growing company, the Amazon bill should be a small factor. >>Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, um, ask me like, look, you're building on snowflake. Um, you, you know, you are, you are, you're gonna be, you're gonna be paying their money. How, how, how, how does that work with your business model? If you're paying them money, you know, do, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. I, we could build a database as well in observe, but then I've got half the development team working on in that will never be as good as snowflake. And so we made the call early on that. No, no, we, we wanna innovate above the database. Yeah. Right. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and, and the same is true of something like Amazon, like, like snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >>Yeah. And what's interesting is that Dave <inaudible> and I have been pointing this out and he's actually more on snowflake. I I've been looking at data bricks, um, and the same dynamics happening, the proof is the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, if you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and data bricks it's exploding. Right. I mean, the shows are selling out the floor. Space's book. That's the old days at VMware. Yeah. The old days at AWS >>One and for snowflake and, and any platform provider, it's a beautiful thing. You know, we build on snowflake and we pay them money. They don't have to sell to us. Right. And we do a lot of the support. And so the, the economics work out really, really well. If you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of ecosystems. >>Yeah. And then also you get, you get a, um, a trajectory of, uh, economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of snowflake integrations, right. New products. You're scaling that function with the, >>Yeah. I mean, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. Right. When I, when I, when I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had, we had one petabyte customer. And, and so at observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so been able to rely on a platform that can manage that is invaluable, >>You know, but Jeremy Greek conversation, thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. Uh, we got a couple minutes left. Um, put a plug in for observe. What do you guys, I know you got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your, your, your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You getting traction. Yeah. >>Yeah. >>Scales around the corner. Sounds like, are you, is that where you are scale? >>Got, we've got a big announcement coming up in two or weeks. We've got, we've got new funding, um, which is always great. Um, the product is, uh, really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, you know, which is at which point can you just start hiring salespeople? And the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. Um, we've got about 40 SaaS companies run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, uh, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting, um, enterprise type customers. We're, we're, you know, F five networks we're POC in right now with capital one, we got some interest in news around capital one coming up. I, I can't share too much, uh, but it's gonna be exciting. And, and like I saids hill continued to, to, to stick, >>I think capital one's a big snowflake customer as well. Right. They, >>They were early in one of the things that attracted me to capital one was they were very, very good with snowflake early on. And, and they put snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. Yeah. And, and today that, that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts. >>So capital one, very innovative cloud, obviously AIOS customer and very innovative, certainly in the CISO and CIO, um, on another point on where you're at. So you're, Prescale meaning you're about to scale, right? So you got POCs, what's that trick GE look like, can you see around the corner? What's, what's going on? What's on, around the corner. That you're, that you're gonna hit the straight and narrow and, and gas it >>Fast. Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the key thing for us is we gotta get the product. Right. Um, the nice thing about having a guy like Mike Pfizer on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage is questions that the board are always about, like, is the product, right? Is the product right? Is the product right? If you got the product right. And cuz we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and, and the revenue will take care of itself. Yeah. So right now all the attention is on the product. Um, the, this year, the exciting thing is we were, we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that back in the day you could do with the new lakes and, and AppDynamics, the last generation of, of APM tools, you're gonna be able to do that within observe. And we've already got the logs and the metrics capability in there. So for us, this year's a big one, cuz we sort of complete the trifecta, you know, the, the logs, >>What's the secret sauce observe. What if you had the, put it into a, a sentence what's the secret sauce? I, >>I, I think, you know, an amazing founding engineering team, uh, number one, I mean, at the end of the day, you have to build an amazing product and you have to solve a problem in a different way. And we've got great long term investors. And, and the biggest thing our investors give is actually it's not just money. It gives us time to get the product, right. Because if we get the product right, then we can get the growth. >>Got it. Final question. Why I got you here? You've been on the enterprise business for a long time. What's the buyer landscape out there. You got people doing POCs on capital one scale. So we know that goes on. What's the appetite at the buyer side for startups and what are their requirements that you're seeing? Uh, obviously we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their business restructure. So a lot happening in cloud. What's the criteria. How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >>Yeah. I mean, enterprises, they know they've gotta spend money transforming the business. I mean, this was, I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but, um, what, what we were saying five years ago is happening. Um, everybody needs to figure out out a way to take their, this to this digital world. Everybody has to do it. So the nice thing from a startup standpoint is they know at times they need to risk or, or take a bet on new technology in order to, to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that a have money, uh, B prepared to take risks and it's, it's a race against time to, you know, get their, their offerings in this. So a new digital footprint, >>Final, final question. What's the state of AWS. Where do you see them going next? Obviously they're continuing to be successful. How does cloud 3.0, or they always say it's day one, but it's more like day 10. Uh, but what's next for Aw. Where do they go from here? Obviously they're doing well. They're getting bigger and bigger. >>Yeah. They're, they're, it's an amazing story. I mean, you know, we we're, we're on AWS as well. And so I, I think if they keep nurturing the builders in the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They, they have an early leads. And if you look at where, you know, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the, in the late it was, they stopped, uh, really caring about developers and the folks who were building on top of their ecosystem. In fact, they started buying up their ecosystem and competing with people in their ecosystem. And I see with AWS, they, they have an amazing head start and if they did more, you know, if they do more than that, that's, what's gonna keep the jut rolling for many years to come. Yeah, >>They got the silicone and they got the staff act, developing Jeremy Burton inside the cube, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called observing in the middle of all the action on the board of snowflake as well. Um, great start. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Always a pleasure. >>Okay. Live from San Francisco to cube. I'm John for your host. Stay with us more coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. >>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here live in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cubes cube coverage of AWS summit 2022 here in San Francisco. We're all the developers of the bay area at Silicon valley. And of course, AWS summit in New York city is coming up in the summer. We'll be there as well. SF and NYC cube coverage. Look for us. Of course, reinforcing Boston and re Mars with the whole robotics AI thing, all coming together. Lots of coverage stay with us today. We've got a great guest from Deibel VC. John Skoda, founding partner, entrepreneurial venture is a venture firm. Your next act, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Good to see you, Matt. I feel like it's been forever since we've been able to do something in person. Well, >>I'm glad you're here because we run into each other all the time. We've known each other for over a decade. Um, >><affirmative>, it's been at least 10 years now, >>At least 10 years more. And we don't wanna actually go back as frees back, uh, the old school web 1.0 days. But anyway, we're in web three now. So we'll get to that in >>Second. We, we are, it's a little bit of a throwback to the path though, in my opinion, >><laugh>, it's all the same. It's all distributed computing and software. We ran each other in cube con you're investing in a lot of tech startup founders. Okay. This next level, next gen entrepreneurs have a new makeup and it's software. It's hardcore tech in some cases, not hardcore tech, but using software is take old something old and make it better, new, faster. <laugh>. So tell us about Deibel what's the firm. I know you're the founder, uh, which is cool. What's going on. Explain >>What you're doing. I mean, you remember I'm a recovering entrepreneur, right? So of course I, I, I, >>No, you're never recovering. You're always entrepreneur >>Always, but we are also always recovering. So I, um, started my first company when I was 24. If you remember, before there was Facebook and friends, there was instant messaging. People were using that product at work every day, they were creating a security vulnerability between their network and the outside world. So I plugged that hole and built an instant messaging firewall. It was my first company. The company was called, I am logic and we were required by Symantec. Uh, then spent 12 years investing in the next generation of our companies, uh, early investor in open source companies and cloud companies and spent a really wonderful 12 years, uh, at a firm called NEA. So I, I feel like my whole life I've been either starting enterprise software companies or helping founders start enterprise software companies. And I'll tell you, there's never been a better time than right now to start enter price software company. >>So, uh, the passion for starting a new firm was really a recognition that founders today that are starting in an enterprise software company, they, they tend to be, as you said, a more technical founder, right? Usually it's a software engineer or a builder mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, they are building products that are serving a slightly different market than what we've traditionally seen in enterprise software. Right? I think traditionally we've seen it buyers or CIOs that have agendas and strategies, which, you know, purchased software that has traditionally bought and sold tops down. But, you know, today I think the most successful enterprise software companies are the ones that are built more bottoms up and have more technical early opts. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software. And it starts with great technical founders with great products and great and emotions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background, super smart admire of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is all companies. The is no, I mean, consumer is enterprise. Now everything is what was once a niche. No, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. But remember, like right now, there's also a giant tech in VC conference in Miami <laugh> it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, >>Ts is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. Well, and, >>And I think all of us here that are, uh, maybe students of history and have been involved in, open in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three movement. >>The hype is definitely that three. >>Yeah. But, but >>You know, for >>Sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east to Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case now? And maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many men over, uh, 500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30% a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast, >>Let's getting, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant, but it's also the hype of like the web three, for instance. But you know, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Luman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, higher direct sales force and SAS kind of crushed the, at now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS? Is snowflake a SAS or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, they own all my data. You know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of commonalities across all successful startups and the overall adoption of technology. Uh, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually user like growth, right. They're one in the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving. You >>Just pull the >>Product through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this movement maybe started with open source where users were, are contributors, you know, contributors, we're users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing and it's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the users. And they're really the, the beneficiaries and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a GenXer technically, so for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I've, I've been staying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit a digital hippie revolution, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one other group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. We hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>It's the main for days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home brew club. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on. Well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source, one example of that religion. Some people will say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? It's, it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily. I mean >>The decision making, let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've made a VC for many years, but you also have the founder, uh, entrepreneurial mindset, but you can get empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of is about believing in the person. So fing, so you make, it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. Oh, >>AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur, right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story. You, I still think that that's important, right? It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. But having said that you're right, the proof is in the pudding, right? At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in this new economy that we live in, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative because their products exactly >>The volume back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song was the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with. Right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the, you know, it's gotta speak to >>The, speak to the user, but let me ask a question now that the people watching who are maybe entrepreneurial entrepreneur, um, masterclass here is in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur to come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine. Whether you're an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage, engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think something will become. Right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way, and we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be, the more likely somebody is gonna align with your vision and, and want to invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I >>Show >>The path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision, uh, have the same vision. You can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle of the journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the latest trends because it's over before you can get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living will say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. So you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but sometimes it happens in six months. Sometimes it takes six years is sometimes like 16 years. >>Uh, what's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Desel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There, there's three big trends that we invest in. And they're the, they're the only things we do day in, day out. One is the explosion and open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen and on what timeline happening >>Forever. >>But it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's, it's one big, massive wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now, a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a, a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally, it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is under invested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a dessert do over, right? I mean, do we need a do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cyber security as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is around 150 billion. And it still is a fraction of what we're, what >>We're and security even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital >>That's right. You mean arguably, right? I mean, arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say, you gotta love your firm. Love. You're doing we're big supporters of your mission. Congratulations on your entrepreneurial venture. And, uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cub gone. Uh, >>Absolutely. >>Certainly EU maybe even north America's in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for having me on >>The show. Guess bell VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California. After the short break, stay with us. Everyone. Welcome to the queue here. Live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022 we're live we're back with the events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, 80% summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube got a great guest here. Justin Coby owner and CEO of innovative solutions. Their booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us a story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. >>Yeah. <laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to midsize businesses that are moving into the cloud or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control, cost, security, compliance, all the good stuff, uh, that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is, but now we have offices down in Austin, Texas up in Toronto, uh, key Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago and it's been a great ride. It >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by AWS. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization and obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? >>Yeah. It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small to midsize business. They're trying to understand how to leverage technology. It better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech ISNT really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're like, listen, we gotta move to the cloud or we move some things to cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then, uh, progressively working through a modernization strateg, always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to midsize businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. They want get set up. But then the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is. And it's not, it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem you guys solve >>In the SMB space? The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and are hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with technology staff that has traditional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to, yeah, they're like, listen, the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's OnPrem or in the cloud. I just want to know that I'm doing that in a way that helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. >>Good. How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I, there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start down your journey in one way and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning the projects that early and not worrying about it, you got it. I mean, most people don't abandon cause like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. And >>They get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. Yeah. >>Frog and boiling water as we used to say. So, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean, this is a dynamic that's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you, I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talked to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did am jazzy announce or Adam, you know, the 5,000 announcement or whatever. They do huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just processes. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are, >>What's the values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to midsize business leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a tech company in the process of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your, or it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning they know that we have their back Andre or the safety net. So when a customer is saying, all right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going in alone. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say you're high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attack. If you have a partner, that's all offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products, uh, that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own. It, it would cost 'em a fortune. If >>Training alone would be insane, a factor and the cost. Yes, absolutely. Opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. Yeah. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018, when, uh, when we made the decision to go all in on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious decision. It wasn't requirement and still isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front desk >>And she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I love it. It's amazing. >>But I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get >>The right people involved. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point about SMBs and businesses in general, small en large, it staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the build out, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner or SMB, do I get the ROI? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cybersecurity issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one and the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Critical issues. This >>Is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about. So that's, >>That's what, at least a million in bloating, if not three or more Just to get that going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side though. Yeah. No. And nevermind AI and ML. That's >>Right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It it's incredibly difficult. And, and the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll >>Do all that >>Exactly. In it department. >>Exactly. >>Like, can we just call up, uh, you know, <laugh> our old vendor. That's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like it, but that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I was a business owner, starting a business to today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. And it's something that we talk about every, with every one of our small to midsize business. >>So just, I want to get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduce other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. And I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months that I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at R I T long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2010 and I was like, Hey, I'm growing the value of this business. And who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years? What do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner, but if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that we're gonna also buy the business with >>Me. And they were the owners, no outside capital, >>None zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons. They all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like if we're owners, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015, and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an earn out process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the business, cuz they care very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting all going all in on the cloud was important for us and we haven't looked back. >>And at that time, the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly the, uh, and those kinds of big enterprises. The game don't, won't say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to midsize business, to migrate completely to the cloud as, as infrastructure was considered. That just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing were a lot of our small to midsize business customers, they wanted to leverage cloud based backup, or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration. The, the Microsoft suite to the cloud and a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on eight at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plug in for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking to migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating to the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customers not to be cash strapped and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so that they can modernize. >>So like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers, empathetic to where they are in their journey. And >>That's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable wind. That's right. Seeing the value and doubling down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate it. Thank >>You very much for having >>Me. Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching with back with more great coverage for two days after this short break >>Live on the floor in San Francisco for 80 west summit, I'm John ferry, host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the action we're back in person. We're at AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube, bringing all the action. Also virtual, we have a hybrid cube, check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticketing off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad >>To be here. So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to have to be back through events. >>It's amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to and what two, three years. >>It's awesome. We'll be at the, uh, New York as well. A lot of developers and a big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything dev sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the, the game is pretty much laid out. Mm. And the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's right. >>Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around, especially the edge public cloud out for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give >>An example, >>Uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech data and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering Aw since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and then became the CEO. Now Adam Slosky is in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to, I don't wanna say, trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listen to customers. They work backwards from the customers. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does >>Computing. It >>Does. >>That's not central lies in the public cloud. Now they got regions. So what is the issue with the edge what's driving? The behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got five GM having. So it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the <affirmative> what's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over fit 15 AWS edge services, and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always used to riff on the cube, uh, cuz it's basically Amazon in a box, pushed in the data center, uh, running native, all the stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of become standard. You're starting to see some standard Deepak sings group is doing some amazing work with open source Rauls team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see low the zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my data center, do I wanna manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outpost. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment and it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. Innovative does that. You have the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in, in these new areas that you're helping out are they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their available ability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is it. They don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on, what's making them money as a business. They wanna focus on their applications. They want focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS, you take the infrastructure. You take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. We help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company, we have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. >>So basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it works? Right. >>And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy FinTech in the Caribbean, we're gonna talk about hurricanes and gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where now have data, you have applications that are tapping into that, that requirement. It makes total sense. We're seeing across the board. So it's not like it's, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech in, in the islands. There are a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what's your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto underly parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming. Uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a tech technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on it's >>Interesting. And I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, projects going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart contract, we use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead. It's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain, just for this like smart contracts for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service, but what happened to decent centralized. >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance. >>Yeah. >>And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through a, a use case of a customer, um, Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud. Um, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my a and I also want all the benefits of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the good this of the cloud. What's the answer. Yeah. >>Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment inside that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with, uh, regular commercially available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Uh, inside of that manufacturing plant, uh, we can do pre-processing on things coming out of the, uh, the robotics that depending on what we're manufacturing, right. Uh, and then we can take the, those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard >>For data lake or whatever, >>To the data lake. Yeah. Data Lakehouse, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but I'll lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just in time, manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going of the data that saves that cost yep. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data unless you have to. Um, but those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you, what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacture, industrial, whatever the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? There's a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe, maybe this decision can wait. Yeah. Uh, and then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot tube doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture in the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are. And, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about out. Customers are starting to talk about throwing away data, uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And well, >>I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this, but the one pattern we're seeing of the past year is that throwing away data's bad, even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retraining their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes code, as we call it in our last showcase, we did a whole whole event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw it away. It's not just business better. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. >>There are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are running pay Toby level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, uh, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move Aytes of data to the AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a kind of a, um, fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background, OnPrem architect, Aus cloud, and skydiving instructor. <laugh> how does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? Yeah. >>Uh, you >>Jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump out >>Kind of. So I was, you jumped out. I was teaching having, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a sky. I instructor, uh, I was teaching skydiving and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and, and how his customers are working. And he can't find an enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, uh, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, uh, I started and the first day there, uh, we had a, a discussion, uh, EC two had just come out <laugh> and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that, and through being in on premises, migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services tore >>It's. So it's such a great story, you know, was gonna, you know, you know, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early days was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, uh, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and maybe it does still feel like that to some people. Right. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting edge stuff, like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You got the right equipment. You gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Yeah. Thanks for coming. You really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here live in San Francisco for eight of us summit. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look up this calendar for all the cube, actually@thecube.net. We'll right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube a be summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John fury host of the cube. We'll be at the eighties summit in New York city this summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco, getting all the coverage what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dos car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor in a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you. Cool. How are you? Good. >>How hello you. >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah. So give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? >>First of all, thank you for having me. We're back to be business with you, never after to see you. Uh, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. We have raised close to a hundred million there. The investors are people like Norwes Menlo ventures, coastal ventures, Ram Shera, and all those people, all well known guys. And Beckel chime Paul me Mayard web. So whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley VCs are involved >>And has it gone? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISRA is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk, uh, the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and service now to take you to the next stage? Well, >>I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, Dave LAN as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh> >>You know, who does >>You, >>You >>Get the call fund to talk to you though. You >>Get the commentary, your, your finger in the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud scale. You predicted that we talked about in the cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing Docker just raised a hundred million on a $2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control plan? Emerging AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded, observability there's 10 billion observability companies. Data is the key. This is what's your end on this. What's your take. >>Yeah, look, I think I'll give you the few that I see right from my side. Obviously data is very clear. So the things that rumor system of recorded you and me talked about the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud native, it'll be called AI. NA AI enable is a new buzzword and using the AI for customer service. It, you talk about observability. I call it, AIOps applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and AI services. What used to be desk with ServiceNow BMC GLA you see a new ALA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflows, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with AI workflows. So you, you see AI going >>Off is RPA. A company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI S one will be at their event this summer? Um, is it a product company? I mean, or I mean, RPA is, should be embedded in everything. It's a >>Feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company also, but that automation should be embedded in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NATO and AI. They it'll become automation data. Yeah. And that's your, thinking's >>Interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kinda having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle, and it was software abstraction. Now you have all kinds of workflows, abstractions everywhere. So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed. Are they integrated? I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So remember the databases became called polyglot databases. Yeah. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area like you, you were talking about, it should be part of service. Now it should be part of ISRA. Like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see it MuleSoft and sales buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies, cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also have an automation as a layer embedded inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind, as you got the XPO hall got, um, we're back to vis, but you got, you know, AMD, Clum, Dynatrace data, dog, innovative, all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right? Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Deibel later. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen, we know all the, the VCs, what does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation. Cloud's bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's code. Yes. Basically. Data's everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders of Amazon created the startups 15 years back. Everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be people don't just build on Amazon. They're going to build it on top of snow. Flake companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake, right? So I see my old boss playing ment, try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer, right? So I think that's the next level of companies trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your moat is, what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last re invent, coined the term super cloud, right? It's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You're starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage. And guys like Charles Fitzgeral out there, who we like was kind of hitting on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get him. Like, yeah, I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> cause he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Yes. Now they say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist and, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. >>It is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer room. The middle layer pass will be snowflake. So I cannot build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer if I really need to size, I'll build it on force.com Salesforce. Yeah. Right. So I think that's where you'll >>See. So basically the, the, if you're an entrepreneur, the, the north star in terms of the, the outcome is be a super cloud. It >>Is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. Yeah. >>Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales, the snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think got Redshift. Amazon has got Redshift. Um, but snowflake big customer. The they're probably paying AWS big, >>I >>Think big bills too. >>So John, very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-option will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with the snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouse as a data layer. So I think depending on the use case you have to use each of the above, I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, you know, foreclose your value. That's right. With some sort of internal hack, but I've think, I think the general question that I have is that I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point, when does the rising tide stop and the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth cycle? I >>Think it's growth. You call it closed skill you the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's as long as there more movement from on, uh, on-prem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations, it helpless. Even the customer service service. Now the ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go made. >>I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers are practitioners, not suppliers to the market. Feel free to text me or DMing. Next question is really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products. Cause you know, the big enterprises now and you know, small, medium, large, and large enterprise, they're all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean seeing some stuff, but why don't we get your thoughts on that? What it >>Is you, if I remember going back to our 2007 or eight, when I used to talk to you back then when Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or one person today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a C I will line our business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can double in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. Yeah. >>And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I, I reference the URL causes like there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solution that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting left for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there. Um, and goes back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure as code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share? >>I, a lot of thoughts that Fu I see the AI op solutions in the futures should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app dynamic, right? Dynatrace, all this solution will go future towards predict to pro so solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service that customers give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can give the best algorithm, but I gotta train them, modify them, make them better, make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to big data days back in 2009, you know that >>Look at, look how much data bricks has grown. >>It is doubled. The key cloud >>Air kinda went private, so good stuff. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking year that growing customers and my customers, or some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk, McAfee, uh, grand <inaudible>. So all the top customers, um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on, predict ours. One area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service, >>Great stuff, man. Doing great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of a us summit 2022. And we're gonna be at Aus summit in San, uh, in New York in the summer. So look for that on the calendar, of course, go to a us startups.com. That's a site for all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This the cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back, little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit in new York's coming in the summer. We'll be two with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the Groove's psych to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're gonna see a lot of virtual cube outta hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economist with duck bill groove, he's the founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe is shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at mark, Andrew's been doing a lot of shit posting lately. All a billionaires are shit posting, but they don't know how to do it. They're >>Doing it right. There's something opportunity there. It's like, here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a mid-size island to begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. >>This shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on this side I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what, what is shitposting >>It's more or less talking about the world of enterprise technology, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream, but it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a Jack ass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, Cuban coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you see the growth of cloud native Amazon's evolving Atos, especially new CEO. Andy move on to be the chief of all. Amazon just saw him the cover of was it time magazine. Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything. These folks do. They're they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble. Imagine the logistics, it takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. And it's, it's sprawling immense, the nominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. >>Well, there's a lot of force for good conversations. Seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to a, is trying to portray themselves, you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now it's same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car, our driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. Either way, it sounds like more exciting. Like they >>Better have a replacement ready in case something goes wrong on the track, highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula, the one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in e-sports with other people in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and video graphics card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. Oh, >>It's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting it into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going on in your world. I know you have a lot of great SA we've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter. Check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's the blowback, any blowback late leads there been tick? What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's hi, I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They not have heard me. It. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do that. >>We should do that. Actually. I think sure would call in. Oh, I, I >>Think >>I guarantee if we had that right now, people would call in and Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the customer. >>You know, I always joke with Dave Avante about how John Fort's always at, uh, um, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0, 0 5, or we can't, we >>Have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And then there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish, but that's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their product >>They're going in different directions. When they named Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonus on number of words, they can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, a session manager is a great one. I love the service ridiculous name. They have a systems manager, parameter store with is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage through parameter store does not. It's fun. >>What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination of you >>Got Ks. You got EMR, you got EC two. You got S three SQS. Well, RedShift's not an acronym. You got >>Gas is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation, >>They still got bean stock or is that still >>Around? Oh, they never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, wow, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it. But while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it, John. >>Okay. >>Simple BV still haunts our >>Dreams. I, I actually got an email on, I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C twos were being deprecated and I got an email I'm like, I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me just like, gimme something else. Right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you is that like, okay, so as Amazon gets better in some areas where do they need more work? And you, your opinion, because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database Snowflake's got out database service. So, you know, Redshift, snowflake database is out there. So you've got this optician. Yes. How's that going? And what are you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with Amazon and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want. And they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multi-cloud cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word. Multi-cloud um, a lot of people are saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word. Like multicloud sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multicloud? >>Multiple single >>Loves that term. Yeah. >>You're building in multiple single points of failure. Do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the, the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about multi-cloud either as the industry leader, let's talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective. It doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on context. But my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. >>Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question cause I know you we've been, you know, fellow journey mean in the, in the cloud journey, going to all the events and then the pandemic hit where now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna end, certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations community's gonna emerge. You've got a pretty big community growing and it's growing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing, or just big changes you've seen with the pan endemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece come in, you're commentating, you're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck bill group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, funny, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who >>Can pony. >>Hello and welcome back to the live cube coverage here in San Francisco, California, the cube live coverage. Two days, day two of a summit, 2022 Aish summit, New York city coming up in summer. We'll be there as well. Events are back. I'm the host, John fur, the Cub got great guest here. Johnny Dallas with Ze. Um, here is on the queue. We're gonna talk about his background. Uh, little trivia here. He was the youngest engineer ever worked at Amazon at the age. 17 had to get escorted into reinvent in Vegas cause he was underage <laugh> with security, all good stories. Now the CEO of company called Z know DevOps kind of focus, managed service, a lot of cool stuff, Johnny, welcome to the cube. >>Thanks John. Great. >>So tell a story. You were the youngest engineer at AWS. >>I was, yes. So