>>Welcome back to the cubes, continuous coverage of AWS storage day. We're in beautiful downtown Seattle in the great Northwest. My name is Dave Vellante and we're going to talk about file systems. File systems are really tricky and making those file systems elastic is even harder. They've got a long history of serving a variety of use cases as with me as Duncan Lennox. Who's the general manager of Amazon elastic file system. Dunkin. Good to see you again, Dave. Good to see you. So tell me more around the specifically, uh, Amazon's elastic file system EFS you, you know, broad file portfolio, but, but let's narrow in on that. What do we need to know? >>Yeah, well, Amazon elastic file system or EFS as we call it is our simple serverless set and forget elastic file system service. So what we mean by that is we deliver something that's extremely simple for customers to use. There's not a lot of knobs and levers. They need to turn or pull to make it work or manage it on an ongoing basis. The serverless part of it is there's absolutely no infrastructure for customers to manage. We handled that entirely for them. The elastic part then is the file system automatically grows and shrinks as they add and delete data. So they never have to provision storage or risk running out of storage and they pay only for the storage they're actually using. >>What are the sort of use cases and workloads that you see EFS supporting? >>Yeah. Yeah. It has to support a broad set of customer workloads. So it's everything from, you know, serial, highly latency, sensitive applications that customers might be running on-prem today and want to move to the AWS cloud up to massively parallel scale-out workloads that they have as well. >>So. Okay. Are there any industry patterns that you see around that? Are there other industries that sort of lean in more or is it more across the board? We >>See it across the board, although I'd have to say that we see a lot of adoption within compliance and regulated industries. And a lot of that is because of not only our simplicity, but the high levels of availability and durability that we bring to the file system as well. The data is designed for 11 nines of durability. So essentially you don't need to be worrying about your anything happening into your data. And it's a regional service meaning that your file system is available from all availability zones in a particular region for high availability. >>So as part of storage data, we, we saw some, some new tiering announcements. W w w what can you tell us about those >>Super excited to be announcing EFS intelligent tiering? And this is a capability that we're bringing to EFS that allows customers to automatically get the best of both worlds and get cost optimization for their workloads and how it works is the customer can select, uh, using our lifecycle management capability, a policy for how long they want their data to remain active in one of our active storage classes, seven days, for example, or 30 days. And what we do is we automatically monitor every access to every file they have. And if we see no access to a file for their policy period, like seven days or 30 days, we automatically and transparently move that file to one of our cost optimized, optimized storage classes. So they can save up to 92% on their storage costs. Um, one of the really cool things about intelligent tiering then is if that data ever becomes active again and their workload or their application, or their users need to access it, it's automatically moved back to a performance optimized storage class, and this is all completely transparent to their applications and users. >>So, so how, how does that work? Are you using some kind of machine intelligence to sort of monitor things and just learn over time? And like, what if I policy, what if I don't get it quite right? Or maybe I have some quarter end or maybe twice a year, you know, I need access to that. Can you, can the system help me figure >>That out? Yeah. The beauty of it is you don't need to know how your application or workload is accessing the file system or worry about those access patterns changing. So we'll take care of monitoring every access to every file and move the file either to the cost optimized storage class or back to the performance optimized class as needed by your application. >>And then optimized storage classes is again, selected by the system. I don't have to >>It that's right. It's completely transparent. So we will take care of that for you. So you'll set the policy by which you want active data to be moved to the infrequent access cost optimized storage class, like 30 or seven days. And then you can set a policy that says if that data is ever touched again, to move it back to the performance optimized storage class. So that's then all happened automatically by the service on our side. You don't need to do anything >>It's, it's it's serverless, which means what I don't have to provision any, any compute infrastructure. >>That's right. What you get is an end point, the ability to Mount your file system using NFS, or you can also manage your file system from any of our compute services in AWS. So not only directly on an instance, but also from our serverless compute models like AWS Lambda and far gays, and from our container services like ECS and EKS, and all of the infrastructure is completely managed by us. You don't see it, you don't need to worry about it. We scale it automatically for you. >>What was the catalyst for all this? I mean, you know, you got to tell me it's customers, but maybe you could give me some, some insight and add some, some color. Like, what would you decoded sort of what the customers were saying? Did you get inputs from a lot of different places, you know, and you had to put that together and shape it. Uh, tell us, uh, take us inside that sort of how you came to where you are >>Today. Well, you know, I guess at the end of the day, when you think about storage and particularly file system storage, customers always want more performance and they want lower costs. So we're constantly optimizing on both of those dimensions. How can we find a way to deliver more value and lower cost to customers, but also meet the performance needs that their workloads have. And what we found in talking to customers, particularly the customers that EFS targets, they are application administrators, their dev ops practitioners, their data scientists, they have a job they want to do. They're not typically storage specialists. They don't want to have know or learn a lot about the bowels of storage architecture, and how to optimize for what their applications need. They want to focus on solving the business problems. They're focused on whatever those are >>You meaning, for instance. So you took tiering is obvious. You're tiering to lower cost storage, serverless. I'm not provisioning, you know, servers, myself, the system I'm just paying for what I use. The elasticity is a factor. So I'm not having to over provision. And I think I'm hearing, I don't have to spend my time turning knobs. You've talked about that before, because I don't know how much time is spent, you know, tuning systems, but it's gotta be at least 15 to 20% of the storage admins time. You're eliminating that as well. Is that what you mean by sort of cost optimum? Absolutely. >>So we're, we're providing the scale of capacity of performance that customer applications need as they needed without the customer needing to know exactly how to configure the service, to get what they need. We're dealing with changing workloads and changing access patterns. And we're optimizing their storage costs. As at the same time, >>When you guys step back, you get to the whiteboard out, say, okay, what's the north star that you're working because you know, you set the north star. You don't want to keep revisiting that, right? This is we're moving in this direction. How do we get there might change, but what's your north star? Where do you see the future? >>Yeah, it's really all about delivering simple file system storage that just works. And that sounds really easy, but there's a lot of nuance and complexity behind it, but customers don't want to have to worry about how it works. They just need it to work. And we, our goal is to deliver that for a super broad cross section of applications so that customers don't need to worry about how they performance tune or how they cost optimize. We deliver that value for them. >>Yeah. So I'm going to actually follow up on that because I feel like, you know, when you listen to Werner Vogels talk, he gives takes you inside. It's a plumbing sometimes. So what is the, what is that because you're right. That it, it sounds simple, but it's not. And as I said up front file systems, getting that right is really, really challenging. So technically what's the challenges, is it doing this at scale? And, and, and, and, and, and having some, a consistent experience for customers, there's >>Always a challenge to doing what we do at scale. I mean, the elasticity is something that we provide to our customers, but ultimately we have to take their data as bits and put them into Adams at some point. So we're managing infrastructure on the backend to support that. And we also have to do that in a way that delivers something that's cost-effective for customers. So there's a balance and a natural tension there between things like elasticity and simplicity, performance, cost, availability, and durability, and getting that balance right. And being able to cover the maximum cross section of all those things. So for the widest set of workloads, we see that as our job and we're delivering value, and we're doing that >>For our customers. Then of course, it was a big part of that. And of course, when we talk about, you know, the taking away the, the need for tuning, but, but you got to get it right. I mean, you, you, you can't, you can't optimize for every single use case. Right. But you can give great granularity to allow those use cases to be supported. And that seems to be sort of the balancing act that you guys so >>Well, absolutely. It's focused on being a general purpose file system. That's going to work for a broad cross section of, of applications and workloads. >>Right. Right. And that's, that's what customers want. You know, generally speaking, you go after that, that metal Dunkin, I'll give you the last word. >>I just encourage people to come and try out EFS it's as simple as a single click in our console to create a file system and get started. So come give it a, try the >>Button Duncan. Thanks so much for coming back to the cube. It's great to see you again. Thanks, Dave. All right. And keep it right there for more great content from AWS storage day from Seattle.

(upbeat music), (logo pop up) >> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE. Presenting active DQ intelligent automation for data quality brought to you by IO-Tahoe. >> Are you ready to see active DQ on Snowflake in action? Let's get into the show and tell him, do the demo. With me or Tiji Matthew, the Data Solutions Engineer at IO-Tahoe. Also joining us is Patrick Zeimet Data Solutions Engineer at IO-Tahoe and Senthilnathan Karuppaiah, who's the Head of Production Engineering at IO-Tahoe. Patrick, over to you let's see it. >> Hey Dave, thank you so much. Yeah, we've seen a huge increase in the number of organizations interested in Snowflake implementation. Were looking for an innovative, precise and timely method to ingest their data into Snowflake. And where we are seeing a lot of success is a ground up method utilizing both IO-Tahoe and Snowflake. To start you define your as is model. By leveraging IO-Tahoe to profile your various data sources and push the metadata to Snowflake. Meaning we create a data catalog within Snowflake for a centralized location to document items such as source system owners allowing you to have those key conversations and understand the data's lineage, potential blockers and what data is readily available for ingestion. Once the data catalog is built you have a much more dynamic strategies surrounding your Snowflake ingestion. And what's great is that while you're working through those key conversations IO-Tahoe will maintain that metadata push and partnered with Snowflake ability to version the data. You can easily incorporate potential scheme changes along the way. Making sure that the information that you're working on stays as current as the systems that you're hoping to integrate with Snowflake. >> Nice, Patrick I wonder if you could address how you IO-Tahoe Platform Scales and maybe in what way it provides a competitive advantage for customers. >> Great question where IO-Tahoe shines is through its active DQ or the ability to monitor your data's quality in real time. Marking which roads need remediation. According to the customized business rules that you can set. Ensuring that the data quality standards meet the requirements of your organizations. What's great is through our use of RPA. We can scale with an organization. So as you ingest more data sources we can allocate more robotic workers meaning the results will continue to be delivered in the same timely fashion you've grown used to. What's Morrisons IO-Tahoe is doing the heavy lifting on monitoring data quality. That's frees up your data experts to focus on the more strategic tasks such as remediation that augmentations and analytics developments. >> Okay, maybe Tiji, you could address this. I mean, how does all this automation change the operating model that we were talking to to Aj and Dunkin before about that? I mean, if it involves less people and more automation what else can I do in parallel? >> I'm sure the participants today will also be asking the same question. Let me start with the strategic tasks Patrick mentioned, Io-Tahoe does the heavy lifting. Freeing up data experts to act upon the data events generated by IO-Tahoe. Companies that have teams focused on manually building their inventory of the data landscape. Leads to longer turnaround times in producing actionable insights from their own data assets. Thus, diminishing the value realized by traditional methods. However, our operating model involves profiling and remediating at the same time creating a catalog data estate that can be used by business or IT accordingly. With increased automation and fewer people. Our machine learning algorithms augment the data pipeline to tag and capture the data elements into a comprehensive data catalog. As IO-Tahoe automatically catalogs the data estate in a centralized view, the data experts can partly focus on remediating the data events generated from validating against business rules. We envision that data events coupled with this drillable and searchable view will be a comprehensive one to assess the impact of bad quality data. Let's briefly look at the image on screen. For example, the view indicates that bad quality zip code data impacts the contact data which in turn impacts other related entities in systems. Now contrast that with a manually maintained spreadsheet that drowns out the main focus of your analysis. >> Tiji, how do you tag and capture bad quality data and stop that from you've mentioned these printed dependencies. How do you stop that from flowing downstream into the processes within the applications or reports? >> As IO-Tahoe builds the data catalog across source systems. We tag the elements that meet the business rule criteria while segregating the failed data examples associated with the elements that fall below a certain threshold. The elements that meet the business rule criteria are tagged to be searchable. Thus, providing an easy way to identify data elements that may flow through the system. The segregated data examples on the other hand are used by data experts to triage for the root cause. Based on the root cause potential outcomes could be one, changes in the source system to prevent that data from entering the system in the first place. Two, add data pipeline logic, to sanitize bad data from being consumed by downstream applications and reports or just accept the risk of storing bad data and address it when it meets a certain threshold. However, Dave as for your question about preventing bad quality data from flowing into the system? IO-Tahoe will not prevent it because the controls of data flowing between systems is managed outside of IO-Tahoe. Although, IO-Tahoe will alert and notify the data experts to events that indicate bad data has entered the monitored assets. Also we have redesigned our product to be modular and extensible. This allows data events generated by IO-Tahoe to be consumed by any system that wants to control the targets from bad data. Does IO-Tahoe empowers the data experts to control the bad data from flowing into their system. >> Thank you for that. So, one of the things that we've noticed, we've written about is that you've got these hyper specialized roles within the data, the centralized data organization. And wonder how do the data folks get involved here if at all, and how frequently do they get involved? Maybe Senthilnathan you could take that. >> Thank you, Dave for having me here. Well, based on whether the data element in question is in data cataloging or monitoring phase. Different data folks gets involved. When it isn't in the data cataloging stage. The data governance team, along with enterprise architecture or IT involved in setting up the data catalog. Which includes identifying the critical data elements business term identification, definition, documentation data quality rules, and data even set up data domain and business line mapping, lineage PA tracking source of truth. So on and so forth. It's typically in one time set up review certify then govern and monitor. But while when it is in the monitoring phase during any data incident or data issues IO-Tahoe broadcast data signals to the relevant data folks to act and remedy it as quick as possible. And alerts the consumption team it could be the data science, analytics, business opts are both a potential issue so that they are aware and take necessary preventative measure. Let me show you an example, critical data element from data quality dashboard view to lineage view to data 360 degree view for a zip code for conformity check. So in this case the zip code did not meet the past threshold during the technical data quality check and was identified as non-compliant item and notification was sent to the ID folks. So clicking on the zip code. Will take to the lineage view to visualize the dependent system, says that who are producers and who are the consumers. And further drilling down will take us to the detailed view, that a lot of other information's are presented to facilitate for a root cause analysis and not to take it to a final closure. >> Thank you for that. So Tiji? Patrick was talking about the as is to be. So I'm interested in how it's done now versus before. Do you need a data governance operating model for example? >> Typically a company that decides to make an inventory of the data assets would start out by manually building a spreadsheet managed by data experts of the company. What started as a draft now get break into the model of a company. This leads to loss of collaboration as each department makes a copy of their catalog for their specific needs. This decentralized approach leads to loss of uniformity which each department having different definitions which ironically needs a governance model for the data catalog itself. And as the spreadsheet grows in complexity the skill level needed to maintain. It also increases thus leading to fewer and fewer people knowing how to maintain it. About all the content that took so much time and effort to build is not searchable outside of that spreadsheet document. >> Yeah, I think you really hit the nail on my head Tiji. Now companies want to move away from the spreadsheet approach. IO-Tahoe addresses the shortcoming of the traditional approach enabling companies to achieve more with less. >> Yeah, what the customer reaction has been. We had Webster Bank, on one of the early episodes for example, I mean could they have achieved. What they did without something like active data quality and automation maybe Senthilnathan you could address that? >> Sure, It is impossible to achieve full data quality monitoring and remediation without automation or digital workers in place reality that introverts they don't have the time to do the remediation manually because they have to do an analysis conform fix on any data quality issues, as fast as possible before it gets bigger and no exception to Webster. That's why Webster implemented IO-Tahoe's active DQ to set up the business, metadata management and data quality monitoring and remediation in the Snowflake cloud data Lake. We help and building the center of excellence in the data governance, which is managing the data catalog schedule on demand and in-flight data quality checks, but Snowflake, no pipe on stream are super beneficial to achieve in flight quality checks. Then the data assumption monitoring and reporting last but not the least the time saver is persisting the non-compliant records for every data quality run within the Snowflake cloud, along with remediation script. So that during any exceptions the respect to team members is not only alerted. But also supplied with necessary scripts and tools to perform remediation right from the IO-Tahoe's Active DQ. >> Very nice. Okay guys, thanks for the demo. Great stuff. Now, if you want to learn more about the IO-Tahoe platform and how you can accelerate your adoption of Snowflake book some time with a data RPA expert all you got to do is click on the demo icon on the right of your screen and set a meeting. We appreciate you attending this latest episode of the IO-Tahoe data automation series. Look, if you missed any of the content that's all available on demand. This is Dave Vellante theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>From around the globe, but it's the cube presenting active DQ, intelligent automation for data quality brought to you by IO Tahoe. >>Now we're going to look at the role automation plays in mobilizing your data on snowflake. Let's welcome. And Duncan Turnbull who's partner sales engineer at snowflake and AIG Vihara is back CEO of IO. Tahoe is going to share his insight. Gentlemen. Welcome. >>Thank you, David. Good to have you back. Yeah, it's great to have you back >>A J uh, and it's really good to CIO Tao expanding the ecosystem so important. Um, now of course bringing snowflake and it looks like you're really starting to build momentum. I mean, there's progress that we've seen every month, month by month, over the past 12, 14 months, your seed investors, they gotta be happy. >>They are all that happy. And then I can see that we run into a nice phase of expansion here and new customers signing up. And now you're ready to go out and raise that next round of funding. I think, um, maybe think of a slight snowflake five years ago. So we're definitely on track with that. A lot of interest from investors and, um, we're right now trying to focus in on those investors that can partner with us, understand AI data and, and automation. >>So personally, I mean, you've managed a number of early stage VC funds. I think four of them, uh, you've taken several comp, uh, software companies through many funding rounds and growth and all the way to exit. So, you know how it works, you have to get product market fit, you know, you gotta make sure you get your KPIs, right. And you gotta hire the right salespeople, but, but what's different this time around, >>Uh, well, you know, the fundamentals that you mentioned though, those are never change. And, um, what we can say, what I can say that's different, that's shifted, uh, this time around is three things. One in that they used to be this kind of choice of, do we go open source or do we go proprietary? Um, now that has turned into, um, a nice hybrid model where we've really keyed into, um, you know, red hat doing something similar with Santos. And the idea here is that there is a core capability of technology that independence a platform, but it's the ability to then build an ecosystem around that made a pervade community. And that community may include customers, uh, technology partners, other tech vendors, and enabling the platform adoption so that all of those folks in that community can build and contribute, um, while still maintaining the core architecture and platform integrity, uh, at the core of it. >>And that's one thing that's changed was fitting a lot of that type of software company, um, emerge into that model, which is different from five years ago. Um, and then leveraging the cloud, um, every cloud snowflake cloud being one of them here in order to make use of what customers, uh, and customers and enterprise software are moving towards. Uh, every CIO is now in some configuration of a hybrid. Um, it is state whether those cloud multi-cloud on prem. That's just the reality. The other piece is in dealing with the CIO is legacy. So the past 15, 20 years they've purchased many different platforms, technologies, and some of those are still established and still, how do you, um, enable that CIO to make purchase while still preserving and in some cases building on and extending the, the legacy, um, material technology. So they've invested their people's time and training and financial investment into solving a problem, customer pain point, uh, with technology, but, uh, never goes out of fashion >>That never changes. You have to focus like a laser on that. And of course, uh, speaking of companies who are focused on solving problems, don't can turn bill from snowflake. You guys have really done a great job and really brilliantly addressing pain points, particularly around data warehousing, simplified that you're providing this new capability around data sharing, uh, really quite amazing. Um, Dunkin AAJ talks about data quality and customer pain points, uh, in, in enterprise. It, why is data quality been such a problem historically? >>Oh, sorry. One of the biggest challenges that's really affected by it in the past is that because to address everyone's need for using data, they've evolved all these kinds of different places to store all these different silos or data marts or all this kind of clarification of places where data lives and all of those end up with slightly different schedules to bringing data in and out. They end up with slightly different rules for transforming that data and formatting it and getting it ready and slightly different quality checks for making use of it. And this then becomes like a big problem in that these different teams are then going to have slightly different or even radically different ounces to the same kinds of questions, which makes it very hard for teams to work together, uh, on their different data problems that exist inside the business, depending on which of these silos they end up looking at and what you can do. If you have a single kind of scalable system for putting all of your data into it, you can kind of sidestep along to this complexity and you can address the data quality issues in a, in a single and a single way. >>Now, of course, we're seeing this huge trend in the market towards robotic process automation, RPA, that adoption is accelerating. Uh, you see, in UI paths, I IPO, you know, 35 plus billion dollars, uh, valuation, you know, snowflake like numbers, nice cops there for sure. Uh, agent you've coined the phrase data RPA, what is that in simple terms? >>Yeah, I mean, it was born out of, uh, seeing how in our ecosystem concern community developers and customers, uh, general business users for wanting to adopt and deploy a tar hose technology. And we could see that, um, I mean, there's not monkeying out PA we're not trying to automate that piece, but wherever there is a process that was tied into some form of a manual overhead with handovers and so on. Um, that process is something that we were able to automate with, with our ties technology and, and the deployment of AI and machine learning technologies specifically to those data processes almost as a precursor to getting into financial automation that, um, that's really where we're seeing the momentum pick up, especially in the last six months. And we've kept it really simple with snowflake. We've kind of stepped back and said, well, you know, the resource that a snowflake can leverage here is, is the metadata. So how could we turn snowflake into that repository of being the data catalog? And by the way, if you're a CIO looking to purchase a data catalog tool stop, there's no need to, um, working with snowflake, we've enable that intelligence to be gathered automatically and to be put, to use within snowflake. So reducing that manual effort, and I'm putting that data to work. And, um, and that's where we've packaged this with, uh, AI machine learning specific to those data tasks. Um, and it made sense that's, what's resonated with, with our customers. >>You know, what's interesting here, just a quick aside, as you know, I've been watching snowflake now for awhile and, and you know, of course the, the competitors come out and maybe criticize why they don't have this feature. They don't have that feature. And it's snowflake seems to have an answer. And the answer oftentimes is, well, its ecosystem ecosystem is going to bring that because we have a platform that's so easy to work with though. So I'm interested Duncan in what kind of collaborations you are enabling with high quality data. And of course, you know, your data sharing capability. >>Yeah. So I think, uh, you know, the ability to work on, on datasets, isn't just limited to inside the business itself or even between different business units. And we were kind of discussing maybe with their silos. Therefore, when looking at this idea of collaboration, we have these where we want to be >>Able to exploit data to the greatest degree possible, but we need to maintain the security, the safety, the privacy, and governance of that data. It could be quite valuable. It could be quite personal depending on the application involved. One of these novel applications that we see between organizations of data sharing is this idea of data clean rooms. And these data clean rooms are safe, collaborative spaces, which allow multiple companies or even divisions inside a company where they have particular, uh, privacy requirements to bring two or more data sets together for analysis. But without having to actually share the whole unprotected data set with each other, and this lets you to, you know, when you do this inside of snowflake, you can collaborate using standard tool sets. You can use all of our SQL ecosystem. You can use all of the data science ecosystem that works with snowflake. >>You can use all of the BI ecosystem that works with snowflake, but you can do that in a way that keeps the confidentiality that needs to be presented inside the data intact. And you can only really do these kinds of, uh, collaborations, especially across organization, but even inside large enterprises, when you have good reliable data to work with, otherwise your analysis just isn't going to really work properly. A good example of this is one of our large gaming customers. Who's an advertiser. They were able to build targeting ads to acquire customers and measure the campaign impact in revenue, but they were able to keep their data safe and secure while doing that while working with advertising partners, uh, the business impact of that was they're able to get a lifted 20 to 25% in campaign effectiveness through better targeting and actually, uh, pull through into that of a reduction in customer acquisition costs because they just didn't have to spend as much on the forms of media that weren't working for them. >>So, ha I wonder, I mean, you know, with, with the way public policy shaping out, you know, obviously GDPR started it in the States, you know, California, consumer privacy act, and people are sort of taking the best of those. And, and, and there's a lot of differentiation, but what are you seeing just in terms of, you know, the government's really driving this, this move to privacy, >>Um, government public sector, we're seeing a huge wake up an activity and, uh, across the whole piece that, um, part of it has been data privacy. Um, the other part of it is being more joined up and more digital rather than paper or form based. Um, we've all got stories of waiting in line, holding a form, taking that form to the front of the line and handing it over a desk. Now government and public sector is really looking to transform their services into being online, to show self service. Um, and that whole shift is then driving the need to, um, emulate a lot of what the commercial sector is doing, um, to automate their processes and to unlock the data from silos to put through into those, uh, those processes. Um, and another thing I can say about this is they, the need for data quality is as a Dunkin mentions underpins all of these processes, government pharmaceuticals, utilities, banking, insurance, the ability for a chief marketing officer to drive a, a loyalty campaign. >>They, the ability for a CFO to reconcile accounts at the end of the month. So do a, a, uh, a quick, accurate financial close. Um, also the, the ability of a customer operations to make sure that the customer has the right details about themselves in the right, uh, application that they can sell. So from all of that is underpinned by data and is effective or not based on the quality of that data. So whilst we're mobilizing data to snowflake cloud, the ability to then drive analytics, prediction, business processes off that cloud, um, succeeds or fails on the quality of that data. >>I mean it, and, you know, I would say, I mean, it really is table stakes. If you don't trust the data, you're not gonna use the data. The problem is it always takes so long to get to the data quality. There's all these endless debates about it. So we've been doing a fair amount of work and thinking around this idea of decentralized data, data by its very nature is decentralized, but the fault domains of traditional big data is that everything is just monolithic and the organizations monolithic technology's monolithic, the roles are very, you know, hyper specialized. And so you're hearing a lot more these days about this notion of a data fabric or what calls a data mesh. Uh, and we've kind of been leaning in to that and the ability to, to connect various data capabilities, whether it's a data warehouse or a data hub or a data Lake that those assets are discoverable, they're shareable through API APIs and they're governed on a federated basis. And you're using now bringing in a machine intelligence to improve data quality. You know, I wonder Duncan, if you could talk a little bit about Snowflake's approach to this topic. >>Sure. So I'd say that, you know, making use of all of your data, is there a key kind of driver behind these ideas that they can mesh into the data fabrics? And the idea is that you want to bring together not just your kind of strategic data, but also your legacy data and everything that you have inside the enterprise. I think I'd also like to kind of expand upon what a lot of people view as all of the data. And I think that a lot of people kind of miss that there's this whole other world of data they could be having access to, which is things like data from their business partners, their customers, their suppliers, and even stuff that's more in the public domain, whether that's, you know, demographic data or geographic or all these kinds of other types of data sources. And what I'd say to some extent is that the data cloud really facilitates the ability to share and gain access to this both kind of between organizations inside organizations. >>And you don't have to, you know, make lots of copies of the data and kind of worry about the storage and this federated, um, you know, idea of governance and all these things that it's quite complex to kind of manage this. Uh, you know, the snowflake approach really enables you to share data with your ecosystem all the world, without any latency with full control over what's shared without having to introduce new complexities or having complex attractions with APIs or software integration. The simple approach that we provide allows a relentless focus on creating the right data product to meet the challenges facing your business today. >>So, Andrea, the key here is to don't get to talking about it in my mind. Anyway, my cake takeaway is to simplicity. If you can take the complexity out of the equation, we're going to get more adoption. It really is that simple. >>Yeah, absolutely. Do you think that that whole journey, maybe five, six years ago, the adoption of data lakes was, was a stepping stone. Uh, however, the Achilles heel there was, you know, the complexity that it shifted towards consuming that data from a data Lake where there were many, many sets of data, um, to, to be able to cure rate and to, um, to consume, uh, whereas actually, you know, the simplicity of being able to go to the data that you need to do your role, whether you're in tax compliance or in customer services is, is key. And, you know, listen for snowflake by auto. One thing we know for sure is that our customers are super small and they're very capable. They're they're data savvy and know, want to use whichever tool and embrace whichever, um, cloud platform that is gonna reduce the barriers to solving. What's complex about that data, simplifying that and using, um, good old fashioned SQL, um, to access data and to build products from it to exploit that data. So, um, simplicity is, is key to it to allow people to, to, to make use of that data. And CIO is recognize that >>So Duncan, the cloud obviously brought in this notion of dev ops, um, and new methodologies and things like agile that brought that's brought in the notion of data ops, which is a very hot topic right now. Um, basically dev ops applies to data about how D how does snowflake think about this? How do you facilitate that methodology? >>Yeah, sorry. I agree with you absolutely. That they drops takes these ideas of agile development of >>Agile delivery and of the kind of dev ops world that we've seen just rise and rise, and it applies them to the data pipeline, which is somewhere where it kind of traditionally hasn't happened. And it's the same kinds of messages as we see in the development world, it's about delivering faster development, having better repeatability and really getting towards that dream of the data-driven enterprise, you know, where you can answer people's data questions, they can make better business decisions. And we have some really great architectural advantages that allow us to do things like allow cloning of data sets without having to copy them, allows us to do things like time travel so we can see what data looked like at some point in the past. And this lets you kind of set up both your own kind of little data playpen as a clone without really having to copy all of that data. >>So it's quick and easy, and you can also, again, with our separation of storage and compute, you can provision your own virtual warehouse for dev usage. So you're not interfering with anything to do with people's production usage of this data. So the, these ideas, the scalability, it just makes it easy to make changes, test them, see what the effect of those changes are. And we've actually seen this. You were talking a lot about partner ecosystems earlier. Uh, the partner ecosystem has taken these ideas that are inside snowflake and they've extended them. They've integrated them with, uh, dev ops and data ops tooling. So things like version control and get an infrastructure automation and things like Terraform. And they've kind of built that out into more of a data ops products that, that you can, you can make yourself so we can see there's a huge impact of, of these ideas coming into the data world. >>We think we're really well-placed to take advantage to them. The partner ecosystem is doing a great job with doing that. And it really allows us to kind of change that operating model for data so that we don't have as much emphasis on like hierarchy and change windows and all these kinds of things that are maybe use as a lot of fashioned. And we kind of taking the shift from this batch data integration into, you know, streaming continuous data pipelines in the cloud. And this kind of gets you away from like a once a week or once a month change window, if you're really unlucky to, you know, pushing changes, uh, in a much more rapid fashion as the needs of the business change. >>I mean, those hierarchical organizational structures, uh, w when we apply those to begin to that, what it actually creates the silos. So if you're going to be a silo Buster, which aji look at you guys in silo busters, you've got to put data in the hands of the domain experts, the business people, they know what data they want, if they have to go through and beg and borrow for a new data sets, et cetera. And so that's where automation becomes so key. And frankly, the technology should be an implementation detail, not the dictating factor. I wonder if you could comment on this. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think, um, making the, the technologies more accessible to the general business users >>Or those specialists business teams that, um, that's the key to unlocking is it is interesting to see is as people move from organization to organization where they've had those experiences operating in a hierarchical sense, I want to break free from that and, um, or have been exposed to, um, automation, continuous workflows, um, change is continuous in it. It's continuous in business, the market's continuously changing. So having that flow across the organization of work, using key components, such as get hub, similar to what you drive process Terraform to build in, um, code into the process, um, and automation and with a high Tahoe leveraging all the metadata from across those fragmented sources is, is, is good to say how those things are coming together. And watching people move from organization to organization say, Hey, okay, I've got a new start. I've got my first hundred days to impress my, my new manager. >>Uh, what kind of an impact can I, um, bring to this? And quite often we're seeing that as, you know, let me take away the good learnings from how to do it, or how not to do it from my previous role. And this is an opportunity for me to, to bring in automation. And I'll give you an example, David, you know, recently started working with a, a client in financial services. Who's an asset manager, uh, managing financial assets. They've grown over the course of the last 10 years through M and a, and each of those acquisitions have bought with it tactical data. It's saying instead of data of multiple CRM systems now multiple databases, multiple bespoke in-house created applications. And when the new CIO came in and had a look at those well, you know, yes, I want to mobilize my data. Yes, I need to modernize my data state because my CEO is now looking at these crypto assets that are on the horizon and the new funds that are emerging that around digital assets and crypto assets. >>But in order to get to that where absolutely data underpins and is the core asset, um, cleaning up that, that legacy situation mobilizing the relevant data into the Safelite cloud platform, um, is where we're giving time back, you know, that is now taking a few weeks, whereas that transitioned to mobilize that data, start with that, that new clean slate to build upon a new business as a, a digital crypto asset manager, as well as the legacy, traditional financial assets, bonds stocks, and fixed income assets, you name it, uh, is where we're starting to see a lot of innovation. >>Yeah. Tons of innovation. I love the crypto examples and FTS are exploding and, you know, let's face it, traditional banks are getting disrupted. Uh, and so I also love this notion of data RPA. I, especially because I've done a lot of work in the RPA space. And, and I want to, what I would observe is that the, the early days of RPA, I call it paving the cow path, taking existing processes and applying scripts, get letting software robots, you know, do its thing. And that was good because it reduced, you know, mundane tasks, but really where it's evolved is a much broader automation agenda. People are discovering new, new ways to completely transform their processes. And I see a similar, uh, analogy for data, the data operating model. So I'm wonder whenever you think about that, how a customer really gets started bringing this to their ecosystem, their data life cycles. >>Sure. Yeah. So step one is always the same is figuring out for the CIO, the chief data officer, what data do I have, um, and that's increasingly something that they want towards a mate, so we can help them there and, and do that automated data discovery, whether that is documents in the file, share backup archive in a relational data store, in a mainframe really quickly hydrating that and bringing that intelligence, the forefront of, of what do I have, and then it's the next step of, well, okay. Now I want to continually monitor and curate that intelligence with the platform that I've chosen. Let's say snowflake, um, in order such that I can then build applications on top of that platform to serve my, my internal, external customer needs and the automation around classifying data reconciliation across different fragmented data silos, building that in those insights into snowflake. >>Um, as you say, a little later on where we're talking about data quality, active DQ, allowing us to reconcile data from different sources, as well as look at the integrity of that data. Um, so they can go on to remediation, you know, I, I wanna, um, harness and leverage, um, techniques around traditional RPA. Um, but to get to that stage, I need to fix the data. So remediating publishing the data in snowflake, uh, allowing analysis to be formed performance snowflake. Th those are the key steps that we see and just shrinking that timeline into weeks, giving the organization that time back means they're spending more time on their customer and solving their customer's problem, which is where we want them to be. >>This is the brilliance of snowflake actually, you know, Duncan is, I've talked to him, then what does your view about this and your other co-founders and it's really that focus on simplicity. So, I mean, that's, you, you picked a good company to join my opinion. So, um, I wonder if you could, you know, talk about some of the industry sectors that are, again, going to gain the most from, from data RPA, I mean, traditional RPA, if I can use that term, you know, a lot of it was back office, a lot of, you know, financial w what are the practical applications where data RPA is going to impact, you know, businesses and, and the outcomes that we can expect. >>Yes, sir. So our drive is, is really to, to make that, um, business general user's experience of RPA simpler and, and using no code to do that, uh, where they've also chosen snowflake to build that their cloud platform. They've got the combination then of using a relatively simple script scripting techniques, such as SQL, uh, without no code approach. And the, the answer to your question is whichever sector is looking to mobilize their data. Uh, it seems like a cop-out, but to give you some specific examples, David, um, in banking where, uh, customers are looking to modernize their banking systems and enable better customer experience through, through applications and digital apps. That's where we're, we're seeing a lot of traction, uh, and this approach to, to pay RPA to data, um, health care, where there's a huge amount of work to do to standardize data sets across providers, payers, patients, uh, and it's an ongoing, um, process there for, for retail, um, helping to, to build that immersive customer experience. >>So recommending next best actions, um, providing an experience that is going to drive loyalty and retention, that's, that's dependent on understanding what that customer's needs intent, uh, being out to provide them with the content or the outfit at that point in time, or all data dependent utilities is another one great overlap there with, with snowflake where, you know, helping utilities, telecoms energy, water providers to build services on that data. And this is where the ecosystem just continues to, to expand. If we, if we're helping our customers turn their data into services for, for their ecosystem, that's, that's exciting. And they were more so exciting than insurance, which we always used to, um, think back to, uh, when insurance used to be very dull and mundane, actually, that's where we're seeing a huge amounts of innovation to create new flexible products that are priced to the day to the situation and, and risk models being adaptive when the data changes, uh, on, on events or circumstances. So across all those sectors that they're all mobilizing that data, they're all moving in some way, shape or form to a, a multi-cloud, um, set up with their it. And I think with, with snowflake and without Tahoe, being able to accelerate that and make that journey simple and as complex is, uh, is why we found such a good partner here. >>All right. Thanks for that. And then thank you guys. Both. We gotta leave it there. Uh, really appreciate Duncan you coming on and Aja best of luck with the fundraising. >>We'll keep you posted. Thanks, David. All right. Great. >>Okay. Now let's take a look at a short video. That's going to help you understand how to reduce the steps around your data ops. Let's watch.

