(intro music) >> Good afternoon guys and gals. Welcome back to The Strip, Las Vegas. It's "theCUBE" live day four of our coverage of "AWS re:Invent". Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. Dave, we've had some awesome conversations the last four days. I can't believe how many people are still here. The AWS ecosystem seems stronger than ever. >> Yeah, last year we really noted the ecosystem, you know, coming out of the isolation economy 'cause everybody had this old pent up demand to get together and the ecosystem, even last year, we were like, "Wow." This year's like 10x wow. >> It really is 10x wow, it feels that way. We're going to have a 10x wow conversation next. We're bringing back DataStax to "theCUBE". Please welcome Thomas Bean, it's CMO. Thomas welcome to "theCUBE". >> Thanks, thanks a lot, thanks for having me. >> Great to have you, talk to us about what's going on at DataStax, it's been a little while since we talked to you guys. >> Indeed, so DataStax, we are the realtime data company and we've always been involved in technology such as "Apache Cassandra". We actually created to support and take this, this great technology to the market. And now we're taking it, combining it with other technologies such as "Apache Pulse" for streaming to provide a realtime data cloud. Which helps our users, our customers build applications faster and help them scale without limits. So it's all about mobilizing all of this information that is going to drive the application going to create the awesome experience, when you have a customer waiting behind their mobile phone, when you need a decision to take place immediately to, that's the kind of data that we, that we provide in the cloud on any cloud, but especially with, with AWS and providing the performance that technologies like "Apache Cassandra" are known for but also with market leading unit economics. So really empowering customers to operate at speed and scale. >> Speaking of customers, nobody wants less data slower. And one of the things I think we learned in the in the pan, during the pandemic was that access to realtime data isn't nice to have anymore for any business. It is table stakes, it's competitive advantage. There's somebody right behind in the rear view mirror ready to take over. How has the business model of DataStax maybe evolved in the last couple of years with the fact that realtime data is so critical? >> Realtime data has been around for some time but it used to be really niches. You needed a lot of, a lot of people a lot of funding actually to, to implement these, these applications. So we've adapted to really democratize it, made super easy to access. Not only to start developing but also scaling. So this is why we've taken these great technologies made them serverless cloud native on the cloud so that developers could really start easily and scale. So that be on project products could be taken to the, to the market. And in terms of customers, the patterns is we've seen enterprise customers, you were talking about the pandemic, the Home Depot as an example was able to deliver curbside pickup delivery in 30 days because they were already using DataStax and could adapt their business model with a real time application that combines you were just driving by and you would get the delivery of what exactly you ordered without having to go into the the store. So they shifted their whole business model. But we also see a real strong trend about customer experiences and increasingly a lot of tech companies coming because scale means success to them and building on, on our, on our stack to, to build our applications. >> So Lisa, it's interesting. DataStax and "theCUBE" were started the same year, 2010, and that's when it was the beginning of the ascendancy of the big data era. But of course back then there was, I mean very little cloud. I mean most of it was on-prem. And so data stacks had, you know, had obviously you mentioned a number of things that you had to do to become cloud friendly. >> Thomas: Yes. >> You know, a lot of companies didn't make it, make it through. You guys just raised a bunch of dough as well last summer. And so that's been quite a transformation both architecturally, you know, bringing the customers through. I presume part of that was because you had such a great open source community, but also you have a unique value problem. Maybe you could sort of describe that a little. >> Absolutely, so the, I'll start with the open source community where we see a lot of traction at the, at the moment. We were always very involved with, with the "Apache Cassandra". But what we're seeing right now with "Apache Cassandra" is, is a lot of traction, gaining momentum. We actually, we, the open source community just won an award, did an AMA, had a, a vote from their readers about the top open source projects and "Apache Cassandra" and "Apache Pulse" are part of the top three, which is, which is great. We also run a, in collaboration with the Apache Project, the, a series of events around the, around the globe called "Cassandra Days" where we had tremendous attendance. We, some of them, we had to change venue twice because there were more people coming. A lot of students, a lot of the big users of Cassandra like Apple, Netflix who spoke at these, at these events. So we see this momentum actually picking up and that's why we're also super excited that the Linux Foundation is running the Cassandra Summit in in March in San Jose. Super happy to bring that even back with the rest of the, of the community and we have big announcements to come. "Apache Cassandra" will, will see its next version with major advances such as the support of asset transactions, which is going to make it even more suitable to more use cases. So we're bringing that scale to more applications. So a lot of momentum in terms of, in terms of the, the open source projects. And to your point about the value proposition we take this great momentum to which we contribute a lot. It's not only about taking, it's about giving as well. >> Dave: Big committers, I mean... >> Exactly big contributors. And we also have a lot of expertise, we worked with all of the members of the community, many of them being our customers. So going to the cloud, indeed there was architectural work making Cassandra cloud native putting it on Kubernetes, having the right APIs for developers to, to easily develop on top of it. But also becoming a cloud company, building customer success, our own platform engineering. We, it's interesting because actually we became like our partners in a community. We now operate Cassandra in the cloud so that all of our customers can benefit from all the power of Cassandra but really efficiently, super rapidly, and also with a, the leading unit economies as I mentioned. >> How will the, the asset compliance affect your, you know, new markets, new use cases, you know, expand your TAM, can you explain that? >> I think it will, more applications will be able to tap into the power of, of "NoSQL". Today we see a lot on the customer experience as IOT, gaming platform, a lot of SaaS companies. But now with the ability to have transactions at the database level, we can, beyond providing information, we can go even deeper into the logic of the, of the application. So it makes Cassandra and therefore Astra which is our cloud service an even more suitable database we can address, address more even in terms of the transaction that the application itself will, will support. >> What are some of the business benefits that Cassandra delivers to customers in terms of business outcomes helping businesses really transform? >> So Cassandra brings skill when you have millions of customers, when you have million of data points to go through to serve each of the customers. One of my favorite example is Priceline, who runs entirely on our cloud service. You may see one offer, but it's actually everything they know about you and everything they have to offer matched while you are refreshing your page. This is the kind of power that Cassandra provide. But the thing to say about "Apache Cassandra", it used to be also a database that was a bit hard to manage and hard to develop with. This is why as part of the cloud, we wanted to change these aspects, provide developers the API they like and need and what the application need. Making it super simple to operate and, and, and super affordable, also cost effective to, to run. So the the value to your point, it's time to market. You go faster, you don't have to worry when you choose the right database you're not going to, going to have to change horse in the middle of the river, like sixth month down the line. And you know, you have the guarantee that you're going to get the performance and also the best, the best TCO which matters a lot. I think your previous person talking was addressing it. That's also important especially in the, in a current context. >> As a managed service, you're saying, that's the enabler there, right? >> Thomas: Exactly. >> Dave: That is the model today. I mean, you have to really provide that for customers. They don't want to mess with, you know, all the plumbing, right? I mean... >> Absolutely, I don't think people want to manage databases anymore, we do that very well. We take SLAs and such and even at the developer level what they want is an API so they get all the power. All of of this powered by Cassandra, but now they get it as a, and it's as simple as using as, as an API. >> How about the ecosystem? You mentioned the show in in San Jose in March and the Linux Foundation is, is hosting that, is that correct? >> Yes, absolutely. >> And what is it, Cassandra? >> Cassandra Summit. >> Dave: Cassandra Summit >> Yep. >> What's the ecosystem like today in Cassandra, can you just sort of describe that? >> Around Cassandra, you have actually the big hyperscalers. You have also a few other companies that are supporting Cassandra like technologies. And what's interesting, and that's been a, a something we've worked on but also the "Apache Project" has worked on. Working on a lot of the adjacent technologies, the data pipelines, all of the DevOps solutions to make sure that you can actually put Cassandra as part of your way to build these products and, and build these, these applications. So the, the ecosystem keeps on, keeps on growing and actually the, the Cassandra community keeps on opening the database so that it's, it's really easy to have it connect to the rest of the, the rest environment. And we benefit from all of this in our Astra cloud service. >> So things like machine learning, governance tools that's what you would expect in the ecosystem forming around it, right? So we'll see that in March. >> Machine learning is especially a very interesting use case. We see more and more of it. We recently did a, a nice video with one of our customers called Unifour who does exactly this using also our abstract cloud service. What they provide is they analyze videos of sales calls and they help actually the sellers telling them, "Okay here's what happened here was the customer sentiment". Because they have proof that the better the sentiment is, the shorter the sell cycle is going to be. So they teach the, the sellers on how to say the right things, how to control the thing. This is machine learning applied on video. Cassandra provides I think 200 data points per second that feeds this machine learning. And we see more and more of these use cases, realtime use cases. It happens on the fly when you are on your phone, when you have a, a fraud maybe to detect and to prevent. So it is going to be more and more and we see more and more of these integration at the open source level with technologies like even "Feast" project like "Apache Feast". But also in the, in, in the partners that we're working with integrating our Cassandra and our cloud service with. >> Where are customer conversations these days, given that every company has to be a data company. They have to be able to, to democratize data, allow access to it deep into the, into the organizations. Not just IT or the data organization anymore. But are you finding that the conversations are rising up the, up the stack? Is this, is this a a C-suite priority? Is this a board level conversation? >> So that's an excellent question. We actually ran a survey this summer called "The State of the Database" where we, we asked these tech leaders, okay what's top of mind for you? And real time actually was, was really one of the top priorities. And they explained for the one that who call themselves digital leaders that for 71% of them they could correlate directly the use of realtime data, the quality of their experience or their decision making with revenue. And that's really where the discussion is. And I think it's something we can relate to as users. We don't want the, I mean if the Starbucks apps take seconds to to respond there will be a riot over there. So that's, that's something we can feel. But it really, now it's tangible in, in business terms and now then they take a look at their data strategy, are we equipped? Very often they will see, yeah, we have pockets of realtime data, but we're not really able to leverage it. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> For ML use cases, et cetera. So that's a big trend that we're seeing on one end. On the other end, what we're seeing, and it's one of the things we discussed a lot at the event is that yeah cost is important. Growth at all, at all cost does not exist. So we see a lot of push on moving a lot of the workloads to the cloud to make them scale but at the best the best cost. And we also see some organizations where like, okay let's not let a good crisis go to waste and let's accelerate our innovation not at all costs. So that we see also a lot of new projects being being pushed but reasonable, starting small and, and growing and all of this fueled by, by realtime data, so interesting. >> The other big topic amongst the, the customer community is security. >> Yep. >> I presume it's coming up a lot. What's the conversation like with DataStax? >> That's a topic we've been working on intensely since the creation of Astra less than two years ago. And we keep on reinforcing as any, any cloud provider not only our own abilities in terms of making sure that customers can manage their own keys, et cetera. But also integrating to the rest of the, of the ecosystem when some, a lot of our customers are running on AWS, how do we integrate with PrivateLink and such? We fit exactly into their security environment on AWS and they use exactly the same management tool. Because this is also what used to cost a lot in the cloud services. How much do you have to do to wire them and, and manage. And there are indeed compliance and governance challenges. So that's why making sure that it's fully connected that they have full transparency on what's happening is, is a big part of the evolution. It's always, security is always something you're working on but it's, it's a major topic for us. >> Yep, we talk about that on pretty much every event. Security, which we could dive into, but we're out of time. Last question for you. >> Thomas: Yes. >> We're talking before we went live, we're both big Formula One fans. Say DataStax has the opportunity to sponsor a team and you get the whole side pod to, to put like a phrase about DataStax on the side pod of this F1 car. (laughter) Like a billboard, what does it say? >> Billboard, because an F1 car goes pretty fast, it will be hard to, be hard to read but, "Twice the performance at half the cost, try Astra a cloud service." >> Drop the mike. Awesome, Thomas, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank for having me. >> Pleasure having you guys on the program. For our guest, Thomas Bean and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching "theCUBE" live from day four of our coverage. "theCUBE", the leader in live tech coverage. (outro music)

(soft electronic music) >> Good afternoon guys and gals. Welcome back to theCube's Live coverage of AWS re:Invent 2022. We've been in Sin City since Monday night, giving you a load of content. I'm sure you've been watching the whole time, so you already know. Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. John, we love having these conversations at AWS re:Invent. So many different topics of conversation. We also love talking to AWS's partner ecosystem. There's so much emphasis on it, so much growth and innovation. >> Yeah, and the thing is we got two great leaders from a very popular company that's doing very well. Security, security's a big part of the story. Data and security. Taking up all the keynote time, you're hearing a lot of it. This company's a company we've been following from the beginning. Doing really good stuff in open source, cloud native, security, shifting-left. Snyk's just a great company. With the CTO and the head of the product organization, these guys have the keys to the kingdom in security. We're going to have a great conversation. >> Yeah, we are. Both from Snyk, Manoj Nair joins us, rejoins us, for your, I believe, 11th visit. Chief Product Officer of Snyk. Adi Sharabani, Chief Technology Officer. Welcome guys. Great to have you. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Great to be back. >> So what's going on at Snyk? I know we get to talk to you often, but Manoj, give us the lowdown on what are some of the things that are new since we last connected with Snyk. >> A lot of innovation going on. We just had a major launch last month and you know when we talked to our customers three big themes are happening in parallel. One is the shift to going from traditional development to, really, DevOps, but we need to make that DevSecOps and Snyk was ahead of, that was the genesis of Snyk, but we're still, you know, maybe 15, 20% of organizations have realized that. So that one big theme. Supply chain security, top of mind for everyone. And then really, cloud and, you know, how do you really take advantage of cloud. Cloud is code. So our innovation map to those three big themes, we have done a lot in terms of that shift-left. And Adi will talk about, kind of, some of our original, like, you know, thinking behind that. But we flipped the security paradigm on its head. Was to make sure developers loved what they were, you know, experiencing with Snyk. And oh, by the way, they're fixing security issues. The second one, supply chain. So you know, SBOMs and everyone hears about this and executive orders, what do you do? Who does what with that? So we launched a few things in terms of simplifying that. You can go to our website and, you know, just upload your SBOM. It'll tell you using the best security intelligence data. In fact, the same data is used by AWS inside their products, inside Inspector. So we use that data from Snyk's intelligence to light up and tell you what vulnerabilities do your third party code have. Even things that you might not be scanning. And then the last one is really code to cloud. Cloud is code. So we have brought the ability to monitor your cloud environments all the way into your platform and the security engineering teams, rather than later on and after the fact. Those are some of the big ones that we're working on. >> Lisa: Lots going on. >> Yeah. >> Lisa: Wow. >> Lots going on there. I mean, SBOMs, Software Bill of Materials. I mean, who would've thought in the developer community, going back a decade, that we'd be talking about bill of materials, open source becomes so popular. You guys are cloud native. Developer productivity's a hot trend. Not much going on here, talking about developer productivity. Maybe Werner, keynote tomorrow will talk about it. Software supply chain, huge security risk. You guys are in the front lines. I want to understand, if you can share, why is Snyk successful? Everyone is hearing about you guys. Your business is doing great. What's the secret sauce of your success? Why are you guys so successful? >> I think that, you know, I've been doing application security for more than two decades now and in the past we always saw the potential associated with transferring, shifting-left in a sense, before the term, right? Taking those security solutions out of the hands of the security people and putting it in the hands of developers. It's speeds up the process. It's very, very clear to anyone. The problem was that we always looked at it the wrong way. We did shift-left, and shift-left is not enough because in my terminology shift-left, meaning let's take those security solution put it earlier in the cycle, but that's not enough because the developer is not speaking those terms. The developer is not a security persona. The security persona is thinking in terms of risk. What are the risks that a specific issue creates? The developer is thinking in terms of the application. What would be the impact on application of a change I would might make into it. And so the root cause of Snyk success, in my opinion, is the fact that from the get-go we scratch that, we build a solution for the developer that is based on how the workflows of the developer, whether it's the ID, whether it's the change management, the pull request. Whether it's integration with the Gits and so on. And whether it's with integration with the cloud and the interaction with the cloud providers. And doing that properly, addressing the developers how they want to context, to get, with the context they want to get as part of the issues, with the workflows they want to get. That's kind of the secret sauce, in a sense. And very easy maybe to say, but very, very hard to implement properly. >> This is huge. I want to unpack that. I want to just, great call out, great description. This is huge. This is a, we're seeing the past three years in particular, maybe three with the pandemic. Okay, maybe go a couple years earlier, then. The developers' behavior is driving the change. And you know, if you look at the past three DockerCons we've covered, we've been powering that site, been following that community very closely since the beginning, as well. It just seems in the past three to four years that the developers choices at scale, not what they're buying or who's pushing tools to them, has been one big trend. >> Yeah. >> They're setting the pace. >> Developer is the king. >> If it's self-service, we've seen self-service. Whether it's freemium to paid, that works. This is the new equation. Developer, developer choice is critical. So self-service they want. And two, the language barrier or jargon between or mindsets between security and developers. Okay, so DevOps brings IT into the workflow. Check. DevSecOps brings in there. You guys crack the code on that, is that what you're saying? >> Yes, and it's both the product, like how do you use the solution, as well as the go to market. How do you consume the solution? And you alluded to that with the PLG motion, that I think Synk has done the superb job at and that really helped our businesses. >> Okay, so Manoj, product, you got the keys to the kingdom, you got the product roadmap. I could imagine, and what I'd love to get your reaction too Adi, if you don't mind. If you do that, what you've done, the consequence of that is now security teams and the data teams can build guardrails. We're reporting a lot of that in the queue. We're hearing that we can provide guardrails. So the velocity of the developer seems to be increasing. Do you see that? Is that a consequence? >> That's something that we actually measure in the product. Right, so Snyk's focus is not finding issues, it's fixing issues. So one of the things we have been able to heuristically look at our thousands of customers and say, they're fixing issues 27 days faster than they were prior to Snyk. So, you know, I'm a Formula one fan. Guardrails, you say. I say there's a speed circuit. Developers love speed. We give them the speed. We give the security teams the ability to sit on those towers and, you know, put the right policies and guardrails in place to make sure that it's not speed without safety. >> And then I'm sure you guys are in the luxury box now, partying while the developers are (Lisa laughing) no more friction, no more fighting, right? >> The culture is changing. I had a discussion with a Fortune 50 CISO a month ago, and they told me, "Adi, it's the first time in my life where the development teams are coming to me, asking me, hey I want you to buy us this security solution." And for, that was mind blowing for him, right? Because it really changes the discussion with the security teams and the development teams >> Before Lisa jumps in, well how long, okay, let me ask you that question on that point. When did that tipping point change, culturally? Was it just the past few years? Has there, has DevOps kind of brought that in, can you? >> Yeah, I think it's a journey that happened together with Snyk's, kind of, growth. So if three years ago it was the very early adopters that were starting to consume that. So companies that are very, you know, modern in the way they developed and so on. And we saw it in our business. In the early days, most of our business came from the high tech industry. And now it's like everywhere. You have manufacturing, you have banks, you have like every segment whatsoever. >> Talk about that cultural shift. That's really challenging for organizations to achieve. Are you seeing, so that, that CISO was quite surprised that the developer came and said, this is what I want. Are you seeing more of that cultural changes? Is that becoming pervasive? >> Yeah, so I think that the root cause of that is that, you mentioned the growth, like the increased speed of velocity in applications. We have 30 million developers in the world today. 30 millions. By the end of the decade it's going to be 45 millions and all of them are using open source, third party code. Look at what's going on here in the event, right? This accelerates the speed for which they develop. So with that, what happened in the digital transformation world, the organizations are facing that huge growth, exponential growth in the amount of technology and products that are being built by their teams. But the way they manage that before, from a security perspective, just doesn't scale. And it breaks and it breaks and it breaks. This is why you need a different approach. A solution that is based on the developers, who are the ones that created the problems and the ones that will be responsible of fixing the issues. This is why we are kind of centering ourselves around them. >> And the world has changed, right? What is cloud? It's code, it's not infrastructure. Old infrastructure, hosted infrastructure. So if cloud is code and cloud native applications are all code and they're being deployed with Terraform packages and cloud formations, that's code. Why take an old school approach of scanning it outside-in. I talked to CISO today who said, I feel bad that, you know, our policy makes it such that a terraform change takes six months. What did I do? I made cloud look like infrastructure. >> Yeah, it's too slow. >> So that, you know, so both sides, you know, CISOs want something that the business, you know, accepts and adopts and it's, culture changes happen because the power is with the developers because all of this is code, and we enabled that whole seamless journey, all the way from code to cloud. So it's kind, you know, I think that this is a part of it. It's by direction, it's a bridge and both sides are meeting in the middle here. >> It's a bridge. I'm curious, how are you facilitating that bridge? You, we talk about the developers being the kings and queens and really so influential in business decisions these days. And you're talking about the developers now embracing Snyk. But you're also talking to CISOs. Is your customer conversation level changing as a result of security folks understanding why it needs to shift-left. >> We had a breakfast meeting with customers, prospects and everyone, I think this morning. It was interesting, we were remarking. There are CTOs, VPs of engineering, CISOs, VPs of AppSec. And it was such a rich conversation on both sides, right? So just the joy of facilitating that conversation and dialogue. CISOs, and so the levels are changing. It started for us in CTOs and VPs of engineering and now it's both because, you know, one of the things Adi talks about is, like, that security has to become development aware. And that's starting to be like the reality. Me getting another solution, with maybe a better acronym than the old acronym, but it's still outside-in, it's scan based. I light up up the Christmas tree, who is going to fix it? And with the speed of cloud, now I got throw in more lights. Those lights are no longer valid. >> The automation. >> The automation without prioritization and actual empowerment is useless. >> All right, I know we got a couple minutes left, but I want to get into that point about automation because inside-out, you've made me think about this. I want to get your thought Adi, if you don't mind. The integration challenges now are much more part of the ecosystem, more joint engineering. You mentioned these meetings are not just salesperson and customer buyer, it's teams are talking to each other. There's a lot of that going on. How do you guys look at that? Because now the worst things that I hear and when I talk to customers is, I hate the word PenTest and AppSec review. It slows things down. People want to go faster. So how do you guys look at that? What's Snyk doing around making the AppSec review process, integration across companies, work better? >> So I'll give you an example from the cloud and then I will relate to the AppSec. And this relates to what you mentioned before. We had a discussion yesterday with a CISO that said, we are scanning the cloud, we are opening the lights, we see this issue. Now what do I do? Who needs to fix this? So they have this long process of finding the actual team that is required to fix it. Now they get to the team and they say, why didn't you tell me about it when I developed it? The same goes for AppSec, right? The audit is a very late stage of the game. You want to make sure that the testing, that the policies, everything is under the same structure, the same policies. So when you do the same thing, it's part of the first time of code that you create, it's part of the change management, it's part of the build, it's part of the deployment and it's part of the audit. And you have everything together being done under the same platform. And this is, kind of, one of the strengths that we bring to the table. The discussion changes because now you have an aligned strategy, rather than kind of blocks that we have, kind of, mashed up together. >> So the new workflow, it's a new workflow, basically, in the mindset of the customer. They got to get their arms around that thing. If we don't design it in, the wheels could come off the bus at the 11th hour. >> Adi: Yeah. >> And everything slows down. >> I had a discussion with Amazon today, actually, that they had an internal discussion and they said, like, some of the teams were like, why have you blocked my app from being released? And they said, have you ever scanned your app? Have you ever looked at your, like, and, and they're like, if you haven't, then you're not really onboard with the platform and it just breaks. This is what happens. >> Great conversation. I know we don't, I wish we had more time. We'll do a follow up on theCube for sure. Should we get into the new twist? >> I've got one final question for you guys. We're making some Instagram reels, so think about your elevator pitch in 30 seconds. And I want to ask you about Snyk's evolution. Manoj, I want to start with you. What is that elevator pitch about Snyk's evolution to the end user customer? >> Empower developers, help them go faster, more productive and do it in a way that security is really built in, not bolted on. And that's really, you know, from a, the evolution and the power that we are giving is make the organization more productive because security is just happening as a part of making the developer more productive. >> Awesome. And Adi, question for you, how, your elevator pitch on how Snyk is really an enabler for CISOs these days? >> Yeah, so I always ask the CISO first of all, are you excited about the way your environment looks like today? Do you need to have a cultural change? Because if you need to have a cultural change, if you want to get those two teams working closely together, we are here to enable that. And it goes from the product, it goes from our education pieces that we can talk about in another section, and it works around the language that we build to allow and enable that discussion. >> Awesome. Guys, that was a double mic drop for both of you. >> Manoj: Thank you. >> Adi: Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you so much for joining John and me, talking about what's happening with Snyk, what you're enabling customers to do and how, really, you're enabling cultural change. That's hard to do. That's awesome stuff guys. And congratulations on your 11th and your first Cube. >> Second, second, >> Second. >> Adi: I will be here more, but (laughs) >> You got it, you got it. You have to come back because we have too much to talk about. >> Adi: Exactly. (laughs) >> Thanks guys, we appreciate it. >> If we can without Manoj, so I can catch up. (Manoj laughs) >> Okay. We'll work on that. >> Bring you in the studio. (everyone laughing) >> Exactly. >> Eight straight interviews. (John and Lisa laughing) >> We hope you've enjoyed this conversation. We want to thank our guests. