>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to Las Vegas. We are at AWS re:Invent, along with Rebecca Knight, I'm John Walls. A lot of energy still behind us here. >> It's amazing. >> Have you noticed that? >> This is day three, people, wow. >> And again, I know a lot of you watching, you come to shows, you attend these things, and you realize that day three sometimes can be a little bit >> Sleepy, yeah. >> Slower, yeah. Not so here, this place is still very much alive. >> Sin City. >> Yeah. Easy, easy now. (group chuckles) We're joined by a couple of gentlemen right now to join us here, Prathap Dendi, who is the General Manager of Growth Initiatives and Commercialization at AppDynamics. Prathap, thank you for being with us. >> Oh, great to be here. >> And Emmanuel Offiong, who is Vice President of Enterprise at Wyndham Hotels. Emmanuel, now usually the conversation in here is, hey, how ya doin', where are you staying? We don't have to ask you that. (group chuckles) We know, right. >> Right. >> So you're good to go at Wyndham. So, first off, let's just talk about, I'd like to get your ideas, we've talked about the show, I mean, how do you feel? You're probably around here quite a bit, Prathap, at various shows and what have ya, your thoughts about what you're seeing here at AWS re:Invent 2018? >> For starters, I think you guys need at least 10 more Cubes because I've been watching the activity here. It's just, you know, crazy, right? A lot of high energy here, a lot of cloud stories, multi-cloud stories, really feed on that, a lot of innovation that's being announced here. >> Alright, and Emmanuel, we hear this a lot, right, customers who are making that big digital jump, you're making that leap, and, in some cases, it's a bit of a leap of faith, right, in some respects. Let's go back to before that, the genesis of your decision, what was the impetus and what were your reservations, and what are your reservations still, for that matter, going forward? >> Sure, so I actually joined Wyndham about three years ago when we were trying to undertake this digital journey, and what we realized was that there was a lot of competition with our online travel agents, and we weren't really bringing in customers the way we thought we could, and so we realized that our digital platforms were antiquated. They weren't speaking to our customers in terms of increased loyalty and such, and so we knew that we had to make a change. We knew that in today's economy, in order to attract customers, we had to be more digital friendly. We had to provide a seamless experience, and we had to make sure that, on all of our platforms, that customers were able to check-in and check-out on their mobile platforms very easily. >> You mentioned online travel agents, but just talk a little bit about this era of hoteling. Has it become so much more competitive, particularly with the rise of Airbnb and other VRBOs? >> It has, it really has, so the Expedias, the Airbnbs of the world, they've really embraced technology, more so than maybe the traditional hospitality companies have, and so that's why you'll see companies like ourselves starting to make investments in technology, making investments into digital transformation. >> So you have your aha moment, we need to move forward, we need a digital transformation so you begin to look for partners. What were you looking for? >> Couple of things, so we were looking at transformation on three levels, for digital, infrastructure management, and data, and so, in terms of a partner, what we wanted to do is we were looking for someone to help us ease that journey. We knew the journey was going to be rough, especially from where we started, so we were looking for a partner like AWS that was going to help us sort of make that scale into modern-day technology very quickly. >> Alright, so when you talk about a digital journey, I just want to back up a little bit. What exactly does that encompass in your case? I mean, I'm thinking you've got your website, you've got your reservation, you know, you've got all these microservices running on your site, you know, it's all good, it's all fine. What weren't you doing specifically germane to your business that AppDynamics is now getting you back up to speed and getting you into the 21st century, if you will? >> Sure, so let me give you some context then. When we talk about customers, we talk about two sets of customers. There are guests who walk in through the door, and then there are franchisees. We're a franchise-based company so let's speak to our guests. In regards to our guests, our check-in/check-out process wasn't as seamless as it could be, right. It wasn't very mobile friendly at the time so those were the things that we were looking to change, and in regards to our franchisees, their ultimate goal is they want to be able to check revenue. They want to be able to check rates, change rates. They want to be able to see what their competitors are doing, and they want to be able to do that very seamlessly and on a mobile platform, and we didn't have those capabilities available to them at the time. >> If I may say something? >> Please. >> It's interesting when we see leaders like Emmanuel talk about digital transformation, they're not talking about I.T. transformation, they're not talking about servers going away, infrastructure. It's really refreshing to see customers talk about business model changes. What I see, you know, Scott and Emmanuel, their team has done a great job about focusing on what is it about the business model that needs to change, and really getting that end-user experience journey, like you asked, right from the time they log-in to requesting a service or changing some reservation, all of that is what they're capturing, and it's really complex, and I know he's quite humble to say, oh, we've done it at scale, but this is hard stuff, to make it simple for the end-user passes the complexity down to the systems, and that's what the team at Wyndham was able to do and we're lucky, AppDynamics, to be part of that journey that monitors the end-to-end performance of the end-user journeys, and then importantly correlate that to business outcomes. You know, do we actually have more partners coming in? Is the full journey faster now, now that we've gone to AWS, is it really impacting the business or is it just I.T. spin? So