(upbeat music), (logo pop up) >> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE. Presenting active DQ intelligent automation for data quality brought to you by IO-Tahoe. >> Are you ready to see active DQ on Snowflake in action? Let's get into the show and tell him, do the demo. With me or Tiji Matthew, the Data Solutions Engineer at IO-Tahoe. Also joining us is Patrick Zeimet Data Solutions Engineer at IO-Tahoe and Senthilnathan Karuppaiah, who's the Head of Production Engineering at IO-Tahoe. Patrick, over to you let's see it. >> Hey Dave, thank you so much. Yeah, we've seen a huge increase in the number of organizations interested in Snowflake implementation. Were looking for an innovative, precise and timely method to ingest their data into Snowflake. And where we are seeing a lot of success is a ground up method utilizing both IO-Tahoe and Snowflake. To start you define your as is model. By leveraging IO-Tahoe to profile your various data sources and push the metadata to Snowflake. Meaning we create a data catalog within Snowflake for a centralized location to document items such as source system owners allowing you to have those key conversations and understand the data's lineage, potential blockers and what data is readily available for ingestion. Once the data catalog is built you have a much more dynamic strategies surrounding your Snowflake ingestion. And what's great is that while you're working through those key conversations IO-Tahoe will maintain that metadata push and partnered with Snowflake ability to version the data. You can easily incorporate potential scheme changes along the way. Making sure that the information that you're working on stays as current as the systems that you're hoping to integrate with Snowflake. >> Nice, Patrick I wonder if you could address how you IO-Tahoe Platform Scales and maybe in what way it provides a competitive advantage for customers. >> Great question where IO-Tahoe shines is through its active DQ or the ability to monitor your data's quality in real time. Marking which roads need remediation. According to the customized business rules that you can set. Ensuring that the data quality standards meet the requirements of your organizations. What's great is through our use of RPA. We can scale with an organization. So as you ingest more data sources we can allocate more robotic workers meaning the results will continue to be delivered in the same timely fashion you've grown used to. What's Morrisons IO-Tahoe is doing the heavy lifting on monitoring data quality. That's frees up your data experts to focus on the more strategic tasks such as remediation that augmentations and analytics developments. >> Okay, maybe Tiji, you could address this. I mean, how does all this automation change the operating model that we were talking to to Aj and Dunkin before about that? I mean, if it involves less people and more automation what else can I do in parallel? >> I'm sure the participants today will also be asking the same question. Let me start with the strategic task. Patrick mentioned IO-Tahoe does the heavy lifting. Freeing up data experts to act upon the data events generated by IO-Tahoe. Companies that have teams focused on manually building their inventory of the data landscape. Leads to longer turnaround times in producing actionable insights from their own data assets. Thus, diminishing the value realized by traditional methods. However, our operating model involves profiling and remediating at the same time creating a catalog data estate that can be used by business or IT accordingly. With increased automation and fewer people. Our machine learning algorithms augment the data pipeline to tag and capture the data elements into a comprehensive data catalog. As IO-Tahoe automatically catalogs the data estate in a centralized view, the data experts can partly focus on remediating the data events generated from validating against business rules. We envision that data events coupled with this drillable and searchable view will be a comprehensive one to assess the impact of bad quality data. Let's briefly look at the image on screen. For example, the view indicates that bad quality zip code data impacts the contact data which in turn impacts other related entities in systems. Now contrast that with a manually maintained spreadsheet that drowns out the main focus of your analysis. >> Tiji, how do you tag and capture bad quality data and stop that from you've mentioned these printed dependencies. How do you stop that from flowing downstream into the processes within the applications or reports? >> As IO-Tahoe builds the data catalog across source systems. We tag the elements that meet the business rule criteria while segregating the failed data examples associated with the elements that fall below a certain threshold. The elements that meet the business rule criteria are tagged to be searchable. Thus, providing an easy way to identify data elements that may flow through the system. The segregated data examples on the other hand are used by data experts to triage for the root cause. Based on the root cause potential outcomes could be one, changes in the source system to prevent that data from entering the system in the first place. Two, add data pipeline logic, to sanitize bad data from being consumed by downstream applications and reports or just accept the risk of storing bad data and address it when it meets a certain threshold. However, Dave as for your question about preventing bad quality data from flowing into the system? IO-Tahoe will not prevent it because the controls of data flowing between systems is managed outside of IO-Tahoe. Although, IO-Tahoe will alert and notify the data experts to events that indicate bad data has entered the monitored assets. Also we have redesigned our product to be modular and extensible. This allows data events generated by IO-Tahoe to be consumed by any system that wants to control the targets from bad data. Does IO-Tahoe empowers the data experts to control the bad data from flowing into their system. >> Thank you for that. So, one of the things that we've noticed, we've written about is that you've got these hyper specialized roles within the data, the centralized data organization. And wonder how do the data folks get involved here if at all, and how frequently do they get involved? Maybe Senthilnathan you could take that. >> Thank you, Dave for having me here. Well, based on whether the data element in question is in data cataloging or monitoring phase. Different data folks gets involved. When it doesn't the data cataloging stage. The data governance team, along with enterprise architecture or IT involved in setting up the data catalog. Which includes identifying the critical data elements business term identification, definition, documentation data quality rules, and data even set up data domain and business line mapping, lineage PA tracking source of truth. So on and so forth. It's typically in one time set up review certify then govern and monitor. But while when it is in the monitoring phase during any data incident or data issues IO-Tahoe broadcast data signals to the relevant data folks to act and remedy it as quick as possible. And alerts the consumption team it could be the data science, analytics, business opts are both a potential issue so that they are aware and take necessary preventative measure. Let me show you an example, critical data element from data quality dashboard view to lineage view to data 360 degree view for a zip code for conformity check. So in this case the zip code did not meet the past threshold during the technical data quality check and was identified as non-compliant item and notification was sent to the ID folks. So clicking on the zip code. Will take to the lineage view to visualize the dependent system, says that who are producers and who are the consumers. And further drilling down will take us to the detailed view, that a lot of other information's are presented to facilitate for a root cause analysis and not to take it to a final closure. >> Thank you for that. So Tiji? Patrick was talking about the as is to be. So I'm interested in how it's done now versus before. Do you need a data governance operating model for example? >> Typically a company that decides to make an inventory of the data assets would start out by manually building a spreadsheet managed by data experts of the company. What started as a draft now get break into the model of a company. This leads to loss of collaboration as each department makes a copy of their catalog for their specific needs. This decentralized approach leads to loss of uniformity which each department having different definitions which ironically needs a governance model for the data catalog itself. And as the spreadsheet grows in complexity the skill level needed to maintain. It also increases thus leading to fewer and fewer people knowing how to maintain it. About all the content that took so much time and effort to build is not searchable outside of that spreadsheet document. >> Yeah, I think you really hit the nail on my head Tiji. Now companies want to move away from the spreadsheet approach. IO-Tahoe addresses the shortcoming of the traditional approach enabling companies to achieve more with less. >> Yeah, what the customer reaction has been. We had Webster Bank, on one of the early episodes for example, I mean could they have achieved. What they did without something like active data quality and automation maybe Senthilnathan you could address that? >> Sure, It is impossible to achieve full data quality monitoring and remediation without automation or digital workers in place reality that introverts they don't have the time to do the remediation manually because they have to do an analysis conform fix on any data quality issues, as fast as possible before it gets bigger and no exception to Webster. That's why Webster implemented IO-Tahoe's active DQ to set up the business, metadata management and data quality monitoring and remediation in the Snowflake cloud data Lake. We help and building the center of excellence in the data governance, which is managing the data catalog schedule on demand and in-flight data quality checks, but Snowflake, no pipe on stream are super beneficial to achieve in flight quality checks. Then the data assumption monitoring and reporting last but not the least the time saver is persisting the non-compliant records for every data quality run within the Snowflake cloud, along with remediation script. So that during any exceptions the respect to team members is not only alerted. But also supplied with necessary scripts and tools to perform remediation right from the IO-Tahoe's Active DQ. >> Very nice. Okay guys, thanks for the demo. Great stuff. Now, if you want to learn more about the IO-Tahoe platform and how you can accelerate your adoption of Snowflake book some time with a data RPA expert all you got to do is click on the demo icon on the right of your screen and set a meeting. We appreciate you attending this latest episode of the IO-Tahoe data automation series. Look, if you missed any of the content that's all available on demand. This is Dave Vellante theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the special presentation from theCUBE, where we're exploring the future of cloud and its business impact in the coming decade, kind of where we've come from and where we're going. My name is Dave Vellante, and with me is a CIO/CTO/COO, and longtime colleague, Dan Sheehan. Hello, Dan, how're you doing? >> Hey, Dave, how are you doing? Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. So folks, Dan has been in the technology industry for a number of years. He's overseen, you know, large-multi, tens of millions of dollar ERP application development efforts, He was a CIO of a marketing, you know, direct mail company. Dan, we met at ADVO, it seems like such a (snickers) long time ago. >> Yeah, that was a long time ago, back in Connecticut. Back in the early 2000s. >> Yeah, ancient days. But pretty serious data for back then, you know, the early 2000s, and then you did a six-year stint as a EVP and CIO at Dunkin' Brands. I remember I came out to see you when I was starting Wikibon and trying to understand. >> Oh yeah. >> You know, what the CIOs cared about. You were so helpful and thanks for that. And that was a big deal. I mean, Dunkin', 17,000 points of distribution. I mean, that was sort of a complicated situation, right? >> Oh yeah. >> So, great experience. >> I mean, when you get involved with franchisees and trying to make everybody happy, yes, that was a lot of fun. >> And then you had a number of other roles, one was as COO at Modell's, and then to fast-forward, Beacon Health. You were EVP and CIO there. And you also, it looked like you had a kind of a business and operational role. You helped the company get acquired by Anthem Blue Cross. So awesome, congrats on that. That must've been a great experience. >> It was. A year of my life, yes. (both laugh) >> You're still standing. So anyway, you can see Dan, he's like this multi-tool star, he's seen a lot of changes in the technology business. So Dan, again, welcome back. Dan Sheehan. >> Oh, thank you. >> So when you started in your career, you know, there was no cloud, right? I mean, you had to do everything. It's funny, I remember I was... You probably know Bill Rucci, CIO of Hartford Steam Boiler. I remember we were talking one day, and this again was pre-cloud and he said, you know, I'm thinking, do I really need to manage my own email? I mean, back then, we did everything. So you had to provision infrastructure so you could write apps, and that was important. That frustrated CFOs, but it was a necessary piece of the value chain. So how have you seen that sort of IT value contribution shift over the years? Let's start there. >> Ah, well, I think it comes down to demand versus capacity. If you look at where companies want to go, they want to do a lot with technology. Technology has taken on a larger role. It's no longer and has not been a, so to speak, cost center. So I think the demand for making change and driving a company forward or reducing costs, there are other executives, peers to the CIO, to the CTO that are looking to do more, and when it comes to doing more, that means more demand, and you step back and you look at what the CIO has for capacity. Looking at Quick Solution's data, solutions in the cloud is appealing, and there are, you know, times where other functions talk to a vendor and see that they can get a vertical solution done pretty quickly. They go off and take that on, or it could be, you know, a ServiceNow capability that you want to implement across the company, and you do that just like an ERP type of roll up. But the bottom line is there are solutions out there that have pushed, I would say the IT organization to look at their capacity versus demand, and sometimes you can get things done quicker with a cloud type of solution. >> So how did you look at that shadow IT as a CIO? Was it something that kind of ticked you off or like you're sort of implying that it made you better? >> Well, I think it does ultimately make you better, but I think you have to partner with the functions because if you don't, you get these types of scenarios, and I've been involved in these just as well. You are busy with, you know, fulfilling your objectives as the leader of IT, and then you get a knock on the door from, let's say marketing or operations, and they say, hey, we just purchased this X solution and we want to integrate it with A, B and C. Well, that was not on the budget or on the IT roadmap or the IT strategy that was linked to the IT, I'm sorry, to the business strategy, and all of a sudden now you have more demand versus the capacity, and then you have to go start reprioritizing. So it's more of, yeah, kind of disrupted, but at the same time, it pushed, you know, the needle of the company forward. But it's all about just working together to make it happen. And that's a lot of, you know, hard conversations when you have to start reprioritizing capacity. >> Well, so let's talk about that alignment. I mean, there's always been a sort of a schism between IT and its ability to deliver, manage demand, and the business will always want you to go faster. They want IT to develop the systems, you know, of course, for less and then they want you to eat the cost of maintaining them, so (chuckles) there's been that tension. But in many ways, that CIO's job is alignment. I mean, it seems to me anyway that schism has certainly narrowed and the cloud's been been part of that, but what do you see as that trajectory over the years and where do you see it going? >> Well, I think it's going to continue to move forward, and depending upon the service, you know, companies are going to take advantage of those services. So yes, some of the non-mission critical capabilities that you would want to move out to the cloud or have somebody else do it, so to speak, that's going to continue to happen because they should be able to do it a lot cheaper than you can, just like use you mentioned a few moments ago about email. I did not want to maintain, you know, exchange service and keeping that all up and running. I moved quickly to Microsoft 365 and that's been a world of difference, but that's just one example. But when you have mission critical apps, you're going to have to make a decision if you want to continue to house them in-house or push them out to an AWS and house them there. So maybe you don't need a large data center and you can utilize some of the best and brightest around security, around managing size of the infrastructure and getting some of their engineering help, which can help. So it just depends upon the application, so to speak, or a function that you're trying to support. And you got to really look at your enterprise architecture and see where that makes sense. So you got to have a hybrid. I see and I have, you know, managed towards a hybrid way of looking at your architecture. >> Okay, so obviously the cloud played a role in that change, and of course, you were in healthcare too so you had to be somewhat careful, >> Yep. >> With the cloud. But you mentioned this hybrid architecture. I mean, from a technologist standpoint and a business standpoint, what do you want out of, you know, you hear a hybrid, multi, all the buzz words. What are you looking for then? Is it a consistent experience? Is it a consistent security? Or is it sort of more horses for courses, where you're trying to run a workload in the right place? What's your philosophy on that? >> Well, I mean, all those things matter, but you're looking at obviously, cost, you're looking at engagement. How does these services engage? Whether it's internal employees or external clients who you're servicing, and you want to get to a cost structure that makes sense in terms of managing those services as well as those mission critical apps. So it comes down to looking at the dollars and cents, as well as what type of services you can provide. In many cases, if you can provide a cheaper and increase the overall services, you're going to go down that path. And just like we did with ServiceNow, I did that at Beacon and also at DentaQuest two healthcare companies. We were able to, you know, remove duplicated, so to speak, ticketing systems and move to one and allow a better experience for the internal employee. They can do self-service, they can look at metrics, they can see status, real-time status on where their request was. So that made a bigger difference. So you engaged the employee differently, better, and then you also reduce your costs. >> Well, how about the economics? I mean, your experience that cloud is cheaper. You hear a lot of the, you know, a lot of the legacy players are saying, oh, no cloud's super expensive. Wait till you get that Amazon bill. (laughs) What's the truth? >> Well, I think there's still a lot of maturing that needs to go on, because unfortunately, depending upon the company, so let's use a couple of examples. So let's look at a startup. You look at a startup, they're probably going to look at all their services being in the cloud and being delivered through a SaaS model, and that's going to be an expense, that's going to be most likely a per user expense per month or per year, however, they structure the contract. And right out of the gate, that's going to be a top line expense that has to be managed going forward. Now you look at companies that have been around for a while, and two of the last companies I worked with, had a lot of technical debt, had on-prem applications. And when you started to look at how to move forward, you know, you had CFOs that were used to going to buy software, capitalize in that software over, you know, five years, sometimes three years, and using that investment to be capitalized, and that would sit below the line, so to speak. Now, don't get me wrong, you still have to pay for it, it's just a matter of where it sits. And when you're running a company and you're looking at the financials, not having that cost on your operational expenses, so to speak, if you're not looking at the depreciation through those numbers, that was advantageous to a CFO many years ago. Now you come to them and say, hey, we're going to move forward with a new HR system, and it's all increasing the expense because there's nothing else to capitalize. Those are different conversations, and all of a sudden your expenses have increased, and yes, you have to make sure that the businesses behind you, with respects to an ROI and supporting it. >> Yeah, so as long as the value is there, and that's a part of the alignment. I want to ask you about cloud pricing strategies because you mentioned ServiceNow, you know, Salesforce is in there, Workday. If you look at the way these guys price, it's really not true cloud pricing in a way, cause they're going to have you sign up for an annual license, you know, a lot of times you got pay up front, or if you want a discount, you're going to have to sign up for two years or three years. But now you see guys like Snowflake coming in, you know, big high-profile IPO. They actually charge you on a consumption-based model. What are your thoughts on that? Do you see that as sort of a trend in the coming decade? >> No, I absolutely think it's going to be on a trend, because consumption means more transactions and more transactions means more computing, and they're going to look at charging it just like any other utility charges. So yes, I see that trend continuing. Did a big deal with UltiPro HR, and yeah, that was all based upon user head count, but they were talking about looking at their payroll and changing their costing on payroll down the road. With their merger, or they went from being a public company to a private company, and now looking to merge with Kronos. I can see where time and attendance and payroll will stop being looked at as a transaction, right? It's a weekly or bi-weekly or monthly, however the company pays, and yes, there is dollars to be made there. >> Well, so let me ask you as a CIO and a business, you know, COO. One of the challenges that you hear with the cloud is okay, if I get my Amazon bill, it's something that Snowflake has talked about, where you know, to me, it's the ideal model, but on the other hand, the transparency is not necessarily there. You don't know what it's going to be at the end of (mumbles) Would you rather have more certainty as to what that bill's going to look like? Or would you rather have it aligned with consumption and the value to the business? >> Well, you know, that's a great question, because yes, I mean, budgets are usually built upon a number that's fixed. Now, no, don't get me wrong. I mean, when I look at the wide area network, the cost for internet services, yes, sometimes we need to increase and that means an increase in the overall cost, but that consumption, that transactional, that's going to be a different way of having to go ahead and budget. You have to budget now for the maximum transactions you anticipate with a growth of a company, and then you need to take a look at that you know, if you're budgeting. I know we were on a calendar fiscal year, so we started up budgeting process in August and we finalized at sometime in the end of October, November for the proceeding year, and if that's the case, you need to get a little bit better on what your consumptions are going to be, because especially if you're a public company, going out on the street with some numbers, those numbers could vary based upon a high transaction volume and the cost, and maybe you're not getting the results on the top end, on the revenue side. So I think, yeah, it's going to be an interesting dilemma as we move forward. >> Yeah. So, I mean, it comes back to alignment, doesn't it? I mean, I know in our small example, you know, we're doing now, we were used to be physical events with theCUBE, now it's all virtual events and our Amazon bill is going through the roof because we're supporting all these users on these virtual events, and our CFO's like, well, look at this Amazon bill, and you say, yeah, but look at the revenue, it's supporting. And so to your point, if the revenue is there, if the ROI is there, then it makes sense. You can kind of live with it because you're growing with it, but if not, then you really got to question it. >> Yeah. So you got to need to partner with your financial folks and come up with better modeling around some of these transactional services and build that into your modeling for your budget and for your, you know, your top line and your expenses. >> So what do you think of some of these SaaS companies? I mean, you've had a lot of experience. They're really coming at it from largely an application perspective, although you've managed a lot of infrastructure too. But we've talked about ServiceNow. They've kind of mopped up in the ITSM. I mean, there's nobody left. I mean, ServiceNow has sort of taken over the whole (mumbles) You know, Salesforce, >> Yeah. >> I guess, sort of similarly, sort of dominating the CRM space. You hear a lot of complaints now about, you know, ServiceNow pricing. There is somebody the other day called them the Oracle of ITSM. Do you see that potentially getting disrupted by maybe some cloud native developers who are developing tools on top? You see in, like, for instance, Datadog going after Splunk and LogRhythm. And there seem to be examples popping up. Well, what's your take on all this? >> No, absolutely. I think cause, you know, when we were talking about back when I first met you, when I was at the ADVO, I mean, Oracle was on it's, you know, rise with their suite of capabilities, and then before you know it, other companies were popping up and took over, whether it was Firstbeat, PeopleSoft, Workday, and then other companies that just came into play, cause it's going to happen because people are going to get, you know, frustrated. And yes, I did get a little frustrated with ServiceNow when I was looking at a couple of new modules because the pricing was a little bit higher than it was when I first started out. So yes, when you're good and you're able to provide the right services, they're going to start pricing it that way. But yes, I think you're going to get smaller players, and then those smaller players will start grabbing up, so to speak, market share and get into it. I mean, look at Salesforce. I mean, there are some pretty good CRMs. I mean, even, ServiceNow is getting into the CRM space big time, as well as a company like Sugar and a few others that will continue to push Salesforce to look at their pricing as well as their services. I mean, they're out there buying up companies, but you just can't automatically assume that they're going to, you know, integrate day one, and it's going to take time for some of their services to come and become reality, so to speak. So yes, I agree that there will be players out there that will push these lager SaaS companies, and hopefully get the right behaviors and right pricing. >> I've said for years, Dan, that I've predicted that ServiceNow and Salesforce are on a collision course. It didn't really happen, but it's starting to, because ServiceNow, the valuation is so huge. They have to grow into other markets much in the same way that Salesforce has. So maybe we'll see McDermott start doing some acquisitions. It's maybe a little tougher for ServiceNow given their whole multi-instance architecture and sort of their own cloud. That's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. >> Yeah. Yeah. You got to play in that type of architecture, let's put it that way. Yes, it'll be interesting to see how that does play out. >> What are your thoughts on the big hyperscalers; Amazon, Microsoft, Google? What's the right strategy there? Do you go all in on one cloud like AWS or are you more worried about lock-in? Do you want to spread your bets across clouds? How real is multi-cloud? Is it a strategy or more sort of a reality that you get M and A and you got shadow IT? What's your take on all that? >> Yeah, that's a great question because it does make you think a little differently around you know, where to put all your eggs. And it's getting tougher because you do want to distribute those eggs out to multiple vendors, if you would, service providers. But, you know, for instance we had a situation where we were building a brand new business intelligence data warehouse, and we decided to go with Microsoft as its core database. And we did a bake-off on business analytic tools. We had like seven of them at Beacon and we ended up choosing Microsoft's Power BI, and a good part of that reason, not all of it, but a good part of it was because we felt they did everything else that the Tableau's and others did, but, you know, Microsoft would work to give, you know, additional capabilities to Power BI if it's sitting on their database. So we had to take that into consideration, and we did and we ended up going with Power BI. With Amazon, I think Amazon's a little bit more, I'll put it horizontal, whereby they can help you out because of the database and just kind of be in that data center, if you would, and be able to move some of your homegrown applications, some of your technical debt over to that, I'll say cloud. But it'll get interesting because when you talk about integration, when you talk about moving forward with a new functionality, yeah, you have to put your architecture in a somewhat of a center point, and then look to see what is easier, cheaper, cost-effective, but, you know, what's happening to my functionality over the next three to five years. >> But it sounds like you'd subscribe to a horses for courses approach, where you put the right workload in the right cloud, as opposed to saying, I'm going to go all in on one cloud and it's going to be, you know, same skillset, same security, et cetera. It sounds like you'd lean toward the former versus going all in with, you know, MANO cloud. >> Yeah, I guess again, when I look at the architecture. There will be major, you know, breaks if you would. So yes, there is somewhat of a, you know, movement to you know, go with one horse. But, you know, I could see looking back at the Beacon architecture that we could, you know, lift and put the claims adjudication capabilities up in Amazon and then have that conduct, you know, the left to right claims processing, and then those transactions could then be moved into Microsoft's data warehouse. So, you know, there is ways to go about spreading it out so that you don't have all those eggs in one basket and that you reduce the amount of risk, but that weighed heavily on my mind. >> So I was going to ask you, how much of a factor lock-in is it? It sounds like it's more, you know, spreading your eggs around, as you say and reducing your risk as opposed to, you know, worried about lock-in, but as a CIO, how worried are you about lock-in? Where is that fit in the sort of decision tree? >> Ah, I mean, I would say it's up there, but unfortunately, there's no number one, there's like five number ones, if you would. So it's definitely up there and it's something to consider when you're looking at, like you said, the cost, risk integration, and then time. You know, sometimes you're up against the time. And again, security, like I said. Security is a big key in healthcare. And actually security overall, whether you're retail, you're going to always have situations no matter what industry, you got to protect the business. >> Yeah, so I want to ask you about security. That's the other number one. Well, you might've been a defacto CSO, but kind of when we started in this business security was the problem of the security teams, and you know, it's now a team sport. But in thinking about the cloud and security, how big of a concern is the cloud? Is it just more, you're looking for consistency and be able to apply the corporate edicts? Are there other concerns like the shared responsibility model? What are your thoughts on security in the cloud? >> Well, it probably goes back to again, the industry, but when I looked at the past five years in healthcare, doing a lot of work with the CMS and Medicaid, Medicare, they had certain requirements and certain restrictions. So we had to make sure that we follow those requirements. And when you got audited, you needed to make sure that you can show that you are adhering to their requirements. So over the past, probably two years with Amazon's government capabilities that those restrictions have changed, but we were always looking to make sure that we owned and managed how we manage the provider and member data, because yes, we did not want to have obviously a breach, but we wanted to make sure we were following the guidelines, whether it's state or federal, and then and even some cases healthcare guidelines around managing that data. So yes, top of mind, making sure that we're protecting, you know, in my case so we had 37 million members, patients, and we needed to make sure that if we did put it in the cloud or if it was on-prem, that it was being protected. And as you mentioned, recently come off of, I was going to say Amazon, but it was an acquisition. That company that was looking at us doing the due diligence, they gave us thumbs up because of how we were managing the data at the lowest point and all the different levels within the architecture. So Anthem who did the acquisition, had a breach back in, I think it was 2015. That was top of mind for them. We had more questions during the due diligence around security than any other functional area. So it is critical, and I think slowly, some of that type of data will get up into the cloud, but again, it's going to go through some massive risk management and security measures, and audits, because how fragile that is. >> Yeah, I mean, that could be a deal breaker in an acquisition. I got two other questions for you. One is, you know, I know you follow the technologies very closely, but there's all the buzz words, the digital transformation, the AI, these new SaaS models that we talked about. You know, a lot of CIOs tell me, look, Dave, get the business right and the technology is the easy part. It's people, it's process. But what are you seeing in terms of some of this new stuff coming out, there's machine learning, you know, obviously massive scale, new cloud workloads. Anything out there that really excites you and that you could see on the horizon that could be, you know, really change agents for the next decade? >> Yeah, I think we did some RPA, robotics on some of the tasks that, you know, where, you know, if the analysis types of situations. So I think RPA is going to be a game changer as it continues to evolve. But I agree with what you just said. Doing this for quite a while now, it still comes down to the people. I can get the technology to do what it needs to do as long as I have the right requirements, so that goes back to people. Making sure we have the partnership that goes back to leadership and the people. And then the change management aspects. Right out of the gate, you should be worrying about how is it going to affect and then the adoption and engagement. Because adoption is critical, because you can go create the best thing you think from a technology perspective, but if it doesn't get used correctly, it's not worth the investment. So I agree, whether it's digital transformation or innovation, it still comes down to understanding the business model and injecting and utilizing technology to grow or reduce costs, grow the business or reduce costs. >> Yeah, usage really means value. Sorry, my last question. What's the one thing that vendors shouldn't do? What's the vendor no-no that'll alienate CIO's? >> To this day, I still don't like, there's a company out there that starts with an O. I still don't like it to that, every single technology module, if you would, has a separate sales rep. I want to work with my strategic partners and have one relationship and that single point of contact that spark and go back into their company and bring me whatever it is that we're looking at so that I don't get, you know, for instance from that company that starts with an O, you know, 17 calls from 17 different sales reps trying to sell me 17 different things. So what irritates me is, you know, you have a company that has a lot of breadth, a lot of, you know, capability and functional, you know that I may want. Give me one person that I can deal with. So a single point of contact, then that makes my life a lot easier. >> Well, Dan Sheehan, I really appreciate you spending some time on theCUBE, it's always a pleasure catching up with you and really appreciate you sharing your insights with our audience. Thank you. >> Oh, thank you, David. I appreciate the opportunity. You have a great day. >> All right. You too. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE on Cloud. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after the short break. Awesome, Dan.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting Cuban cloud brought to you by silicon angle, everybody to Cuban cloud. My name is Dave Volonte, and I'll be here throughout the day with my co host, John Ferrier, who was quarantined in an undisclosed location in California. He's all good. Don't worry. Just precautionary. John, how are you doing? >>Hey, great to see you. John. Quarantine. My youngest daughter had covitz, so contact tracing. I was negative in quarantine at a friend's location. All good. >>Well, we wish you the best. Yeah, well, right. I mean, you know what's it like, John? I mean, you're away from your family. Your basically shut in, right? I mean, you go out for a walk, but you're really not in any contact with anybody. >>Correct? Yeah. I mean, basically just isolation, Um, pretty much what everyone's been kind of living on, kind of suffering through, but hopefully the vaccines are being distributed. You know, one of the things we talked about it reinvent the Amazon's cloud conference. Was the vaccine on, but just the whole workflow around that it's gonna get better. It's kind of really sucky. Here in the California area, they haven't done a good job, a lot of criticism around, how that's rolling out. And, you know, Amazon is now offering to help now that there's a new regime in the U. S. Government S o. You know, something to talk about, But certainly this has been a terrible time for Cove it and everyone in the deaths involved. But it's it's essentially pulled back the covers, if you will, on technology and you're seeing everything. Society. In fact, um, well, that's big tech MIT disinformation campaigns. All these vulnerabilities and cyber, um, accelerated digital transformation. We'll talk about a lot today, but yeah, it's totally changed the world. And I think we're in a new generation. I think this is a real inflection point, Dave. You know, modern society and the geo political impact of this is significant. You know, one of the benefits of being quarantined you'd be hanging out on these clubhouse APS, uh, late at night, listening to experts talk about what's going on, and it's interesting what's happening with with things like water and, you know, the island of Taiwan and China and U. S. Sovereignty, data, sovereignty, misinformation. So much going on to talk about. And, uh, meanwhile, companies like Mark injuries in BC firm starting a media company. What's going on? Hell freezing over. So >>we're gonna be talking about a lot of that stuff today. I mean, Cuba on cloud. It's our very first virtual editorial event we're trying to do is bring together our community. It's a it's an open forum and we're we're running the day on our 3 65 software platform. So we got a great lineup. We got CEO Seo's data Practitioners. We got a hard core technologies coming in, cloud experts, investors. We got some analysts coming in and we're creating this day long Siri's. And we've got a number of sessions that we've developed and we're gonna unpack. The future of Cloud computing in the coming decade is, John said, we're gonna talk about some of the public policy new administration. What does that mean for tech and for big tech in General? John, what can you add to that? >>Well, I think one of the things that we talked about Cove in this personal impact to me but other people as well. One of the things that people are craving right now is information factual information, truth texture that we call it. But hear this event for us, Davis, our first inaugural editorial event. Robbo, Kristen, Nicole, the entire Cube team Silicon angle, really trying to put together Morva cadence we're gonna doom or of these events where we can put out feature the best people in our community that have great fresh voices. You know, we do interview the big names Andy Jassy, Michael Dell, the billionaires with people making things happen. But it's often the people under there that are the rial newsmakers amid savory, for instance, that Google one of the most impressive technical people, he's gotta talk. He's gonna present democratization of software development in many Mawr riel people making things happen. And I think there's a communal element. We're going to do more of these. Obviously, we have, uh, no events to go to with the Cube. So we have the cube virtual software that we have been building and over years and now perfecting and we're gonna introduce that we're gonna put it to work, their dog footing it. We're gonna put that software toe work. We're gonna do a lot mawr virtual events like this Cuban cloud Cuban startup Cuban raising money. Cuban healthcare, Cuban venture capital. Always think we could do anything. Question is, what's the right story? What's the most important stories? Who's telling it and increase the aperture of the lens of the industry that we have and and expose that and fastest possible. That's what this software, you'll see more of it. So it's super exciting. We're gonna add new features like pulling people up on stage, Um, kind of bring on the clubhouse vibe and more of a community interaction with people to meet each other, and we'll roll those out. But the goal here is to just showcase it's cloud story in a way from people that are living it and providing value. So enjoy the day is gonna be chock full of presentations. We're gonna have moderated chat in these sessions, so it's an all day event so people can come in, drop out, and also that's everything's on demand immediately after the time slot. But you >>want to >>participate, come into the time slot into the cube room or breakout session. Whatever you wanna call it, it's a cube room, and the people in there chatting and having a watch party. So >>when you're in that home page when you're watching, there's a hero video there. Beneath that, there's a calendar, and you'll see that red line is that red horizontal line of vertical line is rather, it's a linear clock that will show you where we are in the day. If you click on any one of those sessions that will take you into the chat, we'll take you through those in a moment and share with you some of the guests that we have upcoming and and take you through the day what I wanted to do. John is trying to set the stage for the conversations that folks are gonna here today. And to do that, I wanna ask the guys to bring up a graphic. And I want to talk to you, John, about the progression of cloud over time and maybe go back to the beginning and review the evolution of cloud and then really talk a little bit about where we think it Z headed. So, guys, if you bring up that graphic when a W S announced s three, it was March of 2000 and six. And as you recall, John you know, nobody really. In the vendor and user community. They didn't really pay too much attention to that. And then later that year, in August, it announced E C two people really started. They started to think about a new model of computing, but they were largely, you know, chicken tires. And it was kind of bleeding edge developers that really leaned in. Um what? What were you thinking at the time? When when you saw, uh, s three e c to this retail company coming into the tech world? >>I mean, I thought it was totally crap. I'm like, this is terrible. But then at that time, I was thinking working on I was in between kind of start ups and I didn't have a lot of seed funding. And then I realized the C two was freaking awesome. But I'm like, Holy shit, this is really great because I don't need to pay a lot of cash, the Provisional Data center, or get a server. Or, you know, at that time, state of the art startup move was to buy a super micro box or some sort of power server. Um, it was well past the whole proprietary thing. But you have to assemble probably anyone with 5 to 8 grand box and go in, and we'll put a couple ghetto rack, which is basically, uh, you know, you put it into some coasting location. It's like with everybody else in the tech ghetto of hosting, still paying monthly fees and then maintaining it and provisioning that's just to get started. And then Amazon was just really easy. And then from there you just It was just awesome. I just knew Amazon would be great. They had a lot of things that they had to fix. You know, custom domains and user interface Council got better and better, but it was awesome. >>Well, what we really saw the cloud take hold from my perspective anyway, was the financial crisis in, you know, 709 It put cloud on the radar of a number of CFOs and, of course, shadow I T departments. They wanted to get stuff done and and take I t in in in, ah, pecs, bite sized chunks. So it really was. There's cloud awakening and we came out of that financial crisis, and this we're now in this 10 year plus boom um, you know, notwithstanding obviously the economic crisis with cove it. But much of it was powered by the cloud in the decade. I would say it was really about I t transformation. And it kind of ironic, if you will, because the pandemic it hits at the beginning of this decade, >>and it >>creates this mandate to go digital. So you've you've said a lot. John has pulled forward. It's accelerated this industry transformation. Everybody talks about that, but and we've highlighted it here in this graphic. It probably would have taken several more years to mature. But overnight you had this forced march to digital. And if you weren't a digital business, you were kind of out of business. And and so it's sort of here to stay. How do you see >>You >>know what this evolution and what we can expect in the coming decades? E think it's safe to say the last 10 years defined by you know, I t transformation. That's not gonna be the same in the coming years. How do you see it? >>It's interesting. I think the big tech companies are on, but I think this past election, the United States shows um, the power that technology has. And if you look at some of the main trends in the enterprise specifically around what clouds accelerating, I call the second wave of innovations coming where, um, it's different. It's not what people expect. Its edge edge computing, for instance, has talked about a lot. But industrial i o t. Is really where we've had a lot of problems lately in terms of hacks and malware and just just overall vulnerabilities, whether it's supply chain vulnerabilities, toe actual disinformation, you know, you know, vulnerabilities inside these networks s I think this network effects, it's gonna be a huge thing. I think the impact that tech will have on society and global society geopolitical things gonna be also another one. Um, I think the modern application development of how applications were written with data, you know, we always been saying this day from the beginning of the Cube data is his integral part of the development process. And I think more than ever, when you think about cloud and edge and this distributed computing paradigm, that cloud is now going next level with is the software and how it's written will be different. You gotta handle things like, where's the compute component? Is it gonna be at the edge with all the server chips, innovations that Amazon apple intel of doing, you're gonna have compute right at the edge, industrial and kind of human edge. How does that work? What's Leighton see to that? It's it really is an edge game. So to me, software has to be written holistically in a system's impact on the way. Now that's not necessarily nude in the computer science and in the tech field, it's just gonna be deployed differently. So that's a complete rewrite, in my opinion of the software applications. Which is why you're seeing Amazon Google VM Ware really pushing Cooper Netease and these service messes in the micro Services because super critical of this technology become smarter, automated, autonomous. And that's completely different paradigm in the old full stack developer, you know, kind of model. You know, the full stack developer, his ancient. There's no such thing as a full stack developer anymore, in my opinion, because it's a half a stack because the cloud takes up the other half. But no one wants to be called the half stack developer because it doesn't sound as good as Full Stack, but really Cloud has eliminated the technology complexity of what a full stack developer used to dio. Now you can manage it and do things with it, so you know, there's some work to done, but the heavy lifting but taking care of it's the top of the stack that I think is gonna be a really critical component. >>Yeah, and that that sort of automation and machine intelligence layer is really at the top of the stack. This this thing becomes ubiquitous, and we now start to build businesses and new processes on top of it. I wanna I wanna take a look at the Big Three and guys, Can we bring up the other The next graphic, which is an estimate of what the revenue looks like for the for the Big three. And John, this is I asked and past spend for the Big Three Cloud players. And it's It's an estimate that we're gonna update after earning seasons, and I wanna point a couple things out here. First is if you look at the combined revenue production of the Big Three last year, it's almost 80 billion in infrastructure spend. I mean, think about that. That Z was that incremental spend? No. It really has caused a lot of consolidation in the on Prem data center business for guys like Dell. And, you know, um, see, now, part of the LHP split up IBM Oracle. I mean, it's etcetera. They've all felt this sea change, and they had to respond to it. I think the second thing is you can see on this data. Um, it's true that azure and G C P they seem to be growing faster than a W s. We don't know the exact numbers >>because >>A W S is the only company that really provides a clean view of i s and pass. Whereas Microsoft and Google, they kind of hide the ball in their numbers. I mean, I don't blame them because they're behind, but they do leave breadcrumbs and clues about growth rates and so forth. And so we have other means of estimating, but it's it's undeniable that azure is catching up. I mean, it's still quite distance the third thing, and before I want to get your input here, John is this is nuanced. But despite the fact that Azure and Google the growing faster than a W s. You can see those growth rates. A W s I'll call this out is the only company by our estimates that grew its business sequentially last quarter. Now, in and of itself, that's not significant. But what is significant is because AWS is so large there $45 billion last year, even if the slower growth rates it's able to grow mawr and absolute terms than its competitors, who are basically flat to down sequentially by our estimates. Eso So that's something that I think is important to point out. Everybody focuses on the growth rates, but it's you gotta look at also the absolute dollars and, well, nonetheless, Microsoft in particular, they're they're closing the gap steadily, and and we should talk more about the competitive dynamics. But I'd love to get your take on on all this, John. >>Well, I mean, the clouds are gonna win right now. Big time with the one the political climate is gonna be favoring Big check. But more importantly, with just talking about covert impact and celebrating the digital transformation is gonna create a massive rising tide. It's already happening. It's happening it's happening. And again, this shift in programming, uh, models are gonna really kinda accelerating, create new great growth. So there's no doubt in my mind of all three you're gonna win big, uh, in the future, they're just different, You know, the way they're going to market position themselves, they have to be. Google has to be a little bit different than Amazon because they're smaller and they also have different capabilities, then trying to catch up. So if you're Google or Microsoft, you have to have a competitive strategy to decide. How do I wanna ride the tide If you will put the rising tide? Well, if I'm Amazon, I mean, if I'm Microsoft and Google, I'm not going to try to go frontal and try to copy Amazon because Amazon is just pounding lead of features and scale and they're different. They were, I would say, take advantage of the first mover of pure public cloud. They really awesome. It passed and I, as they've integrated in Gardner, now reports and integrated I as and passed components. So Gardner finally got their act together and said, Hey, this is really one thing. SAS is completely different animal now Microsoft Super Smart because they I think they played the right card. They have a huge installed base converted to keep office 3 65 and move sequel server and all their core jewels into the cloud as fast as possible, clarified while filling in the gaps on the product side to be cloud. So you know, as you're doing trends job, they're just it's just pedal as fast as you can. But Microsoft is really in. The strategy is just go faster trying. Keep pedaling fast, get the features, feature velocity and try to make it high quality. Google is a little bit different. They have a little power base in terms of their network of strong, and they have a lot of other big data capabilities, so they have to use those to their advantage. So there is. There is there is competitive strategy game application happening with these companies. It's not like apples, the apples, In my opinion, it never has been, and I think that's funny that people talk about it that way. >>Well, you're bringing up some great points. I want guys bring up the next graphic because a lot of things that John just said are really relevant here. And what we're showing is that's a survey. Data from E. T. R R Data partners, like 1400 plus CEOs and I T buyers and on the vertical axis is this thing called Net score, which is a measure of spending momentum. And the horizontal axis is is what's called market share. It's a measure of the pervasiveness or, you know, number of mentions in the data set. There's a couple of key points I wanna I wanna pick up on relative to what John just said. So you see A W S and Microsoft? They stand alone. I mean, they're the hyper scale er's. They're far ahead of the pack and frankly, they have fall down, toe, lose their lead. They spend a lot on Capex. They got the flywheel effects going. They got both spending velocity and large market shares, and so, but they're taking a different approach. John, you're right there living off of their SAS, the state, their software state, Andi, they're they're building that in to their cloud. So they got their sort of a captive base of Microsoft customers. So they've got that advantage. They also as we'll hear from from Microsoft today. They they're building mawr abstraction layers. Andy Jassy has said We don't wanna be in that abstraction layer business. We wanna have access to those, you know, fine grain primitives and eso at an AP level. So so we can move fast with the market. But but But so those air sort of different philosophies, John? >>Yeah. I mean, you know, people who know me know that I love Amazon. I think their product is superior at many levels on in its way that that has advantages again. They have a great sass and ecosystem. They don't really have their own SAS play, although they're trying to add some stuff on. I've been kind of critical of Microsoft in the past, but one thing I'm not critical of Microsoft, and people can get this wrong in the marketplace. Actually, in the journalism world and also in just some other analysts, Microsoft has always had large scale eso to say that Microsoft never had scale on that Amazon owned the monopoly on our franchise on scales wrong. Microsoft had scale from day one. Their business was always large scale global. They've always had infrastructure with MSN and their search and the distributive how they distribute browsers and multiple countries. Remember they had the lock on the operating system and the browser for until the government stepped in in 1997. And since 1997 Microsoft never ever not invested in infrastructure and scale. So that whole premise that they don't compete well there is wrong. And I think that chart demonstrates that there, in there in the hyper scale leadership category, hands down the question that I have. Is that there not as good and making that scale integrate in because they have that legacy cards. This is the classic innovator's dilemma. Clay Christensen, right? So I think they're doing a good job. I think their strategy sound. They're moving as fast as they can. But then you know they're not gonna come out and say We don't have the best cloud. Um, that's not a marketing strategy. Have to kind of hide in this and get better and then double down on where they're winning, which is. Clients are converting from their legacy at the speed of Microsoft, and they have a huge client base, So that's why they're stopping so high That's why they're so good. >>Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna give you a little preview. I talked to gear up your f Who's gonna come on today and you'll see I I asked him because the criticism of Microsoft is they're, you know, they're just good enough. And so I asked him, Are you better than good enough? You know, those are fighting words if you're inside of Microsoft, but so you'll you'll have to wait to see his answer. Now, if you guys, if you could bring that that graphic back up I wanted to get into the hybrid zone. You know where the field is. Always got >>some questions coming in on chat, Dave. So we'll get to those >>great Awesome. So just just real quick Here you see this hybrid zone, this the field is bunched up, and the other companies who have a large on Prem presence and have been forced to initiate some kind of coherent cloud strategy included. There is Michael Michael, multi Cloud, and Google's there, too, because they're far behind and they got to take a different approach than a W s. But as you can see, so there's some real progress here. VM ware cloud on AWS stands out, as does red hat open shift. You got VM Ware Cloud, which is a VCF Cloud Foundation, even Dell's cloud. And you'd expect HP with Green Lake to be picking up momentum in the future quarters. And you've got IBM and Oracle, which there you go with the innovator's dilemma. But there, at least in the cloud game, and we can talk about that. But so, John, you know, to your point, you've gotta have different strategies. You're you're not going to take out the big too. So you gotta play, connect your print your on Prem to your cloud, your hybrid multi cloud and try to create new opportunities and new value there. >>Yeah, I mean, I think we'll get to the question, but just that point. I think this Zeri Chen's come on the Cube many times. We're trying to get him to come on lunch today with Features startup, but he's always said on the Q B is a V C at Greylock great firm. Jerry's Cloud genius. He's been there, but he made a point many, many years ago. It's not a winner. Take all the winner. Take most, and the Big Three maybe put four or five in there. We'll take most of the markets here. But I think one of the things that people are missing and aren't talking about Dave is that there's going to be a second tier cloud, large scale model. I don't want to say tear to cloud. It's coming to sound like a sub sub cloud, but a new category of cloud on cloud, right? So meaning if you get a snowflake, did I think this is a tale? Sign to what's coming. VM Ware Cloud is a native has had huge success, mainly because Amazon is essentially enabling them to be successful. So I think is going to be a wave of a more of a channel model of indirect cloud build out where companies like the Cube, potentially for media or others, will build clouds on top of the cloud. So if Google, Microsoft and Amazon, whoever is the first one to really enable that okay, we'll do extremely well because that means you can compete with their scale and create differentiation on top. So what snowflake did is all on Amazon now. They kind of should go to azure because it's, you know, politically correct that have multiple clouds and distribution and business model shifts. But to get that kind of performance they just wrote on Amazon. So there's nothing wrong with that. Because you're getting paid is variable. It's cap ex op X nice categorization. So I think that's the way that we're watching. I think it's super valuable, I think will create some surprises in terms of who might come out of the woodwork on be a leader in a category. Well, >>your timing is perfect, John and we do have some questions in the chat. But before we get to that, I want to bring in Sargi Joe Hall, who's a contributor to to our community. Sargi. Can you hear us? All right, so we got, uh, while >>bringing in Sarpy. Let's go down from the questions. So the first question, Um, we'll still we'll get the student second. The first question. But Ronald ask, Can a vendor in 2021 exist without a hybrid cloud story? Well, story and capabilities. Yes, they could live with. They have to have a story. >>Well, And if they don't own a public cloud? No. No, they absolutely cannot. Uh hey, Sergey. How you doing, man? Good to see you. So, folks, let me let me bring in Sergeant Kohala. He's a He's a cloud architect. He's a practitioner, He's worked in as a technologist. And there's a frequent guest on on the Cube. Good to see you, my friend. Thanks for taking the time with us. >>And good to see you guys to >>us. So we were kind of riffing on the competitive landscape we got. We got so much to talk about this, like, it's a number of questions coming in. Um, but Sargi we wanna talk about you know, what's happening here in Cloud Land? Let's get right into it. I mean, what do you guys see? I mean, we got yesterday. New regime, new inaug inauguration. Do you do you expect public policy? You'll start with you Sargi to have What kind of effect do you think public policy will have on, you know, cloud generally specifically, the big tech companies, the tech lash. Is it gonna be more of the same? Or do you see a big difference coming? >>I think that there will be some changing narrative. I believe on that. is mainly, um, from the regulators side. A lot has happened in one month, right? So people, I think are losing faith in high tech in a certain way. I mean, it doesn't, uh, e think it matters with camp. You belong to left or right kind of thing. Right? But parlor getting booted out from Italy s. I think that was huge. Um, like, how do you know that if a cloud provider will not boot you out? Um, like, what is that line where you draw the line? What are the rules? I think that discussion has to take place. Another thing which has happened in the last 23 months is is the solar winds hack, right? So not us not sort acknowledging that I was Russia and then wish you watching it now, new administration might have a different sort of Boston on that. I think that's huge. I think public public private partnership in security arena will emerge this year. We have to address that. Yeah, I think it's not changing. Uh, >>economics economy >>will change gradually. You know, we're coming out off pandemic. The money is still cheap on debt will not be cheap. for long. I think m and a activity really will pick up. So those are my sort of high level, Uh, >>thank you. I wanna come back to them. And because there's a question that chat about him in a But, John, how do you see it? Do you think Amazon and Google on a slippery slope booting parlor off? I mean, how do they adjudicate between? Well, what's happening in parlor? Uh, anything could happen on clubhouse. Who knows? I mean, can you use a I to find that stuff? >>Well, that's I mean, the Amazons, right? Hiding right there bunkered in right now from that bad, bad situation. Because again, like people we said Amazon, these all three cloud players win in the current environment. Okay, Who wins with the U. S. With the way we are China, Russia, cloud players. Okay, let's face it, that's the reality. So if I wanted to reset the world stage, you know what better way than the, you know, change over the United States economy, put people out of work, make people scared, and then reset the entire global landscape and control all with cash? That's, you know, conspiracy theory. >>So you see the riches, you see the riches, get the rich, get richer. >>Yeah, well, that's well, that's that. That's kind of what's happening, right? So if you start getting into this idea that you can't actually have an app on site because the reason now I'm not gonna I don't know the particular parlor, but apparently there was a reason. But this is dangerous, right? So what? What that's gonna do is and whether it's right or wrong or not, whether political opinion is it means that they were essentially taken offline by people that weren't voted for that. Weren't that when people didn't vote for So that's not a democracy, right? So that's that's a different kind of regime. What it's also going to do is you also have this groundswell of decentralized thinking, right. So you have a whole wave of crypto and decentralized, um, cyber punks out there who want to decentralize it. So all of this stuff in January has created a huge counterculture, and I had predicted this so many times in the Cube. David counterculture is coming and and you already have this kind of counterculture between centralized and decentralized thinking and so I think the Amazon's move is dangerous at a fundamental level. Because if you can't get it, if you can't get buy domain names and you're completely blackballed by by organized players, that's a Mafia, in my opinion. So, uh, and that and it's also fuels the decentralized move because people say, Hey, if that could be done to them, it could be done to me. Just the fact that it could be done will promote a swing in the other direction. I >>mean, independent of of, you know, again, somebody said your political views. I mean Parlor would say, Hey, we're trying to clean this stuff up now. Maybe they didn't do it fast enough, but you think about how new parlor is. You think about the early days of Twitter and Facebook, so they were sort of at a disadvantage. Trying to >>have it was it was partly was what it was. It was a right wing stand up job of standing up something quick. Their security was terrible. If you look at me and Cory Quinn on be great to have him, and he did a great analysis on this, because if you look the lawsuit was just terrible. Security was just a half, asshole. >>Well, and the experience was horrible. I mean, it's not It was not a great app, but But, like you said, it was a quick stew. Hand up, you know, for an agenda. But nonetheless, you know, to start, get to your point earlier. It's like, you know, Are they gonna, you know, shut me down? If