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in emerging and enterprise tech coverage. (soft electronic music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Miami. Lisa Martin here live with the Cube at IFS Unleashed 2022. We're so excited to be here. We just had a great conversation with Ifss, CEO of Darren Rouse. Now we've got another exciting conversation. F1 is here. You know how much I love f1. Christian Peterson joins us as well, the Chief Product Officer at ifs, and Sean Edwards IT business partner at Aston Martin. F1. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you for having >>Us. Thank you >>Very much. We were talking about F one. We probably could have an entire conversation just on that, but Christian, I wanna talk with you. It's been three years since the Cube has covered ifs obviously for obvious reasons during that time. So much momentum has happened. IFS cloud was launched about 18 months ago. Give our audience an o, a flavor of IFS, cloud and some of the milestones that you've hit in such a short time period. >>Yeah, I mean IFS cloud is really transformational in many ways. It's transformational for first and foremost for our customers in what enables them to do, but also transformational for us from a technology perspective, how we work and how we do everything. And at the end of the day, it has really surfaced, served around the the, the fact of what we need to do for our customers. And what we saw our customers often do back then, or any company, was they were out looking for EAP solutions or FSM Solutions or EAM Solutions or what have you. And then they were trying to stitch it all together and we, we said like, Hang on a second, these these traditional software s, those are some that I'm guilty. You know, there's some that we actually invented over the years together with analysts. So we invented EER P and we invented CRM and EAM and all these different things. >>But at the end of the day, customers really want a solution to what they are, they are what they're dealing with. And so in these conversations it became very clear that and very repeated conclusions from the conversations that customers wanted something that could manage and help them optimize the use of their assets. Regardless of what industry you're in, assets is such a key component. Either you are using your assets or you're producing assets. Second thing is really get the best use of of your people, your teams and your crew. How do you get the right people on the right job at the same time? How do you assemble the right crew with the right set of skills in the crew? Get them to the right people at the same time. So, and then the final thing is of course customers, you know all the things that you need to do to get customers to answer these ultimate questions, Will you buy from this company again? And they should say yes. That's the ultimate results of moments of service. So that's how we bring it all together and that's what we have been fast at work at. That's what IFS cloud is all about. >>And you, you talked about IFS cloud, being able to to help customers, orchestrate assets, people, customers, Aston Martin being one of those customers. Shawn, you came from ifs so you have kind of the backstory but just give the audience a little bit of, of flavor of your role at Aston Martin and then let's dig into the smart factory. >>Sure. So I previously worked at IFS as a manufacturing consultant. So my bread and butter is production planning in the ERP sector. So we, I Aston Martin didn't have an ERP system pre IFS or a legacy system that wasn't working for them and the team couldn't rely upon it. So what we did was bring IFS in. I was the consultant there and as IFS always preached customer first, well customer first did come and I jumped to support the team. So we've implemented a fully RP solution to manage the production control and the material traceability all the way through from design until delivery to track. And we've mo most recently implemented a warehouse solution at Trackside as well. So we are now tracking our parts going out with the garage. So that's a really exciting time for RFS. In terms of the smart factory, it's not built yet. >>We're we're supposed to move next year. So that's really exciting cause we're quadrupling our footprint. So going from quite a small factory spread out across the North Hampton Share countryside, we're going into one place quadruple in our footprint. And what we're gonna start looking at is using the technology we're implementing there. So enabling 5G to springboard our IFFs implementations going forward with the likes of Internet of things to connect our 15 brand new CMC machines, but also things like R F I D. So that comes with its own challenges on a Formula One car, but it's all about speed of data capture, single point of truth. And IFFs provides that >>And well, Formula One, the first word that comes to mind is speed. >>Absolutely. Second >>Word is crazy. >>We, we are very unique in terms of most customers Christian deals with, they're about speed but also about profit and efficiency. That doesn't matter to us. It is all about time. Time is our currency and if we go quicker in designing and manufacturing, which ifs supports ultimately the cargo quicker. So speed is everything. >>And and if we, if we think of of people, customers and assets at Asset Martin F one, I can't, I can't imagine the quantity of assets that you're building every race weekend and refactoring. >>Absolutely. So a Formula one car that drives out of the garage is made up of 13,000 car parts, most of which, 50% of which we've made in house. So we have to track that all the way through from the smallest metallic component all the way up to the most complex assembly. So orchestrating that and having a single point of truth for people to look at and track is what IFFs has provided us. >>Christian, elaborate on that a little bit in terms of, I mean, what you're facilitating, F1 is such a great example of of speed we talked about, but the fact that you're setting up the car every, every other weekend maybe sometimes back to back weeks, so many massive changes going on. You mentioned 50% of those 13,000 parts you manufacture. Absolutely. Talk about IFS as being a catalyst for that. >>I mean the, it's, it's fascinating with Formula One, but because as a technology geek like me, it's really just any other business on steroids. I mean we talk, we talk about this absolutely high tech, super high tech manufacturing, but even, even before that, the design that goes in with CFDs and how you optimize for different things and loose simulation software for these things goes into manufacturing, goes into wind tunnels and then goes on track. But guess what, when it's on track, it's an asset. It's an asset that streams from how many sensors are on the car, >>I think it's over 10,000 >>Sensors, over 10,000 sensors that streams maybe at 50 hertz or 50 readings. So every lap you just get this mountain of data, which is really iot. So I always say like F one if one did IOT before anybody invented the term. >>Absolutely. >>Yep. You know, F1 did machine learning and AI before anybody thought about it in terms of pattern recognition and things like that with the data. So that's why it's fascinating to work with an organization like that. It's the, it's the sophistication around the technologies and then the pace what they do. It's not that what they do is actually so different. >>It is, it absolutely isn't. We just have to do it really quickly. Really >>Quickly. Right. And the same thing when you talk about parts. I mean I was fascinated of a conversation with, with one of your designers that says that, you know, sometimes we are, we are designing a part and this, the car is now ready for production but the previous version of that part has not even been deployed on the car yet. So that's how quick the innovation comes through and it's, it's, it's fascinating and that's why we like the challenge that Esther Martin gives us because if we can, if we can address that, there's a lot of businesses we can make happy with that as far, >>So Sha I talk a little bit about this is, so we're coming up, there's what four races left in the 2022 season, but this is your busy time because that new car, the 23 car needs to be debuted in what February? So just a few months time? >>Absolutely. So it's a bit cancer intuitive. So our busiest time is now we're ramping up into it. So we co, we go into something called car build which is from December to December to February, which is our end point and there's no move in that point. The car has gotta go around that track in February. So we have got to make those 13,000 components. We've gotta design 'em, we've gotta make 'em and then we've gotta get 'em to the car in February for our moment of service. They said it on stage. Our moment of service as a manufacturing company is that car going around the track and we have to do it 24 times next year and we've gotta start. Well otherwise we're not gonna keep up. >>I'm just gonna ask you what a, what a moment, what's a moment of service in f1 and you're saying basically getting that >>Functional car >>On the track quickly, as quickly as possible and being able to have the technology underpinning that's really abstracting the complexity. >>Absolutely. So I would say our customer ultimately is the driver and the fans they, they need to have a fast car so they can sport it and they ultimately drive it around the track and go get first place and be competitive. So that is our moment of service to our drivers is to deliver that car 24 times next year. >>I imagine they might be a little demanding >>They are and I think it's gonna be exciting with Alonzo coming in, could the driver if we've gotta manage that change and he'll have new things that he wants to try out on a car. So adds another level of complexity to that. >>Well how influential are the drivers in terms some of the, the manufacturing? Like did they, are they give me kind of a a sense of how Alon Fernando Alanzo your team and ifs maybe collaborate, maybe not directly but >>So Alonzo will come in and suggest that he wants cars to work a certain way so he will feed back to the team in terms of we need this car, we need this car part to do this and this car part to do that. So then we're in a cycle when he first gets into the car in that February, we've then gotta turnaround car parts based off his suggestions. So we need to do that again really quickly and that's where IFS feeds in. So we have to have the release and then the manufacturer of the component completely integrated and that's what we achieve with IFFs and >>It needs to be really seamless. >>Absolutely. If, if we don't get it right, that car doesn't go out track so there's no moving deadline. >>Right. That's the probably one of the industries where deadlines do not move. Absolutely. We're so used to things happening in tech where things shift and change and reorgs, but this is one where the dates are set in their firm. >>Absolutely. And we have to do anything we can do to get that car on the track. So yeah, it's just a move. >>Christian, talk about the partnership a little bit from your standpoint in terms of how influential has Aston Martin F1 been in IFS cloud and its first 18 months. I was looking at some stats that you've already gotten 400,000 plus users in just a short time period. How influential are your customers in the direction and even the the next launch 22 R too? >>I mean our customers do everything plain and simple. That's that's what it is. And we have, we have a partnership, I think about every single customer as a partner of ours and we are partnering in taking technology to the next level in terms of, of the outputs and the benefits it can create for our customers. That's what it's all, all about. And I, I always think about these, these three elements I think I mentioned in our state as well. I think the partnership we have is a partnership around innovation. Innovation doesn't not only come from IFS or the technology partner, it comes from discussions, requirements, opportunities, what if like all these things. So innovation comes from everywhere. There's technology driven innovation, there's customer driven innovation, but that's part of the partnership. The second part of the partnership is inspiration. So with innovation you inspire. So when you innovate on something new that inspires new innovation and new thinking and that's again the second part of the partnership. And then the third part is really iterate and execute, right? Because it's great that we can now innovate and we can agree on what we need to do, but now we need to put it into products, put it in technology and put it into actual use. That's when the benefits comes and that's when we can start bringing the bell. >>And I think it's really intrinsically linked. I mean if you look at progress with Formula One teams and their innovation, it's all underpinned by our technology partners and that's why it's so important. The likes of Christian pushes the product and improves it and innovates it because then we can realize the benefits and ultimately save time and go faster. So it's really important that our, our partners and certainly inform one, push the boundaries and find that technology. >>And I think one of the things that we also find very, very important is that we actually understand our customers and can talk the language. So I think that was one of the key things in our engagement, Martin from the beginning is that we had a set of people that really understand Formula One felt it on their bodies and can have the conversation. So when the Formula One teams they say something, then we actually understand what we're talking about. So for instance, when we talk about, you know, track side inventory, well it's not that different from what a field service technician have in his van when he goes service. The only difference is when you see something happening on track, you'll see the parts manager go out to the pit lane with a tablet and say like, oh we need this, we need that, we need this and we need that. And then we'll go back and pick it and put it on the car and the car is service and maintain and off go. Absolutely. >>Yeah that speed always impresses me. >>It's unbelievable. >>Shannon, last question for you. From a smart factory perspective, you said you're moving in next year. What are some of the things that you are excited about that you think are really gonna be transformative but IFS is doing? >>So I think what I'm really excited about once we get in is using the technology they've already put in terms of 5G networks to sort of springboard that into a further IFS implementation. Maybe IFFs cloud in terms of we always struggle to keep the system up to date with, with what's physically happening so that the less data entry and the more automatic sort of data capture, the better it is for the formula on team cuz we improve our our single point of truth. So I'm really excited to look at the internet of things and sort of integrate our CNC machines to sort of feed that information back into ifs. But also the RFID technology I think is gonna be a game changer when we go into the new factory. So really >>Excited. Excellent. Well well done this year. We look forward to seeing Alonso join the team in 23. Fingers >>Crossed. >>Okay. Fingers crossed. Christian, Jeanette, it's been a pleasure to have you on the program. Thank you so much for sharing your insights and how ifs asked Martin are working together, how you really synergistically working together. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you very much for having us. Our >>Thanks for having us. And go Aston >>Woo go Aston, you already here first Lisa Martin, no relation to Aston Martin, but well, I wanna thank Christian Peterson and Shannon Edwards for joining me, talking about IFS and Aston Martin team and what they're doing at Speed and Scale. Stick around my next guest joins me in a minute. >>Thank you.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Vegas, baby. Lisa Martin here with theCUBE. We are live at Caesar's Forum covering Snowflake Summit 22. This is day two of our wall to wall coverage on theCUBE you won't want to miss. We've got an exciting customer story to talk to you about next with Novartis and Snowflake. Please welcome two guests to theCUBE. Loïc Giraud, Global head digital delivery, Novartis. I hope I got the name right. >> Yes. Hi, thank you. >> I did my best. >> Absolutely. >> Lisa: (laughs) Jesse Cugliotta also joins us. Global Industry Lead, Healthcare and Life Sciences at Snowflake. Welcome with theCUBE, gentlemen. >> Thank you for having us. Good morning. >> So it was great to hear Novartis is a household word now, especially with what's gone on in the last two years. I had a chance to see the Keynote yesterday, heard Novartis mention in terms of a massive outcome that Snowflake is delivering that we're going to get to. But Loic talk to us about Novartis global 500 organization. You rank among the world's top companies investing in R&D, the massive portfolio and you're reaching nearly 800 million patients worldwide. That's huge, but there's been a lot of change in the healthcare and life sciences industry, especially recently. Talk to us about the industry landscape. What are you seeing? >> As you described, Novartis is one of the top life science company in the world. We are number three. We operate in 150 countries, and we have almost 120,000 employees. Our purpose is actually to reimagine medicine for the use of data science and technology and to extend people's life. And we really mean it. I think, as you mentioned, we treat eight or 9 million patient per year with our drugs. We expect to treat more than a billion patients in near time soon. Over the last few years, especially during COVID, our digital transformation help us to accelerate the drug discovery and then the commiseration of our drug to markets. As it was mentioned in the Keynote yesterday, we have actually been able to reduce our time to market. It used to take us up to 12 years and cost around 1.2 billion to discover and commercialize drug. And now we've actually use of technology like Snowflake, we have been able to reduce by two to three years, which ultimately is a benefit for our patients. >> Absolutely. Well, we're talking about life and death situations. Talk about... You mentioned Novartis wants to reimagine medicine. What does that look like? Where is data in that and how is Snowflake an enabler of reimagining medicine? >> So data is core for our asset, is a core of enterprise process. So if you look at our enterprise, we are using data from the research, for drug development, in manufacturing process, and how do we market and sell our product through HCPs and distribute it to reach our patients. If you build through our digital transformation we have created this integrated data ecosystem, where Snowflake is a core component. And through that ecosystem, we are able to identify compounds and cohorts, perform clinical trials, and engage HCPs and HGOs so that can prescribe drugs to serve our patient needs. >> Jesse, let's bring you into the conversation. Snowflake recently launched its healthcare and life sciences data cloud. I believe that was back in March. >> It was. >> Just a couple of months ago. Talk to us about the vertical focus. Talk to us about what this healthcare and life sciences data cloud is aiming to help customers like Novartis achieve. >> Well, as you mentioned there, Snowflake has made a real pivot to kind of focus on the various different industries that we serve in a new way. I think historically, we've been engaged in really, all of the industries across the major sectors where we participate today. But historically we've been often engaging with the office of IT. And there was a recognition as a company that we really need to be able to better speak the language of our customers in with our respective industries. So the entire organization has really made a pivot to start to build that capability internally. That's part of the team that I support here at Snowflake. And with respect to healthcare and life sciences, that means being able to solve some of the challenges that Loic was just speaking about. In particular, we're seeing the industry evolve in a number of ways. You bring up clinical research in the time that it takes to actually bring a drug to market. This is a big one that's really changed a lot over the last couple of years. Some of the reasons are obvious and other ones are somewhat opportunistic. When we looked at what it takes to get a drug to market, there's several stages of clinical research that have to be participated in, and this can often take years. What we saw in the last couple of years, is that all of a sudden, patients didn't want to physically participate in those anymore, because there was fear of potential infection and being in a healthcare facility. So the entire industry realized that it needed to change in terms of way that it would engage with patients in that context. And we're now seeing this concept of decentralized clinical research. And with that, becomes the need to potentially involve many different types of organizations beyond the traditional pharma, their research partners, but we're starting to see organizations like retail pharmacies, like big box retailers, who have either healthcare delivery or pharmaceutical arms actually get involved in the process. And of course, one of the core things that happens here is that everyone needs a better way to collaborate and share data amongst one another. So bringing this back to your original question, this concept of being able to do exactly that is core to the healthcare and the life sciences data cloud. To be able to collaborate and share data amongst those different types of organizations. >> Collaboration and data sharing. It seems to me to be a differentiator for Snowflake, in terms of being able to deliver secure, governed powerful analytics and data sharing to customers, partners to the ecosystem. You mentioned an example of the ecosystem there and how impactful to patients' lives, that collaboration and data sharing can be. >> That's absolutely right. It's something that if you think about all of the major challenges that the industry has had historically, whether it is high costs, whether it are health inequities, whether it is physicians practicing defensive medicine or repeat testing, what's core to each one of these things is kind of the inability to adequate collaborate and share data amongst all of the different players. So the industry has been waiting for the capability or some sort of solution to be able to do this, I think for a long, long time. And this is probably one of the most exciting parts of the conversations that we have with our customers, is when they realize that this is possible. And not only that it's possible within our platform, but that most of the organizations that they work with today are also Snowflake customers. So they realize that everyone's already here. It's just a matter of who else can we work with and how do we get started? >> Join the party. >> Exactly. >> Loic talk to us about Novartis's data journey. I know you guys have been, I believe using Snowflake since 2017 pre pandemic. But you had a largely on-premises infrastructure. Talk to us about the decision of Novartis to go to the cloud, do it securely and why you chose to partner with Snowflake. >> So when we started our journey in 2018, I think the ambition that our CEO, was to transform all enterprise processes for the use of digital tech. And at the core of this digital tech is data foundation. So we started with a large program called Formula One, which aim to integrate all our internal and external data asset into an integrated platform. And for that, I think we've built this multicloud and best upgrade platform, where Snowflake is a core component. And we've been able to integrate almost 1,000 data asset, internal and external for the platform to be able to accelerate the use of data to create insight for our users. In that transformation, we've realized that Snowflake could be a core component because of the scalability and the performance with large dataset. And moreover, when Snowflake started to actually open collaboration for their marketplace, we've been able to integrate new data set that are publicly available at the place that we could not do on ourself, on our own. So that is a core component of what we are trying to do. >> Yeah, and I think that's a great example of really what we're talking about here is that, he's mentioning that they're going out to our marketplace to be able to integrate data more easily with some of the vendors there. And that is kind of this concept of the healthcare and life sciences data cloud realized, where all of a sudden, acquiring and bringing data in and making it ready for analysis becomes much faster, much easier. We continually see more and more vendors coming to us saying, I get it now, I want in. Who else can I work with in this space? So I think that's a perfect example of how this starts to become real for folks. >> Well, it sounds like the marketplace has been an enabler, Loic, of the expansion of use cases. You've grown this beyond drug development. I read that you're developing new products and services for healthcare providers to personalize treatments for patients, which we all are demanding patients. We want that personalized care. But talk about the marketplace as a facilitator of those expanding use cases that Snowflake is powering. >> Yes. That's right. I mean we have currently almost 65 use cases in production and we are in advanced progress for over 200 use cases and they go across all our business sector. So if you look at drug development, we are monitoring our clinical trials using Snowflake. If you look at our omnichannel marketing, we are looking at personalization of information with our HCPs and HGOs using snowflake. If you look at our manufacturing process, we are looking at yet management, freight optimization, inventory, insight. So almost across all the industry sectors that we have, I think we are using the platforms to be able to deliver faster information to our users. >> And that's what we all want. Faster information. I think in the pandemic we learned that access to real time data in every industry wasn't a nice to have. That was a- >> Necessity. >> Absolute necessity. >> Yeah. >> And made the difference for companies that survived and thrived and those that didn't. That's something that we learned. But we also learned that the volume of data just continues to proliferate. Loic, you've been in the industry a couple of decades. What do you see? And you've got, obviously this great foundation now with Snowflake. You've got 65 use cases you said in production. What's the future of the data culture in healthcare and life sciences from your perspective? >> So my perspective. It is time now we give the access to our business technologies to be able to be self-sufficient using digital product. We need to consumerize digital technology so they can be self-sufficient. The amount of problems that we have to solve, and we can now solve with new technology has never been there. And I think where in the past, where in the next few years that you will see an accelerated generation of insight and an accelerated process of medicine by empowering the business technologies to use a technology that like Snowflake and over progress. >> What are your thoughts Loic, of some of the, obviously a lot of news coming out yesterday from Snowflake, we mentioned standing room only in the Keynote. This I believe is north of 10,000 attendees. People are ready to engage in person with Snowflake, but some of the news coming out, what is your perspective? You've been a partner of theirs for a while. What do you see from Snowflake in terms of the news, the volume of customers it's adding, all that good stuff? >> I must say I was blown away yesterday when Frank was talking about the ramp up of customers using Snowflake. But also, and I think in Benoit and Christian, and they talk about the innovation. When you look at native application or you look at hybrid tables, we saw a thing there. And the expansion of the marketplace by monetization application, that is something that is going to accelerate the expansion, not only on the company, but the integration and the utilization of customers. And to Jesse's point, I think that it is key that people collaborate using the platform. I think we want to collaborate with suppliers and providers and they want to collaborate with us. But we want to have a neutral environment where we can do that. And Snowflake can be that environment. >> And do it securely, right? Security is absolutely- >> Of course. I mean that's really table stake for this industry. And I think the point that you just made Loic, is very important, is that, the biggest question that we're often asked by our customers is who else is a customer within this industry that I can collaborate with? I think as Loic here will attest to, one of the challenges within life sciences in particular is that it is a highly regulated industry. It is a highly competitive industry, and folks are very sensitive about referenceability. So about things like logo usage. So to give some ideas here, people often have no idea that we're working with 28 of the top 50 global pharma today, working with seven of the top 12 global medical device companies today. The largest CROs, the largest distributors. So when I say that the party is here, they really are. And that's why we're so excited to have events like these, 'cause people can physically introduce themselves to one another and meet, and actually start to engage in some of these more collaborative discussions that they've been waiting for. >> Jesse, what's been some of the feedback that you've heard the last couple of days on the healthcare and life sciences data cloud? You've obviously finally gotten back to engaging with customers in person. But what are some of the things, feed on this street have said that you've thought, we made the absolute right decision on this pivot? >> Yeah, well I think some of it speaks to the the point I was just speaking about, is that they had no idea that so many of their peers were actually working with Snowflake already and that how mature their implementations have actually been. The other thing that folks are realizing is that, a lot of the technologies that serve this ecosystem, whether they're in the health tech space, whether they're clinical management or commercial engagement or supply chain planning technologies, those companies are also now pivoting to Snowflake, where they're either building a part or the entirety of their platform on top of ours. So it offers this great way to start to collaborate with the ecosystem through some of those capabilities that we spoke about. And that's driving new use cases in commercial, in supply chain, in pharmacovigilance, in clinical operations. >> Well, I think you just sum up beautifully why the theme of this conference is the world of data collaboration. >> Yes, absolutely. >> The potential there, that Snowflake is unleashing to the world is I think is what's captivating to me. That you just scratch on the surface about connecting and facilitating this collaboration and this data sharing in a secure way across industries. Loic, last question for you. Take us home with what is next for Novartis. You've done a tremendous amount of digitalization. 