I used to work at a company called Bebo. I got started very young. I started working when I was about 14, um, kind of as a software engineer. And when I, uh, it was about 16. I graduated out of high school early, um, working at this company Bebo, still running all of the DevOps at that company. Um, I went to reinvent in about 2018 to give a talk about some of the DevOps software I wrote at that company. Um, but you know, as many of those things were probably familiar with reinvent happens in a casino and I was 16. So was not able to actually go into the, a casino on my own. Um, so I'd have <inaudible> security as well as casino security escort me in to give my talk. >>Did Andy jazzy, was he aware of >>This? Um, you know, that's a great question. I don't know. <laugh> >>I'll ask him great story. So obviously you started a young age. I mean, it's so cool to see you jump right in. I mean, I mean you never grew up with the old school that I used to grew up in and loading package software, loading it onto the server, deploying it, plugging the cables in, I mean you just rocking and rolling with DevOps as you look back now what's the big generational shift because now you got the Z generation coming in, millennials on the workforce. It's changing like no one's putting and software on servers. Yeah, >>No. I mean the tools keep getting better, right? We, we keep creating more abstractions that make it easier and easier. When I, when I started doing DevOps, I could go straight into E two APIs. I had APIs from the get go and you know, my background was, I was a software engineer. I never went through like the CIS admin stack. I, I never had to, like you said, rack servers, myself. I was immediately able to scale. I was managing, I think 2,500 concurrent servers across every Ables region through software. It was a fundamental shift. >>Did you know what an SRE was at that time? >>Uh, >>You were kind of an SRE on >>Yeah, I was basically our first SRE, um, was familiar with the, with the phrasing, but really thought of myself as a software engineer who knows cloud APIs, not a SRE. All >>Right. So let's talk about what's what's going on now as you look at the landscape today, what's the coolest thing that's going on in your mind in cloud? >>Yeah, I think the, I think the coolest thing is, you know, we're seeing the next layer of those abstraction tools exist and that's what we're doing with Z is we've basically gone and we've, we're building an app platform that deploys onto your cloud. So if you're familiar with something like Carku, um, where you just click a GitHub repo, uh, we actually make it that easy. You click a GI hub repo and it will deploy on ALS using a AWS tools. So, >>Right. So this is Z. This is the company. Yes. How old's the company about >>A year and a half old now. >>All right. So explain what it does. >>Yeah. So we make it really easy for any software engineer to deploy on a AWS. It's not SREs. These are the actual application engineers doing the business logic. They don't really want to think about Yamo. They don't really want to configure everything super deeply. They want to say, run this API on S in the best way possible. We've encoded all the best practices into software and we set it up for you. Yeah. >>So I think the problem you're solving is that there's a lot of want be DevOps engineers. And then they realize, oh shit, I don't wanna do this. Yeah. And some people want to do it. They loved under the hood. Right. People love to have infrastructure, but the average developer needs to actually be as agile on scale. So that seems to be the problem you solve. Right? >>Yeah. We, we, we give way more productivity to each individual engineer, you know? >>All right. So let me ask you a question. So let me just say, I'm a developer. Cool. I build this new app. It's a streaming app or whatever. I'm making it up cube here, but let's just say I deploy it. I need your service. But what happens about when my customers say, Hey, what's your SLA? The CDN went down from this it's flaky. Does Amazon have, so how do you handle all that SLA reporting that Amazon provides? Cuz they do a good job with sock reports all through the console. But as you start getting into DevOps <affirmative> and sell your app, mm-hmm <affirmative> you have customer issues. How do you, how do you view that? Yeah, >>Well, I, I think you make a great point of AWS has all this stuff already. AWS has SLAs. AWS has contract. Aw has a lot of the tools that are expected. Um, so we don't have to reinvent the wheel here. What we do is we help people get to those SLAs more easily. So Hey, this is AWS SLA as a default. Um, Hey, we'll fix you your services. This is what you can expect here. Um, but we can really leverage S's reliability of you. Don't have to trust us. You have to trust ALS and trust that the setup is good there. >>Do you handle all the recovery or mitigation between, uh, identification say downtime for instance? Oh, the server's not 99% downtime. Uh, went down for an hour, say something's going on? And is there a service dashboard? How does it get what's the remedy? Do you have a, how does all that work? >>Yeah, so we have some built in remediation. You know, we, we basically say we're gonna do as much as we can to keep your endpoint up 24 7 mm-hmm <affirmative>. If it's something in our control, we'll do it. If it's a disc failure, that's on us. If you push bad code, we won't put out that new version until it's working. Um, so we do a lot to make sure that your endpoint stay is up, um, and then alert you if there's a problem that we can't fix. So cool. Hey S has some downtime, this thing's going on. You need to do this action. Um, we'll let you know. >>All right. So what do you do for fun? >>Yeah, so, uh, for, for fun, um, a lot of side projects. <laugh> uh, >>What's your side hustle right now. You got going on >>The, uh, it's >>A lot of tools playing tools, serverless. >>Yeah, painless. A lot of serverless stuff. Um, I think there's a lot of really cool WAM stuff as well. Going on right now. Um, I love tools is, is the truest answer is I love building something that I can give to somebody else. And they're suddenly twice as productive because of it. Um, >>It's a good feeling, isn't it? >>Oh yeah. There's >>Nothing like tools were platforms. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know, the expression, too many tools in the tool. She becomes, you know, tools for all. And then ultimately tools become platforms. What's your view on that? Because if a good tool works and starts to get traction, you need to either add more tools or start building a platform platform versus tool. What's your, what's your view on a reaction to that kind of concept debate? >>Yeah, it's a good question. Uh, we we've basically started as like a, a platform. First of we've really focused on these, uh, developers who don't wanna get deep into the DevOps. And so we've done all of the pieces of the stacks. We do C I C D management. Uh, we do container orchestration, we do monitoring. Um, and now we're, spliting those up into individual tools so they can be used. Awesome in conjunction more. >>All right. So what are some of the use cases that you see for your service? It's DevOps basically nano service DevOps. So people who want a DevOps team, do clients have a DevOps person and then one person, two people what's the requirements to run >>Z. Yeah. So we we've got teams, um, from no DevOps is kind of when they start and then we've had teams grow up to about, uh, five, 10 men DevOps teams. Um, so, you know, as is more infrastructure people come in because we're in your cloud, you're able to go in and configure it on top you're we can't block you. Uh, you wanna use some new AWS service. You're welcome to use that alongside the stack that we deploy >>For you. How many customers do you have now? >>So we've got about 40 companies that are using us for all of their infrastructure, um, kind of across the board, um, as well as >>What's the pricing model. >>Uh, so our pricing model is we, we charge basically similar to an engineering salary. So we charge a monthly rate. We have plans at 300 bucks a month, a thousand bucks a month, and then enterprise plan for >>The requirement scale. Yeah. So back into the people cost, you must have her discounts, not a fully loaded thing, is it? >>Yeah, there's a discounts kind of asking >>Then you pass the Amazon bill. >>Yeah. So our customers actually pay for the Amazon bill themselves. So >>Have their own >>Account. There's no margin on top. You're linking your, a analyst account in, um, got it. Which is huge because we can, we are now able to help our customers get better deals with Amazon. Um, got it. We're incentivized on their team to drive your costs down. >>And what's your unit main unit of economics software scale. >>Yeah. Um, yeah, so we, we think of things as projects. How many services do you have to deploy as that scales up? Um, awesome. >>All right. You're 20 years old now you not even can't even drink legally. <laugh> what are you gonna do when you're 30? We're gonna be there. >>Well, we're, uh, we're making it better, better, >>Better the old guy on the queue here. <laugh> >>I think, uh, I think we're seeing a big shift of, um, you know, we've got these major clouds. ALS is obviously the biggest cloud and it's constantly coming out with new services, but we're starting to see other clouds have built many of the common services. So Kubernetes is a great example. It exists across all the clouds and we're starting to see new platforms come up on top that allow you to leverage tools for multiple times. At the same time. Many of our customers actually have AWS as their primary cloud and they'll have secondary clouds or they'll pull features from other clouds into AWS, um, through our software. I think that's, I'm very excited by that. And I, uh, expect to be working on that when I'm 30. <laugh> awesome. >>Well, you gonna have a good future. I gotta ask you this question cuz uh, you know, I always, I was a computer science undergrad in the, in the, and um, computer science back then was hardcore, mostly systems OS stuff, uh, database compiler. Um, now there's so much compi, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> how do you look at the high school college curriculum experience slash folks who are nerding out on computer science? It's not one or two things. You've got a lot of, lot of things. I mean, look at Python, data engineering and emerging as a huge skill. What's it, what's it like for college kids now and high school kids? What, what do you think they should be doing if you had to give advice to your 16 year old self back a few years ago now in college? Um, I mean Python's not a great language, but it's super effective for coding and the datas were really relevant, but it's, you've got other language opportunities you've got tools to build. So you got a whole culture of young builders out there. What should, what should people gravitate to in your opinion and stay away from or >>Stay away from? That's a good question. I, I think that first of all, you're very right of the, the amount of developers is increasing so quickly. Um, and so we see more specialization. That's why we also see, you know, these SREs that are different than typical application engineering. You know, you get more specialization in job roles. Um, I think if, what I'd say to my 16 year old self is do projects, um, the, I learned most of my, what I've learned just on the job or online trying things, playing with different technologies, actually getting stuff out into the world, um, way more useful than what you'll learn in kind of a college classroom. I think classroom's great to, uh, get a basis, but you need to go out and experiment actually try things. >>You know? I think that's great advice. In fact, I would just say from my experience of doing all the hard stuff and cloud is so great for just saying, okay, I'm done, I'm banning the project. Move on. Yeah. Cause you know, it's not gonna work in the old days. You have to build this data center. I bought all this, you know, people hang on to the old, you know, project and try to force it out there. Now you >>Can launch a project now, >>Instant gratification, it ain't working <laugh> or this is shut it down and then move on to something new. >>Yeah, exactly. Instantly you should be able to do that much more quickly. Right. So >>You're saying get those projects and don't be afraid to shut it down. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that? Do you agree with that? >>Yeah. I think it's ex experiment. Uh, you're probably not gonna hit it rich on the first one. It's probably not gonna be that idea is the genius idea. So don't be afraid to get rid of things and just try over and over again. It's it's number of reps >>That'll win. I was commenting online. Elon Musk was gonna buy Twitter, that whole Twitter thing. And someone said, Hey, you know, what's the, I go look at the product group at Twitter's been so messed up because they actually did get it right on the first time. And we can just a great product. They could never change it because people would freak out and the utility of Twitter. I mean, they gotta add some things, the added button and we all know what they need to add, but the product, it was just like this internal dysfunction, the product team, what are we gonna work on? Don't change the product so that you kind of have there's opportunities out there where you might get the lucky strike right outta the gate. Yeah. Right. You don't know. >>It's almost a curse too. It's you're not gonna hit curse Twitter. You're not gonna hit a rich the second time too. So yeah. >><laugh> Johnny Dallas. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Give a plug for your company. Um, take a minute to explain what you're working on. What you're look looking for. You hiring funding. Customers. Just give a plug, uh, last minute and kind the last word. >>Yeah. So, um, John Dallas from Ze, if you, uh, need any help with your DevOps, if you're a early startup, you don't have DevOps team, um, or you're trying to deploy across clouds, check us out z.com. Um, we are actively hiring. So if you are a software engineer excited about tools and cloud, or you're interested in helping getting this message out there, hit me up. Um, find us on z.co. >>Yeah. LinkedIn Twitter handle GitHub handle. >>Yeah. I'm the only Johnny on a LinkedIn and GitHub and underscore Johnny Dallas underscore on Twitter. All right. Um, >>Johnny Dallas, the youngest engineer working at Amazon, um, now 20 we're on great new project here in the cube. Builders are all young. They're growing into the business. They got cloud at their, at their back it's tailwind. I wish I was 20. Again, this is a I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. Thanks. >>Welcome >>Back to the cubes. Live coverage of a AWS summit in San Francisco, California events are back, uh, ADAS summit in New York cities. This summer, the cube will be there as well. Check us out there lot. I'm glad we have events back. It's great to have everyone here. I'm John furry host of the cube. Dr. Matt wood is with me cube alumni now VP of business analytics division of AWS. Matt. Great to see you. Thank >>You, John. Great to be here. >>Appreciate it. I always call you Dr. Matt wood, because Andy jazzy always says Dr. Matt, we >>Would introduce you on the he's the one and only the one and >>Only Dr. Matt wood >>In joke. I love it. >>Andy style. And I think you had walkup music too on, you know, >>Too. Yes. We all have our own personalized walk. >>So talk about your new role. I not new role, but you're running up, um, analytics, business or AWS. What does that consist of right now? >>Sure. So I work, I've got what I consider to be the one of the best jobs in the world. Uh, I get to work with our customers and, uh, the teams at AWS, uh, to build the analytics services that millions of our customers use to, um, uh, slice dice, pivot, uh, better understand their day data, um, look at how they can use that data for, um, reporting, looking backwards and also look at how they can use that data looking forward. So predictive analytics and machine learning. So whether it is, you know, slicing and dicing in the lower level of, uh Hado and the big data engines, or whether you're doing ETR with glue or whether you're visualizing the data in quick side or building models in SageMaker. I got my, uh, fingers in a lot of pies. >>You know, one of the benefits of, uh, having cube coverage with AWS since 2013 is watching the progression. You were on the cube that first year we were at reinvent 2013 and look at how machine learning just exploded onto the scene. You were involved in that from day one is still day one, as you guys say mm-hmm <affirmative>, what's the big thing now. I mean, look at, look at just what happened. Machine learning comes in and then a slew of services come in and got SageMaker became a hot seller, right outta the gate. Mm-hmm <affirmative> the database stuff was kicking butt. So all this is now booming. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that was the real generational changeover for <inaudible> what's the perspective. What's your perspective on, yeah, >>I think how that's evolved. No, I think it's a really good point. I, I totally agree. I think for machine machine learning, um, there was sort of a Renaissance in machine learning and the application of machine learning machine learning as a technology has been around for 50 years, let's say, but, uh, to do machine learning, right? You need like a lot of data, the data needs to be high quality. You need a lot of compute to be able to train those models and you have to be able to evaluate what those mean as you apply them to real world problems. And so the cloud really removed a lot of the constraints. Finally, customers had all of the data that they needed. We gave them services to be able to label that data in a high quality way. There's all the compute. You need to be able to train the models <laugh> and so where you go. >>And so the cloud really enabled this Renaissance with machine learning, and we're seeing honestly, a similar Renaissance with, uh, with data, uh, and analytics. You know, if you look back, you know, five, 10 years, um, analytics was something you did in batch, like your data warehouse ran a analysis to do, uh, reconciliation at the end of the month. And then was it? Yeah. And so that's when you needed it, but today, if your Redshift cluster isn't available, uh, Uber drivers don't turn up door dash deliveries, don't get made. It's analytics is now central to virtually every business and it is central to every virtually every business is digital transformation. Yeah. And be able to take that data from a variety of sources here, or to query it with high performance mm-hmm <affirmative> to be able to actually then start to augment that data with real information, which usually comes from technical experts and domain experts to form, you know, wisdom and information from raw data. That's kind of, uh, what most organizations are trying to do when they kind of go through this analytics journey. It's >>Interesting, you know, Dave LAN and I always talk on the cube, but out, you know, the future and, and you look back, the things we were talking about six years ago are actually happening now. Yeah. And it's not a, a, a, you know, hyped up statement to say digital transformation. It actually's happening now. And there's also times where we bang our fist on the table, say, I really think this is so important. And Dave says, John, you're gonna die on that hill <laugh>. >>And >>So I I'm excited that this year, for the first time I didn't die on that hill. I've been saying data you're right. Data as code is the next infrastructure as code mm-hmm <affirmative>. And Dave's like, what do you mean by that? We're talking about like how data gets and it's happening. So we just had an event on our 80 bus startups.com site mm-hmm <affirmative>, um, a showcase with startups and the theme was data as code and interesting new trends emerging really clearly the role of a data engineer, right? Like an SRE, what an SRE did for cloud. You have a new data engineering role because of the developer on, uh, onboarding is massively increasing exponentially, new developers, data science, scientists are growing mm-hmm <affirmative> and the, but the pipelining and managing and engineering as a system. Yeah. Almost like an operating system >>And as a discipline. >>So what's your reaction to that about this data engineer data as code, because if you have horizontally scalable data, you've gotta be open that's hard. <laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative> and you gotta silo the data that needs to be siloed for compliance and reasons. So that's got a very policy around that. So what's your reaction to data as code and data engineering and >>Phenomenon? Yeah, I think it's, it's a really good point. I think, you know, like with any, with any technology, uh, project inside an organization, you know, success with analytics or machine learning is it's kind of 50% technology and then 50% cultural. And, uh, you have often domain experts. Those are, could be physicians or drug experts, or they could be financial experts or whoever they might be got deep domain expertise. And then you've got technical implementation teams and it's kind of a natural often repulsive force. I don't mean that rudely, but they, they just, they don't talk the same language. And so the more complex the domain and the more complex the technology, the stronger that repulsive force, and it can become very difficult for, um, domain experts to work closely with the technical experts, to be able to actually get business decisions made. And so what data engineering does and data engineering is in some cases team, or it can be a role that you play. >>Uh, it's really allowing those two disciplines to speak the same language it provides. You can think of it as plumbing, but I think of it as like a bridge, it's a bridge between like the technical implementation and the domain experts. And that requires like a very disparate range of skills. You've gotta understand about statistics. You've gotta understand about the implementation. You've gotta understand about the, it, you've gotta understand and understand about the domain. And if you could pull all of that together, that data engineering discipline can be incredibly transformative for an organization, cuz it builds the bridge between those two >>Groups. You know, I was advising some, uh, young computer science students at the sophomore junior level, uh, just a couple weeks ago. And I told 'em, I would ask someone at Amazon, this questions I'll ask you since you're, you've been in the middle of of it for years, they were asking me and I was trying to mentor them on. What, how do you become a data engineer from a practical standpoint, uh, courseware projects to work on how to think, um, not just coding Python cause everyone's coding in Python mm-hmm <affirmative> but what else can they do? So I was trying to help them and I didn't really know the answer myself. I was just trying to like kind of help figure it out with them. So what is the answer in your opinion or the thoughts around advice to young students who want to be data engineers? Cuz data scientists is pretty clear in what that is. Yeah. You use tools, you make visualizations, you manage data, you get answers and insights and apply that to the business. That's an application mm-hmm <affirmative>, that's not the, you know, sta standing up a stack or managing the infrastructure. What, so what does that coding look like? What would your advice be to >>Yeah, I think >>Folks getting into a data engineering role. >>Yeah. I think if you, if you believe this, what I said earlier about like 50% technology, 50% culture, like the, the number one technology to learn as a data engineer is the tools in the cloud, which allow you to aggregate data from virtually any source into something which is incrementally more valuable for the organization. That's really what data engineering is all about. It's about taking from multiple sources. Some people call them silos, but silos indicates that the, the storage is kind of fungible or UND differentiated. That that's really not the case. Success requires you to really purpose built well crafted high performance, low cost engines for all of your data. So understanding those tools and understanding how to use 'em, that's probably the most important technical piece. Um, and yeah, Python and programming and statistics goes along with that, I think. And then the most important cultural part, I think is it's just curiosity. >>Like you want to be able to, as a data engineer, you want to have a natural curiosity that drives you to seek the truth inside an organization, seek the truth of a particular problem and to be able to engage, cuz you're probably, you're gonna have some choice as you go through your career about which domain you end up in, like maybe you're really passionate about healthcare. Maybe you're really just passionate about your transportation or media, whatever it might be. And you can allow that to drive a certain amount of curiosity, but within those roles, like the domains are so broad, you kind of gotta allow your curiosity to develop and lead, to ask the right questions and engage in the right way with your teams. So because you can have all the technical skills in the world, but if you're not able to help the team's truths seek through that curiosity, you simply won't be successful. >>We just had a guest on 20 year old, um, engineer, founder, Johnny Dallas, who was 16 when he worked at Amazon youngest engineer at >>Johnny Dallas is a great name by the that's fantastic. It's his real name? >>It sounds like a football player. Rockstar. I should call Johnny. I have Johnny Johnny cube. Uh it's me. Um, so, but he's young and, and he, he was saying, you know, his advice was just do projects. >>Yeah. That's get hands on. >>Yeah. And I was saying, Hey, I came from the old days though, you get to stand stuff up and you hugged onto the assets. Cause you didn't wanna kill the cause you spent all this money and, and he's like, yeah, with cloud, you can shut it down. If you do a project that's not working and you get bad data, no one's adopting it or you don't want like it anymore. You shut it down. Just something >>Else. Totally >>Instantly abandoned it. Move onto something new. >>Yeah. With progression. Totally. And it, the, the blast radius of, um, decisions is just way reduced, gone. Like we talk a lot about like trying to, you know, in the old world trying to find the resources and get the funding. And it's like, right. I wanna try out this kind of random idea that could be a big deal for the organization. I need 50 million in a new data center. Like you're not gonna get anywhere. You, >>You do a proposal working backwards, document >>Kinds, all that, that sort of stuff got hoops. So, so all of that is gone, but we sometimes forget that a big part of that is just the, the prototyping and the experimentation and the limited blast radius in terms of cost. And honestly, the most important thing is time just being able to jump in there, get fingers on keyboards, just try this stuff out. And that's why at AWS, we have part of the reason we have so many services because we want, when you get into AWS, we want the whole toolbox to be available to every developer. And so, as your ideas developed, you may want to jump from, you know, data that you have, that's already in a database to doing realtime data. Yeah. And then you can just, you have the tools there. And when you want to get into real time data, you don't just have kineses, but you have real time analytics and you can run SQL again, that data is like the, the capabilities and the breadth, like really matter when it comes to prototyping and, and >>That's culture too. That's the culture piece, because what was once a dysfunctional behavior, I'm gonna go off the reservation and try something behind my boss's back or cause now as a side hustle or fun project. Yeah. So for fun, you can just code something. Yeah, >>Totally. I remember my first Haddo project, I found almost literally a decommissioned set of servers in the data center that no one was using. They were super old. They're about to be literally turned off. And I managed to convince the team to leave them on for me for like another month. And I installed her DUP on them and like, got them going. It's like, that just seems crazy to me now that I, I had to go and convince anybody not to turn these service off, but what >>It was like for that, when you came up with elastic map produce, because you said this is too hard, we gotta make it >>Easier. Basically. Yes. <laugh> I was installing Haddo version, you know, beta nor 0.9 or whatever it was. It's like, this is really hard. This is really hard. >>We simpler. All right. Good stuff. I love the, the walk down memory lane and also your advice. Great stuff. I think culture's huge. I think. And that's why I like Adam's keynote to reinvent Adam. Lesky talk about path minds and trail blazers because that's a blast radius impact. Mm-hmm <affirmative> when you can actually have innovation organically just come from anywhere. Yeah, that's totally cool. Totally. Let's get into the products. Serverless has been hot mm-hmm <affirmative> uh, we hear a lot about EKS is hot. Uh, containers are booming. Kubernetes is getting adopted. There's still a lot of work to do there. Lambda cloud native developers are booming, serverless Lambda. How does that impact the analytics piece? Can you share the hot, um, products around how that translates? Sure, absolutely. Yeah, the SageMaker >>Yeah, I think it's a, if you look at kind of the evolution and what customers are asking for, they're not, you know, they don't just want low cost. They don't just want this broad set of services. They don't just want, you know, those services to have deep capabilities. They want those services to have as lower operating cost over time as possible. So we kind of really got it down. We got built a lot of muscle, lot of services about getting up and running and experimenting and prototyping and turning things off and turn turning them on and turning them off. And like, that's all great. But actually the, you really only most projects start something once and then stop something once. And maybe there's an hour in between, or maybe there's a year, but the real expense in terms of time and, and complexity is sometimes in that running cost. Yeah. And so, um, we've heard very loudly and clearly from customers that they want, that, that running cost is just undifferentiated to them and they wanna spend more time on their work and in analytics that is, you know, slicing the data, pivoting the data, combining the data, labeling the data, training their models, uh, you know, running inference against their models, uh, and less time doing the operational pieces. >>So is that why the servers focus is there? >>Yeah, absolutely. It, it dramatically reduces the skill required to run these, uh, workloads of any scale. And it dramatically reduces the UND differentiated, heavy lifting, cuz you get to focus more of the time that you would've spent on the operation on the actual work that you wanna get done. And so if you look at something just like Redshift serverless that we launched a reinvent, you know, there's a kind of a, we have a lot of customers that want to run like a, uh, the cluster and they want to get into the, the weeds where there is benefit. We have a lot of customers that say, you know, I there's no benefit for me though. I just wanna do the analytics. So you run the operational piece, you're the experts we've run. You know, we run 60 million instant startups every single day. Like we do this a lot. Exactly. We understand the operation. I >>Want the answers come on. So >>Just give the answers or just let, give me the notebook or just give the inference prediction. So today for example, we announced, um, you know, serverless inference. So now once you've trained your machine learning model, just, uh, run a few, uh, lines of code or you just click a few buttons and then yeah, you got an inference endpoint that you do not have to manage. And whether you're doing one query against that endpoint, you know, per hour or you're doing, you know, 10 million, but we'll just scale it on the back end. You >>Know, I know we got not a lot of time left, but I want, wanna get your reaction to this. One of the things about the data lakes, not being data swamps has been from what I've been reporting and hearing from customers is that they want to retrain their machine learning algorithm. They want, they need that data. They need the, the, the realtime data and they need the time series data, even though the time has passed, they gotta store in the data lake mm-hmm <affirmative>. So now the data lakes main function is being reusing the data to actually retrain. Yeah, >>That's >>Right. It worked properly. So a lot of, lot of postmortems turn into actually business improvements to make the machine learning smarter, faster. You see that same way. Do you see it the same way? Yeah, >>I think it's, I think it's really interesting. No, I think it's really interesting because you know, we talk it's, it's convenient to kind of think of analytics as a very clear progression from like point a point B, but really it's, you are navigating terrain for which you do not have a map and you need a lot of help to navigate that terrain. Yeah. And so, you know, being, having these services in place, not having to run the operations of those services, being able to have those services be secure and well governed, and we added PII detection today, you know, something you can do automatically, uh, to be able to use their, uh, any unstructured data run queries against that unstructured data. So today we added, you know, um, text extract queries. So you can just say, well, uh, you can scan a badge for example, and say, well, what's the name on this badge? And you don't have to identify where it is. We'll do all of that work for you. So there's a often a, it's more like a branch than it is just a, a normal, uh, a to B path, a linear path. Uh, and that includes loops backwards. And sometimes you gotta get the results and use those to make improvements further upstream. And sometimes you've gotta use those. And when you're downstream, you'll be like, ah, I remember that. And you come back and bring it all together. So awesome. It's um, it's, uh, uh, it's a wonderful >>Work for sure. Dr. Matt wood here in the queue. Got just take the last word and give the update. Why you're here. What's the big news happening that you're announcing here at summit in San Francisco, California, and update on the, the business analytics >>Group? Yeah, I think, you know, one of the, we did a lot of announcements in the keynote, uh, encouraged everyone to take a look at that. Uh, this morning was Swami. Uh, one of the ones I'm most excited about, uh, is the opportunity to be able to take, uh, dashboards, visualizations. We're all used to using these things. We see them in our business intelligence tools, uh, all over the place. However, what we've heard from customers is like, yes, I want those analytics. I want their visualization. I want it to be up to date, but you know, I don't actually want to have to go my tools where I'm actually doing my work to another separate tool to be able to look at that information. And so today we announced, uh, one click public embedding for quick side dashboards. So today you can literally, as easily as embedding a YouTube video, you can take a dashboard that you've built inside, quick site cut and paste the HTML, paste it into your application and that's it. That's all you have to do. It takes seconds and >>It gets updated in real time. >>Updated in real time, it's interactive. You can do everything that you would normally do. You can brand it like this is there's no power by quick site button or anything like that. You can change the colors, make it fit in perfectly with your, with your applications. So that's sitting incredibly powerful way of being able to take a, uh, an analytics capability that today sits inside its own little fiefdom and put it just everywhere. It's, uh, very transformative. >>Awesome. And the, the business is going well. You got the serverless and your tailwind for you there. Good stuff, Dr. Matt with thank you. Coming on the cube >>Anytime. Thank >>You. Okay. This is the cubes cover of eight summit, 2022 in San Francisco, California. I'm John host cube. Stay with us with more coverage of day two after this short break.