I say something that's, you know, out of line, or how do I control that? >>Yeah, I remember, like, 2019, we involved closing sort of remarks. I was there. I was saying that these companies are gonna be too big to fail. And also, they're too big for other nations to do business with. In a way, I think MNCs are running the show worldwide. They're running the government's. They are way. Have seen the proof of that in us this year. Late last year and this year, um, Twitter last night blocked Chinese Ambassador E in us. Um, from there, you know, platform last night and I was like, What? What's going on? So, like, we used to we used to say, like the Chinese company, tech companies are in bed with the Chinese government. Right. Remember that? And now and now, Actually, I think Chinese people can say the same thing about us companies. Uh, it's not a good thing. >>Well, let's >>get some question. >>Let's get some questions from the chat. Yeah. Thank you. One is on M and a subject you mentioned them in a Who do you see is possible emanate targets. I mean, I could throw a couple out there. Um, you know, some of the cdn players, maybe aka my You know, I like I like Hashi Corp. I think they're doing some really interesting things. What do you see? >>Nothing. Hashi Corp. And anybody who's doing things in the periphery is a candidate for many by the big guys, you know, by the hyper scholars and number two tier two or five hyper scholars. Right. Uh, that's why sales forces of the world and stuff like that. Um, some some companies, which I thought there will be a target, Sort of. I mean, they target they're getting too big, because off their evaluations, I think how she Corpuz one, um, >>and >>their bunch in the networking space. Uh, well, Tara, if I say the right that was acquired by at five this week, this week or last week, Actually, last week for $500 million. Um, I know they're founder. So, like I found that, Yeah, there's a lot going on on the on the network side on the anything to do with data. Uh, that those air too hard areas in the cloud arena >>data, data protection, John, any any anything you could adhere. >>And I think I mean, I think ej ej is gonna be where the gaps are. And I think m and a activity is gonna be where again, the bigger too big to fail would agree with you on that one. But we're gonna look at white Spaces and say a white space for Amazon is like a monster space for a start up. Right? So you're gonna have these huge white spaces opportunities, and I think it's gonna be an M and a opportunity big time start ups to get bought in. Given the speed on, I think you're gonna see it around databases and around some of these new service meshes and micro services. I mean, >>they there's a There's a question here, somebody's that dons asking why is Google who has the most pervasive tech infrastructure on the planet. Not at the same level of other to hyper scale is I'll give you my two cents is because it took him a long time to get their heads out of their ads. I wrote a piece of around that a while ago on they just they figured out how to learn the enterprise. I mean, John, you've made this point a number of times, but they just and I got a late start. >>Yeah, they're adding a lot of people. If you look at their who their hiring on the Google Cloud, they're adding a lot of enterprise chops in there. They realized this years ago, and we've talked to many of the top leaders, although Curry and hasn't yet sit down with us. Um, don't know what he's hiding or waiting for, but they're clearly not geared up to chicken Pete. You can see it with some some of the things that they're doing, but I mean competed the level of Amazon, but they have strength and they're playing their strength, but they definitely recognize that they didn't have the enterprise motions and people in the DNA and that David takes time people in the enterprise. It's not for the faint of heart. It's unique details that are different. You can't just, you know, swing the Google playbook and saying We're gonna home The enterprises are text grade. They knew that years ago. So I think you're going to see a good year for Google. I think you'll see a lot of change. Um, they got great people in there. On the product marketing side is Dev Solution Architects, and then the SRE model that they have perfected has been strong. And I think security is an area that they could really had a lot of value it. So, um always been a big fan of their huge network and all the intelligence they have that they could bring to bear on security. >>Yeah, I think Google's problem main problem that to actually there many, but one is that they don't They don't have the boots on the ground as compared to um, Microsoft, especially an Amazon actually had a similar problem, but they had a wide breath off their product portfolio. I always talk about feature proximity in cloud context, like if you're doing one thing. You wanna do another thing? And how do you go get that feature? Do you go to another cloud writer or it's right there where you are. So I think Amazon has the feature proximity and they also have, uh, aske Compared to Google, there's skills gravity. Larger people are trained on AWS. I think Google is trying there. So second problem Google is having is that that they're they're more focused on, I believe, um, on the data science part on their sort of skipping the cool components sort of off the cloud, if you will. The where the workloads needs, you know, basic stuff, right? That's like your compute storage and network. And that has to be well, talk through e think e think they will do good. >>Well, so later today, Paul Dillon sits down with Mids Avery of Google used to be in Oracle. He's with Google now, and he's gonna push him on on the numbers. You know, you're a distant third. Does that matter? And of course, you know, you're just a preview of it's gonna say, Well, no, we don't really pay attention to that stuff. But, John, you said something earlier that. I think Jerry Chen made this comment that, you know, Is it a winner? Take all? No, but it's a winner. Take a lot. You know the number two is going to get a big chunk of the pie. It appears that the markets big enough for three. But do you? Does Google have to really dramatically close the gap on be a much, much closer, you know, to the to the leaders in orderto to compete in this race? Or can they just kind of continue to bump along, siphon off the ad revenue? Put it out there? I mean, I >>definitely can compete. I think that's like Google's in it. Then it they're not. They're not caving, right? >>So But But I wrote I wrote recently that I thought they should even even put mawr oven emphasis on the cloud. I mean, maybe maybe they're already, you know, doubling down triple down. I just I think that is a multi trillion dollar, you know, future for the industry. And, you know, I think Google, believe it or not, could even do more. Now. Maybe there's just so much you could dio. >>There's a lot of challenges with these company, especially Google. They're in Silicon Valley. We have a big Social Justice warrior mentality. Um, there's a big debate going on the in the back channels of the tech scene here, and that is that if you want to be successful in cloud, you have to have a good edge strategy, and that involves surveillance, use of data and pushing the privacy limits. Right? So you know, Google has people within the country that will protest contract because AI is being used for war. Yet we have the most unstable geopolitical seen that I've ever witnessed in my lifetime going on right now. So, um, don't >>you think that's what happened with parlor? I mean, Rob Hope said, Hey, bar is pretty high to kick somebody off your platform. The parlor went over the line, but I would also think that a lot of the employees, whether it's Google AWS as well, said, Hey, why are we supporting you know this and so to your point about social justice, I mean, that's not something. That >>parlor was not just social justice. They were trying to throw the government. That's Rob e. I think they were in there to get selfies and being protesters. But apparently there was evidence from what I heard in some of these clubhouse, uh, private chats. Waas. There was overwhelming evidence on parlor. >>Yeah, but my point is that the employee backlash was also a factor. That's that's all I'm saying. >>Well, we have Google is your Google and you have employees to say we will boycott and walk out if you bid on that jet I contract for instance, right, But Microsoft one from maybe >>so. I mean, that's well, >>I think I think Tom Poole's making a really good point here, which is a Google is an alternative. Thio aws. The last Google cloud next that we were asked at they had is all virtual issue. But I saw a lot of I T practitioners in the audience looking around for an alternative to a W s just seeing, though, we could talk about Mano Cloud or Multi Cloud, and Andy Jassy has his his narrative around, and he's true when somebody goes multiple clouds, they put you know most of their eggs in one basket. Nonetheless, I think you know, Google's got a lot of people interested in, particularly in the analytic side, um, in in an alternative, hedging their bets eso and particularly use cases, so they should be able to do so. I guess my the bottom line here is the markets big enough to have Really? You don't have to be the Jack Welch. I gotta be number one and number two in the market. Is that the conclusion here? >>I think so. But the data gravity and the skills gravity are playing against them. Another problem, which I didn't want a couple of earlier was Google Eyes is that they have to boot out AWS wherever they go. Right? That is a huge challenge. Um, most off the most off the Fortune 2000 companies are already using AWS in one way or another. Right? So they are the multi cloud kind of player. Another one, you know, and just pure purely somebody going 200% Google Cloud. Uh, those cases are kind of pure, if you will. >>I think it's gonna be absolutely multi cloud. I think it's gonna be a time where you looked at the marketplace and you're gonna think in terms of disaster recovery, model of cloud or just fault tolerant capabilities or, you know, look at the parlor, the next parlor. Or what if Amazon wakes up one day and said, Hey, I don't like the cubes commentary on their virtual events, so shut them down. We should have a fail over to Google Cloud should Microsoft and Option. And one of people in Microsoft ecosystem wants to buy services from us. We have toe kind of co locate there. So these are all open questions that are gonna be the that will become certain pretty quickly, which is, you know, can a company diversify their computing An i t. In a way that works. And I think the momentum around Cooper Netease you're seeing as a great connective tissue between, you know, having applications work between clouds. Right? Well, directionally correct, in my opinion, because if I'm a company, why wouldn't I wanna have choice? So >>let's talk about this. The data is mixed on that. I'll share some data, meaty our data with you. About half the companies will say Yeah, we're spreading the wealth around to multiple clouds. Okay, That's one thing will come back to that. About the other half were saying, Yeah, we're predominantly mono cloud we didn't have. The resource is. But what I think going forward is that that what multi cloud really becomes. And I think John, you mentioned Snowflake before. I think that's an indicator of what what true multi cloud is going to look like. And what Snowflake is doing is they're building abstraction, layer across clouds. Ed Walsh would say, I'm standing on the shoulders of Giants, so they're basically following points of presence around the globe and building their own cloud. They call it a data cloud with a global mesh. We'll hear more about that later today, but you sign on to that cloud. So they're saying, Hey, we're gonna build value because so many of Amazon's not gonna build that abstraction layer across multi clouds, at least not in the near term. So that's a really opportunity for >>people. I mean, I don't want to sound like I'm dating myself, but you know the date ourselves, David. I remember back in the eighties, when you had open systems movement, right? The part of the whole Revolution OS I open systems interconnect model. At that time, the networking stacks for S N A. For IBM, decadent for deck we all know that was a proprietary stack and then incomes TCP I p Now os I never really happened on all seven layers, but the bottom layers standardized. Okay, that was huge. So I think if you look at a W s or some of the comments in the chat AWS is could be the s n a. Depends how you're looking at it, right? And you could say they're open. But in a way, they want more Amazon. So Amazon's not out there saying we love multi cloud. Why would they promote multi cloud? They are a one of the clouds they want. >>That's interesting, John. And then subject is a cloud architect. I mean, it's it is not trivial to make You're a data cloud. If you're snowflake, work on AWS work on Google. Work on Azure. Be seamless. I mean, certainly the marketing says that, but technically, that's not trivial. You know, there are latent see issues. Uh, you know, So that's gonna take a while to develop. What? Do your thoughts there? >>I think that multi cloud for for same workload and multi cloud for different workloads are two different things. Like we usually put multiple er in one bucket, right? So I think you're right. If you're trying to do multi cloud for the same workload, that's it. That's Ah, complex, uh, problem to solve architecturally, right. You have to have a common ap ice and common, you know, control playing, if you will. And we don't have that yet, and then we will not have that for a for at least one other couple of years. So, uh, if you if you want to do that, then you have to go to the lower, lowest common denominator in technical sort of stock, if you will. And then you're not leveraging the best of the breed technology off their from different vendors, right? I believe that's a hard problem to solve. And in another thing, is that that that I always say this? I'm always on the death side, you know, developer side, I think, uh, two deaths. Public cloud is a proxy for innovative culture. Right. So there's a catch phrase I have come up with today during shower eso. I think that is true. And then people who are companies who use the best of the breed technologies, they can attract the these developers and developers are the Mazen's off This digital sort of empires, amazingly, is happening there. Right there they are the Mazen's right. They head on the bricks. I think if you don't appeal to developers, if you don't but extensive for, like, force behind educating the market, you can't you can't >>put off. It's the same game Stepping story was seeing some check comments. Uh, guard. She's, uh, linked in friend of mine. She said, Microsoft, If you go back and look at the Microsoft early days to the developer Point they were, they made their phones with developers. They were a software company s Oh, hey, >>forget developers, developers, developers. >>You were if you were in the developer ecosystem, you were treated his gold. You were part of the family. If you were outside that world, you were competitors, and that was ruthless times back then. But they again they had. That was where it was today. Look at where the software defined businesses and starve it, saying it's all about being developer lead in this new way to program, right? So the cloud next Gen Cloud is going to look a lot like next Gen Developer and all the different tools and techniques they're gonna change. So I think, yes, this kind of developer ecosystem will be harnessed, and that's the power source. It's just gonna look different. So, >>Justin, Justin in the chat has a comment. I just want to answer the question about elastic thoughts on elastic. Um, I tell you, elastic has momentum uh, doing doing very well in the market place. Thea Elk Stack is a great alternative that people are looking thio relative to Splunk. Who people complain about the pricing. Of course it's plunks got the easy button, but it is getting increasingly expensive. The problem with elk stack is you know, it's open source. It gets complicated. You got a shard, the databases you gotta manage. It s Oh, that's what Ed Walsh's company chaos searches is all about. But elastic has some riel mo mentum in the marketplace right now. >>Yeah, you know, other things that coming on the chat understands what I was saying about the open systems is kubernetes. I always felt was that is a bad metaphor. But they're with me. That was the TCP I peep In this modern era, C t c p I p created that that the disruptor to the S N A s and the network protocols that were proprietary. So what KUBERNETES is doing is creating a connective tissue between clouds and letting the open source community fill in the gaps in the middle, where kind of way kind of probably a bad analogy. But that's where the disruption is. And if you look at what's happened since Kubernetes was put out there, what it's become kind of de facto and standard in the sense that everyone's rallying around it. Same exact thing happened with TCP was people were trashing it. It is terrible, you know it's not. Of course they were trashed because it was open. So I find that to be very interesting. >>Yeah, that's a good >>analogy. E. Thinks the R C a cable. I used the R C. A cable analogy like the VCRs. When they started, they, every VC had had their own cable, and they will work on Lee with that sort of plan of TV and the R C. A cable came and then now you can put any TV with any VCR, and the VCR industry took off. There's so many examples out there around, uh, standards And how standards can, you know, flair that fire, if you will, on dio for an industry to go sort of wild. And another trend guys I'm seeing is that from the consumer side. And let's talk a little bit on the consuming side. Um, is that the The difference wouldn't be to B and B to C is blood blurred because even the physical products are connected to the end user Like my door lock, the August door lock I didn't just put got get the door lock and forget about that. Like I I value the expedience it gives me or problems that gives me on daily basis. So I'm close to that vendor, right? So So the middle men, uh, middle people are getting removed from from the producer off the technology or the product to the consumer. Even even the sort of big grocery players they have their APs now, uh, how do you buy stuff and how it's delivered and all that stuff that experience matters in that context, I think, um, having, uh, to be able to sell to thes enterprises from the Cloud writer Breuder's. They have to have these case studies or all these sample sort off reference architectures and stuff like that. I think whoever has that mawr pushed that way, they are doing better like that. Amazon is Amazon. Because of that reason, I think they have lot off sort off use cases about on top of them. And they themselves do retail like crazy. Right? So and other things at all s. So I think that's a big trend. >>Great. Great points are being one of things. There's a question in there about from, uh, Yaden. Who says, uh, I like the developer Lead cloud movement, But what is the criticality of the executive audience when educating the marketplace? Um, this comes up a lot in some of my conversations around automation. So automation has been a big wave to automate this automate everything. And then everything is a service has become kind of kind of the the executive suite. Kind of like conversation we need to make everything is a service in our business. You seeing people move to that cloud model. Okay, so the executives think everything is a services business strategy, which it is on some level, but then, when they say Take that hill, do it. Developers. It's not that easy. And this is where a lot of our cube conversations over the past few months have been, especially during the cova with cute virtual. This has come up a lot, Dave this idea, and start being around. It's easy to say everything is a service but will implement it. It's really hard, and I think that's where the developer lead Connection is where the executive have to understand that in order to just say it and do it are two different things. That digital transformation. That's a big part of it. So I think that you're gonna see a lot of education this year around what it means to actually do that and how to implement it. >>I'd like to comment on the as a service and subject. Get your take on it. I mean, I think you're seeing, for instance, with HP Green Lake, Dell's come out with Apex. You know IBM as its utility model. These companies were basically taking a page out of what I what I would call a flawed SAS model. If you look at the SAS players, whether it's salesforce or workday, service now s a P oracle. These models are They're really They're not cloud pricing models. They're they're basically you got to commit to a term one year, two year, three year. We'll give you a discount if you commit to the longer term. But you're locked in on you. You probably pay upfront. Or maybe you pay quarterly. That's not a cloud pricing model. And that's why I mean, they're flawed. You're seeing companies like Data Dog, for example. Snowflake is another one, and they're beginning to price on a consumption basis. And that is, I think, one of the big changes that we're going to see this decade is that true cloud? You know, pay by the drink pricing model and to your point, john toe, actually implement. That is, you're gonna need a whole new layer across your company on it is quite complicated it not even to mention how you compensate salespeople, etcetera. The a p. I s of your product. I mean, it is that, but that is a big sea change that I see coming. Subject your >>thoughts. Yeah, I think like you couldn't see it. And like some things for this big tech exacts are hidden in the plain >>sight, right? >>They don't see it. They they have blind spots, like Look at that. Look at Amazon. They went from Melissa and 200 millisecond building on several s, Right, Right. And then here you are, like you're saying, pay us for the whole year. If you don't use the cloud, you lose it or will pay by month. Poor user and all that stuff like that that those a role models, I think these players will be forced to use that term pricing like poor minute or for a second, poor user. That way, I think the Salesforce moral is hybrid. They're struggling in a way. I think they're trying to bring the platform by doing, you know, acquisition after acquisition to be a platform for other people to build on top off. But they're having a little trouble there because because off there, such pricing and little closeness, if you will. And, uh, again, I'm coming, going, going back to developers like, if you are not appealing to developers who are writing the latest and greatest code and it is open enough, by the way open and open source are two different things that we all know that. So if your platform is not open enough, you will have you know, some problems in closing the deals. >>E. I want to just bring up a question on chat around from Justin didn't fitness. Who says can you touch on the vertical clouds? Has your offering this and great question Great CP announcing Retail cloud inventions IBM Athena Okay, I'm a huge on this point because I think this I'm not saying this for years. Cloud computing is about horizontal scalability and vertical specialization, and that's absolutely clear, and you see all the clouds doing it. The vertical rollouts is where the high fidelity data is, and with machine learning and AI efforts coming out, that's accelerated benefits. There you have tow, have the vertical focus. I think it's super smart that clouds will have some sort of vertical engine, if you will in the clouds and build on top of a control playing. Whether that's data or whatever, this is clearly the winning formula. If you look at all the successful kind of ai implementations, the ones that have access to the most data will get the most value. So, um if you're gonna have a data driven cloud you have tow, have this vertical feeling, Um, in terms of verticals, the data on DSO I think that's super important again, just generally is a strategy. I think Google doing a retail about a super smart because their whole pitches were not Amazon on. Some people say we're not Google, depending on where you look at. So every of these big players, they have dominance in the areas, and that's scarce. Companies and some companies will never go to Amazon for that reason. Or some people never go to Google for other reasons. I know people who are in the ad tech. This is a black and we're not. We're not going to Google. So again, it is what it is. But this idea of vertical specialization relevant in super >>forts, I want to bring to point out to sessions that are going on today on great points. I'm glad you asked that question. One is Alan. As he kicks off at 1 p.m. Eastern time in the transformation track, he's gonna talk a lot about the coming power of ecosystems and and we've talked about this a lot. That that that to compete with Amazon, Google Azure, you've gotta have some kind of specialization and vertical specialization is a good one. But of course, you see in the big Big three also get into that. But so he's talking at one o'clock and then it at 3 36 PM You know this times are strange, but e can explain that later Hillary Hunter is talking about she's the CTO IBM I B M's ah Financial Cloud, which is another really good example of specifying vertical requirements and serving. You know, an audience subject. I think you have some thoughts on this. >>Actually, I lost my thought. E >>think the other piece of that is data. I mean, to the extent that you could build an ecosystem coming back to Alan Nancy's premise around data that >>billions of dollars in >>their day there's billions of dollars and that's the title of the session. But we did the trillion dollar baby post with Jazzy and said Cloud is gonna be a trillion dollars right? >>And and the point of Alan Answer session is he's thinking from an individual firm. Forget the millions that you're gonna save shifting to the cloud on cost. There's billions in ecosystems and operating models. That's >>absolutely the business value. Now going back to my half stack full stack developer, is the business value. I've been talking about this on the clubhouses a lot this past month is for the entrepreneurs out there the the activity in the business value. That's the new the new intellectual property is the business logic, right? So if you could see innovations in how work streams and workflow is gonna be a configured differently, you have now large scale cloud specialization with data, you can move quickly and take territory. That's much different scenario than a decade ago, >>at the point I was trying to make earlier was which I know I remember, is that that having the horizontal sort of features is very important, as compared to having vertical focus. You know, you're you're more healthcare focused like you. You have that sort of needs, if you will, and you and our auto or financials and stuff like that. What Google is trying to do, I think that's it. That's a good thing. Do cook up the reference architectures, but it's a bad thing in a way that you drive drive away some developers who are most of the developers at 80 plus percent, developers are horizontal like you. Look at the look into the psyche of a developer like you move from company to company. And only few developers will say I will stay only in health care, right? So I will only stay in order or something of that, right? So they you have to have these horizontal capabilities which can be applied anywhere on then. On top >>of that, I think that's true. Sorry, but I'll take a little bit different. Take on that. I would say yes, that's true. But remember, remember the old school application developer Someone was just called in Application developer. All they did was develop applications, right? They pick the framework, they did it right? So I think we're going to see more of that is just now mawr of Under the Covers developers. You've got mawr suffer defined networking and software, defined storage servers and cloud kubernetes. And it's kind of like under the hood. But you got your, you know, classic application developer. I think you're gonna see him. A lot of that come back in a way that's like I don't care about anything else. And that's the promise of cloud infrastructure is code. So I think this both. >>Hey, I worked. >>I worked at people solved and and I still today I say into into this context, I say E r P s are the ultimate low code. No code sort of thing is right. And what the problem is, they couldn't evolve. They couldn't make it. Lightweight, right? Eso um I used to write applications with drag and drop, you know, stuff. Right? But But I was miserable as a developer. I didn't Didn't want to be in the applications division off PeopleSoft. I wanted to be on the tools division. There were two divisions in most of these big companies ASAP. Oracle. Uh, like companies that divisions right? One is the cooking up the tools. One is cooking up the applications. The basketball was always gonna go to the tooling. Hey, >>guys, I'm sorry. We're almost out of time. I always wanted to t some of the sections of the day. First of all, we got Holder Mueller coming on at lunch for a power half hour. Um, you'll you'll notice when you go back to the home page. You'll notice that calendar, that linear clock that we talked about that start times are kind of weird like, for instance, an appendix coming on at 1 24. And that's because these air prerecorded assets and rather than having a bunch of dead air, we're just streaming one to the other. So so she's gonna talk about people, process and technology. We got Kathy Southwick, whose uh, Silicon Valley CEO Dan Sheehan was the CEO of Dunkin Brands and and he was actually the c 00 So it's C A CEO connecting the dots to the business. Daniel Dienes is the CEO of you I path. He's coming on a 2:47 p.m. East Coast time one of the hottest companies, probably the fastest growing software company in history. We got a guy from Bain coming on Dave Humphrey, who invested $750 million in Nutanix. He'll explain why and then, ironically, Dheeraj Pandey stew, Minuteman. Our friend interviewed him. That's 3 35. 1 of the sessions are most excited about today is John McD agony at 403 p. M. East Coast time, she's gonna talk about how to fix broken data architectures, really forward thinking stuff. And then that's the So that's the transformation track on the future of cloud track. We start off with the Big Three Milan Thompson Bukovec. At one oclock, she runs a W s storage business. Then I mentioned gig therapy wrath at 1. 30. He runs Azure is analytics. Business is awesome. Paul Dillon then talks about, um, IDs Avery at 1 59. And then our friends to, um, talks about interview Simon Crosby. I think I think that's it. I think we're going on to our next session. All right, so keep it right there. Thanks for watching the Cuban cloud. Uh huh.

>> Hi, everyone; I am thrilled to personally invite you to a special event created and hosted by "theCUBE." On January 21st, we're holding "theCUBE on Cloud," our first editorial event of the year. We have lined up a fantastic guest list of experts in their respective fields, talking about CIOs, COOs, CEOs, and technologists, analysts, and practitioners. We're going to share their vision of Cloud in the coming decade. Of course, we also have guests from the big three Cloud companies, who are going to sit down with our hosts and have unscripted conversations that "theCUBE" is known for. For example, Mahlon Thompson Bukovec is the head of AWS's storage business, and she'll talk about the future of infrastructure in the Cloud. Amit Zavery is one of Thomas Kurian's lieutenants at Google, and he'll share a vision of the future of application development and how Google plans to compete in Cloud. And J.G. Chirapurath leads Microsoft's data and analytics business. He's going to address our questions about how Microsoft plans to simplify the complexity of tools in the Azure ecosystem and compete broadly with the other Cloud players. But this event, it's not just about the big three Cloud players. It's about how to take advantage of the biggest trends in Cloud, and, of course, data in the coming decade, because those two superpowers along with AI are going to create trillions of dollars in value, and not just for sellers, but for practitioners who apply technology to their businesses. For example, one of our guests, Zhamak Dehghani, lays out her vision of a new data architecture that breaks the decade-long failures of so-called big data architectures and data warehouse and data lakes. And she puts forth a model of a data mesh, not a centralized, monolithic data architecture, but a distributed data model. Now that dovetails into an interview we do with the CEO of Fungible, who will talk about the emergence of the DPU, the data processing unit, and that's a new class of alternative processors that's going to support these massively distributed systems. We also have a number of CXOs who are going to bring practical knowledge and experience to the program. Allen Nance, he led technology transformation for Phillips. Dan Sheehan is a CIO, COO, and CTO and has led teams at Dunkin' brands, Modell's Sporting Goods and other firms. Cathy Southwick has been a CIO at a large firm like AT&T and now is moving at the pace of Silicon Valley at Pure Storage. Automation in the Cloud is another theme we'll hit on with Daniel Dines, who founded and heads the top RPA company. And of course, we'll have a focus on developers in the Cloud with Rachel Stevens of RedMonk. That's a leading edge analyst firm focused exclusively on the developer community. And much more that I just don't have time to go into here, but rest assured, John Furrier and I will be bringing our thoughts, our hard-hitting opinions, along with some special guests that you don't want to miss. So click on the link below and register for this free event, "theCUBE on Cloud." Join us and join the conversation. We'll see you there.