65 use cases in production with Snowflake. What's next for the company? >> See, I think that in next year's to come, open collaboration with the ecosystem, but also personalization. If you look at digital medicine and access to patient's informations, I think this is probably the next revolution that we are entering into. >> Excellent. And of course those demanding patients aren't going to want anything slower or less information. Guys, thank you for joining me on the program talking about the Novartis-Snowflake collaboration. The partnership, the outcomes that you're achieving and how this is really dramatically impacting the lives of hundreds of millions of people. We appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thank you for having us. This was fun. >> My pleasure. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. This is live from Las Vegas, day two of our coverage of Snowflake Summit 22. I'll be right back with my next guest, so stick around. (upbeat music)

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

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

(tubular bells chiming) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We're here, get all the action wall-to-wall coverage. The keynotes with the new CEO, Adam Leschi just happened. A lot of action wall-to-wall coverage for days, and we'd love cloud computing because it impacts business. We love all that, but when it impact sports, we love it even more because it can relate to it. You can see the two great guests here from the NHL Formula 1. We got David Lehanski the EVP of business development and innovation at the NHL, Rob Smedley, director of data systems at Formula 1. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me today in theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> So obviously formula one we know is very data driven. Pun intended, NHL has a lot of action going on as well with innovation streaming, et cetera. Let's get into it. You're both Amazon customers, right? We'll start with you. Formula 1, big partnership with AWS. What's that about? how you guys look at this cloud as you guys go to the next level? Cause you're under a lot of pressure with the data, from the cars and standards and all that good stuff. What's up. >> What's going on? >> Well, I mean, you know, it started probably four or five years ago with the acquisition of Liberty media and formula 1, and there was a real drive towards data. There was a real drive towards, you know, unearthing all of the data that we've got, you know, formula 1, arguably probably generates the most data, this most sports data of any sport on the planet. You know, we have car telemetry data, timing data, metadata, image data, you know, we own all the video data, and the audio data of driver radio, tire data, weather data, you put all that together. You got to, you know, a real massive data. And it was just about trying to unearth that and, and engage the fans more. And that's where the partnership with AWS come from. >> And the competitiveness in formula one I know is really high. You got a lot of smart people on these teams looking for an edge. And I know it's like, it's a whole new world with data as things get exposed. So I got to ask you, what is your job? Are you there to like to corral the data that kind of set standards? What's your role? >> Well, my role is essentially, to use the data at central league level, if you want, for all the franchises, that's all 20 drivers, within the 10 teams to try to, you know, use that data in whatever way possible, whether it's the new car or whether it's the F1 insights powered by AWS to try to engage the fans more. You know, we've understood that data, is really important to tell the story of Formula 1. And it's really important to reach different demographics as well. The younger demographics, the young, the gen Zedders is, you know, those types of guys, it's really important to get to them, because you can condense and at one hour 45 race down to five minutes, right. Which is what they want. So this has been a really important step for us. And a really important part of that journey has been the enablement. >> And I can see the whole e-sports thing I could see after a race. Okay. Now the fans race amongst themselves, as the technology simulation gets better, only headroom there. So to speak. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's what we're, you know, that's probably the next generation of what we want to do with the data is we want to make it much more interactive. We're already giving, you know, through the insights and through, you know, the way that, we're trying to tell stories with the different data assets we're already trying to do that, in a much more proactive way of telling the story. The next level of that. is completely immersive, is interactive. And that's what we call the 21st drivers. So there's 20, formula 1 drivers. Right. But, we want to build systems using the data and gamification where you can embed yourself and immerse yourself in that, in the races, the 21st driver and race against the other guys on a Sunday afternoon. >> Awesome. Dave, let's get to the NHL National Hockey League. You guys are doing a lot of good stuff. You're the EVP of innovation and what's going on over there. How do you see the cloud helping you guys innovate. what's on your agenda and what's your role? >> Wow. I don't know if we have enough time, but at the highest level, you know, we're trying to expand and enhance the way we produce and present our game to the world. You know, our sport, we have some similarities, but there's a lot of differences based on the uniqueness of the sport. Statistics, hadn't really been a big part of the National Hockey League in the way people consume the game. I always say, you know, goaltenders have two statistics that have been used to evaluate them. And they were the same ones that were used to evaluate them back in 1917. So almost again a hundred years where it hasn't really evolved that much, but we think there's so much there that can really enrich and transform the game. So we're trying to partner with AWS and the best technology companies in the world to figure out how we can start to capture that data and turn it into meaningful content and experiences that allow fans to go a little bit deeper and a little bit broader. >> Yeah, I can see the data being used for also seeing what the NFL is doing a lot with the safety. Hits are getting harder and faster in the NHL. I mean, the collisions, the equipment, everyone is going faster. That's a big safety issue too. Isn't it? >> There is a safety component too. And it, look, that is one of the unique things about our sports. Both of us are speed involved. The speed though, for us, it's not just on the ice, it's also the pace of play, right? So when you have a stoppage, it's typically 10 or 15 seconds long. So there's not a lot of time to integrate data, to tell stories, to build and graphics and visualizations. So the first phase for us was to build the tracking system that could capture the positional, the positions of the puck and the players throughout the course of every game. And that's generating a massive amount of new data. Now we're trying to add video to that data so we could start to use it to create entirely new experiences. >> What are you guys thinking about from a fan experience as you look at the analytics. Are they interested in more like the, where the puck is, how fast people are going, what are some of the analytics sharing? >> So it depends, Right? So from a fan standpoint, you know, avid fans really want to, they want to go deep and they want understand controlled zone entries and like, you know, things that are really inherent to, you know, the core factors for determining outcome. Casual fans, they like just on knowing speed, right? How fast is the puck moving? How fast are the players moving. Before we had the system, we weren't able to produce it. Before we had AWS, you won't be able to produce that in real time and overlay it onto a game. So we could go even deeper when it comes to players and coaches and media partners, but the ability to build a solution that works in real time to give them the data and the video that they can use to tell those stories is born from AWS. >> And that brings up a great point. I'd love to ask both of you, if you can answer this question about the fan expectations. One of the big trends coming out of this re-invent this year as cloud is creating more capabilities, but the users and the consumers have new expectations. They want it on mobile, they want the highlights, they want everything. They want the data, there are data junkies. They want everything, cause they're immersing, into the experience with multiple touchpoints. TV, app. Whatever. >> I think that's right. And I think that it's up to, you know, as David's just saying that the two sports here with a lot of similarities and you can see that we're both on the same journey and that's because it's been driven in the end by the consumers, it's been driven by our customers. And, I think that now we're on, you know, what I would call the data flywheel, where there's a lot of inertia and it's just getting stronger and stronger and stronger. And this was, if we go back say three, four years when we started the partnership with AWS and we started to get really deep into the data and understand, you know, what the objectives of this whole exercise were, we always knew that there'd be a point where it started to build a lot of momentum and have a lot of inertia and that's, what's happening now. There's a real thirst for it, right? And it's not just, you know, even the naysayers, you know, even the people that kind of looked at it and went, well, why are you filling my screen with data exactly the same as what Dave says, you know, since you know, the goaltender since 1917, you've used the same two stats to evaluate that particular player. In formula 1 it's been exactly the same. So we started to introduce stuff which had been the same state as core for 70 years. And they say, well, what's all this about. Now, those people can't live without that. Right? It's become, a key part of the broadcast. >> And it creates new products, like things like Netflix, who would've thought a series would be on Formula 1, a soap opera for formula 1 in behind the scenes, driving to survive has been quite an acceleration for fan base. I mean, techies in Silicon valley and all around the world have told us like, hey, you know what? That exposes the nerdiness of Formula 1. Kind of cool. So who would have thought, I mean, there's going to be shows on this whole other level. >> I think, another point to add it is about increasing your distribution points and getting your content out to as many people as possible through as many platforms as possible. But I think in addition to that, it's really about, Rob started to touch on this personalization and customization. What can you do within those platforms to give fans the ability to sort of create their own experience? Right? So data highlights, huge, huge, huge level of importance. >> I think community is going to be a big part of this too. As you start to see the data creates more interactions and more progression, if you will. Community, I'm a Bruins fan in California. There's not a lot of Bruins fans, mostly sharks fans, but I got to get online. Where am I? Where's my tribe. I want to hang, that's not just on Twitter. >> Yeah >> So there's a whole another level coming. How do you guys see community developing in your sports? >> I think the community is the biggest factor in all of this. Right? And it's kind of bringing together. It's a global sports community, first and foremost, but then you've got these pockets. So you've got NHL, NFL, you've got formula 1 and they're all gaining popularity, but it's all through really everybody being on this same journey. Everybody's on this same journey of involving tech in the sport of revolutionizing their particular sport. And it's building this global community. I mean, In formula 1, we've got a billion fans worldwide, but that's growing, it's growing every single year, but it's only growing because we're starting now to get to that younger demographic, formerly one could never get to the demographic, you know, formula 1 fans looked like us, but now it's starting to really improve our system. >> The virtualization of this hybrid world we're living in opens up the doors for more access. >> Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that's the key point here. And again, they've touched on it. It's the personalization. It's using data and platforms and packages to personalize somebody's engagement with their particular sport. >> I got a couple of questions from the fan base, I knew you guys were coming on. I want to get to you , first, Rob, how has F1 been using Amazon and the cloud to develop the new 2022 race car? >> Well, I mean, it, I would say it's no exaggeration to say Amazon technology enabled, was the key enabler in as being able to design that 2022 car, you know, we designed it in a virtual environment called computational fluid dynamics. You know, the simulations, when we were first running design iterations, were taking something like 40 hours with when we started running it on the EC2, you know, spinning up 7,000 calls, something like that. We got that down to seven hours, manageable. We designed the whole new car. >> Awesome. On the NHL, the question here for you, is that okay, how is the young generation coming into the game? What's changed with the innovation that's impacting, how the games played and how the young guns are coming up? Is there any in technology enabling that? >> Sure. You know, so we're looking at the type of content that younger fans are gravitating to, obviously highlights and dance games, but we talked about it before the ability to see what they want to see with regard to that. So, you know, where we're trying to get to is where you could watch a game and ultimately decide whether or not you want to turn on a right rail of real-time statistics for your favorite player, for your favorite team, for a specific event, whether or not you want to turn on the ability to network with your friends across social platforms, whether or not you want to turn on the betting functionality, whether or not you want to turn on the game functionality. Right? So this is how the younger generation really wants to consume the data, like sort of, they want to see what they want to see, when and how they want to see it. So we're working on that. And then there's everything that goes beyond that. The world of NFTs and VR and AR and alternate forms of content distribution, none of that would be capable or available if not for the ability to capture process and distribute data and video in an aggregate in real time. >> You know, I really think we're onto something so new here. And if you guys are really kind of illustrating the whole point of how being in person, the old model of physical, I don't have to go into arena to watch hockey or go watch formula 1, and hopefully it's on TV. Maybe it's got coverage here and there, but now with hybrid, you can integrate the experiences from the physical in-person where the asset is. >> Absolutely. >> And to virtual and just open up completely new hybrid use cases. I mean, this is brand new. There's no standards. >> Not, exactly. And that's something that we're really starting to look at, which is the event of the future. You know? So how would you bring, how do you mismatch? How would you bring that whole data experience and that whole broadcast experience to the actual event, the live event, and how would you bring the live event to somebody's front room? It's the hybrid model, right? And this is definitely next generation of how we're using the data. We're working with AWS. We're calling it event of the future. It's really, really exciting. I mean, you can imagine going there, to a formula 1 race, you're sat in the stands. You're no longer, you know, watching a car pass every few seconds and wondering what's going on. You've now got AR, VR that you can kind of put up and lay-up across what's going on the track. >> Well, a lot of people would love to get you guys' reaction to this comment online. Cause this is big, I see a lot of naysayers out there because they're so locked into the business model of the physical location. There's a lot of investment in events like this, wants me to buy tickets and show up. So they call it a one-way door here in the industry, they don't want to go through that one way door, but I'm saying that door has already been passed. It's like you're in this hybrid world is here. If you don't get out in front of it, you're going to be toast. So the question is, how do you guys think about this when you talk about the business model of experience? Cause you have to get in there and it's not super great right now on virtual. It could be better. It has to get better. So it's a balance. How do you guys talk about that in your respective fields to educate the potential? I won't say naysayers, but yeah. >> Yeah no, no, no. So we believe it wholeheartedly. You know, when you think about the inner arena experience, there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to be in place to be able to deliver those types of experiences to fans, while they're in the building, we wholeheartedly believe that the people who are paying the most to see our games should get the best possible experience. So there should be no replay, they don't get, there should be no game that they can't access, no application that they couldn't have on their phone, but you need to have, you know, fairly advanced wireless in the arena infrastructures in place. You need to have a lot of cloud infrastructure and services there. So, you know, that's why we're leveraging Kinesis and SageMaker and AWS elemental services to get all of it condensed, operating in the cloud and distributed. So if you're a fan at a game, they're 18,000 other people, like you trying to access a mobile phone to place a bet on a real-time event that just happened, you can actually do it, but a lot needs to go into that. >> Yeah, that's really good insight because what you're pointing out is is that the physical location is the first party asset. That's the key. You build on that, invest in that and then feed it out into the next world and then figure that out. Do you agree with that. >> Absolutely. 100 percent correct. Well, 100 percent agree with everything that David just said. And we've got probably, you know, an even bigger challenge because we've got these 20 sites where we lift and shift 20, 23 races, you know, all round the world where we lift and shift every couple of weeks, and they're not arenas either. They're, you know, these are huge sites. These are you know, five, six kilometer by five, six kilometer square sites. So trying to do everything that David just said in that space, we can open it. >> Yeah, we just turn the lights off, it's over, he's got to pack it all up. >> The private 5G is going to totally help. You can run drones and have full blanket coverage over the location. That's good. That's good stuff. Final question for you guys on data, because I think this is something that we've been kind of talking about on theCUBE over the past year, we see open source software has become a huge success. Do you guys see opening up the data to your fan base and seeing e-sports races in formula 1, is just going crazy. Everyone loves it. It's not there yet but the equipment having your own car in your living room, but it's close, pretty close, it's there. Opening up the data, how do you see that potential? Because there are people who want to maybe code on top of it. How do you guys view that? >> Well, I think it, has to, I mean, Dave, again, touched on this earlier when he talked about, you know, the difference between the casual and the avid. The avid, you'll never, ever satisfy the average thirst for data, right. They want to do what I did and sit on a pit wall and manage a grand Prix team. And that's great, you know, it shouldn't just be for a privilege, you know, 10, 20 people in the world to do that. We should be able to give everybody that experience because we have the technology and the ability and the know how to be able to do that. And that's where, you know, again, partnership with AWS, where we're talking about something called the virtual pit wall. So, you know, the pit stands where it's kind of like the mission control. We want to be able to bring that to the average. And it's just getting deeper and deeper layers where you can set up your bespoke environment. You can set it up just as if you were a race engineer or a team strategist, one of those guys, and you can just get deeper and deeper. And then you start to lay over that. You start to build your own models. We bring in simulation into that whole area. And, you know, it's exactly the same as what you have in the teams. You just go deeper and deeper and deeper. >> What's it like to be on the pit wall there, managing teams. what's it. (men laughing) >> Hmm scary sometimes >> Nerve wrecking. >> Nerve-wracking, I mean, I talked about, you know, the gen Zedders who want the, you know, a two hour race to pass in five minutes, it passes in five minutes. Cause there's so much going on. You know, it's kind of like being the coach or the, you know, the football manager, you know, you're under a lot of pressure. You've got to make the right decisions. You've got to, you know, you've got to make decisions in split seconds. Everybody's an expert 10 seconds after the decision has been made. It's that type of thing, but it's great fun, you know. >> I can see virtual Formula 1 being a hot total hit because with all the data and now autonomous vehicles, you can almost have a collective kind of team approach, like swapping out AI in the cars in real time from the virtual pit. >> Yeah. And again, you know, I'm just going to name check deep racer because you know, AWS deep racer, you know, we formula 1, and AWS deep racer. We did an activation about a year back in the first lockdown, in the first COVID lockdown. So we took a couple of formula 1 drivers, Daniel Ricardo being one of them. And then we built out this deep racer platform and we're trying to look at how we can bring that more, you know, more together. So you've got this virtual, sorry, this AI car, this autonomous car, and you've got formula 1. And how do we merge those two worlds together? And again, that's just trying to immerse people more in the experience. >> Alright, final question. What's the coolest thing you got going on in each of your respective innovation fields with AWS? What would you highlight your favorite innovation or coolest thing you're doing? >> Well, I can't tell you about the coolest, right. That's for sure. Look, I just think what we're doing with AWS with regard to AIML around data and statistics analytics, based on what I said earlier, the evolution of statistics and analytics and hockey really hasn't taken hold, we're there now. The ability to really take a game that's has so much volatility, and we're the only professional teams sport that has personnel changes occurring in life play. So you never really know who's on the ice and the ability now to deliver real-time graphics and visualizations in the broadcast based on movements that had just played within milliseconds. And, we're starting to do that today with shot and save analytics with AWS. So where that can go in the future is really, what's probably the most exciting because it'll totally transform the way fans consumer our game. >> The NHS has always been on the cutting edge on the tech. Been following you guys for years, congratulations. Rob, the coolest thing you're working on, from Amazon, that's cool, and in formula 1 that's in your plate right now. >> Do you know what, I mean, there's so much going on at the minute. It's really difficult to choose any one thing. I think the whole partnership it's everything that we wanted it to be that, you know, the whole way that we're moving data forward and where we're revolutionizing this sport in a lot of ways, you know, sport has sat still for a long time. And to go through that digital transformation, you know, with Amazon and you know, in all the various areas that we're working on, I just think it's all, you know, it's all really, really cool. I mean, it's just moving forward at such a pace. Now. >> If you don't mind me asking why I got you here on the whole data thing, I'm just thinking about if I was on a team, I'd be like, okay, there's a whole new wild west. It's this arbitrage of data, we'll get over on the other team. Do you have to watch out, do you guys talk about like watching teams actually, I mean, it's actually innovative that they can get an edge, but an unfair advantage if they actually had used the data, is there like discussion around, like who can use the data, which teams? >> Of course. I mean, you know, when you get down to the franchises, each team can only use its individual data. You know, that's where we have key insight up at the league level because we've got, you know, a subset of all of the teams data. So we can kind of see everything that's going on. >> And watch out for the hackers coming in and get that data. >> Oh, well, alright, we've got pretty good security. >> Guys, thanks for coming on. I love the sports angle on this. It's really awesome. I think this is a great example of how cloud and digital lifestyle is coming together. The tech integration with the fan experience and the business models are super compelling, and I think that's illustration to just every other business. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Awesome. >> Thank you. >> Okay so theCUBE's coverage here at AWS re:Invent. I'm John furrier, your host in theCUBE. You're watching the leader in event tech covers theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soul music)