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante snowflake they love the stock at 400 and hated at 165 that's the nature of the business i guess especially in this crazy cycle over the last two years of lockdowns free money exploding demand and now rising inflation and rates but with the fed providing some clarity on its actions the time has come to really dig into the fundamentals of companies and there's no tech company that's more fun to analyze than snowflake hello and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we look at the action of snowflake stock since its ipo why it's behaved the way it has how some sharp traders are looking at the stock and most importantly what customer demand looks like the stock has really provided some great theater since its ipo i know people who got in at 120 before the open and i know lots of people who kind of held their noses and bought the stock on day one at over 300 a day when it closed at around 240 that first day of trading snowflake hit 164 this week it's all-time low as a public company as my college roommate chip simonton a long time trader told me when great companies trade at all times time lows because of panic it's worth taking a shot he did now of course the stock could go lower there's geopolitical risk and the stock with a 64 billion market cap is expensive for a company that's forecast to do around 2 billion in product revenue this year and remember i don't recommend stocks you shouldn't take my advice and my comments you got to do your own research but i have lots of data and i have opinions and i'm willing to share that with you stocks like snowflake crowdstrike z-scaler octa and companies like this are highly volatile when markets are moving up they're going to move up faster than the mean when they're declining they're going to drop more severely and that's clearly what's happened to snowflake so with a company like this you when you see panic selling you'll also see panic buying sometimes like we we've seen with this name it went from 220 to 320 in a very short period earlier snowflake put in a short-term bottom this week and many traders feel the issue was oversold so they bought okay but not everyone felt this way and you can see this in the headlines snowflake hits low but cloud stocks rise and we're going to come back to that is it a buy don't buy the dip buy the dip and what snowflake investors can learn from microsoft and from the street.com snow stock is sliding on the back of ill-conceived guidance and to that i would say that conservative guidance these days is anything but ill-conceived now let's unpack all this a bit and to do so i reached out to ivana delevska who has been on this program before she's with spear invest a female-led etf that goes deep into understanding supply chains she came on breaking analysis and laid out her thesis to buy the dip on snowflake this is a while ago she told me currently spear still likes snowflake and has doubled its position let me share her analysis she called out two drivers for the downside interest rates you know rising of course in snowflakes guidance which my own publication called weak in that previous chart that i just showed you so let's dig into that a bit snowflake guided for product revenues of 67 year on year which was below buy side expectations but i believe within sell side consensus regardless the guide was nuanced and driven by snowflake's decision to pass along price efficiencies to customers from optimizing processor price performance predominantly from aws's graviton too this is going to hit snowflakes revenue a net of about a hundred million dollars this year but the timing's not precise because it's going to hit 165 million but they're going to make up 65 million in increased demand frank slootman on the earnings call made this very clear he said quote this is not philanthropy this stimulates demand classic slootman the point is spear and other bulls believe that this will result in a gain for snowflake over the medium term and we would agree price goes down roi gets better you throw more projects at snowflakes customers going to buy more snowflake and when that happens and it gives the company an advantage as they continue to build their moat it's a longer term bet on cloud and data which are good bets now some of this could also be competitive pressures there have been you know studies that are out there from competitors attacking snowflakes pricing and price performance and they make comparisons oracle's been pretty aggressive as have others but so far the company's customers continue to consume now at a very fast rate now on on this front what can we learn from microsoft that applies to snowflake that's the headline here from benzinga so the article quoted a wealth manager named josh brown talking about what happened to microsoft after the dot-com bubble burst and how they quadrupled earnings over the next decade and the stock went sideways suggesting the same thing could happen to snowflake now i'd like to make a couple of comments here first at the time microsoft was a 23 billion dollar company and it had a monopoly and was already highly profitable steve ballmer became the ceo of microsoft right after the dot-com bubble burst and he hugged onto windows for dear life and lived off of microsoft's pc software monopoly microsoft became an extremely profitable and remarkably uninteresting caretaker of a pc in on-prem software estate during balmer's tenure so i just don't see the comparison as relevant snowflake you know they're going to make struggle for other reasons but that one didn't really resonate with me what's interesting is this chart it poses the question do cloud and data markets behave differently it's a chart that shows aws growth rates over time and superimposes the revenue in the red in q1 2018 aws generated 5.4 billion dollars in revenue and that was growing at the time at nearly a 50 rate now that rate as you can see decelerated quite significantly as aws grew to a 50 billion dollar run rate company that down below where you see it bottoms now it makes sense right law of large numbers you can't keep growing that fast when you get that big well oops look what happened in 2021 aws's growth rate bottoms in the high 20s and then rockets back up to 40 this past quarter as aws surpasses a 70 billion dollar run rate so you have to ask is cloud different is data different is cloud data different or data cloud different let's put it in the snowflake parlance can cloud because of its consumption model and the speed of innovation and ecosystem depth and breadth enable snowflake to exhibit lots of variability in its growth rates versus a say progressive and somewhat linear decline as the company grows revenue which is what you would expect historically and part of the answer relates to its market size here's a chart we've shared before with some additions it's our version of snowflake's total available market they're tam which snowflake's version that that blue data cloud thing superimposed on the right it shows the various layers of market opportunity that we came up with that that snowflake and others we think have in front of them emerging from the disruption of legacy data lakes and data warehouses to what snowflake refers to as its data cloud we think about the data mesh concept and decentralized data architectures with domain ownership and data product and service builders as consistent with snowflake's data cloud vision where snowflake data stores are nodes they're just simply discoverable nodes on the mesh you could have you know data bricks data lakes you know s3 buckets on that mesh it doesn't matter they can be discovered they can be shared and of course they're governed in a federated model now in snowflake's model it's all inside the snowflake data cloud that's fine then you'll go to the out years it gets a little fuzzy you know from edge locations and ai inference it becomes massive and decision making occurs in real time where machines and machine data take over the world instead of you know clicks and keystrokes sounds out there but it's real and how exactly snowflake plays there at this point is unclear but one thing's for sure there'll be a lot of data and it's going to find its way into snowflake you know snowflake's not a real-time engine it's an analytical system it's moving into the realm of data science and you know we've talked about the need for you know semantic layer between those those two worlds of analytics and data science but expanding the scope further out we think that snowflake is a big role to play in this future and the future is massive okay check you got the big tam now as someone that looks at companies through a fundamentals prism you've got to look obviously at the markets in the tan which we just did but you also want to understand customers and it's not hard to find snowflake customers capital one disney micron alliance sainsbury sonos and hundreds of other companies i've talked to snowflake customers who have also been customers of oracle teradata ibm neteza vertica serious database practitioners and they tell me it's consistent soulflake is different they say it's simpler it's more agile it's less complicated to secure and it's disruptive to their traditional ways of doing data management now of course there are naysayers i've spoken to a number of analysts that feel snowflake is deficient in areas like workload management and course complex joins and it's too specialized in a world where we're seeing the convergence of analytics and transactional workloads our own david floyer believes that what oracle is doing with mysql heatwave is radically disruptive to many of the database architectures and blows away anything out there and he believes that snowflake and the likes of aws are going to have to respond now this the other criticism here is that snowflake is not architected for real-time inference where a lot of that edge activity is is going to happen it's a multi-hundred billion dollar market and so look snowflake has a ton of competition that's the other thing all the major cloud players have very capable and competitive database platforms even though they all partner with snowflake except oracle of course but companies like databricks and have garnered tons of vc other vc funded companies have raised billions of dollars to do this kind of elastic consumption based separate compute from storage stuff so you have to always keep an open mind and be aware of potential blind spots for these companies but to the criticisms i would say look snowflake they got there first and watch their ecosystem it's a real key to its continued success snowflake's not going to go it alone and it's going to use its ecosystem partners to expand its reach and accelerate the network effects and fill those gaps and it will acquire its stock is valuable so it should be doing that just as it did with streamlit a zero revenue company that it bought for 800 million dollars in stock and cash just recently streamlit is an open source python library that gets snowflake further deeper into that data science space that data brick space and look watch what snowflake is doing with snowpark it's an api library for processing data and building data intensive applications we've talked about snowflake essentially being becoming the super cloud and building this sort of path-like layer across clouds rather than trying to do it all themselves it seems snowflake is really staring at the api economy and building its ecosystem to plug those holes so let's come back to the customers here's a chart that shows snowflakes customer spending momentum or net score on the the top line that's the vertical axis and pervasiveness in the data or market share and that bottom brown line snowflake has unprecedented net scores and held them up for many many quarters as you can see here going back you know a couple years all leading to its expanded market penetration and measured as pervasiveness of so-called market share within the etr survey it's not like idc market share it's pervasiveness in the data set now i'll say this i don't see how this is sustainable i've been waiting for this to moderate i wouldn't be surprised to see snowflake come back to earth a little bit i think they'll clearly still be highly elevated based on the data that i've seen but but i could see in in one or more of the etr surveys this year this starting to moderate as they get they get big it's just it has to happen um but i would again expect them to have a high spending velocity score but i think we're going to see snowflake you know maybe porpoise a bit here meaning you know it moderates it comes back up it's just really hard to sustain this piece of momentum and higher train retain and scale without absorbing some some friction and some head woods that's going to slow you down but back to the aws growth example it's entirely possible that we could see a similar dynamic with snowflake that you saw with aws and you kind of see it with salesforce and servicenow very successful large entrenched entrenched companies and it's very possible that snowflake could pull back moderate and then accelerate that growth even though people are concerned about the moderated guidance of 80 percent growth yeah that's that's the new definition of tepid i guess i look i like to look at other some other metrics the one that really called you know my my my attention was the remaining performance obligations this last quarter rpo snowflakes is up to something like 2.6 billion and that is a forward-looking indicator of of future revenues so i want to i'd like to see that growing and it's growing at a fast pace so you're going to see some ups and downs with snowflake i have no doubt but i think things are still looking pretty solid for the company growth companies like snowflake and octa and z scalar those other ones that i mentioned earlier have probably been repriced and refactored by investors while there's always going to be market and of course geopolitical risk especially in these times fundamentals matter you've got huge market well capitalized you got a leadership position great products and strong customer adoption you also have a great team team is something else that we look for we haven't touched on that but i'll leave you with this thought everyone knows about frank slootman mike scarpelli and what they've accomplished in their years of working together that's why the stock you know in ipo was was so overvalued they had seen these guys do it before slootman just documented in all this in his book amp it up which gives great insight into the history of of that though you know that pair and and the teams that they've built the companies that they've built how he thinks about building companies and markets and and how you know total available markets super important but the whole philosophy and culture that that he's building in his management style but you got to wonder right how long is this guy going to keep going what keeps him motivated you know i asked him that one time here's what he said why i mean are you in this for the sport what's the story here uh actually that that's not a bad way of characterizing it i think i am in it uh you know for the sport uh you know the only way to become the best version of yourself is to be uh to be under the gun and uh you know every single day and that's that's certainly uh what we are it sort of has its own rewards building great products building great companies uh you know regardless of you know uh what the spoils may be uh it has its own rewards and i i it's hard for people like us to get off the field and uh you know hang it up so here we are so there you have it he's in it for the sport how great is that he loves building companies and that my opinion that's how frank slootman thinks about success it's not about money money's the byproduct of success as earl nightingale would say success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal i love that quote building great companies building products that change the world changing people's lives with data and insights creating jobs creating life-altering wealth opportunities not for himself but for thousands of employees and partners i'd say that's a pretty worthy ideal and i hope frank slootman sticks with it for a while okay that's it for today thanks to stephanie chan for the background research she does for breaking analysis alex meyerson on production kristen martin and cheryl knight on social with rob hoff on siliconangle and thanks to ivana delevska of spear invest and my friend chip symington for the angles from the money side of things remember all these episodes are available as podcasts just search breaking analysis podcast i publish weekly on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey data you can reach me at devolante or david.velante siliconangle.com and this is dave vellante for cube insights powered by etrbsafe stay well and we'll see you next time [Music] you