>> Go on my lead. >> Dan: All right, very good. >> Five, four. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the special presentation from theCUBE, where we're exploring the future of cloud and its business impact in the coming decade, kind of where we've come from and where we're going. My name is Dave Vellante, and with me is a CIO/CTO/COO, and longtime colleague, Dan Sheehan. Hello, Dan, how're you doing? >> Hey, Dave, how are you doing? Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. So folks, Dan has been in the technology industry for a number of years. He's overseen, you know, large-multi, tens of millions of dollar ERP application development efforts, He was a CIO of a marketing, you know, direct mail company. Dan, we met at ADVO, it seems like such a (snickers) long time ago. >> Yeah, that was a long time ago, back in Connecticut. Back in the early 2000s. >> Yeah, ancient days. But pretty serious data for back then, you know, the early 2000s, and then you did a six-year stint as a EVP and CIO at Dunkin' Brands. I remember I came out to see you when I was starting Wikibon and trying to understand. >> Oh yeah. >> You know, what the CIOs cared about. You were so helpful and thanks for that. And that was a big deal. I mean, Dunkin', 17,000 points of distribution. I mean, that was sort of a complicated situation, right? >> Oh yeah. >> So, great experience. >> I mean, when you get involved with franchisees and trying to make everybody happy, yes, that was a lot of fun. >> And then you had a number of other roles, one was as COO at Modell's, and then to fast-forward, Beacon Health. You were EVP and CIO there. And you also, it looked like you had a kind of a business and operational role. You helped the company get acquired by Anthem Blue Cross. So awesome, congrats on that. That must've been a great experience. >> It was. A year of my life, yes. (both laugh) >> You're still standing. So anyway, you can see Dan, he's like this multi-tool star, he's seen a lot of changes in the technology business. So Dan, again, welcome back. Dan Sheehan. >> Oh, thank you. >> So when you started in your career, you know, there was no cloud, right? I mean, you had to do everything. It's funny, I remember I was... You probably know Bill Rucci, CIO of Hartford Steam Boiler. I remember we were talking one day, and this again was pre-cloud and he said, you know, I'm thinking, do I really need to manage my own email? I mean, back then, we did everything. So you had to provision infrastructure so you could write apps, and that was important. That frustrated CFOs, but it was a necessary piece of the value chain. So how have you seen that sort of IT value contribution shift over the years? Let's start there. >> Ah, well, I think it comes down to demand versus capacity. If you look at where companies want to go, they want to do a lot with technology. Technology has taken on a larger role. It's no longer and has not been a, so to speak, cost center. So I think the demand for making change and driving a company forward or reducing costs, there are other executives, peers to the CIO, to the CTO that are looking to do more, and when it comes to doing more, that means more demand, and you step back and you look at what the CIO has for capacity. Looking at Quick Solution's data, solutions in the cloud is appealing, and there are, you know, times where other functions talk to a vendor and see that they can get a vertical solution done pretty quickly. They go off and take that on, or it could be, you know, a ServiceNow capability that you want to implement across the company, and you do that just like an ERP type of roll up. But the bottom line is there are solutions out there that have pushed, I would say the IT organization to look at their capacity versus demand, and sometimes you can get things done quicker with a cloud type of solution. >> So how did you look at that shadow IT as a CIO? Was it something that kind of ticked you off or like you're sort of implying that it made you better? >> Well, I think it does ultimately make you better, but I think you have to partner with the functions because if you don't, you get these types of scenarios, and I've been involved in these just as well. You are busy with, you know, fulfilling your objectives as the leader of IT, and then you get a knock on the door from, let's say marketing or operations, and they say, hey, we just purchased this X solution and we want to integrate it with A, B and C. Well, that was not on the budget or on the IT roadmap or the IT strategy that was linked to the IT, I'm sorry, to the business strategy, and all of a sudden now you have more demand versus the capacity, and then you have to go start reprioritizing. So it's more of, yeah, kind of disrupted, but at the same time, it pushed, you know, the needle of the company forward. But it's all about just working together to make it happen. And that's a lot of, you know, hard conversations when you have to start reprioritizing capacity. >> Well, so let's talk about that alignment. I mean, there's always been a sort of a schism between IT and its ability to deliver, manage demand, and the business will always want you to go faster. They want IT to develop the systems, you know, of course, for less and then they want you to eat the cost of maintaining them, so (chuckles) there's been that tension. But in many ways, that CIO's job is alignment. I mean, it seems to me anyway that schism has certainly narrowed and the cloud's been been part of that, but what do you see as that trajectory over the years and where do you see it going? >> Well, I think it's going to continue to move forward, and depending upon the service, you know, companies are going to take advantage of those services. So yes, some of the non-mission critical capabilities that you would want to move out to the cloud or have somebody else do it, so to speak, that's going to continue to happen because they should be able to do it a lot cheaper than you can, just like use you mentioned a few moments ago about email. I did not want to maintain, you know, exchange service and keeping that all up and running. I moved quickly to Microsoft 365 and that's been a world of difference, but that's just one example. But when you have mission critical apps, you're going to have to make a decision if you want to continue to house them in-house or push them out to an AWS and house them there. So maybe you don't need a large data center and you can utilize some of the best and brightest around security, around managing size of the infrastructure and getting some of their engineering help, which can help. So it just depends upon the application, so to speak, or a function that you're trying to support. And you got to really look at your enterprise architecture and see where that makes sense. So you got to have a hybrid. I see and I have, you know, managed towards a hybrid way of looking at your architecture. >> Okay, so obviously the cloud played a role in that change, and of course, you were in healthcare too so you had to be somewhat careful, >> Yep. >> With the cloud. But you mentioned this hybrid architecture. I mean, from a technologist standpoint and a business standpoint, what do you want out of, you know, you hear a hybrid, multi, all the buzz words. What are you looking for then? Is it a consistent experience? Is it a consistent security? Or is it sort of more horses for courses, where you're trying to run a workload in the right place? What's your philosophy on that? >> Well, I mean, all those things matter, but you're looking at obviously, cost, you're looking at engagement. How does these services engage? Whether it's internal employees or external clients who you're servicing, and you want to get to a cost structure that makes sense in terms of managing those services as well as those mission critical apps. So it comes down to looking at the dollars and cents, as well as what type of services you can provide. In many cases, if you can provide a cheaper and increase the overall services, you're going to go down that path. And just like we did with ServiceNow, I did that at Beacon and also at DentaQuest two healthcare companies. We were able to, you know, remove duplicated, so to speak, ticketing systems and move to one and allow a better experience for the internal employee. They can do self-service, they can look at metrics, they can see status, real-time status on where their request was. So that made a bigger difference. So you engaged the employee differently, better, and then you also reduce your costs. >> Well, how about the economics? I mean, your experience that cloud is cheaper. You hear a lot of the, you know, a lot of the legacy players are saying, oh, no cloud's super expensive. Wait till you get that Amazon bill. (laughs) What's the truth? >> Well, I think there's still a lot of maturing that needs to go on, because unfortunately, depending upon the company, so let's use a couple of examples. So let's look at a startup. You look at a startup, they're probably going to look at all their services being in the cloud and being delivered through a SaaS model, and that's going to be an expense, that's going to be most likely a per user expense per month or per year, however, they structure the contract. And right out of the gate, that's going to be a top line expense that has to be managed going forward. Now you look at companies that have been around for a while, and two of the last companies I worked with, had a lot of technical debt, had on-prem applications. And when you started to look at how to move forward, you know, you had CFOs that were used to going to buy software, capitalize in that software over, you know, five years, sometimes three years, and using that investment to be capitalized, and that would sit below the line, so to speak. Now, don't get me wrong, you still have to pay for it, it's just a matter of where it sits. And when you're running a company and you're looking at the financials, not having that cost on your operational expenses, so to speak, if you're not looking at the depreciation through those numbers, that was advantageous to a CFO many years ago. Now you come to them and say, hey, we're going to move forward with a new HR system, and it's all increasing the expense because there's nothing else to capitalize. Those are different conversations, and all of a sudden your expenses have increased, and yes, you have to make sure that the businesses behind you, with respects to an ROI and supporting it. >> Yeah, so as long as the value is there, and that's a part of the alignment. I want to ask you about cloud pricing strategies because you mentioned ServiceNow, you know, Salesforce is in there, Workday. If you look at the way these guys price, it's really not true cloud pricing in a way, cause they're going to have you sign up for an annual license, you know, a lot of times you got pay up front, or if you want a discount, you're going to have to sign up for two years or three years. But now you see guys like Snowflake coming in, you know, big high-profile IPO. They actually charge you on a consumption-based model. What are your thoughts on that? Do you see that as sort of a trend in the coming decade? >> No, I absolutely think it's going to be on a trend, because consumption means more transactions and more transactions means more computing, and they're going to look at charging it just like any other utility charges. So yes, I see that trend continuing. Did a big deal with UltiPro HR, and yeah, that was all based upon user head count, but they were talking about looking at their payroll and changing their costing on payroll down the road. With their merger, or they went from being a public company to a private company, and now looking to merge with Kronos. I can see where time and attendance and payroll will stop being looked at as a transaction, right? It's a weekly or bi-weekly or monthly, however the company pays, and yes, there is dollars to be made there. >> Well, so let me ask you as a CIO and a business, you know, COO. One of the challenges that you hear with the cloud is okay, if I get my Amazon bill, it's something that Snowflake has talked about, where you know, to me, it's the ideal model, but on the other hand, the transparency is not necessarily there. You don't know what it's going to be at the end of (mumbles) Would you rather have more certainty as to what that bill's going to look like? Or would you rather have it aligned with consumption and the value to the business? >> Well, you know, that's a great question, because yes, I mean, budgets are usually built upon a number that's fixed. Now, no, don't get me wrong. I mean, when I look at the wide area network, the cost for internet services, yes, sometimes we need to increase and that means an increase in the overall cost, but that consumption, that transactional, that's going to be a different way of having to go ahead and budget. You have to budget now for the maximum transactions you anticipate with a growth of a company, and then you need to take a look at that you know, if you're budgeting. I know we were on a calendar fiscal year, so we started up budgeting process in August and we finalized at sometime in the end of October, November for the proceeding year, and if that's the case, you need to get a little bit better on what your consumptions are going to be, because especially if you're a public company, going out on the street with some numbers, those numbers could vary based upon a high transaction volume and the cost, and maybe you're not getting the results on the top end, on the revenue side. So I think, yeah, it's going to be an interesting dilemma as we move forward. >> Yeah. So, I mean, it comes back to alignment, doesn't it? I mean, I know in our small example, you know, we're doing now, we were used to be physical events with theCUBE, now it's all virtual events and our Amazon bill is going through the roof because we're supporting all these users on these virtual events, and our CFO's like, well, look at this Amazon bill, and you say, yeah, but look at the revenue, it's supporting. And so to your point, if the revenue is there, if the ROI is there, then it makes sense. You can kind of live with it because you're growing with it, but if not, then you really got to question it. >> Yeah. So you got to need to partner with your financial folks and come up with better modeling around some of these transactional services and build that into your modeling for your budget and for your, you know, your top line and your expenses. >> So what do you think of some of these SaaS companies? I mean, you've had a lot of experience. They're really coming at it from largely an application perspective, although you've managed a lot of infrastructure too. But we've talked about ServiceNow. They've kind of mopped up in the ITSM. I mean, there's nobody left. I mean, ServiceNow has sort of taken over the whole (mumbles) You know, Salesforce, >> Yeah. >> I guess, sort of similarly, sort of dominating the CRM space. You hear a lot of complaints now about, you know, ServiceNow pricing. There is somebody the other day called them the Oracle of ITSM. Do you see that potentially getting disrupted by maybe some cloud native developers who are developing tools on top? You see in, like, for instance, Datadog going after Splunk and LogRhythm. And there seem to be examples popping up. Well, what's your take on all this? >> No, absolutely. I think cause, you know, when we were talking about back when I first met you, when I was at the ADVO, I mean, Oracle was on it's, you know, rise with their suite of capabilities, and then before you know it, other companies were popping up and took over, whether it was Firstbeat, PeopleSoft, Workday, and then other companies that just came into play, cause it's going to happen because people are going to get, you know, frustrated. And yes, I did get a little frustrated with ServiceNow when I was looking at a couple of new modules because the pricing was a little bit higher than it was when I first started out. So yes, when you're good and you're able to provide the right services, they're going to start pricing it that way. But yes, I think you're going to get smaller players, and then those smaller players will start grabbing up, so to speak, market share and get into it. I mean, look at Salesforce. I mean, there are some pretty good CRMs. I mean, even, ServiceNow is getting into the CRM space big time, as well as a company like Sugar and a few others that will continue to push Salesforce to look at their pricing as well as their services. I mean, they're out there buying up companies, but you just can't automatically assume that they're going to, you know, integrate day one, and it's going to take time for some of their services to come and become reality, so to speak. So yes, I agree that there will be players out there that will push these lager SaaS companies, and hopefully get the right behaviors and right pricing. >> I've said for years, Dan, that I've predicted that ServiceNow and Salesforce are on a collision course. It didn't really happen, but it's starting to, because ServiceNow, the valuation is so huge. They have to grow into other markets much in the same way that Salesforce has. So maybe we'll see McDermott start doing some acquisitions. It's maybe a little tougher for ServiceNow given their whole multi-instance architecture and sort of their own cloud. That's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. >> Yeah. Yeah. You got to play in that type of architecture, let's put it that way. Yes, it'll be interesting to see how that does play out. >> What are your thoughts on the big hyperscalers; Amazon, Microsoft, Google? What's the right strategy there? Do you go all in on one cloud like AWS or are you more worried about lock-in? Do you want to spread your bets across clouds? How real is multi-cloud? Is it a strategy or more sort of a reality that you get M and A and you got shadow IT? What's your take on all that? >> Yeah, that's a great question because it does make you think a little differently around you know, where to put all your eggs. And it's getting tougher because you do want to distribute those eggs out to multiple vendors, if you would, service providers. But, you know, for instance we had a situation where we were building a brand new business intelligence data warehouse, and we decided to go with Microsoft as its core database. And we did a bake-off on business analytic tools. We had like seven of them at Beacon and we ended up choosing Microsoft's Power BI, and a good part of that reason, not all of it, but a good part of it was because we felt they did everything else that the Tableau's and others did, but, you know, Microsoft would work to give, you know, additional capabilities to Power BI if it's sitting on their database. So we had to take that into consideration, and we did and we ended up going with Power BI. With Amazon, I think Amazon's a little bit more, I'll put it horizontal, whereby they can help you out because of the database and just kind of be in that data center, if you would, and be able to move some of your homegrown applications, some of your technical debt over to that, I'll say cloud. But it'll get interesting because when you talk about integration, when you talk about moving forward with a new functionality, yeah, you have to put your architecture in a somewhat of a center point, and then look to see what is easier, cheaper, cost-effective, but, you know, what's happening to my functionality over the next three to five years. >> But it sounds like you'd subscribe to a horses for courses approach, where you put the right workload in the right cloud, as opposed to saying, I'm going to go all in on one cloud and it's going to be, you know, same skillset, same security, et cetera. It sounds like you'd lean toward the former versus going all in with, you know, MANO cloud. >> Yeah, I guess again, when I look at the architecture. There will be major, you know, breaks if you would. So yes, there is somewhat of a, you know, movement to you know, go with one horse. But, you know, I could see looking back at the Beacon architecture that we could, you know, lift and put the claims adjudication capabilities up in Amazon and then have that conduct, you know, the left to right claims processing, and then those transactions could then be moved into Microsoft's data warehouse. So, you know, there is ways to go about spreading it out so that you don't have all those eggs in one basket and that you reduce the amount of risk, but that weighed heavily on my mind. >> So I was going to ask you, how much of a factor lock-in is it? It sounds like it's more, you know, spreading your eggs around, as you say and reducing your risk as opposed to, you know, worried about lock-in, but as a CIO, how worried are you about lock-in? Where is that fit in the sort of decision tree? >> Ah, I mean, I would say it's up there, but unfortunately, there's no number one, there's like five number ones, if you would. So it's definitely up there and it's something to consider when you're looking at, like you said, the cost, risk integration, and then time. You know, sometimes you're up against the time. And again, security, like I said. Security is a big key in healthcare. And actually security overall, whether you're retail, you're going to always have situations no matter what industry, you got to protect the business. >> Yeah, so I want to ask you about security. That's the other number one. Well, you might've been a defacto CSO, but kind of when we started in this business security was the problem of the security teams, and you know, it's now a team sport. But in thinking about the cloud and security, how big of a concern is the cloud? Is it just more, you're looking for consistency and be able to apply the corporate edicts? Are there other concerns like the shared responsibility model? What are your thoughts on security in the cloud? >> Well, it probably goes back to again, the industry, but when I looked at the past five years in healthcare, doing a lot of work with the CMS and Medicaid, Medicare, they had certain requirements and certain restrictions. So we had to make sure that we follow those requirements. And when you got audited, you needed to make sure that you can show that you are adhering to their requirements. So over the past, probably two years with Amazon's government capabilities that those restrictions have changed, but we were always looking to make sure that we owned and managed how we manage the provider and member data, because yes, we did not want to have obviously a breach, but we wanted to make sure we were following the guidelines, whether it's state or federal, and then and even some cases healthcare guidelines around managing that data. So yes, top of mind, making sure that we're protecting, you know, in my case so we had 37 million members, patients, and we needed to make sure that if we did put it in the cloud or if it was on-prem, that it was being protected. And as you mentioned, recently come off of, I was going to say Amazon, but it was an acquisition. That company that was looking at us doing the due diligence, they gave us thumbs up because of how we were managing the data at the lowest point and all the different levels within the architecture. So Anthem who did the acquisition, had a breach back in, I think it was 2015. That was top of mind for them. We had more questions during the due diligence around security than any other functional area. So it is critical, and I think slowly, some of that type of data will get up into the cloud, but again, it's going to go through some massive risk management and security measures, and audits, because how fragile that is. >> Yeah, I mean, that could be a deal breaker in an acquisition. I got two other questions for you. One is, you know, I know you follow the technologies very closely, but there's all the buzz words, the digital transformation, the AI, these new SaaS models that we talked about. You know, a lot of CIOs tell me, look, Dave, get the business right and the technology is the easy part. It's people, it's process. But what are you seeing in terms of some of this new stuff coming out, there's machine learning, you know, obviously massive scale, new cloud workloads. Anything out there that really excites you and that you could see on the horizon that could be, you know, really change agents for the next decade? >> Yeah, I think we did some RPA, robotics on some of the tasks that, you know, where, you know, if the analysis types of situations. So I think RPA is going to be a game changer as it continues to evolve. But I agree with what you just said. Doing this for quite a while now, it still comes down to the people. I can get the technology to do what it needs to do as long as I have the right requirements, so that goes back to people. Making sure we have the partnership that goes back to leadership and the people. And then the change management aspects. Right out of the gate, you should be worrying about how is it going to affect and then the adoption and engagement. Because adoption is critical, because you can go create the best thing you think from a technology perspective, but if it doesn't get used correctly, it's not worth the investment. So I agree, whether it's digital transformation or innovation, it still comes down to understanding the business model and injecting and utilizing technology to grow or reduce costs, grow the business or reduce costs. >> Yeah, usage really means value. Sorry, my last question. What's the one thing that vendors shouldn't do? What's the vendor no-no that'll alienate CIO's? >> To this day, I still don't like, there's a company out there that starts with an O. I still don't like it to that, every single technology module, if you would, has a separate sales rep. I want to work with my strategic partners and have one relationship and that single point of contact that spark and go back into their company and bring me whatever it is that we're looking at so that I don't get, you know, for instance from that company that starts with an O, you know, 17 calls from 17 different sales reps trying to sell me 17 different things. So what irritates me is, you know, you have a company that has a lot of breadth, a lot of, you know, capability and functional, you know that I may want. Give me one person that I can deal with. So a single point of contact, then that makes my life a lot easier. >> Well, Dan Sheehan, I really appreciate you spending some time on theCUBE, it's always a pleasure catching up with you and really appreciate you sharing your insights with our audience. Thank you. >> Oh, thank you, David. I appreciate the opportunity. You have a great day. >> All right. You too. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE on Cloud. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after the short break. Awesome, Dan.