>>Hello, and welcome back to the cubes coverage of.com. Splunk's annual conference is virtual this year. I'm John furrier, host of the cube and a very special guest Sean vice president of product and technology cube, alumni, Sean, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube and chatting with us. Thanks. It's great to be here. It's been a while since we chatted, you were at AWS. Now it's Splunk heading up the entire products and technology group here, um, which we've been covering sponsors 2012. So we kinda know a lot about what's going on and, and followed your career. Um, your keynote, we kind of went into this cloud vision is hitting Splunk with the data because the cloud scale, which you know a lot about and data is now taking Splunk to a whole nother level. And that's the big theme you observability multi-cloud and security excuse has been for one there for a while. What's your, what's your assessment. >>Yeah, I mean, you know, uh, you and I have talked a number of times before, and what I found is that, you know, there's a lot of companies through this pandemic that, you know, some are thriving and some are not. And the ones that are really thriving, they have this strong data foundation. Like when you, when you talk to them, they're not stuck. Like they're there. When they talk about scaling or adding capacity or building new co uh, uh, customer experiences, they can, uh, their data platform allows that to happen. But the ones that are are stuck, you know, they just can't, they can't, they can't get to the data. They can't ask those questions that they otherwise, you know, love too. So that's, you know, I think Splunk is right in the middle of that. And that's the fun part of it. >>Yeah. You told me you have the strong foundation when thinking about Splunk is every inflection point in the industry. Over the past decade, you see Splunk do something new operationalized data, do something new, operationalize it. We saw security, I think around 2015, come on the radar at.com. And then since then a whole nother level of data, you've got edge. You have now cybersecurity, even, even more advanced than ever before. And then enterprise is just trying to develop modern applications. So you have this whole rapid scale of CICB pipeline, modern applications and the role of data. Isn't just storing it and managing it. It's like making it addressable. This is like, uh, the, the new current phenomenon of cloud. >>I mean, I liked the way you just put it, it, it really, you know, making data addressable, we put it in terms of like turn data into doing so, you know, if you have data that you're storing it, oh, that's one thing. If you don't, you don't want to leave data behind because you don't know what question you may want to ask. And when, but to your point making it addressable is if you and I decided, Hey, we want to build a new customer experience where we're thinking about doing this thing, and we're going to have a million questions to ask that data is going to help you be, uh, to know whether what you're trying to do for your customers is right or wrong. So it is a, it's remarkable to see how many customers are in pursuit of really turning data into >>Doing so. We've got to you, we had the formula one team on here, McLaren, um, Zach brown. I got a little selfie with, uh, the drivers that kind of cool. My son loved it, but that's an IOT application in my mind, first, the coolest of the sports. Awesome. But like the car going in real time, you know, driving that, driving an advantage with data. So it's an IOT IOT. Then you got just the blocking and tackling >>Data warehouse in the cloud. And then you got companies who are trying to transform a data. So I have to ask you as customers out there, look at Splunk and look at the next level of their architecture with multicloud coming around the corner. How should they be thinking about data? Get the foundation with Splunk. What's the next chapter in your mind? I mean, you know, a lot of customers that I meet they're in multiple clouds. They're not just in one. It means they've got data in Amazon or Google or Azure. A lot of them still have data on prem, you know, but when I talk to customers, they don't say things to me like, Hey, I'm in different clouds, I'm on prem. Can you make sure I have different observability and security experiences for each one? Like they don't, they really, at the end of the day, they're like, look, I need a consistent observability experience, consistent security, regardless of where my data is. >>So what that means to Splunk is, you know, wherever your data is, we're going to be Splunk will just work that that's kinda, as you know, it's how we think about it. And speaking that I had dinner with Lando the other night and it was, I hadn't met Lando before, but man, what an awesome, awesome person. We were just kind of hanging out, talking about data and I ask, this is the kind of stuff you wouldn't normally get. I asked him like, Hey, if you could, if technology could do anything to help you win formula one races, what would it be? A totally open-ended question. And I wasn't sure how he was going to answer it, but he didn't pause this guy. Like you talk about, you think of these scenarios. He's very quickly. He's like, oh man, if we had data, could help me do this and this and this and this because in his business, a millisecond can be the difference between winning or losing a race. And for some of you like, oh, that can't be, but for him, that's how his mind works. So it's crazy to see how excited he was to use tech, to get to data, ask questions that can ultimately help them. >>What was the number one thing pitting the right time or tires? What was he, what did he come up there? He is. >>You know, I can't, unfortunately >>I don't want to put you on the spot. I will be. >>This is like, you know, I, I wouldn't, uh, that would put him in a bad spot, but I will tell you though, I mean, this guy is, and that whole team is really about using data to win. >>Well, you know, I was joking. Um, but these guys can, they came on. Cause you know, I'm a big fan, obviously with the Netflix special driving two survives the name of the title. They become hugely popular to a new fan base, especially techies. Um, I said, Hey, you're driving the advantage with data kind of my little, little comeback to that, but that's really kind of a real encapsulates a real world scenario. I mean, well, there are 10,000 people working on McLaren. You have the driver in the car, you have the car itself with all this instrumentation that kind of encapsulates the enterprise experience right now. They don't have the right app doing the right thing with customers. It could be the difference between having a successful digital transformation or not. So it's kind of like parallel. I mean, I know that's kind of the tie in with the, with the sponsorship, but that's the real world now. >>Yeah, it is. And I mean, if you think about it, there's two drivers per car, 10 teams. There's so many races, there's a tremendous amount of money that they're all spending. But you know, when, when your season is really composed of a certain number of races and you got millions of people tuning in you're right. There's hundreds of people working behind the seat. Could you imagine if they didn't use data and you're trying to, you're, you're trying to race and formula one against the best drivers and the best engineers in the world. I just, you know, it goes to show you're right. It is, it's a perfect example of them transforming as any other enterprise, basically using data to get an advantage. >>And just before we move on to the next topic, the e-sports thing is fascinating as well, because now they're taking this memento verse kind of vibe where they're moving people on the e-sports, where they're having the shadow competition. It's a very interesting kind of bringing the fan base in, but there's probably gonna be a lot of data involved in that as well. Maybe identify the next driver who knows, hopefully, you know, good stuff. So Sean, you're in charge of process technology. I have to ask you, um, as customers look at all the different solutions out there, I'll say multicloud check, you guys have a good vision on that. Like that observability. I mean, that's the fashion right now. Let's talk about observability that there's so many companies out there doing quote observability. How should customers think about what that means in context to the decision of they make everyone's coming into the, the CSO or the CIO saying, um, your observability solution? >>Yeah, I mean first, um, you know, what is observability? I always like to just sort of map it back to things we might understand. So back in the day, monitoring really was connect to a machine. It has a monolith app, you know this and you just try to debug this one thing. That's not the world we live in today. Today when you're building apps in the cloud, you're you, you have hundreds of these services behind the scenes. Like no one person can actually comprehend all of it. So now all of a sudden tools become, they really matter. And what I would say is from a Splunk perspective, when we talk to customers, it's not like one person there, one team is quote, you know, working and making the whole system work. Oftentimes you have different teams like network teams, app teams, security teams, and they all kind of need to work together in one way shape or another. But this is why, you know, when rebuild our systems, it's off of shared data so that, you know, if I'm an operator, you're an app developer. And if I need to work with you, at least I can share something with you in context. So we, we, while there are individual tools to do certain things, our mental model is that they all do work together. That's super, super important for any observability thing you're looking at. You just want to make sure that you can see things end to end. Otherwise you get in trouble >>Quick. You know, I'd love to get your perspective being new to Splunk as you come in and new, the industry obviously has experienced that in the cloud has been well documented, certainly in the cube. What's it like there because as you come in, it's not a utility anymore. It's not a tool anymore. It's a platform and it's getting bigger and growing. So you have probably a lot of things going on. So you walk in and you, you say, okay, let me see the price of technology. Were you blown away? What was your reaction? What can you share some, uh, color around what's uh, what was it like when you open up the doors of the kingdom of the product? >>Yeah. Well, I mean, these t-shirts are real men and there's like ponies running around this. The Splunkers love to have fun. And you know, before I came to Splunk, the one thing I noticed, anytime I asked my thoughts long, they were fired up. Like they were really, really excited about the tech, but when I got into it, the truth is, you know, you don't know what you don't know until you see it, but I was just done to, to then sort of connect the dots like wow. Splunk is in the core data plane of tens of thousands of enterprises all over the world, like the data plane for all of their architecture and applications. So with that becomes a great responsibility, as you could imagine, but it is not just a tool. It is something that customers like. I dunno, the university of Illinois, you know, with COVID, they'll they'll track, uh, they'll track 3.2 million saliva tests just for contract tracing and behind the scenes, they're using Splunk for a real thing. Or we've talked about F1 or you think of slack, like we're all kind of using slack. These days, slack is using, um, uh, Splunk to make sure that their environment of slackers and everything's building it's all secure. So th it's those stories that go on and on are just incredible. When you learn that, >>I started at Teresa Carlson yesterday, and we were talking about the growth opportunity and I spent speculating that, you know, my opinion, my opinion, that's looking, hang on the cube is that Splunk's that this new inflection point that another elbow, another kickoff, the growth, the way it's positioned. If you look at kind of where it's been, kind of where it's going with security now as a platform with the enterprises, how do you describe that growth in your mind? Because obviously this market's changing an edge real time. All these things are happening. What's, what's the, where's the growth going to be? >>Yeah, I think it's in the cloud. I mean, if you think of Splunk, I think the company is about 18, 19 years old. So its history is an almost 20 years of on-premise software. In some sense, you might go, Hey, is that a liability? But Rio, the reality is it's a strength because we're already part of these enterprise infrastructures and application stacks. And then when you now move that group to the cloud, and then you got all others coming to the cloud, that's where they're, I mean, it is just the tip of what is happening. So, you know, if I'm a customer and I moved to the cloud in the cloud, it's like, I don't have to really scale or size anything. Like it just works. And it, to me, it's just an end point and I load data. So in that context, the number of new use cases that customers are able to get after is actually pretty awesome. But really at the end of the day it's cloud. >>Well, great to have you on, I know you've got to go. Thanks for coming on the queue. One final question. What's your vision for the next year or two, what's your to do items. What's the message to the marketplace. >>You know, I'm, I'm thrilled to be here, but at the end of the day, you know, my message to the marketplaces, we're all excited to work with our customers to really help them have that strong foundation so they can turn data into doing and actually pull off these digital transformation. >>One final final question for the companies that get the cloud scale combined with putting data into action for the, for the value what's the result going to be is they can put more competitive advantage. Is it more agility? What do you see happening when you combine the cloud scale with a great data plane? >>Yeah, I think at the end of the day, these companies would tell you that they can move faster than ever before. They're more competitive there. They have confidence that their environments secure, they can build new customer experiences. And when you put all of that together, honestly, that is what these digital transformations are all >>Great to be in the product and technology business these days. Isn't it a lot of fun, a lot of action. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Yeah, you bet. Good to be here. It's the cube coverage here, here at the live studio for Splunk studios, for their virtual events, the cube bring you all the action. I'm John for a, your host. Thanks for watching.

>>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of splunk.com virtual this year. I'm John ferry, host of the cube. And one of the great reasons of great reasons of being on site with the team here is we have to bring remote guests in real guests from all no stories, too small. We bring people into the cube to have the right conversations. We've got Brooke Cunningham area, VP of global partner marketing experience. Brooke, welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Hey, thank you, John. This is my sixth dot conflict, but this is actually my first time being on the cube. So I'm delighted. >>Great to have you on these new hybrid events. We can bring people in. You don't have to be here. All the execs are here, the partners are here. Great news is happening all around the world. You guys just announced a new partner program for the cloud called partner verse program. This is kind of, you know, mostly partner news is okay. Okay. Partner news partner ecosystem. But I think this is an important story because Splunk is kind of going to the next level of scale. That's to me is my observations walking away from the keynote, a lot of the partners, great technology, great platform, a lot of growth with cloud. We had formula one on you guys have a growing ecosystem. What is the new announcement partner versus about? >>Yes. Thanks, John. And you are spot on. We are growing for scale and Splunk's partner ecosystem is 2200 strong and we were so delighted to have so much partner success highlighted today on the keynotes. And specifically we have announced an all new spunk Splunk partner program called the Splunk partner verse. So we're taking it to new frontiers for our partners, really built for the cloud to help our partners lean into those cloud transformations with their customer. >>Great. Fro can you walk me through some of the numbers inside the numbers for a second? How many partners do you have and what is this program about specifically? >>Yeah, so 2200 partners that we featured some amazing stories in the keynotes today, around some of the momentum we have with partners like AWS, a center blue buoyant, a partner that just recently rearchitected all of their managed services from Splunk enterprise to Splunk cloud, because as they put it, Splunk is the only solution that can truly offer that hybrid solution for their customers. So all new goodness for our partners to help them lean in, to get enabled around all of the Splunk products, as well as to differentiate, differentiate their offerings with a new badging system. And we're going to help our partners really take that to the market by extending and expanding our marketing and creating an all new solutions catalog for our partners to differentiate themselves to their customers. >>You mentioned a couple things I want to double down on this badging thing, get in some of the nuances, but I want to just point out that, you know, and get your reaction to this when you see growth. And I saw this early on with AWS early on, when they performing, when you start to see the ecosystem grow like this, you start to see more enablement. You see more, money-making going on more, more, um, custom solutions, more agility you. So you started to see these things develop around you guys. So what does all this badging mean? How what's in it for me as a partner? Like how do I win on this? >>Yeah, great question. So first of all, John partner listening is a big part of what we do here at Splunk. And it's specifically a major part of what I do in my role. So we create a lot of forums to get that real deal partner feedback. What do they need to be successful with their customers? Especially as Splunk continues to expand our portfolio. And we heard some really clear feedback from our partners. Number one, they need more enablement faster, especially all those new products. They really want to get enabled around new product areas like observability, their customers are asking for it. They secondly told us that being able to differentiate themselves to customers was key. And that showing that they had core expertise around specific solution areas, types of services, as well as specializations. For example, some of our partners that are authorized learning partners, they really want it to be able to showcase these skills and differentiate that to their customers in the market. And it's not a role for us at Splunk to really help them do that. And so we took that feedback and really incorporated it into this new program, badging specifically will help to address some of those things I mentioned. So for example, a lot of badging around those use case areas, security, observability, AOD migrations, as well as specializations. Like I mentioned, for things like, uh, partners that are doing, uh, learning specific partners that are really helping us extend our reach in, in different international markets and so on. >>Okay. Let me just ask a question on the badge if you don't mind. Um, so you mentioned, you mentioned almost like you were going through like verticals is badging to be much more about discovery from a client customer, uh, end user customer standpoint. Are you looking to create kind of much more categorical differentiation is what's the, what, what's the purpose of the badge? Cause I noticed it was like different verticals. I heard security and >>Yeah, so I would say it's think of it as both. So for example, our partners go to market with us in many different ways. Some of them are selling servicing building. So there'll be partner motion badges to really differentiate the different ways that they're supporting customers from a go-to-market approach and then additional badging to help really identify some of those specialization areas around whether that's clunky use cases, specializations and more, uh, for example, a specific badge that we're rolling out right here at.com is around cloud migrations and partners will be able to get started to get engaged on that badge in preparation for our full-scale launch in February, we'll, they'll start to be able to take advantage of learning pathways, get their teams skilled up, and that will then unlock some new incentives as well as, uh, benefits that they can take advantage of things like accessing or of the Splunk's I've experience and the proof of concept platform and really giving their teams more, uh, capability. And, >>You know, I such a recent cross in the hallway here at dot confidence. She was, she and I were talking about how AI and data is enabling a lot of people to create these solutions. So, you know, you got kind of this almost like Amazon web services dynamic, where it's growing really fast and we're hearing stories, how data is driving value. We had formula one on the cube, the keynotes were giving some examples as you start to see this momentum kind of scaling up to the next level, if you're enabling customers, which you are with data, the monetization or the economic shifts, right? So it's healthy ecosystems, the partners create solutions, they deal with the customer, they're making some money, right? So, so can you share your vision on the unit on the economic equation of how partners are tapping into this? Because I almost imagine, um, a thousand flowers are blooming and then you start to see more value being created and Splunk also gets a cut of it, but there's, there should be that kind of deck. And you can talk about that. >>Yeah, absolutely. In fact, one of the things that I have the opportunity to do with our partners is study our partners, success and profitability. And some of the things that we learned from those studies with our partners is that what's really helping our partners to grow their practices with Blanca and their profitability with that business is really the stickiness that they have with their customers, being able to deliver solutions and services and really be those subject matter experts for their customers. And we know that our most successful and profitable partners are servicing their customers across the Splunk cases. So for example, many of our partners came from a security background and they are super deep, super knowledgeable around security, and they are trusted by their customers as the, you know, subject matter experts around security. And so many of them are starting to lean in on some of the new, additional use cases. Observability is a hot topic with our partners right now it's a new and emerging use cases case for them to transition some of the same sets of data that they are addressing in their current appointments with our customers and bring new value with those new use cases. But that's where we're seeing partner profitability growth. >>I love the channel dynamic. There we go, indirect and real and value creation. I got to ask you about the day-to-day dynamic. Of course we all know about the mark injuries and story. Software's eating the world, okay. Software ate the world. Okay. Now that's done. Now we're data is continuing to drive the value proposition. And so that's going to have an impact on how customer your partners serve their customers, ultimately your customer at the end of the day. How, how is that happening? And from a success standpoint, how would you talk to, uh, where people are on the progress of bringing the most innovative solutions? What, where's the headroom, where do you see that going Brook >>There's? I would say there's just endless opportunity here. And we just see so much innovation in our partner ecosystem to create purpose built solutions for their customers business problems. And that's where I think the value of the data comes to life. Really turning that data into doing as is really the Matic for all the things that we're talking about here, uh, at.com 21, that our partners really see these opportunities and then can replicate some of those same solutions for other customers in the same spaces. So for example, you know, really specialized solutions for healthcare where they're, uh, providing, you know, access to all the data across the hospital, or, um, you heard in guard's keynote about unlocking the value of SAP data. This is just a huge opportunity accessing all that data and really turning that data into doing. And we'll be talking even more about the new SAP relationship and the value for the partner ecosystem to go address those FP data sets in their customers. We'll be talking more about that on our partner feature session, which is tomorrow in day two of dotcom. >>Well, you guys to have a nice mix of business in the partner ecosystem from, you know, small boutiques to high-end system integrators and everything in between, I noticed you're doing a lot with censure. Could you talk about how you guys are partnering with the large global system integrators because they're becoming their own clouds. So, you know, as Jerry Chen at Greylock says, are these castles being built in the cloud with real competitive advantage with data? Again, this is a new phenomenon in the past really two years, you're starting to see explosion of, of scale and refactoring business models with data. What's your, what's your reaction to that? >>Absolutely. In fact, we are really leading in with some of these global systems integrators, and you've heard this exciting news in Theresa Carlson's portion of the keynote earlier today, where we've announced a partner, a center partner business group together. And we're so excited about the center and Splunk partner business group. It's going to elevate the Splunk and essential partnership eCenter has invested in thousands and thousands of joint professionals that are skilled up on flunk. They are building a purpose patients. We have so many amazing examples where Splunk and essential work together to solve real life problems. For example, there's a joint solution that helps address anti-human trafficking. Uh, there's a joint solution that helped with vaccine tracking. I mean, just really powerful examples that are just really extending value to customers and solving real life, data problems. >>Well, you guys have a lot of momentum, bro. Congratulations on the success and partner versus we're going to follow it again. It was built for the cloud. I know it's in the headline. It says flunked launches, new partner program for the cloud. Was there a partner program for the on premises and what's different about on the cloud? Was it kind of new, everything is cloud what's that? What does that mean? That statement? Yeah, >>Absolutely. So we, you know, as we've all seen, customers are leaning into the class that growth to the movement, to the cloud, just accelerated during COVID. And so part of that feedback that I referenced earlier that we heard from our partners, they said, we need help. We need help moving faster. And so that's really the underpinning of the all-new Splunk partner vers program is to really that acceleration to skill up our partners and give them the tools to be successful. And so with that, we did want to rebrand and reinvigorate it to really signal this newness. And as it was mentioning earlier, when we were talking about the badges, it's really about making sure we're providing the partners the right enablement so that they can be ready and able to support their customers on this journey, to the cloud, as well as the access, the resources, the support and the marketing so that they can be successful and really featured their expertise and value in the market. >>Well, Brooke, I want to get one final question before we go. Cause I know you have a lot of experience in the partner ecosystems and over your career. And we just interviewed the formula one CEO, uh, Zach brown, and, and they've been very popular with the, with the Netflix series driving to survive. And I was joking with him driving value with data as channel partners and your partners look to the post pandemic survive and thrive trend that people are going through right now. What should they be thinking about when they look at partner versus, and how Splunk can help them drive an advantage, not only just survive, but to actually drive to an advantage. >>I, I just see this as an opportunity for partners that haven't already leaned into the cloud and helping their customers migrate to the cloud now is the time rapid five acceleration is just essential for organizations to reach their most critical missions and their outcomes. And this one partner versus program is a significant move forward for Splunk partners. And we want to pursue a massive market opportunity focused on the cloud with our partners, for our customers. So I just really encourage our partners to engage, participate and join us on this journey. >>Well, it's a lot of evidence to support this vision. Uh, with pandemic, we saw refab replatforming and refactoring the businesses in the cloud at speeds, that unprecedented deployments. So, uh, cloud can, can bring that scale and speed to the table. It's really incredible. So thank you very much for coming on the cube remotely. Thanks have you had, >>Thank you. This was a delight. Really appreciate the time, John and very excited to have my first opportunity to be a >>Okay. You're a cube alumni. We are here in the studios, Splunk studios for their virtual event here with all the top executives and partners bringing in guests remotely. It's a virtual event. So we'll be back in person. I'm Jennifer, the cube. Thanks for watching.