that's really a good caller to see that digital transformation is really a business model change not just an I.T. change. >> So the business model, so walk us through exactly what you did for this transformation and this cloud migration too. >> Sure, so the first step was realizing that we had to start to migrate some workloads to the cloud, and the reason why we knew we had to go to the cloud was, like I said before, we wanted to get out of the business of managing infrastructure, right, so we said we're going to take our workloads to the cloud. Well, going to the cloud, especially with the type of workloads we were looking at, is often a very complicated and complex adventure, and that's where AppDynamics came in for us, right. We knew we needed something that was going to allow us to see end to end where we started from, and when we migrate to the cloud, have that same level of visibility to ensure that we didn't do two things, right. We're protecting the brand, and we want to make sure we protect our customer experience. Those are the two things that were most important to us as a part of this journey. >> From a security standpoint, huge concern, right? I mean, it has been for a while, but when you go public and what exposure there might be, how have you two kind of dealt with that because, obviously, you're dealing with financial information, with customer information, there's a lot of proprietary stuff that you're getting from your folks that you have to protect, and, obviously, internally as well. So talk about the security component. >> Yeah, happy to go first. It used to be just about five, six years ago, application was seen as a separate silo or a separate layer, and security was different and experience was different. What we're now seeing is every business function is getting really melded into that one concept of end-user experience so security becomes, not an afterthought, but actually is part of the design construct, right, and what we've seen with customers like Wyndham is they have gotten so much better at measuring right from the click stream of from reservation to fulfillment, and looking for anomalies in that data, right, so security correlation to the application data is out of the box now so that's the pre-design for architecture groups like Emmanuel's. >> Sure, yeah, so I (chuckles) I think you said it very well. >> I'll say what he said, right? (group chuckles) >> Well, when you're thinking about this migration, which began in, when did this journey begin? >> Couple years ago. >> Couple of years ago. So, now, was there resistance to it? As you said, you were really at this tipping point where you said we got to do something different here. We've got a lot of different competition coming at us from different angles. >> Yeah, so there was some level of internal concern, I would say, but we worked through that, right. It's really about, at the end of the day, we migrated 8,400 hotels across 18 brands onto this new platform, right, so it's not insignificant so you can imagine, right, the amount of internal conversations that needed to happen to get something like that accomplished. >> And what haven't you done? Obviously, this is a multi-year process. You can't snap your fingers and it's going to be done. I assume you're in a still a nascent stage of this, and you have much more work to do. >> Yep, now we're focused on data, right. Now, we're focused on grabbing insights from the data that we've put into the cloud. We've migrated most of what we were looking to migrate over the last two years, if you will, and now we're lookin' at how do we get more insights from the data that's available to us? >> Alright, and is that something that your company can play with as well? >> And Amazon and AWS themselves so I think over the years what I've seen, you know, I've been an engineer in this career, now in the business side, you co-system around application stack has gotten so transparent, right, so customers like Wyndham are able to purchase best of breed solutions like AppDynamics on AWS marketplace, click of a button. There's no long cycles of value so you quickly get to the value, and then once the journey starts, it's really all about the customer. They're generating trillions of data set every day across their business. Our goal is to see how can we bubble up the impact of that investment to their line of business? How quickly are the customers getting on board, making their decisions versus having to worry about the servers and the infrastructure. That's what we're seeing in a big way. >> Well, and as you said before, this is a business model change. It wasn't just a technology change so how have your customers seen this? How are they reacting? What are your franchisees seeing? How has the business changed? >> From our perspective, the customers love it, and we can measure that in terms of our bookings. We're up 75% in terms of mobile bookings as a result of some of these changes that we've made. Our customers have given us feedback that the experience is much more seamless. Our franchisees have given us feedback that, you know what, it's easier to use our services. >> Yeah, all I want is the best rate. (group laughs) Just give me the best rate, Emmanuel, alright, and I'm a happy camper. >> The statistic that he shared is phenomenal, right, being able to see 75% jump in mobile booking is significant. >> That's extraordinary. >> That's real ROI. >> Yeah, and there are others too. Scott, their CIO, recently wrote in a blog about how and why the CIOs are sleeping better, right. They're actually getting sleep back, and I think that's really the result of the transformation where systems like AppDynamics, systems like applications they wrote, they'll become a lot more seamless now, and being able to show, when I invest a dollar into an application, how is that yielding to line of business, real time is what they have as power now. >> The boss is happy. >> Yeah. >> Yes. >> Well, if they're sleeping well, we're all sleeping well. I know how that goes. Gentlemen, thanks for sharing this story. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, thank you for having us. >> Appreciate your time here. >> Appreciate it. >> Appreciate it. >> You bet, back with more here from AWS re:Invent. You're watching this live from Las Vegas, and we're on theCUBE. (techno music)