>>from >>around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of a dips reinvent 2020. I'm John for your host of the Cube great segment here with Presidio. Two great guests Chris Keg, Nazi senior vice president, general manager of the Cloud and Managed Services Group of Presidio, and Sam Fattah Gado, VP of Cloud Solutions Group with Presidio both been here in the Cube talking with us many times before. Great to have you guys on. Thanks for coming on Chris and Sam. >>Great. Thank you, John. Thanks for having us. >>We've had many great cloud conversations with your company and engineers. Architects going back, I think 2016 2017, really as cloud hit, that inflection point. Certainly, scaling Public Cloud and on premise is cloud operations. Certainly that has happened as continue to accelerate. Chris, I would like you to explain your relationship with AWS and you're focused at this. Reinvent what's going on with Presidio? What's new in your world? What's changed for you and the customers, >>right? So thank you, John. So Presidio's focus really is, um you know, around developing the right strategies, helping companies realize the full potential of the AWS cloud. Think of it as ah vory strategic approach that aligns technology with business outcomes really on a global scale. Um, this past year, um, if I look back a year ago, it reinvent when Presidio was there. Um, code a global was also there, which was an acquisition that we did. And we closed out, uh, in August and Sam Farr Gado was the CEO of Code Global. So what's really changed for us is taking our legacy business around infrastructure around security around Matic services on bond, combining that with really combining that with what Coda had around the professional services side of cloud engagement and really building out a company that I believe can deliver a very unique offering to clients because we can cover the full spectrum. So for us Ah, lots happened in a year since we were at reinvent attend day. It's really about, you know, business and technical leaders that we have that are really dedicated thio, you know, focusing on customers, their client experience, and really delivering the best business outcome that weekend >>you know, one of the things that we chat in the past, you just mentioned manage services. This is a huge deal because one of the trends that we've been reporting on here in the Cube and on Silicon angle is, you know, a lot of the transformational goals or accelerated Cove it. We see that projects that are doubling down are mostly cloud related, large scale automation, machine learning. But from an executive standpoint, the mandate is everything is a service. So there's a big executive push. See XO, CSOs, whatever for everything as a service. And when you put that out there and put that ball in play, so to speak, it's not easy, right? So when you go when you say hey, make everything is a service, it's not trivial, and then you get okay, How does that work? That's where the hard part happens. I want to get your take on that. Is that something that you're seeing with your customers? They put that ball in play, let's get the manage services and then you got to put it together. Not that easy. What's your take on that? >>I think you know when you think about clients today and what CEOs are looking for, it's really it is a pay by the drink or a consumption based model, right? But at the end of the day, they don't they want to manage their business. They don't want a Mac manage huge I t groups on DSO software developers within within their own business. They wanna pass that responsibility onto experts like Presidio. So I think it za fact. What's what's simple for them? How does how do they move kind of accountability and how did they get to their business outcomes without owning? And I t business within their existing business? So those are some of the changes that we've certainly seen from a mindset perspective, but but we're fully prepared. Thio offer that city >>that's great for your business is certainly a tail when Sam, I want to get to you. Because when you get to that conversation, okay, put his a service a lot in their unpack. I mean, depending on who you're talking to, you know, certainly accelerating it with Presidio. I see that you're now part of Presidio. Take us through what's going on in your world because when you get to the customer. You gotta work backwards from what they're trying to dio not trying to retrofit of technology into their environment. You've got to kind of work with what they got. But actually get them to the cloud. Can you share what you're doing with customers? >>Yeah. Thanks, John. I appreciate that. And one thing I want to say about joining Presidio is that, uh, you know, we, uh, had worked together for a couple of years and really found that we had a great cultural fit and that we had the same goal. And that's to become a W s number one partner globally, providing these kinds of mission critical solutions for clients. We've been told often times that we are Amazonian in terms of our customer obsession are bias for action. And what you just said there is helping them get the benefits of cloud quickly, no matter where they're coming from. Because, you know, they wanna have the availability security scalability, But they also have to integrate in with their existing systems. So what we're finding with clients is they want to transform the way they do business. They want to transform their industry oftentimes, and that's what they're looking for, you know, when they partner with us and they look for leveraging the AWS platform. >>So let me ask you a question then, because certainly we've seen I've interviewed a ton of Amazon customers and executives, and it's some >>of the >>things that's going on with Cove. It has just been amazing what they've enabled people to move so fast and put riel game changing impact, whether it's societal impact or some other transformative thing. And if you look at Amazon traditionally they started as a transactional thing. You get some easy to you by by the drink. Everything's going on. But every reinvent is more announcement. Andy Jassy said one hour keynote turns into a two hour keynote three, our keynote. And now you're looking at more transform inal transformational solutions. You still got some transactions in there. But when you gotta put the holistic, cohesive plan together, that has to be transformative. How do you guys talk to customers when you say it's not just transactional? Transformative? >>Yeah, well, we look, you know, we're doing it, you know, internally ourselves as well. You know, with Presidio now we've gone from transactions. Transactions are important but we really want to transform the way our customers are able to do business. And with co vid, it's been even more important to be ableto get things done without having to be physically present in one location. And so whether it's telehealth or remote learning, remote sales activities making sure that systems are integrated with commerce engines are again are very secure. The cloud and A W S is really bringing a big difference to the marketplace, and we're very immersed in that we have clients. Uh, I'll give you an example. Wheel pros. One of the leading tire after market tire and wheel manufacturers and designers we've talked with with their CEO, Randy White. He said. What we're doing with Presidio and on AWS platform is building the wheel. Pros of the future. What does that look like? He says he wants his systems to be just like his products for his customers. They've got to be high performing. They gotta be high quality, and they've got to deliver a great customer experience. Uh, well, you know, we want to be able to leverage a lot of the services that AWS has to be able to deliver those kinds of things quickly and with high quality. So it's really exciting to be able to see the impact we're having wheel pros, business and other clients like that. >>So when you talk about your solution to take him in to explain what you guys offer a client because you have a Presidio cloud solution, you get a lot of services can just take a minute to explain what people are buying and what they're getting from Presidio. Because, um, that sounds like a great customer success story. What are they? >>What >>are they getting? >>Okay, so what? They're getting really again following kind of the Amazonian way, working backwards, right? So let's start with an idea. Let's let's let's look at something we really want to do that's going to change dramatically. Change and improve the way they delight their customers. So start with that idea. Will help them design it. Welcome. Build it. Welcome. Deploy it. We could help support it. Fully managed service support eso from from the idea through to production and then ongoing support enhancements. They can count on Presidio to deliver all of those capabilities on Dakota Couldn't do all of that on our own. We were really grated application development, data and analytics. Uh, dev Ops and Automation. But with Presidio, we bring everything to the table Onda geun fully supported. Help them from, you know, even managing. You know, they're they're resell, being able to manage the environment, making sure that they're getting the most value out of these critical investments. >>Chris, I want to get your thoughts on this. Um, Sam mentioned you wanna be the number one solution provider for on AWS? Um, great mission, by the way, I wanna unpack that now. Last year, I reported at reinvent one of the feedback items was Amazon's gonna think more about solutions. Certainly Microsoft does that. We've seen that, um, Amazon doesn't really flout a plant. Those solutions very much. I mean, even though they have them there there you guys are a nice fit there. So if you're gonna be the number one solution provider, what do you guys need to do to do that? What a customers expect from you guys? Can you take a minute? Explain your plan? >>Sure. Yeah, absolutely, John. So I think you know, when you think about clients that air transforming their business right. They need to be competitive in their own market. So when they think about business outcomes in what Presidio does, we look at it in really a full life bull approach. If you think about the applications that Sam spoke about creating things that Air Cloud native, perhaps it's a mobile ordering app that's going to make them more competitive, especially in this covert environment. Um, think about their their just their normal consumption of services on the AWS platform. How do we optimize it for them? How do we ensure that they have the right services in a very agile, secure environment? So managing and owning it the full life cycle is really kind of what we deliver from a solution set. But every client is a little bit different, depending on really what their their needs are and what what their business outcomes are. So we can take it everywhere, anywhere from, uh, full development toe Full deployment Onda managing it in a very secure way, um, to adding in their consumption side of it, adding in their licensing component where perhaps they're buying under marketplace or a or a c p p o offering. So what's really unique about Presidio is that we offer that full solution to clients from end to end, and we can manage the entire process, deliver performance, cost savings and very predictable models >>from I love the, you know, a big fan of the entire and people who watch the Cubano. All I do is talk about and to end is really a critical way to look at things holistically if you're looking at something cohesive as a solution with transactional transformative capabilities. But I want to get your thoughts on some of the market demand challenges. And if you guys could react to it, um, Sam and Chris, there's two spectrums we're seeing with this pandemic clients, customers who were, like, have a tailwind. Oh, my God. This is accelerating my value proposition. I need more help. I gotta get to the cloud I gotta transformed quickly. And then the other end of the spectrum is the worst screwed. So we're gonna reset and retool while we're kind of in this bunker down mode and they want to come out of the pandemic with a growth plan. So kind of to spectrums, right? Did you guys see that as well what's the range of psychology or buyer behavior for your customers? Because there seems to be like the airline. They're not really getting a lot of business, but they're redoing their systems. They're being classified. Or, you know, this is an app for zoom or school educational. It's needed. It's in more demand. So you kind of everything in between those Do you guys see that? And if so, or if not >>way, certainly see a component with our client base around saving costs, right? What are they going to do in this environment? Toe save costs. But at the same time, we are seeing a lot of creativity around. What does their future model look like? And how did and what do they need to build? And that's what they're spending money on. Eso. We've seen it across kind of all verticals within the business, but certainly it it's a it's a dual approach. I think customers that go about doing that properly really prepare themselves for when we all do come out of this. That the business was will be set to capitalize on the change in market. That's what I've seen. I'm sure Sam has some additional comments >>Your thoughts? >>Yeah, absolutely. I would say necessity is the mother of invention. Invention. Right. So you know, we're seeing customers that we're thinking about cloud or, you know, considering maybe a new application cloud native application. But, you know, maybe you felt like they had time to do it where, you know, with covert ITT's bold are gonna be the ones that survive and thrive on DSO. Just like we saw when people came out of the 2000 and eight financial crisis. Those that invested in their systems, invested in their people, people skills is another big area right way at Presidio have I think we're upto like 600 AWS certifications across the board from sales through all different technologies. Because, you know, we wanna retain our people. We want to help them develop their skills and make sure that we're bringing the best talent to our clients. Eso yet z you know, it's a it's a difficult time, but it's a time for opportunity. >>Necessity could be business opportunity to capture opportunity, recognition, capture or survival. I mean, it is the mother of invention, you know it is it is a forcing function, guys. Thanks for the >>one of our clients. If I if I could, just mentioned Dunkin Brands, you know, they they couldn't have traffic in their stores. So, you know, mobile ordering became even more important. Um, you know, driving with Dr Drive up pick up and we helped them move from a multi tenant SAS application that was, you know, wasn't performing wasn't a reliable enough to an AWS Cloud native application, and they tripled the traffic while also improving performance and reliability. That's the kind of power that you can have with AWS and Presidio. >>That's a great eggs. And that's a great example looking relate to that. First of all, Dunkin Donuts makes great coffee and from the East Coast originally. So I love Dunkin Donuts. DND um, but great, great brand that mobile app. Good call, because people want to get in the curbside pickup or delivered. I mean, this is the new the new normal guys. Thanks so much for the insight. Final word. If you both can weigh in, um, share with the audience. The focus for this reinvent if you could share the Presidio message for reinvent virtual 2020. What do you think, >>Sam Why don't you go first? >>Well, from my perspective, it's all about, you know, taking it to another level. That's what we feel like we're doing was part of the video now again becoming the number one AWS partner. But it's also helping customers take their most important applications, uh, to the cloud so that they can improve the way they deliver for their customers. That's really what it's all about for me. >>Yeah, I would. I would have to concur with Sam. I mean, you know, our goal. Really like Sam said a few times to be be the number one aws partner. But with that comes, you know, a huge undertaking in a huge responsibility for us, you know, with our teams and and with our customers. At the end of the day, we want all of our clients to think of us first. Um, you know, when we're delivering these solutions and how impactful Presidio has been to their business for their growth onder for their future success. So for us, the customer obsession side of it all is really we want to continue that, and that's what we're gonna get out of this conference is how do we continue that? >>Well, congratulations. Like Chris and Sam. Thanks for coming on. I always say I enjoyed my conversations with your team. Uh, they get the technical chops, um, and having a service offering that accelerates mawr cloud goodness for customers on my, um, Amazon's got a great ecosystem clouds growing like crazy. So congratulations. Thank you. >>Thank you. Thank >>you. >>Thanks for coming on the Cuban John for your watching the Cube coverage of aws reinvent 2020. It's virtual this year. We're not impersonal, but the cube virtualization It's hit the market. More cube interviews remotely. And I'm John for Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE's two day coverage of Acronis' Global Cyber Summit 2019, here in Miami Beach, at the Fontainebleau Hotel. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're with Katya Fisher, Partner Chief and Chief Privacy Officer at Greenspoon Marder. Legal advice is right here on theCUBE, ask her anything. We're going to do a session here. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much, I'm going to have to do the little disclaimer that all lawyers do, which is, nothing here is to be construed as advice. It's just opinions and information only. >> I didn't mean to set you up like that. All kidding aside, you closed for the panel here for Acronis' conference. Obviously, cyber protection's their gig. Data protection, cyber protection. Makes sense, I think that category is evolving from a niche, typical enterprise niche, to a much more holistic view as data becomes you know, critical in the security piece of it. What was on the, what were you guys talking about in the panel? >> Well, so, the first issue that you have to understand is that cyber protection is something that has now become critical for pretty much every individual on the planet, as well as governments. So something that we talked about on the panel today was how governments are actually dealing with incoming cyber threats. Because now, they have to take a look at it from the perspective of, first of all, how they themselves are going to become technologically savvy enough to protect themselves, and to protect their data, but also, in terms of regulation and how to protect citizens. So, that was what the panel discussion was about today. >> On the regulatory front, we've been covering on SiliconANGLE, our journalism site, the innovation balance, is regulatory action helpful or hurtful to innovation? Where is the balance? What is the education needed? What's your thoughts on this, where are we? I mean early stages, where's the progress? What needs to get done? What's your view on the current situation? >> So, I'm an attorney, so my views are perhaps a bit more conservative than some of the technologists you might speak with and some of my clients as well. I think that regulation is, as a general matter, it can be a good thing. And it can be quite necessary. The issues that we see right now, with regard to regulation, I think one of the hottest issues today is with respect to data laws and data privacy laws. And that's obviously something that I think everyone is familiar with. I mean take a look at, in the United States alone. We've seen the city of Baltimore dealing with breaches. We've seen other parts of the government, from the Federal level all the way down to municipalities, dealing with breaches in cyber attacks. We've seen data breaches from banks, Capital One, right? I believe Dunkin' Donuts suffered a breach. Equifax, and then at the same time we've also seen individuals up in arms over companies like 23andMe and Facebook, and how data is used and processed. So data seems to be a very very hot button issue today across the board. So something that we're really thinking about now is, first of all, with respect to the regulatory climate, how to deal with it, not only in the United States, but on a global level, because, when we talk about technology and the internet right, we're in an era of globalization. We're in an era where a lot of these things go across boarders and therefore we have to be mindful of the regulatory regimes in other places. So, I'll give you an example. You might be familiar with the GDPR. So the GDPR is in the European Union. It's been in effect now for the last year and a half, but it affects all my U.S. clients. We still have to take a look at the GDPR because at the end of the day my clients, my firm, might be dealing with foreign companies, foreign individuals, companies that have some sort of nexus in the European Union, et cetera. So because of that, even though the GDPR is a set of regulations specific to the European Union, it becomes extremely important in the context of the United States and globally. At the same time, the GDPR has certain issues that then end up conflicting often times with some of the regulations that we have here in the United States. So, for example, the right to be forgotten is perhaps the most famous clause or part of the GDPR and the right to be forgotten is this concept in the GDPR that an individual can have information erased about him or her in order to protect his or her privacy. The problem is that from a technical's perspective, first of all, it's an issue because it becomes very very difficult to figure out where data is stored, if you're using third-party processors, et cetera. But from a regulatory perspective, the conflict comes in when you take a look at certain U.S. laws. So take a look for example at banking regulations in the United States. Banks have to hold some types of data for seven years and other types of data they can never delete. Right? Lawyers. I am licensed by the New York State Bar Association. Lawyers have their own rules and regulations with regard to how they store data and how they store information. HIPAA, medical records. So, you see these conflicts and there are ways to deal with them appropriately, but it becomes some food for thought. >> So it's complicated. >> It's really complicated >> There's a lot of conflicts. >> Yeah. >> First of all, I talked to a storage guy. He's like data? I don't even know which drive that's on. Storage is not elevated up to the level of state-of-the-art, from a tracking standpoint. So, it's just on the business logic is complicated. I can't imagine that. So, I guess my question to you is that, are you finding that the jurisdictional issue, is it the biggest problem, in terms of crossport and the business side or is the technical underpinnings, that with GDPR's the problem or both? What's your-- >> I mean it's both, right? They're a lot of issues. You're right, it's very complicated. I mean, in the United States we don't have some sort of overarching federal law. There's no cyber protection law in the United States. There's no overarching data protection law. So, even in the U.S. alone, because of federalism, we have HIPAA and we have COPPA which protects children and we have other types of acts, but then we also have state regulations. So, in California you have the California Privacy Act. In New York you have certain regulations with regard to cyber security and you have to deal with this patchwork. So, that becomes something that adds a new layer of complexity and a new layer of issues, as we take a look, even within the U.S. alone, as to how to deal with all of this. And then we start looking at the GDPR and all of this. From a technical perspective. I'm not a technologist, but. >> Katya, let me ask you a question on the (mumbles) and business front. (mumbles) I think one of the things. I'm saying it might or may not be an issue, but I want to get your legal weigh-in on this. >> Katya: Sure. >> It used to be when you started a company, you go to Delaware, very friendly, domicile in Delaware, do some formation there, whether you're a C corp or whatever, that's where we tend to go, raise some money, get some preferred stock, you're in business. >> Is there a shift in where companies with domicile, their entity, or restructure their companies around this complexity? Because, there's two schools of thought. This brute force act, everything coming at you, or you restructure your corporate formation to handle some of the nuances, whether it's I have a Cayman or a Bermuda... whatever's going on in the regulatory regime, whether it's innovative or not. Are people thinking like that? Or, what's your take on it? What's some of the data you're seeing from the field around, restructuring around the problem? >> So, with respect to restructuring, specifically around data laws and data protection laws, I'm not seeing too much of that, simple because of the fact that regulations like the GDPR are just so all-encompassing. With respect to companies setting up in Delaware as opposed to other jurisdictions, those are usually based on two issues, right, two core ones, if I can condense it. One has to do with the court system and how favorable a court system is to the corporation, and the second is taxes. So, a lot of times when you see companies that are doing all of this restructuring, where they're setting up in offshore zones, or et cetera, it's usually because of some sort of a tax benefit. It might be because of the fact that, I don't know, for example, intellectual property. If you have a company that's been licensing IP to the United States, there's a 30% withholding tax when royalties are paid back overseas. So a lot of times when you're looking at an international structuring, you're trying to figure out a jurisdiction that might have a tax treaty with the United States, that will create some sort of an opportunity to get rid of that 30% withholding. So, that's where things usually come into play with regard to taxes and IP. I haven't seen yet, on the side of looking for courts that are more favorable to companies, with respect to data privacy and data protection. I just haven't seen that happen yet because I think that it's too soon. >> How do companies defend themselves against claims that come out of these new relations? I mean GDPR, I've called it the shitstorm when it came out. I never was a big fan of it. It just didn't. I mean, I get the concept, but I kind of understood the technical issues, but let's just say that you're a small growing business and you don't have the army of lawyers or if someone makes a claim on you, I have to defend it. How are companies defending themselves? Do they just shut down? Do they hire you guys? I mean, obviously lawyers need to be involved. But, at some point there's a line of where having a U.S. company and someone consumes my media in Germany and it says, hey I'm a German citizen. You American company, delete my records. How does that work? Do I have to be responsible for that? I mean, what's? >> So, it's really case-by-case basis. First of all, obviously, with regard to what I was talking about earlier, with respect to the fact that there are certain regulations in the U.S. that conflict with GDPR and the right to be forgotten. If you can actually assert a defense and sort of a good reason for why you have to maintain that information, that's step one. Step two is, if it's some complaint that you received, is to delete the person's information. There's an easier way to do it. >> Yeah, just do what they want. >> Just comply with what they want. If somebody wants to be off of a mailing list, take them off the mailing list. The third is, putting in best practices. So, I'm sure a lot of things that people see online, it's always great to go ahead and obtain legal counsel, even if you're consulting with a lawyer just for an hour or two, just to really understand your particular situation. But, take a look at privacy policies online. Take a look at the fact that cookies now have a pop-up whenever you go to a website. I'm sure you've noticed this, right? >> John: Yeah. So, there are little things like this. Think about the fact that there are, what is known as clickwrap agreements. So, usually you have to consent. You have to check a box or uncheck a box with respect to reading privacy policies, being approved for having your email address and contact information somewhere. So, use some common sense. >> So, basically don't ignore the prompt. >> Don't ignore the problem. >> Don't ignore it. Don't stick your head in the sand. It'll bite you. >> Correct. And the thing is, to be honest, for most people, for most small companies, it's not that difficult to comply. When we start talking about mid-size and large businesses, the next level, the next step, obviously beyond hiring attorneys and the like, is try to comply with standards and certifications. For example, there's what is known as ISO standards. Your company can go through the ISO 27001 certification process. I think it costs around approximately $20,000. But, it's an opportunity to go ahead, go through that process, understand how compliant you are, and because you have the certification, you're then able to go to your customers and say, hey, we've been through this, we're certified. >> Yeah. Well, I want to get, Katya, your thoughts, as we wrap up on this segment, around Crypto and Blockchain. Obviously, we're bullish on Blockchain. We think this is a supply chain. (mumbles) Blockchain can be a good force, although some think there's some work needs to be done on the whole energy side of it, which is, we would agree. But, still. I'm not going to make that be a wet blanket of excitement. But cryptocurrency has been fraudulent. It's been. The SCC's been cracking down in the U.S., in the news. Lieber's falling apart, although, I called that separately, but, (laughing) it had nothing to do with that Lieber. It was more of Facebook, but. Telegram. We were talking about that, others. People are getting handcuffed on this stuff. They're really kind of clamping down. But, overseas in Asia, it's still an unregulated, seems to be (mumbles) kind of market. Your advice to clients was to shy away, be careful? >> My advice to clients is as follows. First of all, Blockchain and cryptocurrency are not the same thing. Right? Cryptocurrency is a use case coming out of Blockchain technology. I think that in the United States, the best way to think about it is to understand that the term cryptocurrency, from a regulatory perspective, is actually a misnomer. It's not a currency. It's property. Right? It's an asset. It's digital assets. So, if you think about it the same way that we think of shares in a company, it's actually much easier to become compliant, because, then you can understand that it's going to be subject to U.S. securities laws, just like other securities. It's going to be taxed, just like securities are taxed, which means that it's going to be subject to long and short-term capitol gain, and it's also going to be subject to the other regulatory restrictions that are adherent to securities, both on the federal and state level. >> It's interesting that you mentioned security. The word security. If you look back at the ICO craze, internet coin offerings, crypto offerings, whatever you call it, The people who got whacked the most were the ones that went out as a utility tokens. Not to get nerdy on this, but utility and security are two types of tokens. The ones that went out and raised money as the utility token had no product, raised money using the utility that doesn't exist. That's essentially a security. And, so, no wonder why they're getting slapped. >> They're securities. Look, Bitcoin, different story, because Bitcoin is the closest to being I guess, what we could consider to be truly decentralized, right? And the regulatory climate around Bitcoin is a little bit different from what I'm talking about, with respects to securities laws. Although, from a tax perspective, it's the same. It's taxed as property. It's not taxed the way that foreign currency is taxed. But ultimately, yeah. You had a lot of cowboys who went out, and made a lot of money, and were just breaking the law, and now everyone is shocked when they see what's going on with this cease-and-desist order from the SCC against Telegram, and these other issues. But, none of it is particularly surprising because at the end of the day we have regulations in place, we have a regulatory regime, and most people just chose to ignore it. >> It's interesting how fast the SCC modernized their thinking around this. They really. From a speed standpoint, all government agencies tend to be glacier speed kind of movement. They were pretty fast. I mean, they kind of huddled on this for a couple months and came out with direction. They've been proactive. I got to say. I was usually skeptical of most government organization. I don't think they well inform. In this case, I think the SCC did a good job. >> So, I think that the issue is as follows. You know, Crypto is a very very very small portion of what the SCC deals with, so, they actually paid an inordinate amount of attention to this, and, I think that they did it for a couple of reasons. One is because, you asked me in the beginning of this interview about regulations versus innovation. And, I don't think anyone wants to stifle innovation in America. It's a very interesting technology. It's very interesting ideas, right? No one wants that to go away and no one wants people to stop experimenting and stop dreaming bigger. At the same time, the other issue that we've seen now, especially, not only with the SCC, but with the IRS now getting involved, is the fact that even though this is something very very small, they are very concerned about where the technology could go in the future. The IRS is extremely concerned about erosion of the tax space. So, because of that, it makes a lot of sense for them to pay attention to this very very early on, nip this in the bud, and help guide it back into the right direction. >> I think that's a good balance. Great point. Innovation doesn't want to be stifled at all, absolutely. What's new and exciting for you? Share some personal or business updates in your world. What's going on? What's getting you excited these days, in the field? >> What's getting me excited these days? Well, I have to tell you that one thing that actually has gotten me excited these days is the fact that the Blockchain and cryptocurrency industries have grown up, substantially. And, now we're able to take a look at those industries in tandem with the tech industry at large, because they seem to sort of be going off in a different direction, and now we're taking a look at it, and now you can really see sort of where the areas that things are going to get exciting. I look at my clients and I see the things that they're doing and I'm always excited for them, and I'm always interested to see what new things that they'll innovate, because, again, I'm not a technologist. So, for me, that's a lot of fun. And, in addition to that, I think that other areas are extremely exciting as well. I'm a big fan of Acronis. I'm a big fan of cyber protection issues, data protection, data regulation. I think something that's really interesting in the world of data regulation, that actually has come out of the Blockchain community, in a way, is the notion of data as a personal right, as personal property. So, one of the big things is the idea that now that we've seen these massive data breaches with Facebook and 23andME, and the way that big government, big companies, are using individuals' datas, the idea that if data were to be personal property, it would be used very very differently. And technologists who are using Blockchain technology say that Blockchain technology might actually be able to make that happen. Because if you could have a decentralized Facebook, let's say, people could own their own data and then use that data as they want to and be compensated for it. So, that's really interesting, right-- Yeah, but, if you're just going to use the product, they might as well own their data, right? >> Katya: Exactly. >> Katya, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for the insight. Great, compelling narrative. Thanks for sharing. >> Sure, thank you very much. >> Appreciate it. I'm John Furrier here on theCUBE, Miami Beach, at the Fontainebleau hotel for Acronis' Global Cyber Summit 2019. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.