>> Well, hello everybody, John Walls here on theCUBE and continuing our coverage. So splunk.com for 21, you know, we talk about big data these days, you realize the importance of speed, right? We all get that, but certainly Formula One Racing understands speed and big data, a really neat marriage there. And with us to talk about that is James Hodge, who was the global vice president and chief strategy officer international at Splunk. James, good to see it today. Thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. Thank you for having me and yeah, the speed of McLaren. Like I'm, I'm all for it today. >> Absolutely. And I find it interesting too, that, that you were telling me before we started the interview that you've been in Splunk going on nine years now. And you remember being at splunk.com, you know, back in the past other years and watching theCUBE and here you are! you made it. >> I know, I think it's incredible. I love watching you guys every single year and kind of the talk that guests. And then more importantly, like it reminds me of conf for every time we see theCUBE, no matter where you are, it reminds me of like this magical week there's dot com for us. >> Well, excellent. I'm glad that we could be a part of it at once again and glad you're a part of it here on theCUBE. Let's talk about McLaren now and the partnership, obviously on the racing side and the e-sports side, which is certainly growing in popularity and in demand. So just first off characterize for our audience, that relationship between Splunk and McLaren. >> Well, so we started the relationship almost two years ago. And for us it was McLaren as a brand. If you think about where they were, they recently, I think it's September a Monza. They got a victory P1 and P2. It was over 3200 days since their last victory. So that's a long time to wait. I think of that. There's 3000 days of continual business transformation, trying to get them back up to the grid. And what we found was that ethos, the drive to digital the, the way they're completely changing things, bringing in kind of fluid dynamics, getting people behind the common purpose that really seem to fit the Splunk culture, what we're trying to do and putting data at the heart of things. So kind of Formula One and McLaren, it felt a really natural place to be. And we haven't really looked back since we started at that partnership. It's been a really exciting last kind of 18 months, two years. >> Well, talk a little bit about, about the application here a little bit in terms of data cars, the, the Formula One cars, the F1 cars, they've got hundreds of sensors on them. They're getting, you know, hundreds of thousands or a hundred thousand data points almost instantly, right? I mean, there's this constant processing. So what are those inputs basically? And then how has McLaren putting them to use, and then ultimately, how is Splunk delivering on that from McLaren? >> So I learned quite a lot, you know, I'm, I'm, I been a childhood Formula One fan, and I've learned so much more about F1 over the last kind of couple of years. So it actually starts with the car going out on the track, but anyone that works in the IT function, the car can not go out on track and less monitoring from the car actually is being received by the garage. It's seen as mission critical safety critical. So IT, when you see a car out and you see the race engineer, but that thumbs up the mechanical, the thumbs up IT, get their vote and get to put the thumbs up before the car goes out on track there around about 300 sensors on the car in practice. And there were two sites that run about 120 on race day that gets streamed on a two by two megabits per second, back to the FIA, the regulating body, and then gets streams to the, the garage where they have a 32 unit rack near two of them that have all of their it equipment take that data. They then stream it over the internet over the cloud, back to the technology center in working where 32 race engineers sit in calm conditions to be able to go and start to make decisions on when the car should pit what their strategy should be like to then relate that back to the track side. So you think about that data journey alone, that is way more complicated and what you see on TV, you know, the, the race energy on the pit wall and the driver going around at 300 kilometers an hour. When we look at what Splunk is doing is making sure that is resilient. You know, is the data coming off the car? Is it actually starting to hit the garage when it hits that rack into the garage, other than streaming that back with the right latency back to the working technology center, they're making sure that all of the support decision-making tools there are available, and that's just what we do for them on race weekend. And I'll give you one kind of the more facts about the car. So you start the beginning of the season, they launched the car. The 80% of that car will be different by the end of the season. And so they're in a continual state of development, like constantly developing to do that. So they're moving much more to things like computational fluid dynamics applications before the move to wind tunnel that relies on digital infrastructure to be able to go and accelerate that journey and be able to go make those assumptions. That's a Splunk is becoming the kind of underpinning of to making sure those mission critical applications and systems are online. And that's kind of just scratching the surface of kind of the journey with McLaren. >> Yeah. So, so what would be an example then maybe on race day, what's a stake race day of an input that comes in and then mission control, which I find fascinating, right? You've got 32 different individuals processing this input and then feeding their, their insights back. Right. And so adjustments are being made on the fly very much all data-driven what would be an example of, of an actual application of some information that came in that was quickly, you know, recorded, noted, and then acted upon that then resulted in an improved performance? >> Well, the most important one is pit stop strategy. It can be very difficult to overtake on track. So starting to look at when other teams go into the pit lane and when they come out of the, the pit lane is incredibly important because it gives you a choice. Do you stay also in your current set of tires and hope to kind of get through that team and kind of overtake them, or do you start to go into the pits and get your fresh sets of tires to try and take a different strategy? There are three people in mission control that have full authority to go and make a Pit lane call. And I think like the thing that really resonated for me from learning about McLaren, the technology is amazing, but it's the organizational constructs on how they turn data into an action is really important. People with the right knowledge and access to the data, have the authority to make a call. It's not the team principle, it's not the person on the pit wall is the person with the most amount of knowledge is authorized and kind of, it's an open kind of forum to go and make those decisions. If you see something wrong, you are just as likely to be able to put your hand up and say, something's wrong here. This is my, my decision than anyone else. And so when we think about all these organizations that are trying to transform the business, we can learn a lot from Formula One on how we delegate authority and just think of like technology and data as the beginning of that journey. It's the people in process that F1 is so well. >> We're talking a lot about racing, but of course, McLaren is also getting involved in e-sports. And so people like you like me, we can have that simulated experience to gaming. And I know that Splunk has, is migrating with McLaren in that regard. Right. You know, you're partnering up. So maybe if you could share a little bit more about that, about how you're teaming up with McLaren on the e-sports side, which I'm sure anybody watching this realizes there's a, quite a big market opportunity there right now. >> It's a huge market opportunity is we got McLaren racing has, you know, Formula One, IndyCar and now extreme E and then they have the other branch, which is e-sports so gaming. And one of the things that, you know, you look at gaming, you know, we were talking earlier about Ted Lasso and, you know, the go to the amazing game of football or soccer, depending on kind of what side of the Atlantic you're on. I can go and play something like FIFA, you know, the football game. I can be amazing at that. I have in reality, you know, in real life I have two left feet. I am never going to be good at football however, what we find with e-sports is it makes gaming and racing accessible. I can go and drive the same circuits as Lando Norris and Daniel Ricardo, and I can improve. And I can learn like use data to start to discover different ways. And it's an incredibly expanding exploding industry. And what McLaren have done is they've said, actually, we're going to make a professional racing team, an e-sports team called the McLaren Shadow team. They have this huge competition called the Logitech KeyShot challenge. And when we looked at that, we sort of lost the similarities in what we're trying to achieve. We are quite often starting to merge the physical world and the digital world with our customers. And this was an amazing opportunity to start to do that with the McLaren team. >> So you're creating this really dynamic racing experience, right? That, that, that gives people like me, or like our viewers, the opportunity to get even a better feel for, for the decision-making and the responsiveness of the cars and all that. So again, data, where does that come into play there? Now, What, what kind of inputs are you getting from me as a driver then as an amateur driver? And, and how has that then I guess, how does it express in the game or expressed in, in terms of what's ahead of me to come in a game? >> So actually there are more data points that come out of the F1 2021 Codemasters game than there are in Formula One car, you get a constant stream. So the, the game will actually stream out real telemetry. So I can actually tell your tire pressures from all of your tires. I can see the lateral G-Force longitudinal. G-Force more importantly for probably amateur drivers like you and I, we can see is the tire on asphalt, or is it maybe on graphs? We can actually look at your exact position on track, how much accelerator, you know, steering lock. So we can see everything about that. And that gets pumped out in real time, up to 60 Hertz. So a phenomenal amount of information, what we, when we started the relationship with McLaren, Formula One super excited or about to go racing. And then at Melbourne, there's that iconic moment where one of the McLaren team tested positive and they withdrew from the race. And what we found was, you know, COVID was starting and the Formula One season was put on hold. The FIA created this season and called i can't remember the exact name of it, but basically a replica e-sports gaming F1 series. We're using the game. Some of the real drivers like Lando, heavy gamer was playing in the game and they'd run that the same as race weekends. They brought celebrity drivers in there. And I think my most surreal zoom call I ever was on was with Lando Norris and Pierre Patrick Aubameyang, who was who's the arsenal football captain, who was the guest driver in the series to drive around Monaco and Randy, the head of race strategy as McLaren, trying to coach him on how to go drive the car, what we ended up with data telemetry coming from Splunk. And so Randy could look out here when he pressing the accelerator and the brake pedal. And what was really interesting was Lando was watching how he was entering corners on the video feed and intuitively kind of coming to the same conclusions as Randy. So kind of, you could see that race to intuition versus the real stats, and it was just incredible experience. And it really shows you, you know, racing, you've got that blurring of the physical and the virtual that it's going to be bigger and bigger and bigger. >> So to hear it here, as I understand what you were just saying now, the e-sports racing team actually has more data to adjust its performance and to modify its behaviors, then the real racing team does. Yep. >> Yeah, it completely does. So what we want to be able to do is turn that into action. So how do you do the right car setup? How do you go and do the right practice laps actually have really good practice driver selection. And I think we're just starting to scratch the surface of what really could be done. And the amazing part about this is now think of it more like a digital twin, what we learn on e-sports we can actually say we've learned something really interesting here, and then maybe a low, you know, if we get something wrong, it may be doesn't matter quite as much as maybe getting an analytics wrong on race weekend. >> Right. >> So we can actually start to look and improve through digital and then start to move that support. That's over to kind of race weekend analytics and supporting the team. >> If I could, you know, maybe pun intended here, shift gears a little bit before we run out of time. I mean, you're, you're involved on the business side, you know, you've got, you know, you're in the middle east Africa, right? You've got, you know, quite an international portfolio on your plate. Now let's talk about just some of the data trends there for our viewers here in the U S who maybe aren't as familiar with what's going on overseas, just in terms of, especially post COVID, you know, what, what concerns there are, or, or what direction you're trying to get your clients to, to be taking in terms of getting back to work in terms of, you know, looking at their workforce opportunities and strengths and all those kinds of things. >> I think we've seen a massive shift. I think we've seen that people it's not good enough just to be storing data its how do you go and utilize that data to go and drive your business forwards I think a couple of key terms we're going to see more and more over the next few years is operational resilience and business agility. And I'd make the assertion that operational resilience is the foundation for the business agility. And we can dive into that in a second, but what we're seeing take the Netherlands. For example, we run a survey last year and we found that 87% of the respondents had created new functions to do with data machine learning and AI, as all they're trying to do is go and get more timely data to front line staff to go. And next that the transformation, because what we've really seen through COVID is everything is possible to be digitized and we can experiment and get to market faster. And I think we've just seen in European markets, definitely in Asia Pacific is that the kind of brand loyalty is potentially waning, but what's the kind of loyalty is just to an experience, you know, take a ride hailing app. You know, I get to an airport, I try one ride hailing app. It tells me it's going to be 20 minutes before a taxi arrives. I'm going to go straight to the next app to go and stare. They can do it faster. I want the experience. I don't necessarily want the brand. And we're find that the digital experience by putting data, the forefront of that is really accelerating and actually really encouraging, you know, France, Germany are actually ahead of UK. Let's look, listen, their attitudes and adoption to data. And for our American audience and America, America is more likely, I think it's 72% more likely to have a chief innovation officer than the rest of the world. I think I'm about 64% in EMEA. So America, you are still slightly ahead of us in terms of kind of bringing some of that innovation that. >> I imagine that gap is going to be shrinking though I would think. >> It is massively shrinking. >> So before we, we, we, we are just a little tight on time, but I want to hear about operational resilience and, and just your, your thought that definition, you know, define that for me a little bit, you know, put a little more meat on that bone, if you would, and talk about why, you know, what that is in, in your thinking today and then why that is so important. >> So I think inputting in, in racing, you know, operational resilience is being able to send some response to what is happening around you with people processing technology, to be able to baseline what your processes are and the services you're providing, and be able to understand when something is not performing as it should be, what we're seeing. Things like European Union, in financial services, or at the digital operational resilience act is starting to mandate that businesses have to be operational in resilient service, monitoring fraud, cyber security, and customer experience. And what we see is really operational resilience is the amount of change that can be absorbed before opportunities become risk. So having a stable foundation of operational resilience allows me to become a more agile business because I know my foundation and people can then move and adjust quickly because I have the awareness of my environment and I have the ability to appropriately react to my environment because I've thought about becoming a resilient business with my digital infrastructure is a theme. I think we're going to see in supply chain coming very soon and across all other industries, as we realize digital is our business. Nowadays. >> What's an exciting world. Isn't it, James? That you're, that you're working in right now. >> Oh, I, I love it. You know, you said, you know, eight and an eight and a half years, nine years at Splunk, I'm still smiling. You know, it is like being at the forefront of this diesel wave and being able to help people make action from that. It's an incredible place to be. I, is liberating and yeah, I can't even begin to imagine what's, you know, the opportunities are over the next few years as the world continually evolves. >> Well, every day is a school day, right? >> It is my favorite phrase >> I knew that. >> And it is, James Hodge. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE. Glad to have you on finally, after being on the other side of the camera, it's great to have you on this side. So thanks for making that transition for us. >> Thank you, John. You bet James Hodge joining us here on the cube coverage of splunk.com 21, talking about McLaren racing team speed and Splunk.

>>Thank you for joining us for accelerate next event. I hope you're enjoying it so far. I know you've heard about the industry challenges the I. T. Trends HP strategy from leaders in the industry and so today what we wanna do is focus on going deep on workload solutions. So in the most important workload solutions, the ones we always get asked about and so today we want to share with you some best practices, some examples of how we've helped other customers and how we can help you. All right with that. I'd like to start our panel now and introduce chris idler, who's the vice president and general manager of the element. Chris has extensive solution expertise, he's led HP solution engineering programs in the past. Welcome chris and Mark Nickerson, who is the Director of product management and his team is responsible for solution offerings, making sure we have the right solutions for our customers. Welcome guys, thanks for joining me. >>Thanks for having us christa. >>Yeah, so I'd like to start off with one of the big ones, the ones that we get asked about all the time, what we've been all been experienced in the last year, remote work, remote education and all the challenges that go along with that. So let's talk a little bit about the challenges that customers have had in transitioning to this remote work and remote education environments. >>Uh So I I really think that there's a couple of things that have stood out for me when we're talking with customers about V. D. I. Um first obviously there was a an unexpected and unprecedented level of interest in that area about a year ago and we all know the reasons why, but what it really uncovered was how little planning had gone into this space around a couple of key dynamics. One is scale. Um it's one thing to say, I'm going to enable V. D. I. For a part of my work force in a pre pandemic environment where the office was still the central hub of activity for work. It's a completely different scale. When you think about okay I'm going to have 50, 60, 80, maybe 100 of my workforce now distributed around the globe. Um Whether that's in an educational environment where now you're trying to accommodate staff and students in virtual learning, Whether that's in the area of things like Formula one racing, where we had the desire to still have events going on. But the need for a lot more social distancing. Not as many people able to be trackside but still needing to have that real time experience. This really manifested in a lot of ways and scale was something that I think a lot of customers hadn't put as much thought into. Initially the other area is around planning for experience a lot of times the V. D. I. Experience was planned out with very specific workloads are very specific applications in mind. And when you take it to a more broad based environment, if we're going to support multiple functions, multiple lines of business, there hasn't been as much planning or investigation that's gone into the application side. And so thinking about how graphically intense some applications are. Uh one customer that comes to mind would be Tyler I. S. D. Who did a fairly large rollout pre pandemic and as part of their big modernization effort, what they uncovered was even just changes in standard Windows applications Had become so much more graphically intense with Windows 10 with the latest updates with programs like Adobe that they were really needing to have an accelerated experience for a much larger percentage of their install base than they had counted on. So, um, in addition to planning for scale, you also need to have that visibility into what are the actual applications that are going to be used by these remote users? How graphically intense those might be. What's the logging experience going to be as well as the operating experience. And so really planning through that experience side as well as the scale and the number of users is kind of really two of the biggest, most important things that I've seen. >>You know, Mark, I'll just jump in real quick. I think you covered that pretty comprehensively there and it was well done. The a couple of observations I've made, one is just that um, V. D. I suddenly become like mission critical for sales. It's the front line, you know, for schools, it's the classroom, you know, that this isn't Uh cost cutting measure or uh optimization in IT. measure anymore. This is about running the business in a way it's a digital transformation. One aspect of about 1000 aspects of what does it mean to completely change how your business does. And I think what that translates to is that there's no margin for error, right? You know, you really need to to deploy this in a way that that performs, that understands what you're trying to use it for. That gives that end user the experience that they expect on their screen or on their handheld device or wherever they might be, whether it's a racetrack classroom or on the other end of a conference call or a boardroom. Right? So what we do in the engineering side of things when it comes to V. D. I. R. Really understand what's a tech worker, What's a knowledge worker? What's the power worker? What's a gP really going to look like? What time of day look like, You know, who's using it in the morning, Who is using it in the evening? When do you power up? When do you power down? Does the system behave? Does it just have the, it works function and what our clients can can get from H. P. E. Is um you know, a worldwide set of experiences that we can apply to, making sure that the solution delivers on its promises. So we're seeing the same thing you are christa, We see it all the time on beady eye and on the way businesses are changing the way they do business. >>Yeah. It's funny because when I talked to customers, you know, one of the things I heard that was a good tip is to roll it out to small groups first so you can really get a good sense of what the experiences before you roll it out to a lot of other people and then the expertise. Um It's not like every other workload that people have done before. So if you're new at it make sure you're getting the right advice expertise so that you're doing it the right way. Okay. One of the other things we've been talking a lot about today is digital transformation and moving to the edge. So now I'd like to shift gears and talk a little bit about how we've helped customers make that shift and this time I'll start with chris. >>All right Hey thanks. Okay so you know it's funny when it comes to edge because um the edge is different for every customer and every client and every single client that I've ever spoken to of. H. P. S. Has an edge somewhere. You know whether just like we were talking about the classroom might be the edge. But I think the industry when we're talking about edges talking about you know the internet of things if you remember that term from not too not too long ago you know and and the fact that everything is getting connected and how do we turn that into um into telemetry? And I think Mark is going to be able to talk through a a couple of examples of clients that we have in things like racing and automotive. But what we're learning about Edge is it's not just how do you make the Edge work? It's how do you integrate the edge into what you're already doing? And nobody's just the edge. Right. And so if it's if it's um ai ml dl there that's one way you want to use the edge. If it's a customer experience point of service, it's another, you know, there's yet another way to use the edge. So, it turns out that having a broad set of expertise like HP does, um, to be able to understand the different workloads that you're trying to tie together, including the ones that are running at the, at the edge. Often it involves really making sure you understand the data pipeline. What information is at the edge? How does it flow to the data center? How does it flow? And then which data center, which private cloud? Which public cloud are you using? Um, I think those are the areas where we, we really sort of shine is that we we understand the interconnectedness of these things. And so, for example, Red Bull, and I know you're going to talk about that in a minute mark, um the racing company, you know, for them the edges, the racetrack and, and you know, milliseconds or partial seconds winning and losing races, but then there's also an edge of um workers that are doing the design for the cars and how do they get quick access? So, um, we have a broad variety of infrastructure form factors and compute form factors to help with the edge. And this is another real advantage we have is that we we know how to put the right piece of equipment with the right software. And we also have great containerized software with our admiral container platform. So we're really becoming um, a perfect platform for hosting edge centric workloads and applications and data processing. Uh, it's uh um all the way down to things like a Superdome flex in the background. If you have some really, really, really big data that needs to be processed and of course our workhorse reliance that can be configured to support almost every combination of workload you have. So I know you started with edge christa but and and we're and we nail the edge with those different form factors, but let's make sure, you know, if you're listening to this, this show right now, um make sure you you don't isolate the edge and make sure they integrated with um with the rest of your operation, Mark, you know, what did I miss? >>Yeah, to that point chris I mean and this kind of actually ties the two things together that we've been talking about here at the Edge has become more critical as we have seen more work moving to the edge as where we do work, changes and evolves. And the edge has also become that much more closer because it has to be that much more connected. Um, to your point talking about where that edge exists, that edge can be a lot of different places. Um, but the one commonality really is that the edge is an area where work still needs to get accomplished. It can't just be a collection point and then everything gets shipped back to a data center back to some other area for the work. It's where the work actually needs to get done. Whether that's edge work in a used case like V. D. I. Or whether that's edge work. In the case of doing real time analytics, you mentioned red bull racing, I'll bring that up. I mean, you talk about uh, an area where time is of the essence, everything about that sport comes down to time. You're talking about wins and losses that are measured as you said in milliseconds. And that applies not just to how performance is happening on the track, but how you're able to adapt and modify the needs of the car, adapt to the evolving conditions on the track itself. And so when you talk about putting together a solution for an edge like that, you're right. It can't just be, here's a product that's going to allow us to collect data, ship it back someplace else and and wait for it to be processed in a couple of days, you have to have the ability to analyze that in real time. When we pull together a solution involving our compute products are storage products or networking products. When we're able to deliver that full package solution at the edge, what you see results like a 50 decrease in processing time to make real time analytic decisions about configurations for the car and adapting to real time test and track conditions. >>Yeah, really great point there. Um, and I really love the example of edge and racing because I mean that is where it all every millisecond counts. Um, and so important to process that at the edge. Now, switching gears just a little bit. Let's talk a little bit about um some examples of how we've helped customers when it comes to business agility and optimizing the workload for maximum outcome for business agility. Let's talk about some things that we've done to help customers with that >>mark, give it a >>shot. >>Uh, So when we, when we think about business agility, what you're really talking about is the ability to implement on the fly to be able to scale up and scale down the ability to adapt to real time changing situations. And I think the last year has been, has been an excellent example of exactly how so many businesses have been forced to do that. Um I think one of the areas that I think we've probably seen the most ability to help with customers in that agility area is around the space of private and hybrid clouds. Um if you take a look at the need that customers have to be able to migrate workloads and migrate data between public cloud environments, app development environments that may be hosted on site or maybe in the cloud, the ability to move out of development and into production and having the agility to then scale those application rollouts up, having the ability to have some of that. Um some of that private cloud flexibility in addition to a public cloud environment is something that is becoming increasingly crucial for a lot of our customers. >>All right, well, we could keep going on and on, but I'll stop it there. Uh, thank you so much Chris and Mark. This has been a great discussion. Thanks for sharing how we help other customers and some tips and advice for approaching these workloads. I thank you all for joining us and remind you to look at the on demand sessions. If you want to double click a little bit more into what we've been covering all day today, you can learn a lot more in those sessions. And I thank you for your time. Thanks for tuning in today.