>>And welcome to this special cube conversation. I'm John for a, your host of the cube. We're here in Palo Alto, California, and I'm here with a very special guest coming down from Seattle remotely into the cube studios is the leader at AWS Amazon web services, the vice president of database analytics and machine learning Swami. Great to see you cube alumni recently taking over the database business at AWS as a leader. Congratulations. And thanks for coming on the cube. >>Hey, my pleasure to be here, John, very excited to talk to you. >>Yeah. We've had many conversations on the cube and also in person and also online around all the major mega trends. You've had your hand in all the action, going back to your days when you were in school learning and, and writing papers. And 10 years ago, Amazon web services launched AWS dynamo, DB, fast, flexible, no SQL database that everyone loves today, which has inspired a generation of what I would call database distributing cloud scale, single digit millisecond performance at scale. And again, the key scale. And again, this is 10 years ago, so it seems like yesterday, but you guys are celebrating and your name was on the original paper with CTO Verner. Vogel's your celebrity. Congratulations. >>Thank you. Not sure about the celebrating part, but I'm very excited. At least I played a hand in building such an amazing technology that has enabled so many amazing customers along the way as well. So >>Trivia on the, on the paper as you were an intern at AWS, so you're getting your PhD. And then since, since rising through the ranks and involved in a lot of products over the years, and then leading the machine learning and AI, which is now changing the game at the industry level, but I got to ask you getting back to the story here. A lot of customers have built amazing things on top of dynamo DB, not to mention lots of other AWS and Amazon tech riding on it. Can you share some of the highlights that came out of the original paper? And so with some examples, because I think this is a point in time, 10 years ago, where you start to, so the KickUp of cloud scale, not just, just for developers and building startups, you're really starting to see the scale rise. >>Yeah, I actually, I mean, as you probably know, based on what he read to explain the Genesis of dynamo DB itself had to explain the Genesis of how Amazon got into building the original dynamo, right? And this was during the time when miner, I joined Ron esteem as an intern and, and Amazon was one of the pioneers in pushing the boundary of scale. And a year over year, our Q4 holiday season tends to be really, really bad for all the right reasons. We all want our holiday shopping done during that time. And you want to be able to scale your website, arters fulfillment centers, all of them at that time. And those are the times around 2005. And the answer is when people think our database, they think of a single database server that actually runs on a box and has a certain characteristics and does a scale and availability and whatnot. >>And it's usually relational. And then when we had a major disruption during Q4 that's when yeah, ask ourselves the question, why are we actually using a relational database for some of these things when they really didn't need the data model complexity of relational database. And normally I would say most companies where to actually ask an intern or a few engineers who are early in the career saying like, what the hell are you suggesting? Just go away. But Amazon being enabling Buddhists to build what they want. And they actually let us start reimagining what a database or our scale could look like. And that led to dynamo. And since she unstained mine, then we migrated from an traditional relational database stair this one for some of the amazon.com services. And then I moved on to actually start building some butts off our storage service and then our managed relational database service, I explicitly remember. >>And one of our customer advisory board, we're just the set off some of our leading customers who actually give us feedback on roadmap. Another son, Don, who's the CEO and chief geek of spunk bargain faker. And him actually looking at the Trinity me, I was starting in the corner and saying like you all, both tomorrow and why do I need to keep shotting my, my sequel database and reshooting assigned scaling. And this is the time when the state of the art in most databases were around. Like, you start sharding your relational database and constantly reshaping. And this is when most websites are starting to experience the kind of scale which we consider a normal month. During those times it was mostly, most companies used to have a single relational database backend and start scaling that way. And that conversation led entirely under duress, unaided read, lot of AWS leaders and myself saying like, Hey, what is a cloud database reimagined without the hampering SQL look like? And that led us to start building dynamo DB, but just a key value database at that time. Now we support document might've too, but that single digit millisecond latency at any scale imagine. So >>I think about that time at that time, 10 years ago, when you were having this conversation and I know the smug mug and I, he said, he's in totally geek and he's, he's good to point that out. You also have Netflix as customers too. I'd like to hear how that's evolved, but, but I think back at the time, if you look back then I got to ask you most people we've talked about this before. No one database rules, a world that's now standard people now don't see one database back then it was a one database kind of mindset back then. Yeah. And then you had that big data movement happening with Hadoop. You had the object store developing. So you're in you're you're circling around that area. What was it like then? I mean, take, take us through that because there was obvious visibility that, Hey, let's just store this. Now you see data lakes and that's all happening. But back then object store was kind of new. Yeah. >>Ah, it's a great question. Now, one of the things I realized early on, especially when I was working with binary, when you're saying amazon.com itself as an example, that the access patterns for various applications and Amazon, but let alone AWS customers tend to be very, very, very, some of them really just needed an object store. Some of them needed a relational database. Some of them really wanted a key value store within a fast latency. Some of them really needed a durable cash. And, but it so happens when you have a giant hammer. You use that for everything looks like a map, which is essentially the story at that time. And so everyone kept using the same database, irrespective of what the problem was because nobody else, I mean, thought about like, what else can we build that is better? So this let us do, literally I remember writing a paper with Bernard internally that is widely used in Amazon explaining what are all the menu of booklets that access. >>And then how do we go about actually solving for each of these things so that they can actually grow and innovate faster. And, and this was led to actually the Genesis of not only building IDs and so forth, but also dynamo and various other non-relational data. There's a still let alone not so storage access patterns and what not. So, and this was one of the big revelations he had just that there is not a single database that is going to meet the customer, needs us. The diversity of workloads in the internet is growing. And this was a key pivotal moment because with cloud now applications can scale very more instantly than before now. Building an application for Superbowl is very easier than before. That means that on, I mean, everybody is pushing the boundaries of what scale means, and they are expecting more from their obligations. That's when you need technologies like dynamo, DB, and that's exactly what dynamo already be set out to do. And since then, we are continuing to innovate on behalf of our customers and the purpose of the database story as well. And this concept has resonated well across the board. If you see that the database industry has also embraced this method, >>It's natural that you obviously evolved into the machine learning side of it because that's data is big part of that. And you see back then you, you bringing up kind of like flashes for me where it's like those, the data conversations back then and the data movement was just beginning. So the idea that you can have diversity in access methods of the kind of databases was a use case driven by the application, not so much database saying, this is how you have to work, that the script was flipped. It it's changed from infrastructure dictating to the applications, what to do. Now, the applications are going to the infrastructure and saying, give me what I want. I want to access something here in an office store, something here in no SQL that became the Genesis of infrastructure as code at a, at a global level. And so your paper kind of set the, the, the wave, the influence for this, no SQL did big data movement. It's created tons of value, maybe a third Mongo might've been influenced by this other people have been influenced. Can you share some stories of how people adopted the concept of dynamo DB and how that's changed in the industry and how has that helped the industry evolve? >>I mean, plus file data. Most share our experience of building and dynamo style data store. Very, it is a non-relational API and showing what are some of the experiences that the Venter in building such an paper and these set out early on itself, that it is should not be just a design paper, but it should be something that we shared our experiences. So even now, when I talked to my friends and colleagues and various other companies, one thing they always tell me is they appreciated the openness with which we were sharing. Some of the examples and learnings that we learned to not optimizing for percentile latencies, and what are some of the scalability challenges, how we solved and some of the techniques around things like sloppy Cora or various other stuff. We invented a lot of towns along the way too, but people really appreciated several of some of our findings and as talking about it. >>And since then I met so many other innovations are happening in the industry and the AWS, but also across the entire academia and industry in this space, the databases I've been going through what I call as a period of Renaissance, where one of the things, if you see our own arc, when Roger and I started on the database, front Disney started over the promo saying like, if you were to build a database where cloud is the new normal, this is again in 2008, we asked ourselves that question and what the belt that led us to start building things like dynamo, DB, RDS star. I know that alone, we reimagined data viruses with Redshift and several, and then several other databases like time stream for time series workloads started running Neptune for graph and whatnot. But at the moment we started actually asking that question and working backwards from customers. Then you will start being able to innovate accordingly. And this has worked really well. Then more than a hundred thousand AWS customers have chosen dynamo DB for mobile gaming tech IOT. Many of these are fast growing businesses, such as ledge, Darryl BNB, red fan, as soon as enterprises like Samsung Toyota, capital one and so far. So these are like really some meaningful clouds, let alone amazon.com. I run this. >>We have an internal customer is always good to have that entire inside customer. You know, I really find this a really profound use case because you're just talking, you know, in Amazonian terms, I'll just translate for the audience working backwards from the customer, which is the customer obsession you guys have. So here's, what's going on off the way I see it. You got dynamo, DB, paper, you and Verner, and the team Paul was a great as a great video on your blog posts that goes into the, to the talk he gave at around that time, which is fun to watch if you look back, but you have a radical enabler here, that's disrupting and changing S3 RDS, Aurora. These are game-changing concepts inside the, the landscape of AWS at the same time, you're working backwards from the customer. So the question I have for you as a leader and as a builder, how did you balance the working backwards from the customer while bringing something brand new and radical at that time to the market? >>Yeah, this is one of the S I mean hardest things to be, as leaders need to balance on. If you see many times, then we actually worked backwards from customers. The literal later translated this, literally do what customers are asking for, which is true nine out of 10 times, but there is one or a 10 times, you got to read between the lines on what they are asking. Because many times customers when are articulate that they need to go fast. If in the right way, they might say, Hey, I wish my heart storage goes faster, but they're not going to tell you they need a car, but you need to know and be able to translate and read between the lines we call it under the bucket of innovate on behalf of customers. And that is exactly the kind of a mantra we had when we were thinking about concepts like dynamo DB, because essentially at that time, almost everybody would, if I asked, they would just say, I wish a relational database could actually be able to scale from not just like a hundred gigabyte to one terabyte are, it can take up to like 2 million transactions, a second and so forth and still be cheap and made in reality as relational databases, the way they were engineered at that time, those are not going to meet the scale needs. >>So this is fair. We hunted read between the lines on what are some of the key Mustang needs from customers and then work backwards and then innovate on behalf of these workloads, be enabled by the sun oh four, which are some of the reasons that led to us launching some of the initial sets on dynamo on a single digit millisecond latency and seamless scale. At that time, databases didn't have the elasticity to go from like 10 requests, a second to like a hundred thousand or 1 million requests a second, and then scaled right back in an hour. So that was not possible. And we kind of enabled that. And that was an, a pretty big game changer that showed the elasticity of the cloud to a database. Well, >>Yeah, I think also just to, not to nerd out on this, but it enables a lot of other kind of cool scaled concepts, like queuing storage. It's all kind of together. This database piece of that you guys are solving. And again, props to you guys on the team. Congratulations. I have to ask, you know, more generally, how has your thinking changed since the paper? I'll see, you've got more experience under your belt. You don't yet have the gray hairs yet, but we'll see those soon come in, but you know, you're, you got a lot more experience. You're running teams, you're launching a lot of products. How has your thinking changed in the industry since the paper what's happening now? What's the big evolution. What are those new things now that are in the innovate on behalf of the customer? What's between the lines now, how do you see this happening? >>I mean, now since wanting dynamo via a victim, I had the opportunity to work on various problems in the big data space. There we've worked on some are fire things that you might be aware of in the analytics all the way from Redshift to quick side, too. Then I moved on to start some of our efforts, having built systems that enabled customer to store process and credit, and then analyze them. One of the realizations, I had this, the in around 2015 or 2016, I kinda had that machine learning was hitting a critical point where now it is ready for being scaled at option. Their cloud has basically enabled limitless compute and limitless storage, which are the factors that are holding back machine learning technology. Then I realized that now we have a unique opportunity to bring machine learning BI to everybody, not just folks with PhD in machine learning. >>And that's when I moved on from database and analytics areas, they started machine learning. We're just a descent area because machine learning is powered by data and then started building capabilities like SageMaker, which is our end to end ML platform to build, train and deploy them on models. And this, what does the leading enterprise platform by several gaggled users and then also a bunch of our AI services since then, I view the reason I'm giving all this historical context is one of the biggest realization I had early on itself. And 2016 as first machine learning is one of the most disruptive technologies. She will then country in our generation. This is right after cloud. I think these still are the most amazing combination that is going to revolutionize how we build applications and how we actually reason about that. Now, the second thing is that at the end of the day, when you look at the ANC and journey, it is not just about one database or one data Varroa. >>So one data lake product, or even 1:00 AM out platform. It is about the end to end journey where a customer is storing their order database. And then they are actually building a data lake that test customer history and order history. And they want to be able to personalize. And for their viewer experience are actually forecast what products to staff in their fulfillment center, but then all these things need to work and to handle. And that view is one of the big things that struck me for the past five years. And I've been on this journey in addition to building this Emma building blocks to connect the dots so that customers can go on this modern end to end data strategy as I call it, right. It goes beyond a single database technology or data technology, but putting now all of these end to end together so that customers don't end up spending six months connecting the dots, which has been the state of the down for the last couple of years. And we are bringing it down to matter of the Sundays. Now >>He's incredible Swami. Thank you so much for spending the time with us here in the, >>Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks again, Sean. Thanks for having me.