>> Live, from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the District, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Day two of the AWS Public Sector Summit. We saw Teresa Carlson yesterday, a lot of keynotes, we saw the CIA. Todd Osbourne is here, he's the Vice President of Alliances of New Relic, a company that's been smokin' hot, six billion dollar market cap, and really is takin' the world by storm. He's joined by Scott Drossos, who's the president of Infiniti, who is a public sector consultancy. Gentleman, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks, good to be here. >> Thank you. >> So Todd, you heard me, I mean really, everybody's talkin' about New Relic, stocks been smoking, I read an article recently, "it's got to cool off, it's too hot." So why so hot, what's goin' on, why the appeal of New Relic? >> Well as our CEO Lew Cirne has been on a couple of times talking to you about, every business is becoming a software business in the public sector, which we're here representing at the Amazon public sector event. It's the same thing with agencies and all the digital experiences that are happening across all the government and whether it's education, higher ed, healthcare, any of the DOD or other agencies, there's always some sort of digital experience that folks are having with the citizens that all the agencies and organizations are tryin' to support, and New Relic's right there, right there at the forefront of every one of those digital experiences. Everyone's running software that's modern software, or shifting to that with modern software running microservices, running containers, shifting to the cloud, and anyone deploying that type of software needs to have New Relic as part of their engagement to monitor what's happening at the citizen or the customer level, what's going on in the back end, on through the infrastructure. And New Relic, whether it's a large enterprise that we're out there, like Dunkin' Donuts or Dominos, monitoring their applications and their eCommerce sites, or it's an agency in the public sector space, you got to have New Relic as part of those engagements. >> So Scott, when AWS services first came out, 2006 timeframe, we looked at it, we said okay, this is the future, but as much as it potentially simplifies lives, it brings a lot of new complexities. So you know, Stu and I used to talk about, look, the AWS is awesome, we're big fans, but the ecosystem has to grow. Consultancies have to come out of the woodworks, and help customers really, adopt. So that's really exactly what's happened. I presume that's how Infiniti got started, maybe you could tell us a little bit about the company, and what your value is. >> Sure, thanks Dave, so Infiniti is a 15 year old company. We're originally founded in public sector IT consulting, and we realized several years ago that the world was changing and that we needed to make the shift from IT consulting to cloud services. And so we dove in headfirst with AWS, and we really tried to move to the top of the curve very quickly, and so we were a little bit ahead of our market in public sector, being a public sector focused organization, but we felt it was important to get ahead of the market because now the market really is smokin' hot. But we thought it was important that if we're going to move into the cloud, we wanted to move to the top of the curve, and deal with things like DevOps, migrations, even machine learning, predictive analytics, so we kind of pride ourselves on having some of the largest public sector contracts in the US, even though we're, right now, predominantly California based, California focused. >> And what's your head count? >> We're about a hundred people. >> I mean this is the thing, we're seeing this trend toward a lot of, you know, smaller specialists, are really doing super. Why is that, or how are you able to differentiate from these big global SIs that have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of employees, vertical expertise, why are you guys winning? >> Well, first of all, I think we're able to be nimble and shift our focus pretty quickly to serve our market, to serve our customers, I think more successfully. But one of the thing's that's changed when the cloud arrived, is the cloud really let smaller organizations like us, act like big organizations, so we didn't need to go deploy millions of dollars of capital to go set up a massive data center, we can build an environment on the fly, as you know, in the cloud, and we can have access to world-class platform tools like New Relic, and we can help a customer, a large customer, perform just as well as if we were a large multi-billion dollar services organization. >> Todd, one of the interesting things to talk to customers about is their journey, and where are they, and the cloud migration and how do they do this, reinvent? A year ago or two I heard there were like seven or nine ARS to get there, anything from the full refactoring and building cool new stuff with server lists and things like that, to just the re-platforming. Lift and shift, is that a good thing, isn't that? Walk us through how New Relic with Infiniti, how are you involved in some of those migrations? There's no typical customer, but give us some examples. >> Yeah absolutely, so Infiniti, just like many of the integrators that we work with are all delivering services generally in a couple different areas. One is typically a cloud adoption, or cloud migration practice. So working with Amazon, how do we get more and more of customer's workloads shifted to the cloud? Usually those projects are also going on with something in the refactoring world or application space. Usually they're also developing or shifting to some sort of DevOps practice, and that's also part of our sweet spot, what's happening in the application there, whether it's on the cloud yet or not, we're going to provide that visibility to that. And then the third piece is, there's usually something else happening with that, as I was mentioning before, the customer experience or the citizen experience, so what's the browser impact, what's the user experience on that, what's the, if it's on a mobile app, what's the user experience on there? So while Infiniti's delivering all those services for the clients, New Relic's part of all those services, so our whole model that we're tryin' to do with all of our partners is embed ourselves into all of those services, such that we can help Infiniti be more successful, deliver those projects on time, and really resolve any issues that may come up during those migration issues. >> Scott, I'd love to hear especially, I know I hear DevOps talked about a lot in New Relic's customers, is it pervasive around the agencies that you work with and please do add some color there too. >> So in the public sector, it's a range of readiness, but we're seeing a real wave building, we believe. We worked with New Relic on a very large DevOps, SysOps, very complex cloud services engagement, largest higher education cloud services engagement in the US, and in that case, just like Todd was referencing, when we implemented the migration of the legacy platform to the cloud, first of all we had to do, make choices around refactory, host, rearchitect and so forth, but then when we're managing that environment, and there's millions of users hitting that environment, we need to be able to make sure that we can monitor the application to make sure the application's performing well, and if there's an issue, we want to see the line of code that's causing the problem as quickly as possible so we can keep the environment up all the time. Even though public sector may not be driven by the same financials as say, commercial, they still expect to be up all the time. They still want to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud and so New Relic allows us to do that, but then, as we're looking at the users interface with the application environment, New Relic's browser and mobile, they let us monitor how that experience is going, and we can proactively get at the performance issues there that the application may not tell us, if there's an issue there. And then, we can do things like test middleware with synthetics and make sure that the whole environment's working, and then obviously on the infrastructure side, it lets us make sure that we're optimizing the environment for our clients. One of the cool thing is, when you in the past, you'd set up an EC2 instance, you may not see that you don't need as much CPU as you're using, and so you can size that appropriately, and allow your environment to still run at a high performance, 100% up time, but give them the cost efficiencies at the same time. So we use New Relic across board to help support the entire environment. >> I wonder if we could talk about the marketplace a little bit, generally and then specifically, the public sector? So Scott, I presume you're obviously public sector focused, but are you exclusive to AWS, no, you probably do some other stuff, is that right, is that fair? >> Well we are both AWS and Azure Gold, in terms of partner, but we do more of our work in AWS for sure. >> Okay, so we'll come back to that. And New Relic, of course you're a software company, so you want everybody to love your software, so if there's a cloud that a customer wants to use, you want your software to be on that cloud, fair enough? >> Sure, and also on PRIM, I mean a lot of our... >> On PRIM too. >> A lot of our applications we monitor are still on PRIM, and there's a tremendous amount of value there regardless of... >> I would just add, Infiniti is a trusted advisor, we like to see ourselves as a trusted advisor, so we do feel like we have to be multi-cloud and have an objective perspective. >> And New Relic is presumably the same way, I mean let the customers decide, so, and it's a hybrid world, folks, despite what Amazon wants, it's a hybrid world, and they even recognize that. My question is, there's a lot of discussion in the industry about Amazon as an infrastructure service provider and their lead or relative lead on the competition. It's our sense that there's still a lead there, what's your sense? >> Well AWS is still the leading cloud services provider in the marketplace. They lead in innovation, they lead in disruption, they lead in market share, they lead in so many metrics, and because they have that lead, and that's where we started, we've benefited from that, and we've invested heavily, and in the same way, we see New Relic, when we made a choice around who we were going to pick as a platform to support our customers, we wanted something that was cloud-born, didn't come out of on-premise and get sort of bootstrapped into the cloud, and we wanted something that was a complete platform. So New Relic was really a clear choice for us. It was not a, we looked at the entire market when we made that choice. >> So the narrative in the market used to be, oh, security in the cloud, now we hear the CIA say hey, security on the worst day in Amazon's cloud is way better than I ever saw with client server. It was a pretty powerful statement, so let's assume security, people are relatively comfortable with security these days, even though I'm sure there's still some issues with regard to corporate edicts, and flexibility, and audits, let's put that aside. SLAs is another big one. People often criticize the public cloud SLAs, and cost, oh it's so expensive, I can do it cheaper on PRIM. Are those myths, are those realities, is it a it depends? What's your sense? >> I mean they're all, they're all factors that all of our customers are looking into. I would say what we're hearing a lot about right now, is how do we help provide more visibility to everything that's happening, so if you've got a developer now that has the ability to write code, put it on any cloud they want, spin up containers, spin down containers, go try out server-less base of architectures, they've got a lot of flexibility to do what they want. Government agencies, as well as customers, one of the things they're looking for is what's actually happening? Who's doing what? The governance piece is a big piece and I think New Relic plays right into that in terms of helping control all that. One of the things that we're, is one of our sweet spots, is as you move to DevOps and a truly microservices architecture, one of the whole values of that is speed, keeping up with how fast the whole market is moving, and customers and agencies, what they want out of that, is to deploy applications where they're releasing multiple times a day. You have to have visibility into everything you're doing across the stack to be successful in that, and that's really New Relic's sweet spot in terms of doing that. So providing that visibility, instrumenting the applications in the infrastructure before, and then helping provide visibility to things like governance, things that other, not necessarily our sweet spot, but other companies in the industry are doing things throughout the DevOps life cycle in the governance realm, things like that. So we're part of that ecosystem that's helping Amazon and the other cloud providers be very successful, helping customers and agencies be very successful deploying modern applications. >> It's all about that visibility. >> Scott, one of the things, when we look at any rollout of new technology or migration, once it's up and running, then what, so wondering how your firm's involved in, you know, is there re-training, is there things go on, once this is in place, now what? >> Well Infiniti, what we found in public sector is that everybody wants to take advantage of the cost efficiencies and the benefits, and most public sector isn't going to reduce cost, they're just going to want to re-use cost more wisely. So some of the confusion around cost savings is that they're getting way more for their dollar in the future state, and the choices you have to make around how fast you want to get to the cloud, and what you want to get out of the cloud when you're there, those all effect the equation in terms of what you're actually outcomes are immediately and in the long term. So we often see that in public sector, some of the legacy applications, they may not naturally or easily move all at once, and so you have to make a choice, are you going to do some refactory and architecting before you get it there, are you going to get in the cloud now, and then do it afterwards. Either way, there's benefits, but you have to make choices about what, how you want to approach it. >> Yeah, when you talk about, after I've rolled this in, I've heard from some customers, they're like, after I've gotten a cloud, I love it, but I had to dedicate an engineer for financial architecting because there's all of these things we need to do. Are we still in that state? And once again, do you help with some of the training as to, okay, or is it plugging them into the Amazon ecosystem and how do they get certified and ready to use all of this. >> So Infiniti works with clients differently, we work with some in a more episodic, lighter capacity, and we work with some in a wholistic capacity where we are that engine for them, where we provide them the complete cloud services team to do everything from migrations, architecture, DevOps, SysOps, SecOps, machine learning and all the way through. And so when we're providing those services, we're doing those kind of things, we're making sure that the next improvement is worked into the architecture. Last year, the customer I was referencing earlier, we did just under a hundred releases, so that's a hundred releases that we're using the New Relic platform and our architectural solution, our solution architects, rather, to make sure that it's faultless, that the process is efficient, it's effective, it's secure, and that we're driving efficiencies wherever possible. So it really depends on what the customer wants. If the customer wants to hone the environment, they may have to go a little slower to account for their learning, their learning curve, and we'll help them, if that's what they want, but if they want to go faster, and they want to take advantage of our expertise, we make that available, and we're happy to do that. >> We had the former CTO of the NSA on yesterday, who now works for Accenture, and we were asking about sort of, federal versus commercial, are we sort of still taking, learning lessons from commercial and bringing it to federal, or is it because federal has so much interesting technology around analytics, does it go the other way, and he said, "it's funny, when you're on the inside, you think all the innovation is goin' on outside, now that I'm on the outside I say wow, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on in federal." We heard Teresa yesterday talk about Aurora, she talked about the VM wear partnership, so things that were announced a while ago and actually being adopted in commercial coming in to federal. So how does it work? Is it more of a two-way than it used to be 20 years ago and I wonder if you could comment? >> Yeah, from Infiniti's perspective, absolutely. We work with clients to understand the problems and where they want to get to, and then we innovate with them. You're pretty dependent on the subject matter expertise of the organization. I think our customers like that, they like that they're part of the solution, but then they need the expertise that we bring to create the next generation solution. We just created something in the higher ed space called, a college called Architecture Builder, and it was after teaming with a specific college, and working in that space for a long time, but we wanted to create a way for colleges to rapidly implement a complete architecture integrated with all the different things, including New Relic, quickly and successfully, and that was done in partnership with them, so we did the work, but we couldn't have done it without them. >> Todd, New Relic obviously, you're a believer, you drink the Koolaid every day. Why New Relic relative to the competition? How do you guys differentiate? Pitch me. >> So it's really all about being successful in that modern software space, again, as I've mentioned, and so New Relic is the only SAS only platform, so we're not going to put anything on PRIM. We've got ourselves one of the biggest and best DevOps team that develops our software, we roll code everyday, and our customers get the benefit of us being a pure SAS platform. Part of that is scalability. What we can do at scale is unbelievable. There was a customer that was just talked about on the news today that I can't mention, but they just went from basically zero to $100 million on an application just in the past 90 days. It's one of our customers and we've scaled, we have no problem scaling with customers that are doing things like that, and again, the full platform value that we have now, looking at everything from the front end on the browser and mobile applications, through the application, which is core to us, it's where we provide that code-level visibility, the ability to trace across all the different microservices that are happening, connected back to that infrastructure. That full platform now provides such tremendous value up and down the stack, but not only to the technology leaders but also to those folks that are business leaders, chief marketing officers, heads of practices at the consultants we work with, all these folks are all getting value out of New Relic. >> What would that customer who should not be named say about the value contribution of New Relic to that scale? >> The value's unbelievable. That's a commercial customer, but their business is taking off like so many of our customer's businesses are at an unbelievable scale. They can't be hamstrung by having to do a server upgrade, or having to go back, working with a release of code from a couple weeks ago, they have to be as fast as possible 'cause their business is moving so fast, their agencies are moving so fast, they need a provider that's going to provide that visibility to that at the speed with which they're moving. >> Awesome so, you got one more? >> No, we've got to run. >> Yeah, we've got to go. So this is the last question, so impressions of AWS Public Sector Summit? I presume you guys, like we did, had to register yesterday. There were some logistic issues, but other than that, maybe you could give us your last word on the summit? >> Well Infiniti is very committed to public sector, so we really enjoy coming to the Public Sector Summit. It's great to connect with our partners, like New Relic and others, and it's great to see the latest innovations coming out from AWS. >> Yeah and I've been to, I don't know, 10 or so summits around the world so far this year. It is unbelievable the excitement and the amount of people that are now excited about what's happening in the clouded option world, and Amazon's piece in that, and what's happening here in D.C. this week is no exception. >> I would second that. It's been a while since I've been at summits. Stu, you go all the time, and they are just exploding and growing, and this is one of the best that's out there. So thanks guys, for comin' on theCUBE, we really appreciate it. >> Thanks very much. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest after this short break. John Furrier's here, you're watchin' theCUBE live, from AWS Public Sector Summit. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat instrumental music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering AWS re:Invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is the Cube, live here in Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent 2017. I'm John Furrier, the cohost of the cube. My cohost, Keith Townsend, here for our fifth year in a row, covering the thunderous growth of Amazon Web Services as they continue to not only nail the developers and the start ups, but continue to win the enterprise. Our next guest, Lew Cirne, who's the founder and CEO of publicly held New Relic, a very successful startup, one of the most admired places to work in the Bay area, and in tech. Lew, great to have you on the Cube, welcome. >> Hi. >> John: Hi, first time. >> I know, so great to be here. I can't believe it's the firs time. I've been such a fan for a long time. >> Now you're an alumni, the benefits. >> Here I am. >> All the benefits of being an alumni, all those season tickets to all of our games. I gotta, I want to just share something with the audience out there. You're the only public CEO that I know that's been on the Cube that writes software, has a GitHub account, and manages a publicly held company. So that's a unique thing and I want to just say it's awesome. >> It's a full plate, that's for sure, but I'm the luckiest guy in the world because I've always loved building software since my first computer I got in the Christmas of 82, what's that, 35 years ago now, and, and so, what an exciting time to be someone who's passionate about software and technology. Look what's going on in the cloud, and so I've been fortunate enough to start this company that's participating in this revolution in technology, so it's great. >> You guys are always in the cutting edge. I noticed, you guys get your hands dirty, you get in there, you're coding away, but you guys are very successful in a very important area right now, which is instrumentation of data. >> Lew: Absolutely. >> In applications, so I really want to get your, kind of your thoughts on the landscape. We were talking about on our intro analysis, that we're seeing a renaissance in software development, where with open source growing exponentially, a new software methodology's coming out, where there's just so much going on. Multiple databases within one app, IOT, so a new kind of thinking is evolving. What's your take on that? >> Well I think it's really important to understand why all of this is happening. So why are there 40,000 people here in Las Vegas for re:Invent? Why are people consuming the cloud at just a dizzying pace? It's not just for the sake of cloud computing, it's because there's this business imperative to compete on software, so if you look at where software was 15, 20 years ago, software was a tool to reduce costs and automate things in the back end. Now your software's your business. If you are a large global bank, your app has more to do with your customers' experience and satisfaction than the branch because nobody walks through a branch anymore, so now the best software developing bank is going to be the winner, so if you think about that's what's going on and that's why they're adopting new technologies to move faster, so where do we fit in? If you're going to compete on your software, and by competing you have to build the best stuff, the fastest as possible, so you have to get to market quickly, and that means you've got to change a lot. Anytime you're changing something rapidly, that introduces risk. New Relic de-risks all of that rapid movement by instrumentation, by measuring everything in the software. Those measurements help you move faster with confidence. >> And also I would say that you, not only does that create risks, but new software creates risks, so I'm doing server-less, I want to try the new service because it could A, add value, AKA Lamda or whatever, so a new, maybe time out is needed, so all kinds of new things or elements are going on inside the software stacks. >> Yes, and more complex than ever before, right, so you introduce things like Lambda server-less function computing, call it what you will, and you integrate it with, you know, microservice architecture, and so instead of one monolith, you might have hundreds, or even some of our customers have thousands of independent services, all supposed to be working in flawless concert in order to deliver a great customer experience. How on earth do you make sense of whether that's all working? Well it involves collecting an enormous amount of data about everything that's going on in real time, and then applying intelligence to that data using what we call at New Relic applied intelligence to tell our customers in real time, here's what's working well, and more importantly, here's what's going to be a problem if you don't take immediate action. And that's, you know, that's a hard problem to solve. We think we're the best at doing it. >> And that's critical too, because like you said, if it crashes, or there's some sort of breach hold that comes out there, all the stuff is at risk. >> And like, customers have just incredibly high expectations that only get higher and higher every day. Like, you know, one of our customers is Domino's and it's an amazing thing where you pre-order your pizza and you can see, second by second, how your order is doing, right? They put your pizza in the oven, then they took the pizza out of the oven, and I see that in phone, and that gives, that's that feedback that's valuable to me, right? So long as it's working, right? >> John: I'm hungry now. >> So we, we've ravished this word digital transformation all the time. >> Oh yeah, it's a little overused, but. >> It is a little overused. But melding that physical world with cold. I love it that you're a developer. First off, what's your favorite language? >> Oh geez, it really depends on the project. I'm really getting into, I love React right now on the front end. I'll still do Java when it needs some heavy lifting, Ruby for rapid prototyping. It really depends on the task at hand. >> So the value of reducing friction from a developer seeing a problem, needing to solve that problem, and getting the resources needed to solve a problem, AWS does a wonderful job of saying, you know what, developer, give me your credit card, we'll give you all the tools you need. Where is the first stumbling block because this is new capability, net new over the past few years? Where's the first set of stumbling blocks when developers reduce friction, get to that first level contact with the branch manager of the pizza store, where does it fall apart and New Relic comes in to help? >> Look, how many times have you ever had a developer or a tech or someone that works on my machine, right? >> Exactly, worked on my laptop. I don't know why it didn't deploy well in production, it worked perfectly fine on my laptop. >> I really, I started thinking about and solving this problem 20 years ago now. The notion of less instrument Java code because I was frustrated with the stuff that worked on my laptop. I couldn't understand why it didn't work when a customer used it, and everything prior to the customer using the software is nothing but sunk cost. There is no value in the software you're building until it runs in production. How well it runs in production is what determines the fate of the application. And that's where New Relic comes in, is we feel like alright, let me take you back to the ancient days of like turn of the century, 2000, nothing went to production without QA. Now nothing goes to production without instrumentation. >> Yeah, but now Agile's there, so the old days was a crab. You built a software product, but you didn't know if it was going to work until it went into production with QA. Now you're shipping stuff fast, so it's still. You've got that dev off mindset, but it's in QA. >> One of our customers, Airbnb, deploys more than a thousand times a day. And this is not a small, low load site. I mean like every deploy has to work, otherwise millions of people are impacted and it's the whole business, and it's a big business, so you're talking about a pace of innovation and change that cannot be managed with a traditional QA cycle. I've, of course testing's important, but instrumentation's more important than that. >> Lew, I want to ask you an important question because I asked Andy Jassie this last Monday when I had a one on one with him. A lot of people that are entering ecosystem for Amazon is new, that are new, or considerably, Amazon's the big, they're fearful, it's always going to be that way. He highlighted your company, New Relic, and said they're an amazing part, they do extremely well, even though they introduced Cloud Watch, which because some customers just wanted it, they have monitoring, but you guys are so much better. I said that, but if he implied it, obviously you're doing well. So the successful participation of the ecosystem is there. You can be successful in the Amazon ecosystem. >> Absolutely, it's a great partnership. >> So what's this formula for a new entry coming in or someone who's here that needs to find some white space? How do you read the tea leaves to know where not to play and where to play? >> You know, it just comes down to the fundamental good thought process you use when you're thinking about approaching your customer too. Don't think about what's in it for me, the Amazon partner. What's in it for Amazon? How do you make them more successful? And so when I imagine myself as Andy, who is like, what an incredible job he's done, but what Andy, what's top mind of Andy is how do I get more customers consuming more of Amazon faster, right? All of Amazon, all of Amazon's web services, and so we solve a problem for Andy and his team. We help our customers consume Amazon faster because we give them the confidence to consume more and move faster, and there's data to prove it. When Amazon asks their customers that aren't yet New Relic customers how much they're consuming and how fast, they get a slower rate of adoption than they do for the cohort that uses New Relic, and so it's in our mutual interest to go to market together because we help them consume more, and so I. >> John: Build a good product. >> Build a good product. >> John: Customer value. >> Think about how you help your partner be successful. Talk in that language, don't talk in language. >> Alright, so personal question. So you and I, pretend we're sitting here, having a beer, you're playing the guitar. >> A little light. >> I'm singing some tunes and Keith's our friend. He says I'm in trouble, I'm a CIO. I've got a transformation project. I don't know what to do. Which cloud do I use? How do I become data driven? Guys, help me out. Lew, what do you say? >> I say first of all, you have an instrumentation strategy. Everything, if you're a CIO in a large organization, you don't have one, two, three, or four projects. You have dozens, if not hundreds, sometimes thousands of applications and services that are all running, and you've got, I haven't met a CIO that doesn't say they've got too many monitoring tools. So you need an instrumentation strategy. Nothing should run in production without instrumentation. That's not just the service light stuff that runs on EC2, it's also every click that runs. You know, when Dunkin Donuts, which has been a longtime customer of ours, and they run in the Amazon Cloud, you know when you pre-order that doughnut, we track the tap, how long it takes from the phone all the way through the cloud services, all that's fully instrumented, so if you're a CIO, you say I can't be tactical with instrumentation. If I'm going to move fast and compete at my software, nothing should run in production without education. >> John: That's native. >> That's right. >> Foundational. >> Foundational. It's a core requirement to run in production if you're going to move at any level of speed, so establish that strategy, and then we think, we offer the best instrumentation, certainly the best value, the most ubiquitous, the easiest to use, the most comprehensive, and then we make the most sense of it, but you could pick another, you know you could pick another strategy. Some people do the heavy lifting of manually instrumenting all their code. We just don't think that's a good use of your developer time, so we automatically do that for you, but have a strategy and then execute to it. >> Awesome. Lew, congratulations on a blowout quarter. I won't even get you to comment on it, just say that you guys had a great quarter, stocks at an all time high, all because you guys are doing a great product. Congratulations and great to have you on the Cube. >> We're delighted to be here. I've honestly, I've been a longtime fan. It means a lot that you could have me on, and we really enjoy partnering with Amazon, and what a great show. >> Yeah, super successful ecosystem partner, one of the best, New Relic, based out of San Francisco, here with the founder and CEO, also musician, writes code, gets down and dirty, runs a publicly held company. He's Superman. Lew, thanks for coming on the Cube. More live data and action here on the Cube after this short break, stay with us. (upbeat instrumental music)

>> Announcer: Please welcome Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Amazon Web Services, Ariel Kelman. (applause) (techno music) >> Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming. I hope you guys are having a great day here. It is my pleasure to introduce to come up on stage here, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, Andy Jassy. (applause) (techno music) >> Okay. Let's get started. I have a bunch of questions here for you, Andy. >> Just like one of our meetings, Ariel. >> Just like one of our meetings. So, I thought I'd start with a little bit of a state of the state on AWS. Can you give us your quick take? >> Yeah, well, first of all, thank you, everyone, for being here. We really appreciate it. We know how busy you guys are. So, hope you're having a good day. You know, the business is growing really quickly. In the last financials, we released, in Q four of '16, AWS is a 14 billion dollar revenue run rate business, growing 47% year over year. We have millions of active customers, and we consider an active customer as a non-Amazon entity that's used the platform in the last 30 days. And it's really a very broad, diverse customer set, in every imaginable size of customer and every imaginable vertical business segment. And I won't repeat all the customers that I know Werner went through earlier in the keynote, but here are just some of the more recent ones that you've seen, you know NELL is moving their their digital and their connected devices, meters, real estate to AWS. McDonalds is re-inventing their digital platform on top of AWS. FINRA is moving all in to AWS, yeah. You see at Reinvent, Workday announced AWS was its preferred cloud provider, and to start building on top of AWS further. Today, in press releases, you saw both Dunkin Donuts and Here, the geo-spatial map company announced they'd chosen AWS as their provider. You know and then I think if you look at our business, we have a really large non-US or global customer base and business that continues to expand very dramatically. And we're also aggressively increasing the number of geographic regions in which we have infrastructure. So last year in 2016, on top of the broad footprint we had, we added Korea, India, and Canada, and the UK. We've announced that we have regions coming, another one in China, in Ningxia, as well as in France, as well as in Sweden. So we're not close to being done expanding geographically. And then of course, we continue to iterate and innovate really quickly on behalf of all of you, of our customers. I mean, just last year alone, we launched what we considered over 1,000 significant services and features. So on average, our customers wake up every day and have three new capabilities they can choose to use or not use, but at their disposal. You've seen it already this year, if you look at Chime, which is our new unified communication service. It makes meetings much easier to conduct, be productive with. You saw Connect, which is our new global call center routing service. If you look even today, you look at Redshift Spectrum, which makes it easy to query all your data, not just locally on disk in your data warehouse but across all of S3, or DAX, which puts a cash in front of DynamoDB, we use the same interface, or all the new features in our machine learning services. We're not close to being done delivering and iterating on your behalf. And I think if you look at that collection of things, it's part of why, as Gartner looks out at the infrastructure space, they estimate the AWS is several times the size business of the next 14 providers combined. It's a pretty significant market segment leadership position. >> You talked a lot about adopts in there, a lot of customers moving to AWS, migrating large numbers of workloads, some going all in on AWS. And with that as kind of backdrop, do you still see a role for hybrid as being something that's important for customers? >> Yeah, it's funny. The quick answer is yes. I think the, you know, if you think about a few years ago, a lot of the rage was this debate about private cloud versus what people call public cloud. And we don't really see that debate very often anymore. I think relatively few companies have had success with private clouds, and most are pretty substantially moving in the direction of building on top of clouds like AWS. But, while you increasingly see more and more companies every month announcing that they're going all in to the cloud, we will see most enterprises operate in some form of hybrid mode for the next number of years. And I think in the early days of AWS and the cloud, I think people got confused about this, where they thought that they had to make this binary decision to either be all in on the public cloud and AWS or not at all. And of course that's not the case. It's not a binary decision. And what we know many of our enterprise customers want is they want to be able to run the data centers that they're not ready to retire yet as seamlessly as they can alongside of AWS. And it's why we've built a lot of the capabilities we've built the last several years. These are things like PPC, which is our virtual private cloud, which allows you to cordon off a portion of our network, deploy resources into it and connect to it through VPN or Direct Connect, which is a private connection between your data centers and our regions or our storage gateway, which is a virtual storage appliance, or Identity Federation, or a whole bunch of capabilities like that. But what we've seen, even though the vast majority of the big hybrid implementations today are built on top of AWS, as more and more of the mainstream enterprises are now at the point where they're really building substantial cloud adoption plans, they've come back to us and they've said, well, you know, actually you guys have made us make kind of a binary decision. And that's because the vast majority of the world is virtualized on top of VMWare. And because VMWare and AWS, prior to a few months ago, had really done nothing to try and make it easy to use the VMWare tools that people have been using for many years seamlessly with AWS, customers were having to make a binary choice. Either they stick with the VMWare tools they've used for a while but have a really tough time integrating with AWS, or they move to AWS and they have to leave behind the VMWare tools they've been using. And it really was the impetus for VMWare and AWS to have a number of deep conversations about it, which led to the announcement we made late last fall of VMWare and AWS, which is going to allow customers who have been using the VMWare tools to manage their infrastructure for a long time to seamlessly be able to run those on top of AWS. And they get to do so as they move workloads back and forth and they evolve their hybrid implementation without having to buy any new hardware, which is a big deal for companies. Very few companies are looking to find ways to buy more hardware these days. And customers have been very excited about this prospect. We've announced that it's going to be ready in the middle of this year. You see companies like Amadeus and Merck and Western Digital and the state of Louisiana, a number of others, we've a very large, private beta and preview happening right now. And people are pretty excited about that prospect. So we will allow customers to run in the mode that they want to run, and I think you'll see a huge transition over the next five to 10 years. >> So in addition to hybrid, another question we get a lot from enterprises around the concept of lock-in and how they should think about their relationship with the vendor and how they should think about whether to spread the workloads across multiple infrastructure providers. How do you think about that? >> Well, it's a question we get a lot. And Oracle has sure made people care about that issue. You know, I think people are very sensitive about being locked in, given the experience that they've had over the last 10 to 15 years. And I think the reality is when you look at the cloud, it really is nothing like being locked into something like Oracle. The APIs look pretty similar between the various providers. We build an open standard, it's like Linux and MySQL and Postgres. All the migration tools that we build allow you to migrate in or out of AWS. It's up to customers based on how they want to run their workload. So it is much easier to move away from something like the cloud than it is from some of the old software services that has created some of this phobia. But I think when you look at most CIOs, enterprise CIOs particularly, as they think about moving to the cloud, many of them started off thinking that they, you know, very well might split their workloads across multiple cloud providers. And I think when push comes to shove, very few decide to do so. Most predominately pick an infrastructure provider to run their workloads. And the reason that they don't split it across, you know, pretty evenly across clouds is a few reasons. Number one, if you do so, you have to standardize in the lowest common denominator. And these platforms are in radically different stages at this point. And if you look at something like AWS, it has a lot more functionality than anybody else by a large margin. And we're also iterating more quickly than you'll find from the other providers. And most folks don't want to tie the hands of their developers behind their backs in the name of having the ability of splitting it across multiple clouds, cause they actually are, in most of their spaces, competitive, and they have a lot of ideas that they want to actually build and invent on behalf of their customers. So, you know, they don't want to actually limit their functionality. It turns out the second reason is that they don't want to force their development teams to have to learn multiple platforms. And most development teams, if any of you have managed multiple stacks across different technologies, and many of us have had that experience, it's a pain in the butt. And trying to make a shift from what you've been doing for the last 30 years on premises to the cloud is hard enough. But then forcing teams to have to get good at running across two or three platforms is something most teams don't relish, and it's wasteful of people's time, it's wasteful of natural resources. That's the second thing. And then the third reason is that you effectively diminish your buying power because all of these cloud providers have volume discounts, and then you're splitting what you buy across multiple providers, which gives you a lower amount you buy from everybody at a worse price. So when most CIOs and enterprises look at this carefully, they don't actually end up splitting it relatively evenly. They predominately pick a cloud provider. Some will just pick one. Others will pick one and then do a little bit with a second, just so they know they can run with a second provider, in case that relationship with the one they choose to predominately run with goes sideways in some fashion. But when you really look at it, CIOs are not making that decision to split it up relatively evenly because it makes their development teams much less capable and much less agile. >> Okay, let's shift gears a little bit, talk about a subject that's on the minds of not just enterprises but startups and government organizations and pretty much every organization we talk to. And that's AI and machine learning. Reinvent, we introduced our Amazon AI services and just this morning Werner announced the general availability of Amazon Lex. So where are we overall on machine learning? >> Well it's a hugely exciting opportunity for customers, and I think, we believe it's exciting for us as well. And it's still in the relatively early stages, if you look at how people are using it, but it's something that we passionately believe is going to make a huge difference in the world and a huge difference with customers, and that we're investing a pretty gigantic amount of resource and capability for our customers. And I think the way that we think about, at a high level, the machine learning and deep learning spaces are, you know, there's kind of three macro layers of the stack. I think at that bottom layer, it's generally for the expert machine learning practitioners, of which there are relatively few in the world. It's a scarce resource relative to what I think will be the case in five, 10 years from now. And these are folks who are comfortable working with deep learning engines, know how to build models, know how to tune those models, know how to do inference, know how to get that data from the models into production apps. And for that group of people, if you look at the vast majority of machine learning and deep learning that's being done in the cloud today, it's being done on top of AWS, are P2 instances, which are optimized for deep learning and our deep learning AMIs, that package, effectively the deep learning engines and libraries inside those AMIs. And you see companies like Netflix, Nvidia, and Pinterest and Stanford and a whole bunch of others that are doing significant amounts of machine learning on top of those optimized instances for machine learning and the deep learning AMIs. And I think that you can expect, over time, that we'll continue to build additional capabilities and tools for those expert practitioners. I think we will support and do support every single one of the deep learning engines on top of AWS, and we have a significant amount of those workloads with all those engines running on top of AWS today. We also are making, I would say, a disproportionate investment of our own resources and the MXNet community just because if you look at running deep learning models once you get beyond a few GPUs, it's pretty difficult to have those scale as you get into the hundreds of GPUs. And most of the deep learning engines don't scale very well horizontally. And so what we've found through a lot of extensive testing, cause remember, Amazon has thousands of deep learning experts inside the company that have built very sophisticated deep learning capabilities, like the ones you see in Alexa, we have found that MXNet scales the best and almost linearly, as we continue to add nodes, as we continue to horizontally scale. So we have a lot of investment at that bottom layer of the stack. Now, if you think about most companies with developers, it's still largely inaccessible to them to do the type of machine learning and deep learning that