momentum is gathering [Music] business is evolving more and more quickly moving through one transformation to the next because change never stops it only accelerates this is a world that demands a new kind of compute deployed from edge to core to cloud compute that can outpace the rapidly changing needs of businesses large and small unlocking new insights turning data into outcomes empowering new experiences compute that can scale up or scale down with minimum investment and effort guided by years of expertise protected by 360-degree security served up as a service to let it control own and manage massive workloads that weren't there yesterday and might not be there tomorrow this is the compute power that will drive progress giving your business what you need to be ready for what's next this is the compute power of hpe delivering your foundation for digital transformation welcome to accelerating next thank you so much for joining us today we have a great program we're going to talk tech with experts we'll be diving into the changing economics of our industry and how to think about the next phase of your digital transformation now very importantly we're also going to talk about how to optimize workloads from edge to exascale with full security and automation all coming to you as a service and with me to kick things off is neil mcdonald who's the gm of compute at hpe neil always a pleasure great to have you on it's great to see you dave now of course when we spoke a year ago you know we had hoped by this time we'd be face to face but you know here we are again you know this pandemic it's obviously affected businesses and people in in so many ways that we could never have imagined but in the reality is in reality tech companies have literally saved the day let's start off how is hpe contributing to helping your customers navigate through things that are so rapidly shifting in the marketplace well dave it's nice to be speaking to you again and i look forward to being able to do this in person some point the pandemic has really accelerated the need for transformation in businesses of all sizes more than three-quarters of cios report that the crisis has forced them to accelerate their strategic agendas organizations that were already transforming or having to transform faster and organizations that weren't on that journey yet are having to rapidly develop and execute a plan to adapt to this new reality our customers are on this journey and they need a partner for not just the compute technology but also the expertise and economics that they need for that digital transformation and for us this is all about unmatched optimization for workloads from the edge to the enterprise to exascale with 360 degree security and the intelligent automation all available in that as a service experience well you know as you well know it's a challenge to manage through any transformation let alone having to set up remote workers overnight securing them resetting budget priorities what are some of the barriers that you see customers are working hard to overcome simply per the organizations that we talk with are challenged in three areas they need the financial capacity to actually execute a transformation they need the access to the resource and the expertise needed to successfully deliver on a transformation and they have to find the way to match their investments with the revenues for the new services that they're putting in place to service their customers in this environment you know we have a data partner called etr enterprise technology research and the spending data that we see from them is it's quite dramatic i mean last year we saw a contraction of roughly five percent of in terms of i.t spending budgets etc and this year we're seeing a pretty significant rebound maybe a six to seven percent growth range is the prediction the challenge we see is organizations have to they've got to iterate on that i call it the forced march to digital transformation and yet they also have to balance their investments for example at the corporate headquarters which have kind of been neglected is there any help in sight for the customers that are trying to reduce their spend and also take advantage of their investment capacity i think you're right many businesses are understandably reluctant to loosen the purse strings right now given all of the uncertainty and often a digital transformation is viewed as a massive upfront investment that will pay off in the long term and that can be a real challenge in an environment like this but it doesn't need to be we work through hpe financial services to help our customers create the investment capacity to accelerate the transformation often by leveraging assets they already have and helping them monetize them in order to free up the capacity to accelerate what's next for their infrastructure and for their business so can we drill into that i wonder if we could add some specifics i mean how do you ensure a successful outcome what are you really paying attention to as those sort of markers for success well when you think about the journey that an organization is going through it's tough to be able to run the business and transform at the same time and one of the constraints is having the people with enough bandwidth and enough expertise to be able to do both so we're addressing that in two ways for our customers one is by helping them confidently deploy new solutions which we have engineered leveraging decades of expertise and experience in engineering to deliver those workload optimized portfolios that take the risk and the complexity out of assembling some of these solutions and give them a pre-packaged validated supported solution intact that simplifies that work for them but in other cases we can enhance our customers bandwidth by bringing them hpe point next experts with all of the capabilities we have to help them plan deliver and support these i.t projects and transformations organizations can get on a faster track of modernization getting greater insight and control as they do it we're a trusted partner to get the most for a business that's on this journey in making these critical compute investments to underpin the transformations and whether that's planning to optimizing to safe retirement at the end of life we can bring that expertise to bayer to help amplify what our customers already have in-house and help them accelerate and succeed in executing these transformations thank you for that neil so let's talk about some of the other changes that customers are seeing and the cloud has obviously forced customers and their suppliers to really rethink how technology is packaged how it's consumed how it's priced i mean there's no doubt in that to take green lake it's obviously a leading example of a pay as pay-as-you-scale infrastructure model and it could be applied on-prem or hybrid can you maybe give us a sense as to where you are today with green lake well it's really exciting you know from our first pay-as-you-go offering back in 2006 15 years ago to the introduction of green lake hpe has really been paving the way on consumption-based services through innovation and partnership to help meet the exact needs of our customers hpe green lake provides an experience that's the best of both worlds a simple pay-per-use technology model with the risk management of data that's under our customers direct control and it lets customers shift to everything as a service in order to free up capital and avoid that upfront expense that we talked about they can do this anywhere at any scale or any size and really hpe green lake is the cloud that comes to you like that so we've touched a little bit on how customers can maybe overcome some of the barriers to transformation what about the nature of transformations themselves i mean historically there was a lot of lip service paid to digital and and there's a lot of complacency frankly but you know that covered wrecking ball meme that so well describes that if you're not a digital business essentially you're going to be out of business so neil as things have evolved how is hpe addressed the new requirements well the new requirements are really about what customers are trying to achieve and four very common themes that we see are enabling the productivity of a remote workforce that was never really part of the plan for many organizations being able to develop and deliver new apps and services in order to service customers in a different way or drive new revenue streams being able to get insights from data so that in these tough times they can optimize their business more thoroughly and then finally think about the efficiency of an agile hybrid private cloud infrastructure especially one that now has to integrate the edge and we're really thrilled to be helping our customers accelerate all of these and more with hpe compute i want to double click on that remote workforce productivity i mean again the surveys that we see 46 percent of the cios say that productivity improved with the whole work from home remote work trend and on average those improvements were in the four percent range which is absolutely enormous i mean when you think about that how does hpe specifically you know help here what do you guys do well every organization in the world has had to adapt to a different style of working and with more remote workers than they had before and for many organizations that's going to become the new normal even post pandemic many it shops are not well equipped for the infrastructure to provide that experience because if all your workers are remote the resiliency of that infrastructure the latencies of that infrastructure the reliability of are all incredibly important so we provide comprehensive solutions expertise and as a service options that support that remote work through virtual desktop infrastructure or vdi so that our customers can support that new normal of virtual engagements online everything across industries wherever they are and that's just one example of many of the workload optimized solutions that we're providing for our customers is about taking out the guesswork and the uncertainty in delivering on these changes that they have to deploy as part of their transformation and we can deliver that range of workload optimized solutions across all of these different use cases because of our broad range of innovation in compute platforms that span from the ruggedized edge to the data center all the way up to exascale and hpc i mean that's key if you're trying to affect the digital transformation and you don't have to fine-tune you know be basically build your own optimized solutions if i can buy that rather than having to build it and rely on your r d you know that's key what else is hpe doing you know to deliver things new apps new services you know your microservices containers the whole developer trend what's going on there well that's really key because organizations are all seeking to evolve their mix of business and bring new services and new capabilities new ways to reach their customers new way to reach their employees new ways to interact in their ecosystem all digitally and that means app development and many organizations of course are embracing container technology to do that today so with the hpe container platform our customers can realize that agility and efficiency that comes with containerization and use it to provide insights to their data more and more that data of course is being machine generated or generated at the edge or the near edge and it can be a real challenge to manage that data holistically and not have silos and islands an hpe esmerald data fabric speeds the agility and access to data with a unified platform that can span across the data centers multiple clouds and even the edge and that enables data analytics that can create insights powering a data-driven production-oriented cloud-enabled analytics and ai available anytime anywhere in any scale and it's really exciting to see the kind of impact that that can have in helping businesses optimize their operations in these challenging times you got to go where the data is and the data is distributed it's decentralized so i i i like the esmerel of vision and execution there so that all sounds good but with digital transformation you get you're going to see more compute in in hybrid's deployments you mentioned edge so the surface area it's like the universe it's it's ever-expanding you mentioned you know remote work and work from home before so i'm curious where are you investing your resources from a cyber security perspective what can we count on from hpe there well you can count on continued leadership from hpe as the world's most secure industry standard server portfolio we provide an enhanced and holistic 360 degree view to security that begins in the manufacturing supply chain and concludes with a safeguarded end-of-life decommissioning and of course we've long set the bar for security with our work on silicon root of trust and we're extending that to the application tier but in addition to the security customers that are building this modern hybrid are private cloud including the integration of the edge need other elements too they need an intelligent software-defined control plane so that they can automate their compute fleets from all the way at the edge to the core and while scale and automation enable efficiency all private cloud infrastructures are competing with web scale economics and that's why we're democratizing web scale technologies like pinsando to bring web scale economics and web scale architecture to the private cloud our partners are so important in helping us serve our customers needs yeah i mean hp has really upped its ecosystem game since the the middle of last decade when when you guys reorganized it you became like even more partner friendly so maybe give us a preview of what's coming next in that regard from today's event well dave we're really excited to have hp's ceo antonio neri speaking with pat gelsinger from intel and later lisa sue from amd and later i'll have the chance to catch up with john chambers the founder and ceo of jc2 ventures to discuss the state of the market today yeah i'm jealous you guys had some good interviews coming up neil thanks so much for joining us today on the virtual cube you've really shared a lot of great insight how hpe is partnering with customers it's it's always great to catch up with you hopefully we can do so face to face you know sooner rather than later well i look forward to that and uh you know no doubt our world has changed and we're here to help our customers and partners with the technology the expertise and the economics they need for these digital transformations and we're going to bring them unmatched workload optimization from the edge to exascale with that 360 degree security with the intelligent automation and we're going to deliver it all as an as a service experience we're really excited to be helping our customers accelerate what's next for their businesses and it's been really great talking with you today about that dave thanks for having me you're very welcome it's been super neal and i actually you know i had the opportunity to speak with some of your customers about their digital transformation and the role of that hpe plays there so let's dive right in we're here on the cube covering hpe accelerating next and with me is rule siestermans who is the head of it at the netherlands cancer institute also known as nki welcome rule thank you very much great to be here hey what can you tell us about the netherlands cancer institute maybe you could talk about your core principles and and also if you could weave in your specific areas of expertise yeah maybe first introduction to the netherlands institute um we are one of the top 10 comprehensive cancers in the world and what we do is we combine a hospital for treating patients with cancer and a recent institute under one roof so discoveries we do we find within the research we can easily bring them back to the clinic and vis-a-versa so we have about 750 researchers and about 3 000 other employees doctors nurses and and my role is to uh to facilitate them at their best with it got it so i mean everybody talks about digital digital transformation to us it all comes down to data so i'm curious how you collect and take advantage of medical data specifically to support nki's goals maybe some of the challenges that your organization faces with the amount of data the speed of data coming in just you know the the complexities of data how do you handle that yeah it's uh it's it's it's challenge and uh yeah what we we have we have a really a large amount of data so we produce uh terabytes a day and we we have stored now more than one petabyte on data at this moment and yeah it's uh the challenge is to to reuse the data optimal for research and to share it with other institutions so that needs to have a flexible infrastructure for that so a fast really fast network uh big data storage environment but the real challenge is not not so much the i.t bus is more the quality of the data so we have a lot of medical systems all producing those data and how do we combine them and and yeah get the data fair so findable accessible interoperable and reusable uh for research uh purposes so i think that's the main challenge the quality of the data yeah very common themes that we hear from from other customers i wonder if you could paint a picture of your environment and maybe you can share where hpe solutions fit in what what value they bring to your organization's mission yeah i think it brings a lot of flexibility so what we did with hpe is that we we developed a software-defined data center and then a virtual workplace for our researchers and doctors and that's based on the hpe infrastructure and what we wanted to build is something that expect the needs of doctors and nurses but also the researchers and the two kind of different blood groups blood groups and with different needs so uh but we wanted to create one infrastructure because we wanted to make the connection between the hospital and the research that's that's more important so um hpe helped helped us not only with the the infrastructure itself but also designing the whole architecture of it and for example what we did is we we bought a lot of hardware and and and the hardware is really uh doing his his job between nine till five uh dennis everything is working within everyone is working within the institution but all the other time in evening and and nights hours and also the redundant environment we have for the for our healthcare uh that doesn't do nothing of much more or less uh in in those uh dark hours so what we created together with nvidia and hpe and vmware is that we we call it video by day compute by night so we reuse those those servers and those gpu capacity for computational research jobs within the research that's you mentioned flexibility for this genius and and so we're talking you said you know a lot of hard ways they're probably proliant i think synergy aruba networking is in there how are you using this environment actually the question really is when you think about nki's digital transformation i mean is this sort of the fundamental platform that you're using is it a maybe you could describe that yeah it's it's the fundamental platform to to to work on and and and what we see is that we have we have now everything in place for it but the real challenge is is the next steps we are in so we have a a software defined data center we are cloud ready so the next steps is to to make the connection to the cloud to to give more automation to our researchers so they don't have to wait a couple of weeks for it to do it but they can do it themselves with a couple of clicks so i think the basic is we are really flexible and we have a lot of opportunities for automation for example but the next step is uh to create that business value uh really for for our uh employees that's a great story and a very important mission really fascinating stuff thanks for sharing this with our audience today really appreciate your time thank you very much okay this is dave vellante with thecube stay right there for more great content you're watching accelerating next from hpe i'm really glad to have you with us today john i know you stepped out of vacation so thanks very much for joining us neil it's great to be joining you from hawaii and i love the partnership with hpe and the way you're reinventing an industry well you've always excelled john at catching market transitions and there are so many transitions and paradigm shifts happening in the market and tech specifically right now as you see companies rush to accelerate their transformation what do you see as the keys to success well i i think you're seeing actually an acceleration following the covet challenges that all of us faced and i wasn't sure that would happen it's probably at three times the paces before there was a discussion point about how quickly the companies need to go digital uh that's no longer a discussion point almost all companies are moving with tremendous feed on digital and it's the ability as the cloud moves to the edge with compute and security uh at the edge and how you deliver these services to where the majority of applications uh reside are going to determine i think the future of the next generation company leadership and it's the area that neil we're working together on in many many ways so i think it's about innovation it's about the cloud moving to the edge and an architectural play with silicon to speed up that innovation yes we certainly see our customers of all sizes trying to accelerate what's next and get that digital transformation moving even faster as a result of the environment that we're all living in and we're finding that workload focus is really key uh customers in all kinds of different scales are having to adapt and support the remote workforces with vdi and as you say john they're having to deal with the deployment of workloads at the edge with so much data getting generated at the edge and being acted upon at the edge the analytics and the infrastructure to manage that as these processes get digitized and automated is is so important for so many workflows we really believe that the choice of infrastructure partner that underpins those transformations really matters a partner that can help create the financial capacity that can help optimize your environments and enable our customers to focus on supporting their business are all super key to success and you mentioned that in the last year there's been a lot of rapid course correction for all of us a demand for velocity and the ability to deploy resources at scale is more and more needed maybe more than ever what are you hearing customers looking for as they're rolling out their digital transformation efforts well i think they're being realistic that they're going to have to move a lot faster than before and they're also realistic on core versus context they're they're their core capability is not the technology of themselves it's how to deploy it and they're we're looking for partners that can help bring them there together but that can also innovate and very often the leaders who might have been a leader in a prior generation may not be on this next move hence the opportunity for hpe and startups like vinsano to work together as the cloud moves the edge and perhaps really balance or even challenge some of the big big incumbents in this category as well as partners uniquely with our joint customers on how do we achieve their business goals tell me a little bit more about how you move from this being a technology positioning for hpe to literally helping your customers achieve their outcomes they want and and how are you changing hpe in that way well i think when you consider these transformations the infrastructure that you choose to underpin it is incredibly critical our customers need a software-defined management plan that enables them to automate so much of their infrastructure they need to be able to take faster action where the data is and to do all of this in a cloud-like experience where they can deliver their infrastructure as code anywhere from exascale through the enterprise data center to the edge and really critically they have to be able to do this securely which becomes an ever increasing challenge and doing it at the right economics relative to their alternatives and part of the right economics of course includes adopting the best practices from web scale architectures and bringing them to the heart of the enterprise and in our partnership with pensando we're working to enable these new ideas of web scale architecture and fleet management for the enterprise at scale you know what is fun is hpe has an unusual talent from the very beginning in silicon valley of working together with others and creating a win-win innovation approach if you watch what your team has been able to do and i want to say this for everybody listening you work with startups better than any other company i've seen in terms of how you do win win together and pinsando is just the example of that uh this startup which by the way is the ninth time i have done with this team a new generation of products and we're designing that together with hpe in terms of as the cloud moves to the edge how do we get the leverage out of that and produce the results for your customers on this to give the audience appeal for it you're talking with pensano alone in terms of the efficiency versus an amazon amazon web services of an order of magnitude i'm not talking 100 greater i'm talking 10x greater and things from throughput number of connections you do the jitter capability etc and it talks how two companies uniquely who believe in innovation and trust each other and have very similar cultures can work uniquely together on it how do you bring that to life with an hpe how do you get your company to really say let's harvest the advantages of your ecosystem in your advantages of startups well as you say more and more companies are faced with these challenges of hitting the right economics for the infrastructure and we see many enterprises of various sizes trying to come to terms with infrastructures that look a lot more like a service provider that require that software-defined management plane and the automation to deploy at scale and with the work we're doing with pinsando the benefits that we bring in terms of the observability and the telemetry and the encryption and the distributed network functions but also a security architecture that enables that efficiency on the individual nodes is just so key to building a competitive architecture moving forwards for an on-prem private cloud or internal service provider operation and we're really excited about the work we've done to bring that technology across our portfolio and bring that to our customers so that they can achieve those kind of economics and capabilities and go focus on their own transformations rather than building and running the infrastructure themselves artisanally and having to deal with integrating all of that great technology themselves makes tremendous sense you know neil you and i work on a board together et cetera i've watched your summarization skills and i always like to ask the question after you do a quick summary like this what are the three or four takeaways we would like for the audience to get out of our conversation well that's a great question thanks john we believe that customers need a trusted partner to work through these digital transformations that are facing them and confront the challenge of the time that the covet crisis has taken away as you said up front every organization is having to transform and transform more quickly and more digitally and working with a trusted partner with the expertise that only comes from decades of experience is a key enabler for that a partner with the ability to create the financial capacity to transform the workload expertise to get more from the infrastructure and optimize the environment so that you can focus on your own business a partner that can deliver the systems and the security and the automation that makes it easily deployable and manageable anywhere you need them at any scale whether the edge the enterprise data center or all the way up to exascale in high performance computing and can do that all as a service as we can at hpe through hpe green lake enabling our customers most critical workloads it's critical that all of that is underpinned by an ai powered digitally enabled service experience so that our customers can get on with their transformation and running their business instead of dealing with their infrastructure and really only hpe can provide this combination of capabilities and we're excited and committed to helping our customers accelerate what's next for their businesses neil it's fun i i love being your partner and your wingman our values and cultures are so similar thanks for letting me be a part of this discussion today thanks for being with us john it was great having you here oh it's friends for life okay now we're going to dig into the world of video which accounts for most of the data that we store and requires a lot of intense processing capabilities to stream here with me is jim brickmeyer who's the chief marketing and product officer at vlasics jim good to see you good to see you as well so tell us a little bit more about velocity what's your role in this tv streaming world and maybe maybe talk about your ideal customer sure sure so um we're leading provider of carrier great video solutions video streaming solutions and advertising uh technology to service providers around the globe so we primarily sell software-based solutions to uh cable telco wireless providers and broadcasters that are interested in launching their own um video streaming services to consumers yeah so this is this big time you know we're not talking about mom and pop you know a little video outfit but but maybe you can help us understand that and just the sheer scale of of the tv streaming that you're doing maybe relate it to you know the overall internet usage how much traffic are we talking about here yeah sure so uh yeah so our our customers tend to be some of the largest um network service providers around the globe uh and if you look at the uh the video traffic um with respect to the total amount of traffic that that goes through the internet video traffic accounts for about 90 of the total amount of data that uh that traverses the internet so video is uh is a pretty big component of um of how people when they look at internet technologies they look at video streaming technologies uh you know this is where we we focus our energy is in carrying that traffic as efficiently as possible and trying to make sure that from a consumer standpoint we're all consumers of video and uh make sure that the consumer experience is a high quality experience that you don't experience any glitches and that that ultimately if people are paying for that content that they're getting the value that they pay for their for their money uh in their entertainment experience i think people sometimes take it for granted it's like it's