>>Welcome back to the cubes cover dot com. Splunk annual conference >>Virtual this year. I'm john for >>your host of the cube as always we're being the best stories. The best guest to you and the best guest today is the ceo Doug merit of course, Top Dog. It's great to see you. Thanks for coming on to be seen. >>So nice. I can't believe it. We had a whole year without seeing each other. >>I love this conference because it's kind of like a studio taking over a full virtual studio multiple sets, cubes here. You have the main stage, you've got rooms upstairs, tons of virtual interactions. Great numbers. Congratulations. >>Thank you. Thank you. We were, we wanted this to be primarily live where we are live, primarily on site. Um, and we pivoted some private marketing team. How quickly they pivoted and I love the environment they've created as I know next year we will be always have virtual now we've all learned but will be on site, which is great. >>It's good to see kind of you guys telling the story a lot, a lot more stories happening and You know, we've been covering splint since 2012 on the Cube. I think longer than aws there was 2013 our first cube seeing Splunk emerge is the trend has been, it's new, it's got value and you operationalize it for customers. Something new happens. You operationalized for customers and it just keeps on the Splunk way, the culture of innovation. It just seems now more than ever. You guys were involved in security early 2015 I think that was the year we started kind of talking about it your first year and now it just feels like something bigger is right here in front of us. It's and people are trying to figure out multi cloud observe ability. We see that what that's a big growth wave coming. What's the wave that's happening? >>So uh the beauty of Splunk and the kind of culture and how we were born was we have this non structured backbone um what I would call the investigative lake where you just dump garbage into it and then get value out of it through the question asking which means you can traverse anywhere because you're not taking a point of view on the data it's usable all over the place. And that's how we went up in security. As we had the I. T. Systems administrators pinging that thing with with questions. And at that point in time the separate teams were almost always part of the I. T. Teams like hey can we ask questions that thing. It's like yeah go ahead. And also they got value. And then the product managers and the app dev guys started asking questions. And so a lot of our proliferation has been because of the underlying back bonus blank the ability for new people to come to the data and find value in the data. Um as you know and as our users know we have tried to stay very focused on the go to market basis on serving the technical triumphant the cyber teams, the infrastructure management, 90 ops teams and the abdomen devoPS teams and on the go to market basis and the solutions we package that is, we're trying to stay super pure to that. That's $90 billion of total addressable market. We're super excited will be well over three billion an error this year, which is amazing is 300 million when I started seven years ago so that 10 x and seven years is great. But three billion and 90 billion like we're all just getting going right now with those Corbyn centers. The were on top of what sean bison as we tell you about, hey, we've got to continue to focus on multi cloud and edge is really important. Machine learning is important. That the lever that we've been focused on for a long time that we'll continue to gain better traction on is making sure that we've got the right data plane and application platform layer so that the rest of the world can participate in building high quality reusable and recyclable applications so that operate operationalization that we have done officially around cyber it and devops and unofficially on a one off basis for marketing and supply chain and logistics and manufacturing that those other use cases can be packaged repeated, sold and supported by the people that really know those domains because we're not manufacturing experts. It's we're honored that portion BMW are using us to get operational insight into the manufacturing floor. But they lead that we just were there is the technical Splunk people to help bring that to life. But there are lots of firms out there, no manufacturing cold process versus the screed and they can create with these packages. They're appropriate for automotive, automotive versus paint versus wineries versus having that. I think the big Accelerant over the next 10 years response, we gotta keep penetrating our core use cases but it would be allowing our ecosystem and so happy Teresa Karlsson's here is just pounding the table and partners to take the other probably 90% of the market that is not covered by by our core market. >>Yeah, I think that's awesome. And the first time we get to the partner 1st and 2nd the rebranding of the ecosystem as it's growing. But you mentioned you didn't know manufacturing as an example where the value is being created. That's interesting because you guys are enabling that value, their adding that because they know their apps then they're experts. That's where the ecosystem is really gonna shine because if you can provide that enablement this control plane as you mentioned, that's going to feed the ecosystem. So the question I have for you is as you guys have become essentially the de facto control playing for most companies because they were using spring for a lot of other great reasons now you have set them up that way is the pattern to just keep building machine learning apps on top of it or more querying what's the what's the customer next level trends that you're seeing. >>So the two core focus areas that we will stay on top of is enriching that data platform and ensure that we continue to provide better at peace and better interfaces so that when people want to build a really interesting automotive parts, supply chain optimization app that they're able to do that, we've got the right A. P. S. We've got the right services, we've got the right separation between the application of platforms so they can get that done, we'll continue to advance that platform so that there's modernization capabilities and there's advertising capabilities and other pieces that they can make their business. The other piece that will stay very focused on is within the cyber realm within I. T. Ops within devops, ensuring that we're leveraging that platform, but baking ml and baking all the advanced edge and other capabilities into those solutions because the cyber teams as where you started with a You know, we really started reporting on cyber 2015, those guys have got such a hard job and while there's lots of people pretending like they're going to come in and serve them, it's the difficulty is there are hundreds of tools and technologies that the average C so deals with and the rate of innovation is not slowing down and those vendors that have a vested interest and I want to maintain my footprint and firewalls, I want to maintain an implant, I want to maintain. It's really hard for them to say, you know what? There are 25 other categories of tools and there's 500 vendors. You gotta play nicely with your competitors and know all those folks if you really want to provide the ml the detection, the remediation, The investigation capabilities. And that's where I'm really excited about the competition. The fake competition in many cases because like, yeah, bring it on. Like I've got 2000 engineers, all they do all day long is focused on the data layer and making sure that we're effective there and I'm not diverting my engineers with any other tasks that I've got a it's hard enough to do what we do in the day layers. Well, >>it's interesting. I just had some notes here, I had one data driven innovation you've been talking about since you've been here. We've been talking about data driven innovation, cybersecurity mentioned for many years, it's almost like the balance of you gotta have tools, but you gotta have the platform. If you have too many tools and no platform, then there's a mix match here and you get hung up with tools and these blind spots. You can't have blind spots, you can't have silos. This is what kind of everyone's pretty much agreeing on right now. It's not a debate. It's more like, okay, I got silos and I got blind spots. Well how do I solve >>the difficulty? And I touched a little bit of the sun my keynote of There are well over 60 and I was using 16 because DB engines categorizes 16 different database tools. But there's actually more if you go deeper. So there's different 16 different categories of database tools. Think relational database, data warehouse, ledger databases, graph database, et cetera over 16 categories those 350 vendors. That's not because we're all stupid in tech like a graph DB is different than a relational database, which is different than what we do with our stimulus index. So there's those categories that many vendors because they're trying to solve different problems within the swim lane that you are in which for us is this non structured, high volume difficult data to manage Now. The problem is how do you create that non broken that end to end view. So you can handle your use cases effectively. Um and then the customer is still going to do with the fact that we're not a relational database engine company. We're not a data warehousing company where we were beginning to use graph DB capabilities within our our solution sets. We're gonna lean on open source other vendors use the tool for the job >>you need. But I think that what you're thinking hitting on my like is this control plane idea. I want to get back to that because if you think about what the modern application developers want is they want devops and deVOps kind of one infrastructures codes there. But if I'm a modern developer, I just want to code, >>I don't want to configure >>the data or the infrastructure. So the data value now is so much more important for the developer, whether that's policy based innovation, get options, some people call it A I ops, these are big trends. This is fairly new in the sense of being mainstream. It's been around for a couple of years, but this time, how do you see the data being much more of a developer input. >>People talk about deVOps is a new thing when I was running on the HR products at Peoplesoft in 2000 and four, we had a deVOPS teams. So that is, you know, there's always been a group of people whether Disney or not that are kind of managing the manufacturing floor for your developers, making sure they got the right tools and databases and what's new is because the ephemeral nature of cloud, that app dev work and devops and everyone that surrounds those or is now 100% data driven because you have ephemeral services, they're popping up and popping down. And if you're not able to trap the data that are each one of those services are admitting and do it on a real time basis and a thorough, complete basis, you can't sample then you are flying blind and that's not gonna work when you've got a critical code push for a feature your customers demanding and if you don't get it out, your competitors are, you need to have assurance that you've done the right things and that the quality and and the actual deployment actually works And that's where what lettuce tubes or ability Three years ago as we roughly started doing our string of acquisitions is we saw that transition from a state full world where it was all transaction engine driven. I've got to insert transaction and engines in a code. Very different engineering problem to I've got to grab data and it's convoluted data. It's chaotic data. It's changing all the time. Well, jeez that sounds and latency >>issues to they're gonna be doing fast. >>I've got to do it. You literally millisecond by millisecond. You've got are are bigger customers were honored because of how we operate. Splunk to serve some of the biggest web properties in the in the globe and they're dealing with hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of data per day that are traversing these pipes and you've got to be able to extract metrics that entire multi petabyte or traces that entire multi pedal extreme and you can't hope you're guessing right by only extracting from portions of it because again, if you missed that data you've missed it forever. So for us that was a data problem, which is why we stepped in and >>other things That data problem these days, it's almost it's the most fun to talk about if you love the problem statement that we're trying to solve. I want to get your reaction something if you don't mind. I was talking to a C. So in the C. I. O. We have a conversation kind of off camera at an event recently and I said what's the biggest challenge that you have? Just curious? I asked him, it's actually it's personnel people are mad at each other. Developers want to go faster because there are ci cd pipeline is devops their coding. They're having to wait for the security groups in some cases weeks and days when they could do it in minutes they want to do it on the in the pipelines, shifting left as some call it and it's kind of getting in the way. So it's kind of like it's not they're not getting along very well uh meaning they're slowing things down. I can say something what they really said, but they weren't getting along. What's your reaction? Because that seems to be a speed scale problem. That's developer centric, not organizational, you've got organizational challenges and being slowed down. >>So uh while we all talk about this converted landscape and how exciting is going to be. You do have diametrically opposed metrics and you're never going to have, it's very difficult to get a single person to have the same allegiance to those diametrically a virgin metrics as you want. So you've got checks and balances and the reality of what the cyber teams need to be doing to ensure that you aren't just coding effective functions with the right delivery timeframe. But that's also secure is I think going to make the security team is important forever and the same thing. You can't just write sloppy code that consumes, that blows your AWS budget or G. C. P budget within the first week of deploying it because you've still got to run a responsible business. So there are different dimensions that we all have to deal with quality time and feature functionality that different groups represent. So we, I believe a converged landscape is important. It's not that we're gonna blow it up and one person is going to do it all if you've got to get those groups talking better and you've got to reduce cycle times now we believe it's plunk is with a common data plane, which is the backbone and then solutions built from that common data plane to serve those groups. You're lessening the lack of understanding and you're reducing the cycle time. So now I can look when I'm publishing the code. If it's done properly, is it also secure And the cyber teams can kind of be flying in saying, hey, wait, wait, wait, we just saw something in the data says we're not quite ready. I'm sorry. I know you want to push, you can't push now, but there'll be a data driven conversation and not this, you shouldn't be waiting a week or two weeks, like we can't operate that scale and you've got to address people with facts and data and logic and that's what we're trying to get done. And you >>guys have a good policy engine, you can put up that up into the pipeline. So awesome. That's great, great insight there. Thanks for sharing. Final question. Um looking back in your time since you've been Ceo the culture kind of hasn't changed at Splunk, it's still they have fun, hard charging laid back a little bit and public company now, he's still got to meet the numbers, but your growing business is good, but there's a lot more coming as a big wave coming talk about the Splunk culture. >>So the core elements of culture that I love that. I think all of us agree you don't want to change one where curiosity driven culture, our tool is an investigative tool, so I never want to lose. I think that threat of grit, determination, tenacity and curiosity is paramount in life and I think literally what we push out represents that and I want our people represent that and I think the fun element is really the quirkiness of the fund, like that is one of the things I love about Splunk but we are a serious company, we are in the data plane of tens of thousands of organizations globally and what we do literally makes a difference on whether they're successful or not. As organizations, we're talking about walmart is example And how one second latency can have a, have a 10% drop off in fulfillment of transaction for wal mart that's like a billion dollars a week if you cannot get their system to perform at the level it needs to so what we do matters and the change that we've been driving that I think is a great enhancement to the culture is as we are now tip into the 50% cloud company, you have the opportunity to measure millisecond by millisecond, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour and that's a different level of help that you get. You can literally see patterns happening over the course of minutes within customers and that's not something we were born with. We were an on premise solution, we had beautiful tools and it was the C E O. S problem, the CSS problem um and their opportunity to get that feedback. Now we get that feedback so we're trying to measure that crunchiness, the fun, the cool part about Splunk with. We also have got to be very operationally disciplined because we carry a heavy responsibility set from our customers and we're in the middle of that as well as the world knows, we're halfway through our transition to be a cloud first company but I'm excited with the results I'm seeing, so I think curiosity and tenacity go with that operational rigor. Like we should all be growth mindset oriented and very excited about, Hey, can I improve? I guess there's some information that I need that I'm not getting that will make me serve my customers better and that is the tone and tenor. I want to cross all the Splunk of whether in HR legal or engineering or sales or we serve customers and we've got to be so excited every day about getting better feedback and how to serve them better. >>Doug. Thanks for coming on the Cuban, sharing that inside. I know you had to cancel your physical event, pulled off an exceptionally strong virtual event here in person. Thanks for having the Cuban. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for being here and I can't wait to do this in person. Next >>to mary the ceo of Splunk here inside the cube cube coverage continues stay with us for more. We've got more interviews all the rest of the day, Stay with us. I'm john for your host. Thanks for watching. Mm >>mm mhm >>mhm >>Yeah