they'd really like to do. And that's because the tools, I think, are still too primitive. And there's a number of services out there, we built one ourselves in Amazon Machine Learning that we have a lot of customers use, and yet I would argue that all of those services, including our own, are still more difficult than they should be for everyday developers to be able to build machine learning and access machine learning and deep learning. And if you look at the history of what AWS has done, in every part of our business, and a lot of what's driven us, is trying to democratize technologies that were really only available and accessible before to a select, small number of companies. And so we're doing a lot of work at what I would call that middle layer of the stack to get rid of a lot of the muck associated with having to do, you know, building the models, tuning the models, doing the inference, figuring how to get the data into production apps, a lot of those capabilities at that middle layer that we think are really essential to allow deep learning and machine learning to reach its full potential. And then at the top layer of the stack, we think of those as solutions. And those are things like, pass me an image and I'll tell you what that image is, or show me this face, does it match faces in this group of faces, or pass me a string of text and I'll give you an mpg file, or give me some words and what your intent is and then I'll be able to return answers that allow people to build conversational apps like the Lex technology. And we have a whole bunch of other services coming in that area, atop of Lex and Polly and Recognition, and you can imagine some of those that we've had to use in Amazon over the years that we'll continue to make available for you, our customers. So very significant level of investment at all three layers of that stack. We think it's relatively early days in the space but have a lot of passion and excitement for that. >> Okay, now for ML and AI, we're seeing customers wanting to load in tons of data, both to train the models and to actually process data once they've built their models. And then outside of ML and AI, we're seeing just as much demand to move in data for analytics and traditional workloads. So as people are looking to move more and more data to the cloud, how are we thinking about making it easier to get data in? >> It's a great question. And I think it's actually an often overlooked question because a lot of what gets attention with customers is all the really interesting services that allow you to do everything from compute and storage and database and messaging and analytics and machine learning and AI. But at the end of the day, if you have a significant amount of data already somewhere else, you have to get it into the cloud to be able to take advantage of all these capabilities that you don't have on premises. And so we have spent a disproportionate amount of focus over the last few years trying to build capabilities for our customers to make this easier. And we have a set of capabilities that really is not close to matched anywhere else, in part because we have so many customers who are asking for help in this area that it's, you know, that's really what drives what we build. So of course, you could use the good old-fashioned wire to send data over the internet. Increasingly, we find customers that are trying to move large amounts of data into S3, is using our S3 transfer acceleration service, which basically uses our points of presence, or POPs, all over the world to expedite delivery into S3. You know, a few years ago, we were talking to a number of companies that were looking to make big shifts to the cloud, and they said, well, I need to move lots of data that just isn't viable for me to move it over the wire, given the connection we can assign to it. It's why we built Snowball. And so we launched Snowball a couple years ago, which is really, it's a 50 terabyte appliance that is encrypted, the data's encrypted three different ways, and you ingest the data from your data center into Snowball, it has a Kindle connected to it, it allows you to, you know, that makes sure that you send it to the right place, and you can also track the progress of your high-speed ingestion into our data centers. And when we first launched Snowball, we launched it at Reinvent a couple years ago, I could not believe that we were going to order as many Snowballs to start with as the team wanted to order. And in fact, I reproached the team and I said, this is way too much, why don't we first see if people actually use any of these Snowballs. And so the team thankfully didn't listen very carefully to that, and they really only pared back a little bit. And then it turned out that we, almost from the get-go, had ordered 10X too few. And so this has been something that people have used in a very broad, pervasive way all over the world. And last year, at the beginning of the year, as we were asking people what else they would like us to build in Snowball, customers told us a few things that were pretty interesting to us. First, one that wasn't that surprising was they said, well, it would be great if they were bigger, you know, if instead of 50 terabytes it was more data I could store on each device. Then they said, you know, one of the problems is when I load the data onto a Snowball and send it to you, I have to still keep my local copy on premises until it's ingested, cause I can't risk losing that data. So they said it would be great if you could find a way to provide clustering, so that I don't have to keep that copy on premises. That was pretty interesting. And then they said, you know, there's some of that data that I'd actually like to be loading synchronously to S3, and then, or some things back from S3 to that data that I may want to compare against. That was interesting, having that endpoint. And then they said, well, we'd really love it if there was some compute on those Snowballs so I can do analytics on some relatively short-term signals that I want to take action on right away. Those were really the pieces of feedback that informed Snowball Edge, which is the next version of Snowball that we launched, announced at Reinvent this past November. So it has, it's a hundred-terabyte appliance, still the same level of encryption, and it has clustering so that you don't have to keep that copy of the data local. It allows you to have an endpoint to S3 to synchronously load data back and forth, and then it has a compute inside of it. And so it allows customers to use these on premises. I'll give you a good example. GE is using these for their wind turbines. And they collect all kinds of data from those turbines, but there's certain short-term signals they want to do analytics on in as close to real time as they can, and take action on those. And so they use that compute to do the analytics and then when they fill up that Snowball Edge, they detach it and send it back to AWS to do broad-scale analytics in the cloud and then just start using an additional Snowball Edge to capture that short-term data and be able to do those analytics. So Snowball Edge is, you know, we just launched it a couple months ago, again, amazed at the type of response, how many customers are starting to deploy those all over the place. I think if you have exabytes of data that you need to move, it's not so easy. An exabyte of data, if you wanted to move from on premises to AWS, would require 10,000 Snowball Edges. Those customers don't want to really manage a fleet of 10,000 Snowball Edges if they don't have to. And so, we tried to figure out how to solve that problem, and it's why we launched Snowmobile back at Reinvent in November, which effectively, it's a hundred-petabyte container on a 45-foot trailer that we will take a truck and bring out to your facility. It comes with its own power and its own network fiber that we plug in to your data center. And if you want to move an exabyte of data over a 10 gigabit per second connection, it would take you 26 years. But using 10 Snowmobiles, it would take you six months. So really different level of scale. And you'd be surprised how many companies have exabytes of data at this point that they want to move to the cloud to get all those analytics and machine learning capabilities running on top of them. Then for streaming data, as we have more and more companies that are doing real-time analytics of streaming data, we have Kinesis, where we built something called the Kinesis Firehose that makes it really simple to stream all your real-time data. We have a storage gateway for companies that want to keep certain data hot, locally, and then asynchronously be loading the rest of their data to AWS to be able to use in different formats, should they need it as backup or should they choose to make a transition. So it's a very broad set of storage capabilities. And then of course, if you've moved a lot of data into the cloud or into anything, you realize that one of the hardest parts that people often leave to the end is ETL. And so we have announced an ETL service called Glue, which we announced at Reinvent, which is going to make it much easier to move your data, be able to find your data and map your data to different locations and do ETL, which of course is hugely important as you're moving large amounts. >> So we've talked a lot about moving things to the cloud, moving applications, moving data. But let's shift gears a little bit and talk about something not on the cloud, connected devices. >> Yeah. >> Where do they fit in and how do you think about edge? >> Well, you know, I've been working on AWS since the start of AWS, and we've been in the market for a little over 11 years at this point. And we have encountered, as I'm sure all of you have, many buzzwords. And of all the buzzwords that everybody has talked about, I think I can make a pretty strong argument that the one that has delivered fastest on its promise has been IOT and connected devices. Just amazing to me how much is happening at the edge today and how fast that's changing with device manufacturers. And I think that if you look out 10 years from now, when you talk about hybrid, I think most companies, majority on premise piece of hybrid will not be servers, it will be connected devices. There are going to be billions of devices all over the place, in your home, in your office, in factories, in oil fields, in agricultural fields, on ships, in cars, in planes, everywhere. You're going to have these assets that sit at the edge that companies are going to want to be able to collect data on, do analytics on, and then take action. And if you think about it, most of these devices, by their very nature, have relatively little CPU and have relatively little disk, which makes the cloud disproportionately important for them to supplement them. It's why you see most of the big, successful IOT applications today are using AWS to supplement them. Illumina has hooked up their genome sequencing to AWS to do analytics, or you can look at Major League Baseball Statcast is an IOT application built on top of AWS, or John Deer has over 200,000 telematically enabled tractors that are collecting real-time planting conditions and information that they're doing analytics on and sending it back to farmers so they can figure out where and how to optimally plant. Tata Motors manages their truck fleet this way. Phillips has their smart lighting project. I mean, there're innumerable amounts of these IOT applications built on top of AWS where the cloud is supplementing the device's capability. But when you think about these becoming more mission-critical applications for companies, there are going to be certain functions and certain conditions by which they're not going to want to connect back to the cloud. They're not going to want to take the time for that round trip. They're not going to have connectivity in some cases to be able to make a round trip to the cloud. And what they really want is customers really want the same capabilities they have on AWS, with AWS IOT, but on the devices themselves. And if you've ever tried to develop on these embedded devices, it's not for mere mortals. It's pretty delicate and it's pretty scary and there's a lot of archaic protocols associated with it, pretty tough to do it all and to do it without taking down your application. And so what we did was we built something called Greengrass, and we announced it at Reinvent. And Greengrass is really like a software module that you can effectively have inside your device. And it allows developers to write lambda functions, it's got lambda inside of it, and it allows customers to write lambda functions, some of which they want to run in the cloud, some of which they want to run on the device itself through Greengrass. So they have a common programming model to build those functions, to take the signals they see and take the actions they want to take against that, which is really going to help, I think, across all these IOT devices to be able to be much more flexible and allow the devices and the analytics and the actions you take to be much smarter, more intelligent. It's also why we built Snowball Edge. Snowball Edge, if you think about it, is really a purpose-built Greengrass device. We have Greengrass, it's inside of the Snowball Edge, and you know, the GE wind turbine example is a good example of that. And so it's to us, I think it's the future of what the on-premises piece of hybrid's going to be. I think there're going to be billions of devices all over the place and people are going to want to interact with them with a common programming model like they use in AWS and the cloud, and we're continuing to invest very significantly to make that easier and easier for companies. >> We've talked about several feature directions. We talked about AI, machine learning, the edge. What are some of the other areas of investment that this group should care about? >> Well there's a lot. (laughs) That's not a suit question, Ariel. But there's a lot. I think, I'll name a few. I think first of all, as I alluded to earlier, we are not close to being done expanding geographically. I think virtually every tier-one country will have an AWS region over time. I think many of the emerging countries will as well. I think the database space is an area that is radically changing. It's happening at a faster pace than I think people sometimes realize. And I think it's good news for all of you. I think the database space over the last few decades has been a lonely place for customers. I think that they have felt particularly locked into companies that are expensive and proprietary and have high degrees of lock-in and aren't so customer-friendly. And I think customers are sick of it. And we have a relational database service that we launched many years ago and has many flavors that you can run. You can run MySQL, you can run Postgres, you can run MariaDB, you can run SQLServer, you can run Oracle. And what a lot of our customers kept saying to us was, could you please figure out a way to have a database capability that has the performance characteristics of the commercial-grade databases but the customer-friendly and pricing model of the more open engines like the MySQL and Postgres and MariaDB. What you do on your own, we do a lot of it at Amazon, but it's hard, I mean, it takes a lot of work and a lot of tuning. And our customers really wanted us to solve that problem for them. And it's why we spent several years building Aurora, which is our own database engine that we built, but that's fully compatible with MySQL and with Postgres. It's at least as fault tolerant and durable and performant as the commercial-grade databases, but it's a tenth of the cost of those. And it's also nice because if it turns out that you use Aurora and you decide for whatever reason you don't want to use Aurora anymore, because it's fully compatible with MySQL and Postgres, you just dump it to the community versions of those, and off you are. So there's really hardly any transition there. So that is the fastest-growing service in the history of AWS. I'm amazed at how quickly it's grown. I think you may have heard earlier, we've had 23,000 database migrations just in the last year or so. There's a lot of pent-up demand to have database freedom. And we're here to help you have it. You know, I think on the analytic side, it's just never been easier and less expensive to collect, store, analyze, and share data than it is today. Part of that has to do with the economics of the cloud. But a lot of it has to do with the really broad analytics capability that we provide you. And it's a much broader capability than you'll find elsewhere. And you know, you can manage Hadoop and Spark and Presto and Hive and Pig and Yarn on top of AWS, or we have a managed elastic search service, and you know, of course we have a very high scale, very high performing data warehouse in Redshift, that just got even more performant with Spectrum, which now can query across all of your S3 data, and of course you have Athena, where you can query S3 directly. We have a service that allows you to do real-time analytics of streaming data in Kinesis. We have a business intelligence service in QuickSight. We have a number of machine learning capabilities I talked about earlier. It's a very broad array. And what we find is that it's a new day in analytics for companies. A lot of the data that companies felt like they had to throw away before, either because it was too expensive to hold or they didn't really have the tools accessible to them to get the learning from that data, it's a totally different day today. And so we have a pretty big investment in that space, I mentioned Glue earlier to do ETL on all that data. We have a lot more coming in that space. I think compute, super interesting, you know, I think you will find, I think we will find that companies will use full instances for many, many years and we have, you know, more than double the number of instances than you'll find elsewhere in every imaginable shape and size. But I would also say that the trend we see is that more and more companies are using smaller units of compute, and it's why you see containers becoming so popular. We have a really big business in ECS. And we will continue to build out the capability there. We have companies really running virtually every type of container and orchestration and management service on top of AWS at this point. And then of course, a couple years ago, we pioneered the event-driven serverless capability in compute that we call Lambda, which I'm just again, blown away by how many customers are using that for everything, in every way. So I think the basic unit of compute is continuing to get smaller. I think that's really good for customers. I think the ability to be serverless is a very exciting proposition that we're continuing to to fulfill that vision that we laid out a couple years ago. And then, probably, the last thing I'd point out right now is, I think it's really interesting to see how the basic procurement of software is changing. In significant part driven by what we've been doing with our Marketplace. If you think about it, in the old world, if you were a company that was buying software, you'd have to go find bunch of the companies that you should consider, you'd have to have a lot of conversations, you'd have to talk to a lot of salespeople. Those companies, by the way, have to have a big sales team, an expensive marketing budget to go find those companies and then go sell those companies and then both companies engage in this long tap-dance around doing an agreement and the legal terms and the legal teams and it's just, the process is very arduous. Then after you buy it, you have to figure out how you're going to actually package it, how you're deploy to infrastructure and get it done, and it's just, I think in general, both consumers of software and sellers of software really don't like the process that's existed over the last few decades. And then you look at AWS Marketplace, and we have 35 hundred product listings in there from 12 hundred technology providers. If you look at the number of hours, that software that's been running EC2 just in the last month alone, it's several hundred million hours, EC2 hours, of that software being run on top of our Marketplace. And it's just completely changing how software is bought and procured. I think that if you talk to a lot of the big sellers of software, like Splunk or Trend Micro, there's a whole number of them, they'll tell you it totally changes their ability to be able to sell. You know, one of the things that really helped AWS in the early days and still continues to help us, is that we have a self-service model where we don't actually have to have a lot of people talk to every customer to get started. I think if you're a seller of software, that's very appealing, to allow people to find your software and be able to buy it. And if you're a consumer, to be able to buy it quickly, again, without the hassle of all those conversations and the overhead associated with that, very appealing. And I think it's why the marketplace has just exploded and taken off like it has. It's also really good, by the way, for systems integrators, who are often packaging things on top of that software to their clients. This makes it much easier to build kind of smaller catalogs of software products for their customers. I think when you layer on top of that the capabilities that we've announced to make it easier for SASS providers to meter and to do billing and to do identity is just, it's a very different world. And so I think that also is very exciting, both for companies and customers as well as software providers. >> We certainly touched on a lot here. And we have a lot going on, and you know, while we have customers asking us a lot about how they can use all these new services and new features, we also tend to get a lot of questions from customers on how we innovate so quickly, and they can think about applying some of those lessons learned to their own businesses. >> So you're asking how we're able to innovate quickly? >> Mmm hmm. >> I think there's a few things that have helped us, and it's different for every company. But some of these might be helpful. I'll point to a few. I think the first thing is, I think we disproportionately index on hiring builders. And we think of builders as people who are inventors, people who look at different customer experiences really critically, are honest about what's flawed about them, and then seek to reinvent them. And then people who understand that launch is the starting line and not the finish line. There's very little that any of us ever built that's a home run right out of the gate. And so most things that succeed take a lot of listening to customers and a lot of experimentation and a lot of iterating before you get to an equation that really works. So the first thing is who we hire. I think the second thing is how we organize. And we have, at Amazon, long tried to organize into as small and separable and autonomous teams as we can, that have all the resources in those teams to own their own destiny. And so for instance, the technologists and the product managers are part of the same team. And a lot of that is because we don't want the finger pointing that goes back and forth between the teams, and if they're on the same team, they focus all their energy on owning it together and understanding what customers need from them, spending a disproportionate amount of time with customers, and then they get to own their own roadmaps. One of the reasons we don't publish a 12 to 18 month roadmap is we want those teams to have the freedom, in talking to customers and listening to what you tell us matters, to re-prioritize if there are certain things that we assumed mattered more than it turns out it does. So, you know I think that the way that we organize is the second piece. I think a third piece is all of our teams get to use the same AWS building blocks that all of you get to use, which allow you to move much more quickly. And I think one of the least told stories about Amazon over the last five years, in part because people have gotten interested in AWS, is people have missed how fast our consumer business at Amazon has iterated. Look at the amount of invention in Amazon's consumer business. And they'll tell you that a big piece of that is their ability to use the AWS building blocks like they do. I think a fourth thing is many big companies, as they get larger, what starts to happen is what people call the institutional no, which is that leaders walk into meetings on new ideas looking to find ways to say no, and not because they're ill intended but just because they get more conservative or they have a lot on their plate or things are really managed very centrally, so it's hard to imagine adding more to what you're already doing. At Amazon, it's really the opposite, and in part because of the way we're organized in such a decoupled, decentralized fashion, and in part because it's just part of our DNA. When the leaders walk into a meeting, they are looking for ways to say yes. And we don't say yes to everything, we have a lot of proposals. But we say yes to a lot more than I think virtually any other company on the planet. And when we're having conversations with builders who are proposing new ideas, we're in a mode where we're trying to problem-solve with them to get to yes, which I think is really different. And then I think the last thing is that we have mechanisms inside the company that allow us to make fast decisions. And if you want a little bit more detail, you should read our founder and CEO Jeff Bezos's shareholder letter, which just was released. He talks about the fast decision-making that happens inside the company. It's really true. We make fast decisions and we're willing to fail. And you know, we sometimes talk about how we're working on several of our next biggest failures, and we hope that most of the things we're doing aren't going to fail, but we know, if you're going to push the envelope and if you're going to experiment at the rate that we're trying to experiment, to find more pillars that allow us to do more for customers and allow us to be more relevant, you are going to fail sometimes. And you have to accept that, and you have to have a way of evaluating people that recognizes the inputs, meaning the things that they actually delivered as opposed to the outputs, cause on new ventures, you don't know what the outputs are going to be, you don't know consumers or customers are going to respond to the new thing you're trying to build. So you have to be able to reward employees on the inputs, you have to have a way for them to continue to progress and grow in their career even if they work on something didn't work. And you have to have a way of thinking about, when things don't work, how do I take the technology that I built as part of that, that really actually does work, but I didn't get it right in the form factor, and use it for other things. And I think that when you think about a culture like Amazon, that disproportionately hires builders, organizes into these separable, autonomous teams, and allows them to use building blocks to move fast, and has a leadership team that's looking to say yes to ideas and is willing to fail, you end up finding not only do you do more inventing but you get the people at every level of the organization spending their free cycles thinking about new ideas because it actually pays to think of new ideas cause you get a shot to try it. And so that has really helped us and I think most of our customers who have made significant shifts to AWS and the cloud would argue that that's one of the big transformational things they've seen in their companies as well. >> Okay. I want to go a little bit deeper on the subject of culture. What are some of the things that are most unique about the AWS culture that companies should know about when they're looking to partner with us? >> Well, I think if you're making a decision on a predominant infrastructure provider, it's really important that you decide that the culture of the company you're going to partner with is a fit for yours. And you know, it's a super important decision that you don't want to have to redo multiple times cause it's wasted effort. And I think that, look, I've been at Amazon for almost 20 years at this point, so I have obviously drank the Kool Aid. But there are a few things that I think are truly unique about Amazon's culture. I'll talk about three of them. The first is I think that we are unusually customer-oriented. And I think a lot of companies talk about being customer-oriented, but few actually are. I think most of the big technology companies truthfully are competitor-focused. They kind of look at what competitors are doing and then they try to one-up one another. You have one or two of them that I would say are product-focused, where they say, hey, it's great, you Mr. and Mrs. Customer have ideas on a product, but leave that to the experts, and you know, you'll like the products we're going to build. And those strategies can be good ones and successful ones, they're just not ours. We are driven by what customers tell us matters to them. We don't build technology for technology's sake, we don't become, you know, smitten by any one technology. We're trying to solve real problems for our customers. 90% of what we build is driven by what you tell us matters. And the other 10% is listening to you, and even if you can't articulate exactly what you want, trying to read between the lines and invent on your behalf. So that's the first thing. Second thing is that we are pioneers. We really like to invent, as I was talking about earlier. And I think most big technology companies at this point have either lost their will or their DNA to invent. Most of them acquire it or fast follow. And again, that can be a successful strategy. It's just not ours. I think in this day and age, where we're going through as big a shift as we are in the cloud, which is the biggest technology shift in our lifetime, as dynamic as it is, being able to partner with a company that has the most functionality, it's iterating the fastest, has the most customers, has the largest ecosystem of partners, has SIs and ISPs, that has had a vision for how all these pieces fit together from the start, instead of trying to patch them together in a following act, you have a big advantage. I think that the third thing is that we're unusually long-term oriented. And I think that you won't ever see us show up at your door the last day of a quarter, the last day of a year, trying to harass you into doing some kind of deal with us, not to be heard from again for a couple years when we either audit you or try to re-up you for a deal. That's just not the way that we will ever operate. We are trying to build a business, a set of relationships, that will outlast all of us here. And I think something that always ties it together well is this trusted advisor capability that we have inside our support function, which is, you know, we look at dozens of programmatic ways that our customers are using the platform and reach out to you if you're doing something we think's suboptimal. And one of the things we do is if you're not fully utilizing resources, or hardly, or not using them at all, we'll reach out and say, hey, you should stop paying for this. And over the last couple of years, we've sent out a couple million of these notifications that have led to actual annualized savings for customers of 350 million dollars. So I ask you, how many of your technology partners reach out to you and say stop spending money with us? To the tune of 350 million dollars lost revenue per year. Not too many. And I think when we first started doing it, people though it was gimmicky, but if you understand what I just talked about with regard to our culture, it makes perfect sense. We don't want to make money from customers unless you're getting value. We want to reinvent an experience that we think has been broken for the prior few decades. And then we're trying to build a relationship with you that outlasts all of us, and we think the best way to do that is to provide value and do right by customers over a long period of time. >> Okay, keeping going on the culture subject, what about some of the quirky things about Amazon's culture that people might find interesting or useful? >> Well there are a lot of quirky parts to our culture. And I think any, you know lots of companies who have strong culture will argue they have quirky pieces but I think there's a few I might point to. You know, I think the first would be the first several years I was with the company, I guess the first six years or so I was at the company, like most companies, all the information that was presented was via PowerPoint. And we would find that it was a very inefficient way to consume information. You know, you were often shaded by the charisma of the presenter, sometimes you would overweight what the presenters said based on whether they were a good presenter. And vice versa. You would very rarely have a deep conversation, cause you have no room on PowerPoint slides to have any depth. You would interrupt the presenter constantly with questions that they hadn't really thought through cause they didn't think they were going to have to present that level of depth. You constantly have the, you know, you'd ask the question, oh, I'm going to get to that in five slides, you want to do that now or you want to do that in five slides, you know, it was just maddening. And we would often find that most of the meetings required multiple meetings. And so we made a decision as a company to effectively ban PowerPoints as a communication vehicle inside the company. Really the only time I do PowerPoints is at Reinvent. And maybe that shows. And what we found is that it's a much more substantive and effective and time-efficient way to have conversations because there is no way to fake depth in a six-page narrative. So what we went to from PowerPoint was six-page narrative. You can write, have as much as you want in the appendix, but you have to assume nobody will read the appendices. Everything you have to communicate has to be done in six pages. You can't fake depth in a six-page narrative. And so what we do is we all get to the room, we spend 20 minutes or so reading the document so it's fresh in everybody's head. And then where we start the conversation is a radically different spot than when you're hearing a presentation one kind of shallow slide at a time. We all start the conversation with a fair bit of depth on the topic, and we can really hone in on the three or four issues that typically matter in each of these conversations. So we get to the heart of the matter and we can have one meeting on the topic instead of three or four. So that has been really, I mean it's unusual and it takes some time getting used to but it is a much more effective way to pay attention to the detail and have a substantive conversation. You know, I think a second thing, if you look at our working backwards process, we don't write a lot of code for any of our services until we write and refine and decide we have crisp press release and frequently asked question, or FAQ, for that product. And in the press release, what we're trying to do is make sure that we're building a product that has benefits that will really matter. How many times have we all gotten to the end of products and by the time we get there, we kind of think about what we're launching and think, this is not that interesting. Like, people are not going to find this that compelling. And it's because you just haven't thought through and argued and debated and made sure that you drew the line in the right spot on a set of benefits that will really matter to customers. So that's why we use the press release. The FAQ is to really have the arguments up front about how you're building the product. So what technology are you using? What's the architecture? What's the customer experience? What's the UI look like? What's the pricing dimensions? Are you going to charge for it or not? All of those decisions, what are people going to be most excited about, what are people going to be most disappointed by. All those conversations, if you have them up front, even if it takes you a few times to go through it, you can just let the teams build, and you don't have to check in with them except on the dates. And so we find that if we take the time up front we not only get the products right more often but the teams also deliver much more quickly and with much less churn. And then the third thing I'd say that's kind of quirky is it is an unusually truth-seeking culture at Amazon. I think we have a leadership principle that we say have backbone, disagree, and commit. And what it means is that we really expect people to speak up if they believe that we're headed down a path that's wrong for customers, no matter who is advancing it, what level in the company, everybody is empowered and expected to speak up. And then once we have the debate, then we all have to pull the same way, even if it's a different way than you were advocating. And I think, you always hear the old adage of where, two people look at a ceiling and one person says it's 14 feet and the other person says, it's 10 feet, and they say, okay let's compromise, it's 12 feet. And of course, it's not 12 feet, there is an answer. And not all things that we all consider has that black and white answer, but most things have an answer that really is more right if you actually assess it and debate it. And so we have an environment that really empowers people to challenge one another and I think it's part of why we end up getting to better answers, cause we have that level of openness and rigor. >> Okay, well Andy, we have time for one more question. >> Okay. >> So other than some of the things you've talked about, like customer focus, innovation, and long-term orientation, what is the single most important lesson that you've learned that is really relevant to this audience and this time we're living in? >> There's a lot. But I'll pick one. I would say I'll tell a short story that I think captures it. In the early days at Amazon, our sole business was what we called an owned inventory retail business, which meant we bought the inventory from distributors or publishers or manufacturers, stored it in our own fulfillment centers and shipped it to customers. And around the year 1999 or 2000, this third party seller model started becoming very popular. You know, these were companies like Half.com and eBay and folks like that. And we had a really animated debate inside the company about whether we should allow third party sellers to sell on the Amazon site. And the concerns internally were, first of all, we just had this fundamental belief that other sellers weren't going to care as much about the customer experience as we did cause it was such a central part of everything we did DNA-wise. And then also we had this entire business and all this machinery that was built around owned inventory business, with all these relationships with publishers and distributors and manufacturers, who we didn't think would necessarily like third party sellers selling right alongside us having bought their products. And so we really debated this, and we ultimately decided that we were going to allow third party sellers to sell in our marketplace. And we made that decision in part because it was better for customers, it allowed them to have lower prices, so more price variety and better selection. But also in significant part because we realized you can't fight gravity. If something is going to happen, whether you want it to happen or not, it is going to happen. And you are much better off cannibalizing yourself or being ahead of whatever direction the world is headed than you are at howling at the wind or wishing it away or trying to put up blockers and find a way to delay moving to the model that is really most successful and has the most amount of benefits for the customers in question. And that turned out to be a really important lesson for Amazon as a company and for me, personally, as well. You know, in the early days of doing Marketplace, we had all kinds of folks, even after we made the decision, that despite the have backbone, disagree and commit weren't really sure that they believed that it was going to be a successful decision. And it took several months, but thankfully we really were vigilant about it, and today in roughly half of the units we sell in our retail business are third party seller units. Been really good for our customers. And really good for our business as well. And I think the same thing is really applicable to the space we're talking about today, to the cloud, as you think about this gigantic shift that's going on right now, moving to the cloud, which is, you know, I think in the early days of the cloud, the first, I'll call it six, seven, eight years, I think collectively we consumed so much energy with all these arguments about are people going to move to the cloud, what are they going to move to the cloud, will they move mission-critical applications to the cloud, will the enterprise adopt it, will public sector adopt it, what about private cloud, you know, we just consumed a huge amount of energy and it was, you can see both in the results in what's happening in businesses like ours, it was a form of fighting gravity. And today we don't really have if conversations anymore with our customers. They're all when and how and what order conversations. And I would say that this going to be a much better world for all of us, because we will be able to build in a much more cost effective fashion, we will be able to build much more quickly, we'll be able to take our scarce resource of engineers and not spend their resource on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of infrastructure and instead on what truly differentiates your business. And you'll have a global presence, so that you have lower latency and a better end user customer experience being deployed with your applications and infrastructure all over the world. And you'll be able to meet the data sovereignty requirements of various locales. So I think it's a great world that we're entering right now, I think we're at a time where there's a lot less confusion about where the world is headed, and I think it's an unprecedented opportunity for you to reinvent your businesses, reinvent your applications, and build capabilities for your customers and for your business that weren't easily possible before. And I hope you take advantage of it, and we'll be right here every step of the way to help you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. (applause) >> Thank you, Andy. And thank you, everyone. I appreciate your time today. >> Thank you. (applause) (upbeat music)