like we we all forget about dial up right those days are long gone but the early days of video was so jittery and restarting and and the thing too is that you know when you think about the pandemic and the boom in streaming that that hit you know we all sort of experienced that but the service levels were pretty good i mean how much how much did the pandemic affect traffic what kind of increases did you see and how did that that impact your business yeah sure so uh you know obviously while it was uh tragic to have a pandemic and have people locked down what we found was that when people returned to their homes what they did was they turned on their their television they watched on on their mobile devices and we saw a substantial increase in the amount of video streaming traffic um over service provider networks so what we saw was on the order of 30 to 50 percent increase in the amount of data that was traversing those networks so from a uh you know from an operator's standpoint a lot more traffic a lot more challenging to to go ahead and carry that traffic a lot of work also on our behalf and trying to help operators prepare because we could actually see geographically as the lockdowns happened [Music] certain areas locked down first and we saw that increase so we were able to help operators as as all the lockdowns happened around the world we could help them prepare for that increase in traffic i mean i was joking about dial-up performance again in the early days of the internet if your website got fifty percent more traffic you know suddenly you were you your site was coming down so so that says to me jim that architecturally you guys were prepared for that type of scale so maybe you could paint a picture tell us a little bit about the solutions you're using and how you differentiate yourself in your market to handle that type of scale sure yeah so we so we uh we really are focused on what we call carrier grade solutions which are designed for that massive amount of scale um so we really look at it you know at a very granular level when you look um at the software and and performance capabilities of the software what we're trying to do is get as many streams as possible out of each individual piece of hardware infrastructure so that we can um we can optimize first of all maximize the uh the efficiency of that device make sure that the costs are very low but one of the other challenges is as you get to millions and millions of streams and that's what we're delivering on a daily basis is millions and millions of video streams that you have to be able to scale those platforms out um in an effective in a cost effective way and to make sure that it's highly resilient as well so we don't we don't ever want a consumer to have a circumstance where a network glitch or a server issue or something along those lines causes some sort of uh glitch in their video and so there's a lot of work that we do in the software to make sure that it's a very very seamless uh stream and that we're always delivering at the very highest uh possible bit rate for consumers so that if you've got that giant 4k tv that we're able to present a very high resolution picture uh to those devices and what's the infrastructure look like underneath you you're using hpe solutions where do they fit in yeah that's right yeah so we uh we've had a long-standing partnership with hpe um and we work very closely with them to try to identify the specific types of hardware that are ideal for the the type of applications that we run so we run video streaming applications and video advertising applications targeted kinds of video advertising technologies and when you look at some of these applications they have different types of requirements in some cases it's uh throughput where we're taking a lot of data in and streaming a lot of data out in other cases it's storage where we have to have very high density high performance storage systems in other cases it's i gotta have really high capacity storage but the performance does not need to be quite as uh as high from an io perspective and so we work very closely with hpe on trying to find exactly the right box for the right application and then beyond that also talking with our customers to understand there are different maintenance considerations associated with different types of hardware so we tend to focus on as much as possible if we're going to place servers deep at the edge of the network we will make everything um maintenance free or as maintenance free as we can make it by putting very high performance solid state storage into those servers so that uh we we don't have to physically send people to those sites to uh to do any kind of maintenance so it's a it's a very cooperative relationship that we have with hpe to try to define those boxes great thank you for that so last question um maybe what the future looks like i love watching on my mobile device headphones in no distractions i'm getting better recommendations how do you see the future of tv streaming yeah so i i think the future of tv streaming is going to be a lot more personal right so uh this is what you're starting to see through all of the services that are out there is that most of the video service providers whether they're online providers or they're your traditional kinds of paid tv operators is that they're really focused on the consumer and trying to figure out what is of value to you personally in the past it used to be that services were one size fits all and um and so everybody watched the same program right at the same time and now that's uh that's we have this technology that allows us to deliver different types of content to people on different screens at different times and to advertise to those individuals and to cater to their individual preferences and so using that information that we have about how people watch and and what people's interests are we can create a much more engaging and compelling uh entertainment experience on all of those screens and um and ultimately provide more value to consumers awesome story jim thanks so much for keeping us helping us just keep entertained during the pandemic i really appreciate your time sure thanks all right keep it right there everybody you're watching hpes accelerating next first of all pat congratulations on your new role as intel ceo how are you approaching your new role and what are your top priorities over your first few months thanks antonio for having me it's great to be here with you all today to celebrate the launch of your gen 10 plus portfolio and the long history that our two companies share in deep collaboration to deliver amazing technology to our customers together you know what an exciting time it is to be in this industry technology has never been more important for humanity than it is today everything is becoming digital and driven by what i call the four key superpowers the cloud connectivity artificial intelligence and the intelligent edge they are super powers because each expands the impact of the others and together they are reshaping every aspect of our lives and work in this landscape of rapid digital disruption intel's technology and leadership products are more critical than ever and we are laser focused on bringing to bear the depth and breadth of software silicon and platforms packaging and process with at scale manufacturing to help you and our customers capitalize on these opportunities and fuel their next generation innovations i am incredibly excited about continuing the next chapter of a long partnership between our two companies the acceleration of the edge has been significant over the past year with this next wave of digital transformation we expect growth in the distributed edge and age build out what are you seeing on this front like you said antonio the growth of edge computing and build out is the next key transition in the market telecommunications service providers want to harness the potential of 5g to deliver new services across multiple locations in real time as we start building solutions that will be prevalent in a 5g digital environment we will need a scalable flexible and programmable network some use cases are the massive scale iot solutions more robust consumer devices and solutions ar vr remote health care autonomous robotics and manufacturing environments and ubiquitous smart city solutions intel and hp are partnering to meet this new wave head on for 5g build out and the rise of the distributed enterprise this build out will enable even more growth as businesses can explore how to deliver new experiences and unlock new insights from the new data creation beyond the four walls of traditional data centers and public cloud providers network operators need to significantly increase capacity and throughput without dramatically growing their capital footprint their ability to achieve this is built upon a virtualization foundation an area of intel expertise for example we've collaborated with verizon for many years and they are leading the industry and virtualizing their entire network from the core the edge a massive redesign effort this requires advancements in silicon and power management they expect intel to deliver the new capabilities in our roadmap so ecosystem partners can continue to provide innovative and efficient products with this optimization for hybrid we can jointly provide a strong foundation to take on the growth of data-centric workloads for data analytics and ai to build and deploy models faster to accelerate insights that will deliver additional transformation for organizations of all types the network transformation journey isn't easy we are continuing to unleash the capabilities of 5g and the power of the intelligent edge yeah the combination of the 5g built out and the massive new growth of data at the edge are the key drivers for the age of insight these new market drivers offer incredible new opportunities for our customers i am excited about recent launch of our new gen 10 plus portfolio with intel together we are laser focused on delivering joint innovation for customers that stretches from the edge to x scale how do you see new solutions that this helping our customers solve the toughest challenges today i talked earlier about the superpowers that are driving the rapid acceleration of digital transformation first the proliferation of the hybrid cloud is delivering new levels of efficiency and scale and the growth of the cloud is democratizing high-performance computing opening new frontiers of knowledge and discovery next we see ai and machine learning increasingly infused into every application from the edge to the network to the cloud to create dramatically better insights and the rapid adoption of 5g as i talked about already is fueling new use cases that demand lower latencies and higher bandwidth this in turn is pushing computing to the edge closer to where the data is created and consumed the confluence of these trends is leading to the biggest and fastest build out of computing in human history to keep pace with this rapid digital transformation we recognize that infrastructure has to be built with the flexibility to support a broad set of workloads and that's why over the last several years intel has built an unmatched portfolio to deliver every component of intelligent silicon our customers need to move store and process data from the cpus to fpgas from memory to ssds from ethernet to switch silicon to silicon photonics and software our 3rd gen intel xeon scalable processors and our data centric portfolio deliver new core performance and higher bandwidth providing our customers the capabilities they need to power these critical workloads and we love seeing all the unique ways customers like hpe leverage our technology and solution offerings to create opportunities and solve their most pressing challenges from cloud gaming to blood flow to brain scans to financial market security the opportunities are endless with flexible performance i am proud of the amazing innovation we are bringing to support our customers especially as they respond to new data-centric workloads like ai and analytics that are critical to digital transformation these new requirements create a need for compute that's warlord optimized for performance security ease of use and the economics of business now more than ever compute matters it is the foundation for this next wave of digital transformation by pairing our compute with our software and capabilities from hp green lake we can support our customers as they modernize their apps and data quickly they seamlessly and securely scale them anywhere at any size from edge to x scale but thank you for joining us for accelerating next today i know our audience appreciated hearing your perspective on the market and how we're partnering together to support their digital transformation journey i am incredibly excited about what lies ahead for hp and intel thank you thank you antonio great to be with you today we just compressed about a decade of online commerce progress into about 13 or 14 months so now we're going to look at how one retailer navigated through the pandemic and what the future of their business looks like and with me is alan jensen who's the chief information officer and senior vice president of the sawing group hello alan how are you fine thank you good to see you hey look you know when i look at the 100 year history plus of your company i mean it's marked by transformations and some of them are quite dramatic so you're denmark's largest retailer i wonder if you could share a little bit more about the company its history and and how it continues to improve the customer experience well at the same time keeping costs under control so vital in your business yeah yeah the company founded uh approximately 100 years ago with a department store in in oahu's in in denmark and i think in the 60s we founded the first supermarket in in denmark with the self-service and combined textile and food in in the same store and in beginning 70s we founded the first hyper market in in denmark and then the this calendar came from germany early in in 1980 and we started a discount chain and so we are actually building department store in hyber market info in in supermarket and in in the discount sector and today we are more than 1 500 stores in in three different countries in in denmark poland and germany and especially for the danish market we have a approximately 38 markets here and and is the the leader we have over the last 10 years developed further into online first in non-food and now uh in in food with home delivery with click and collect and we have done some magnetism acquisition in in the convenience with mailbox solutions to our customers and we have today also some restaurant burger chain and and we are running the starbuck in denmark so i can you can see a full plate of different opportunities for our customer in especially denmark it's an awesome story and of course the founder's name is still on the masthead what a great legacy now of course the pandemic is is it's forced many changes quite dramatic including the the behaviors of retail customers maybe you could talk a little bit about how your digital transformation at the sawing group prepared you for this shift in in consumption patterns and any other challenges that that you faced yeah i think uh luckily as for some of the you can say the core it solution in in 19 we just roll out using our computers via direct access so you can work from anywhere whether you are traveling from home and so on we introduced a new agile scrum delivery model and and we just finalized the rolling out teams in in in january february 20 and that was some very strong thing for suddenly moving all our employees from from office to to home and and more or less overnight we succeed uh continuing our work and and for it we have not missed any deadline or task for the business in in 2020 so i think that was pretty awesome to to see and for the business of course the pandemic changed a lot as the change in customer behavior more or less overnight with plus 50 80 on the online solution forced us to do some different priorities so we were looking at the food home delivery uh and and originally expected to start rolling out in in 2022 uh but took a fast decision in april last year to to launch immediately and and we have been developing that uh over the last eight months and has been live for the last three months now in the market so so you can say the pandemic really front loaded some of our strategic actions for for two to three years uh yeah that was very exciting what's that uh saying luck is the byproduct of great planning and preparation so let's talk about when you're in a company with some strong financial situation that you can move immediately with investment when you take such decision then then it's really thrilling yeah right awesome um two-part question talk about how you leverage data to support the solid groups mission and you know drive value for customers and maybe you could talk about some of the challenges you face with just the amount of data the speed of data et cetera yeah i said data is everything when you are in retail as a retailer's detail as you need to monitor your operation down to each store eats department and and if you can say we have challenge that that is that data is just growing rapidly as a year by year it's growing more and more because you are able to be more detailed you're able to capture more data and for a company like ours we need to be updated every morning as a our fully updated sales for all unit department single sku selling in in the stores is updated 3 o'clock in the night and send out to all top management and and our managers all over the company it's actually 8 000 reports going out before six o'clock every day in the morning we have introduced a loyalty program and and you are capturing a lot of data on on customer behavior what is their preferred offers what is their preferred time in the week for buying different things and all these data is now used to to personalize our offers to our cost of value customers so we can be exactly hitting the best time and and convert it to sales data is also now used for what we call intelligent price reductions as a so instead of just reducing prices with 50 if it's uh close to running out of date now the system automatically calculate whether a store has just enough to to finish with full price before end of day or actually have much too much and and need to maybe reduce by 80 before as being able to sell so so these automated [Music] solutions built on data is bringing efficiency into our operation wow you make it sound easy these are non-trivial items so congratulations on that i wonder if we could close hpe was kind enough to introduce us tell us a little bit about the infrastructure the solutions you're using how they differentiate you in the market and i'm interested in you know why hpe what distinguishes them why the choice there yeah as a when when you look out a lot is looking at moving data to the cloud but we we still believe that uh due to performance due to the availability uh more or less on demand we we still don't see the cloud uh strong enough for for for selling group uh capturing all our data we have been quite successfully having one data truth across the whole con company and and having one just one single bi solution and having that huge amount of data i think we have uh one of the 10 largest sub business warehouses in global and but on the other hand we also want to be agile and want to to scale when needed so getting close to a cloud solution we saw it be a green lake as a solution getting close to the cloud but still being on-prem and could deliver uh what we need to to have a fast performance on on data but still in a high quality and and still very secure for us to run great thank you for that and thank alan thanks so much for your for your time really appreciate your your insights and your congratulations on the progress and best of luck in the future thank you all right keep it right there we have tons more content coming you're watching accelerating next from hpe [Music] welcome lisa and thank you for being here with us today antonio it's wonderful to be here with you as always and congratulations on your launch very very exciting for you well thank you lisa and we love this partnership and especially our friendship which has been very special for me for the many many years that we have worked together but i wanted to have a conversation with you today and obviously digital transformation is a key topic so we know the next wave of digital transformation is here being driven by massive amounts of data an increasingly distributed world and a new set of data intensive workloads so how do you see world optimization playing a role in addressing these new requirements yeah no absolutely antonio and i think you know if you look at the depth of our partnership over the last you know four or five years it's really about bringing the best to our customers and you know the truth is we're in this compute mega cycle right now so it's amazing you know when i know when you talk to customers when we talk to customers they all need to do more and and frankly compute is becoming quite specialized so whether you're talking about large enterprises or you're talking about research institutions trying to get to the next phase of uh compute so that workload optimization that we're able to do with our processors your system design and then you know working closely with our software partners is really the next wave of this this compute cycle so thanks lisa you talk about mega cycle so i want to make sure we take a moment to celebrate the launch of our new generation 10 plus compute products with the latest announcement hp now has the broadest amd server portfolio in the industry spanning from the edge to exascale how important is this partnership and the portfolio for our customers well um antonio i'm so excited first of all congratulations on your 19 world records uh with uh milan and gen 10 plus it really is building on you know sort of our you know this is our third generation of partnership with epic and you know you are with me right at the very beginning actually uh if you recall you joined us in austin for our first launch of epic you know four years ago and i think what we've created now is just an incredible portfolio that really does go across um you know all of the uh you know the verticals that are required we've always talked about how do we customize and make things easier for our customers to use together and so i'm very excited about your portfolio very excited about our partnership and more importantly what we can do for our joint customers it's amazing to see 19 world records i think i'm really proud of the work our joint team do every generation raising the bar and that's where you know we we think we have a shared goal of ensuring that customers get the solution the services they need any way they want it and one way we are addressing that need is by offering what we call as a service delivered to hp green lake so let me ask a question what feedback are you hearing from your customers with respect to choice meaning consuming as a service these new solutions yeah now great point i think first of all you know hpe green lake is very very impressive so you know congratulations um to uh to really having that solution and i think we're hearing the same thing from customers and you know the truth is the compute infrastructure is getting more complex and everyone wants to be able to deploy sort of the right compute at the right price point um you know in in terms of also accelerating time to deployment with the right security with the right quality and i think these as a service offerings are going to become more and more important um as we go forward in the compute uh you know capabilities and you know green lake is a leadership product offering and we're very very you know pleased and and honored to be part of it yeah we feel uh lisa we are ahead of the competition and um you know you think about some of our competitors now coming with their own offerings but i think the ability to drive joint innovation is what really differentiate us and that's why we we value the partnership and what we have been doing together on giving the customers choice finally you know i know you and i are both incredibly excited about the joint work we're doing with the us department of energy the oak ridge national laboratory we think about large data sets and you know and the complexity of the analytics we're running but we both are going to deliver the world's first exascale system which is remarkable to me so what this milestone means to you and what type of impact do you think it will make yes antonio i think our work with oak ridge national labs and hpe is just really pushing the envelope on what can be done with computing and if you think about the science that we're going to be able to enable with the first exascale machine i would say there's a tremendous amount of innovation that has already gone in to the machine and we're so excited about delivering it together with hpe and you know we also think uh that the super computing technology that we're developing you know at this broad scale will end up being very very important for um you know enterprise compute as well and so it's really an opportunity to kind of take that bleeding edge and really deploy it over the next few years so super excited about it i think you know you and i have a lot to do over the uh the next few months here but it's an example of the great partnership and and how much we're able to do when we put our teams together um to really create that innovation i couldn't agree more i mean this is uh an incredible milestone for for us for our industry and honestly for the country in many ways and we have many many people working 24x7 to deliver against this mission and it's going to change the future of compute no question about it and then honestly put it to work where we need it the most to advance life science to find cures to improve the way people live and work but lisa thank you again for joining us today and thank you more most importantly for the incredible partnership and and the friendship i really enjoy working with you and your team and together i think we can change this industry once again so thanks for your time today thank you so much antonio and congratulations again to you and the entire hpe team for just a fantastic portfolio launch thank you okay well some pretty big hitters in those keynotes right actually i have to say those are some of my favorite cube alums and i'll add these are some of the execs that are stepping up to change not only our industry but also society and that's pretty cool and of course it's always good to hear from the practitioners the customer discussions have been great so far today now the accelerating next event continues as we move to a round table discussion with krista satrathwaite who's the vice president and gm of hpe core compute and krista is going to share more details on how hpe plans to help customers move ahead with adopting modern workloads as part of their digital transformations krista will be joined by hpe subject matter experts chris idler who's the vp and gm of the element and mark nickerson director of solutions product management as they share customer stories and advice on how to turn strategy into action and realize results within your business thank you for joining us for accelerate next event i hope you're enjoying it so far i know you've heard about the industry challenges the i.t trends hpe strategy from leaders in the industry and so today what we want to do is focus on going deep on workload solutions so in the most important workload solutions the ones we always get asked about and so today we want to share with you some best practices some examples of how we've helped other customers and how we can help you all right with that i'd like to start our panel now and introduce chris idler who's the vice president and general manager of the element chris has extensive uh solution expertise he's led hpe solution engineering programs in the past welcome chris and mark nickerson who is the director of product management and his team is responsible for solution offerings making sure we have the right solutions for our customers welcome guys thanks for joining me thanks for having us krista yeah so i'd like to start off with one of the big ones the ones that we get asked about all the time what we've been all been experienced in the last year remote work remote education and all the challenges that go along with that so let's talk a little bit about the challenges that customers have had in transitioning to this remote work and remote education environment uh so i i really think that there's a couple of things that have stood out for me when we're talking with customers about vdi first obviously there was a an unexpected and unprecedented level of interest in that area about a year ago and we all know the reasons why but what it really uncovered was how little planning had gone into this space around a couple of key dynamics one is scale it's one thing to say i'm going to enable vdi for a part of my workforce in a pre-pandemic environment where the office was still the the central hub of activity for work uh it's a completely different scale when you think about okay i'm going to have 50 60 80 maybe 100 of my workforce now distributed around the globe um whether that's in an educational environment where now you're trying to accommodate staff and students in virtual learning uh whether that's uh in the area of things like uh formula one racing where we had uh the desire to still have events going on but the need for a lot more social distancing not as many people able to be trackside but still needing to have that real-time experience this really manifested in a lot of ways and scale was something that i think a lot of customers hadn't put as much thought into initially the other area is around planning for experience a lot of times the vdi experience was planned out with very specific workloads or very specific applications in mind and when you take it to a more broad-based environment if we're going to support multiple functions multiple lines of business there hasn't been as much planning or investigation that's gone into the application side and so thinking about how graphically intense some applications are one customer that comes to mind would be tyler isd who did a fairly large roll out pre-pandemic and as part of their big modernization effort what they uncovered was even just changes in standard windows applications had become so much more graphically intense with windows 10 with the latest updates with programs like adobe that they were really needing to have an accelerated experience for a much larger percentage of their install base than than they had counted on so in addition to planning for scale you also need to have that visibility into what are the actual applications that are going to be used by these remote users how graphically intense those might be what's the login experience going to be as well as the operating experience and so really planning through that experience side as well as the scale and the number of users uh is is kind of really two of the biggest most important things that i've seen yeah mark i'll i'll just jump in real quick i think you you covered that pretty comprehensively there and and it was well done the couple of observations i've made one is just that um vdi suddenly become like mission critical for sales it's the front line you know for schools it's the classroom you know that this isn't a cost cutting measure or a optimization nit measure anymore this is about running the business in a way it's a digital transformation one aspect of about a thousand aspects of what does it mean to completely change how your business does and i think what that translates to is that there's no margin for error right you really need to deploy this in a way that that performs that understands what you're trying to use it for that gives that end user the experience that they expect on their screen or on their handheld device or wherever they might be whether it's a racetrack classroom or on the other end of a conference call or a boardroom right so what we do in in the engineering side of things when it comes to vdi or really understand what's a tech worker what's a knowledge worker what's a power worker what's a gp really going to look like what's time of day look like you know who's using it in the morning who's using it in the evening when do you power up when do you power down does the system behave does it just have the it works function and what our clients can can get from hpe is um you know a worldwide set of experiences that we can apply to making sure that the solution delivers on its promises so we're seeing the same thing you are krista you know we see it all the time on vdi and on the way businesses are changing the way they do business yeah and it's funny because when i talk to customers you know one of the things i heard that was a good tip is to roll it out to small groups first so you could really get a good sense of what the experience is before you roll it out to a lot of other people and then the expertise it's not like every other workload that people have done before so if you're new at it make sure you're getting the right advice expertise so that you're doing it the right way okay one of the other things we've been talking a lot about today is digital transformation and moving to the edge so now i'd like to shift gears and talk a little bit about how we've helped customers make that shift and this time i'll start with chris all right hey thanks okay so you know it's funny when it comes to edge because um the edge is different for for every customer in every client and every single client that i've ever spoken to of hp's has an edge somewhere you know whether just like we were talking about the classroom might be the edge but but i think the industry when we're talking about edge is talking about you know the internet of things if you remember that term from not to not too long ago you know and and the fact that everything's getting connected and how do we turn that into um into telemetry and and i think mark's going to be able to talk through a couple of examples of clients that we have in things like racing and automotive but what we're learning about edge is it's not just how do you make the edge work it's how do you integrate the edge into what you're already doing and nobody's just the edge right and and so if it's if it's um ai mldl there's that's one way you want to use the edge if it's a customer experience point of service it's another you know there's yet another way to use the edge so it turns out that having a broad set of expertise like hpe does to be able to understand the different workloads that you're trying to tie together including the ones that are running at the at the edge often it involves really making sure you understand the data pipeline you know what information is at the edge how does it flow to the data center how does it flow and then which data center uh which private cloud which public cloud are you using i think those are the areas where where we really sort of shine is that we we understand the interconnectedness of these things and so for example red bull and i know you're going to talk about that in a minute mark um uh the racing company you know for them the the edge is the racetrack and and you know milliseconds or partial seconds winning and losing races but then there's also an edge of um workers that are doing the design for for the cars and how do they get quick access so um we have a broad variety of infrastructure form factors and compute form factors to help with the edge and this is another real advantage we have is that we we know how to put the right piece of equipment with the right software we also have great containerized software with our esmeral container platform so we're really becoming um a perfect platform for hosting edge-centric workloads and applications and data processing yeah it's uh all the way down to things like our superdome flex in the background if you have some really really really big data that needs to be processed and of course our workhorse proliance that can be configured to support almost every um combination of workload you have so i know you started with edge krista but but and we're and we nail the edge with those different form factors but let's make sure you know if you're listening to this this show right now um make sure you you don't isolate the edge and make sure they integrate it with um with the rest of your operation mark you know what did i miss yeah to that point chris i mean and this kind of actually ties the two things together that we've been talking about here but the edge uh has become more critical as we have seen more work moving to the edge as where we do work changes and evolves and the edge has also become that much more closer because it has to be that much more connected um to your point uh talking about where that edge exists that edge can be a lot of different places but the one commonality really is that the edge is is an area where work still needs to get accomplished it can't just be a collection point and then everything gets shipped back to a data center or back to some some other area for the work it's where the work actually needs to get done whether that's edge work in a use case like vdi or whether that's edge work in the case of doing real-time analytics you mentioned red bull racing i'll i'll bring that up i mean you talk about uh an area where time is of the essence everything about that sport comes down to time you're talking about wins and losses that are measured as you said in milliseconds and that applies not just to how performance is happening on the track but how you're able to adapt and modify the needs of the car uh adapt to the evolving conditions on the track itself and so when you talk about putting together a solution for an edge like that you're right it can't just be here's a product that's going to allow us to collect data ship it back someplace else and and wait for it to be processed in a couple of days you have to have the ability to analyze that in real time when we pull together a solution involving our compute products our storage products our networking products when we're able to deliver that full package solution at the edge what you see are results like a 50 decrease in processing time to make real-time analytic decisions about configurations for the car and adapting to to real-time uh test and track conditions yeah really great point there um and i really love the example of edge and racing because i mean that is where it all every millisecond counts um and so important to process that at the edge now switching gears just a little bit let's talk a little bit about some examples of how we've helped customers when it comes to business agility and optimizing their workload for maximum outcome for business agility let's talk about some things that we've done to help customers with that mark yeah give it a shot so when we when we think about business agility what you're really talking about is the ability to to implement on the fly to be able to scale up to scale down the ability to adapt to real time changing situations and i think the last year has been has been an excellent example of exactly how so many businesses have been forced to do that i think one of the areas that that i think we've probably seen the most ability to help with customers in that agility area is around the space of private and hybrid clouds if you take a look at the need that customers have to to be able to migrate workloads and migrate data between public cloud environments app development environments that may be hosted on-site or maybe in the cloud the ability to move out of development and into production and having the agility to then scale those application rollouts up having the ability to have some of that some of that private cloud flexibility in addition to a public cloud environment is something that is becoming increasingly crucial for a lot of our customers all right well i we could keep going on and on but i'll stop it there uh thank you so much uh chris and mark this has been a great discussion thanks for sharing how we helped other customers and some tips and advice for approaching these workloads i thank you all for joining us and remind you to look at the on-demand sessions if you want to double click a little bit more into what we've been covering all day today you can learn a lot more in those sessions and i thank you for your time thanks for tuning in today many thanks to krista chris and mark we really appreciate you joining today to share how hpe is partnering to facilitate new workload adoption of course with your customers on their path to digital transformation now to round out our accelerating next event today we have a series of on-demand sessions available so you can explore more details around every step of that digital transformation from building a solid infrastructure strategy identifying the right compute and software to rounding out your solutions with management and financial support so please navigate to the agenda at the top of the page to take a look at what's available i just want to close by saying that despite the rush to digital during the pandemic most businesses they haven't completed their digital transformations far from it 2020 was more like a forced march than a planful strategy but now you have some time you've adjusted to this new abnormal and we hope the resources that you find at accelerating next will help you on your journey best of luck to you and be well [Music] [Applause] [Music] 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(upbeat music) >> Edge computing is projected to be a multi-trillion dollar business. It's hard to really pinpoint the size of this market let alone fathom the potential of bringing software, compute, storage, AI and automation to the edge and connecting all that to clouds and on-prem systems. But what is the edge? Is it factories? Is it oil rigs, airplanes, windmills, shipping containers, buildings, homes, race cars. Well, yes and so much more. And what about the data? For decades we've talked about the data explosion. I mean, it's a mind-boggling but guess what we're going to look back in 10 years and laugh what we thought was a lot of data in 2020. Perhaps the best way to think about Edge is not as a place but when is the most logical opportunity to process the data and maybe it's the first opportunity to do so where it can be decrypted and analyzed at very low latencies. That defines the edge. And so by locating compute as close as possible to the sources of data to reduce latency and maximize your ability to get insights and return them to users quickly, maybe that's where the value lies. Hello everyone and welcome to this CUBE conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and with me to noodle on these topics is Omer Asad, VP and GM of Primary Storage and Data Management Services at HPE. Hello Omer, welcome to the program. >> Thanks Dave. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. >> Yeah. Great to see you again. So how do you see the edge in the broader market shaping up? >> Dave, I think that's a super important question. I think your ideas are quite aligned with how we think about it. I personally think enterprises are accelerating their sort of digitization and asset collection and data collection, they're typically especially in a distributed enterprise, they're trying to get to their customers. They're trying to minimize the latency to their customers. So especially if you look across industries manufacturing which has distributed factories all over the place they are going through a lot of factory transformations where they're digitizing their factories. That means a lot more data is now being generated within their factories. A lot of robot automation is going on, that requires a lot of compute power to go out to those particular factories which is going to generate their data out there. We've got insurance companies, banks, that are creating and interviewing and gathering more customers out at the edge for that. They need a lot more distributed processing out at the edge. What this is requiring is what we've seen is across analysts. A common consensus is this that more than 50% of an enterprises data especially if they operate globally around the world is going to be generated out at the edge. What does that mean? New data is generated at the edge what needs to be stored. It needs to be processed data. Data which is not required needs to be thrown away or classified as not important. And then it needs to be moved for DR purposes either to a central data center or just to another site. So overall in order to give the best possible experience for manufacturing, retail, especially in distributed enterprises, people are generating more and more data centric assets out at the edge. And that's what we see in the industry. >> Yeah. We're definitely aligned on that. There's some great points and so now, okay. You think about all this diversity what's the right architecture for these multi-site deployments, ROBO, edge? How do you look at that? >> Oh, excellent question, Dave. Every customer that we talked to wants SimpliVity and no pun intended because SimpliVity is reasoned with a simplistic edge centric architecture, right? Let's take a few examples. You've got large global retailers, they have hundreds of global retail stores around the world that is generating data that is producing data. Then you've got insurance companies, then you've got banks. So when you look at a distributed enterprise how do you deploy in a very simple and easy to deploy manner, easy to lifecycle, easy to mobilize and easy to lifecycle equipment out at the edge. What are some of the challenges that these customers deal with? These customers, you don't want to send a lot of IT staff out there because that adds cost. You don't want to have islands of data and islands of storage and promote sites because that adds a lot of states outside of the data center that needs to be protected. And then last but not the least how do you push lifecycle based applications, new applications out at the edge in a very simple to deploy manner. And how do you protect all this data at the edge? So the right architecture in my opinion needs to be extremely simple to deploy so storage compute and networking out towards the edge in a hyper converged environment. So that's we agree upon that. It's a very simple to deploy model but then comes how do you deploy applications on top of that? How do you manage these applications on top of that? How do you back up these applications back towards the data center, all of this keeping in mind that it has to be as zero touch as possible. We at HPE believe that it needs to be extremely simple, just give me two cables, a network cable, a power cable, fire it up, connect it to the network, push it state from the data center and back up it state from the edge back into the data center, extremely simple. >> It's got to be simple 'cause you've got so many challenges. You've got physics that you have to deal, you have latency to deal with. You got RPO and RTO. What happens if something goes wrong you've got to be able to recover quickly. So that's great. Thank you for that. Now you guys have heard news. What is new from HPE in this space? >> Excellent question, great. So from a deployment perspective, HPE SimpliVity is just gaining like it's exploding like crazy especially as distributed enterprises adopted as it's standardized edge architecture, right? It's an HCI box has got storage computer networking all in one. But now what we have done is not only you can deploy applications all from your standard V-Center interface from a data center, what have you have now added is the ability to backup to the cloud right from the edge. You can also back up all the way back to your core data center. All of the backup policies are fully automated and implemented in the distributed file system that is the heart and soul of the SimpliVity installation. In addition to that, the customers now do not have to buy any third-party software. Backup is fully integrated in the architecture and it's then efficient. In addition to that now you can backup straight to the client. You can back up to a central high-end backup repository which is in your data center. And last but not least, we have a lot of customers that are pushing the limit in their application transformation. So not only, we previously were one-on-one leaving VMware deployments out at the edge site now evolved also added both stateful and stateless container orchestration as well as data protection capabilities for containerized applications out at the edge. So we have a lot of customers that are now deploying containers, rapid manufacture containers to process data out at remote sites. And that allows us to not only protect those stateful applications but back them up back into the central data center. >> I saw in that chart, it was a line no egress fees. That's a pain point for a lot of CIOs that I talked to. They grit their teeth at those cities. So you can't comment on that or? >> Excellent question. I'm so glad you brought that up and sort of at the point that pick that up. So along with SimpliVity, we have the whole Green Lake as a service offering as well, right? So what that means Dave is, that we can literally provide our customers edge as a service. And when you compliment that with with Aruba Wired Wireless Infrastructure that goes at the edge, the hyperconverged infrastructure as part of SimpliVity that goes at the edge. One of the things that was missing with cloud backups is that every time you back up to the cloud, which is a great thing by the way, anytime you restore from the cloud there is that egress fee, right? So as a result of that, as part of the GreenLake offering we have cloud backup service natively now offered as part of HPE, which is included in your HPE SimpliVity edge as a service offering. So now not only can you backup into the cloud from your edge sites, but you can also restore back without any egress fees from HPE's data protection service. Either you can restore it back onto your data center, you can restore it back towards the edge site and because the infrastructure is so easy to deploy centrally lifecycle manage, it's very mobile. So if you want to deploy and recover to a different site, you could also do that. >> Nice. Hey, can you, Omer, can you double click a little bit on some of the use cases that customers are choosing SimpliVity for particularly at the edge and maybe talk about why they're choosing HPE? >> Excellent question. So one of the major use cases that we see Dave is obviously easy to deploy and easy to manage in a standardized form factor, right? A lot of these customers, like for example, we have large retailer across the US with hundreds of stores across US, right? Now you cannot send service staff to each of these stores. Their data center is essentially just a closet for these guys, right? So now how do you have a standardized deployment? So standardized deployment from the data center which you can literally push out and you can connect a network cable and a power cable and you're up and running and then automated backup, elimination of backup and state and DR from the edge sites and into the data center. So that's one of the big use cases to rapidly deploy new stores, bring them up in a standardized configuration both from a hardware and a software perspective and the ability to backup and recover that instantly. That's one large use case. The second use case that we see actually refers to a comment that you made in your opener, Dave, was when a lot of these customers are generating a lot of the data at the edge. This is robotics automation that is going up in manufacturing sites. These is racing teams that are out at the edge of doing post-processing of their cars data. At the same time there is disaster recovery use cases where you have campsites and local agencies that go out there for humanity's benefit. And they move from one site to the other. It's a very, very mobile architecture that they need. So those are just a few cases where we were deployed. There was a lot of data collection and there was a lot of mobility involved in these environments, so you need to be quick to set up, quick to backup, quick to recover. And essentially you're up to your next move. >> You seem pretty pumped up about this new innovation and why not. >> It is, especially because it has been taught through with edge in mind and edge has to be mobile. It has to be simple. And especially as we have lived through this pandemic which I hope we see the tail end of it in at least 2021 or at least 2022. One of the most common use cases that we saw and this was an accidental discovery. A lot of the retail sites could not go out to service their stores because mobility is limited in these strange times that we live in. So from a central recenter you're able to deploy applications. You're able to recover applications. And a lot of our customers said, hey I don't have enough space in my data center to back up. Do you have another option? So then we rolled out this update release to SimpliVity verse from the edge site. You can now directly back up to our backup service which is offered on a consumption basis to the customers and they can recover that anywhere they want. >> Fantastic Omer, thanks so much for coming on the program today. >> It's a pleasure, Dave. Thank you. >> All right. Awesome to see you, now, let's hear from Red Bull Racing an HPE customer that's actually using SimpliVity at the edge. (engine revving) >> Narrator: Formula one is a constant race against time Chasing in tens of seconds. (upbeat music) >> Okay. We're back with Matt Cadieux who is the CIO Red Bull Racing. Matt, it's good to see you again. >> Great to see you Dave. >> Hey, we're going to dig in to a real world example of using data at the edge in near real time to gain insights that really lead to competitive advantage. But first Matt tell us a little bit about Red Bull Racing and your role there. >> Sure. So I'm the CIO at Red Bull Racing and at Red Bull Racing we're based in Milton Keynes in the UK. And the main job for us is to design a race car, to manufacture the race car and then to race it around the world. So as CIO, we need to develop, the IT group needs to develop the applications use the design, manufacturing racing. We also need to supply all the underlying infrastructure and also manage security. So it's really interesting environment that's all about speed. So this season we have 23 races and we need to tear the car apart and rebuild it to a unique configuration for every individual race. And we're also designing and making components targeted for races. So 23 and movable deadlines this big evolving prototype to manage with our car but we're also improving all of our tools and methods and software that we use to design make and race the car. So we have a big can-do attitude of the company around continuous improvement. And the expectations are that we continue to say, make the car faster. That we're winning races, that we improve our methods in the factory and our tools. And so for IT it's really unique and that we can be part of that journey and provide a better service. It's also a big challenge to provide that service and to give the business the agility of needs. So my job is really to make sure we have the right staff, the right partners, the right technical platforms. So we can live up to expectations. >> And Matt that tear down and rebuild for 23 races, is that because each track has its own unique signature that you have to tune to or are there other factors involved? >> Yeah, exactly. Every track has a different shape. Some have lots of straight, some have lots of curves and lots are in between. The track surface is very different and the impact that has on tires, the temperature and the climate is very different. Some are hilly, some have big curbs that affect the dynamics of the car. So all that in order to win you need to micromanage everything and optimize it for any given race track. >> COVID has of course been brutal for sports. What's the status of your season? >> So this season we knew that COVID was here and we're doing 23 races knowing we have COVID to manage. And as a premium sporting team with Pharma Bubbles we've put health and safety and social distancing into our environment. And we're able to able to operate by doing things in a safe manner. We have some special exceptions in the UK. So for example, when people returned from overseas that they did not have to quarantine for two weeks, but they get tested multiple times a week. And we know they're safe. So we're racing, we're dealing with all the hassle that COVID gives us. And we are really hoping for a return to normality sooner instead of later where we can get fans back at the track and really go racing and have the spectacle where everyone enjoys it. >> Yeah. That's awesome. So important for the fans but also all the employees around that ecosystem. Talk about some of the key drivers in your business and some of the key apps that give you competitive advantage to help you win races. >> Yeah. So in our business, everything is all about speed. So the car obviously needs to be fast but also all of our business operations need to be fast. We need to be able to design a car and it's all done in the virtual world, but the virtual simulations and designs needed to correlate to what happens in the real world. So all of that requires a lot of expertise to develop the simulations, the algorithms and have all the underlying infrastructure that runs it quickly and reliably. In manufacturing we have cost caps and financial controls by regulation. We need to be super efficient and control material and resources. So ERP and MES systems are running and helping us do that. And at the race track itself. And in speed, we have hundreds of decisions to make on a Friday and Saturday as we're fine tuning the final configuration of the car. And here again, we rely on simulations and analytics to help do that. And then during the race we have split seconds literally seconds to alter our race strategy if an event happens. So if there's an accident and the safety car comes out or the weather changes, we revise our tactics and we're running Monte-Carlo for example. And use an experienced engineers with simulations to make a data-driven decision and hopefully a better one and faster than our competitors. All of that needs IT to work at a very high level. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, as a lay person, historically when I think about technology in car racing, of course I think about the mechanical aspects of a self-propelled vehicle, the electronics and the light but not necessarily the data but the data's always been there. Hasn't it? I mean, maybe in the form of like tribal knowledge if you are somebody who knows the track and where the hills are and experience and gut feel but today you're digitizing it and you're processing it and close to real time. Its amazing. >> I think exactly right. Yeah. The car's instrumented with sensors, we post process and we are doing video image analysis and we're looking at our car, competitor's car. So there's a huge amount of very complicated models that we're using to optimize our performance and to continuously improve our car. Yeah. The data and the applications that leverage it are really key and that's a critical success factor for us. >> So let's talk about your data center at the track, if you will. I mean, if I can call it that. Paint a picture for us what does that look like? >> So we have to send a lot of equipment to the track at the edge. And even though we have really a great wide area network link back to the factory and there's cloud resources a lot of the tracks are very old. You don't have hardened infrastructure, don't have ducks that protect cabling, for example and you can lose connectivity to remote locations. So the applications we need to operate the car and to make really critical decisions all that needs to be at the edge where the car operates. So historically we had three racks of equipment like I said infrastructure and it was really hard to manage, to make changes, it was too flexible. There were multiple panes of glass and it was too slow. It didn't run our applications quickly. It was also too heavy and took up too much space when you're cramped into a garage with lots of environmental constraints. So we'd introduced hyper convergence into the factory and seen a lot of great benefits. And when we came time to refresh our infrastructure at the track, we stepped back and said, there's a lot smarter way of operating. We can get rid of all the slow and flexible expensive legacy and introduce hyper convergence. And we saw really excellent benefits for doing that. We saw up three X speed up for a lot of our applications. So I'm here where we're post-processing data. And we have to make decisions about race strategy. Time is of the essence. The three X reduction in processing time really matters. We also were able to go from three racks of equipment down to two racks of equipment and the storage efficiency of the HPE SimpliVity platform with 20 to one ratios allowed us to eliminate a rack. And that actually saved a $100,000 a year in freight costs by shipping less equipment. Things like backup mistakes happen. Sometimes the user makes a mistake. So for example a race engineer could load the wrong data map into one of our simulations. And we could restore that DDI through SimpliVity backup at 90 seconds. And this enables engineers to focus on the car to make better decisions without having downtime. And we sent two IT guys to every race, they're managing 60 users a really diverse environment, juggling a lot of balls and having a simple management platform like HPE SimpliVity gives us, allows them to be very effective and to work quickly. So all of those benefits were a huge step forward relative to the legacy infrastructure that we used to run at the edge. >> Yeah. So you had the nice Petri dish in the factory so it sounds like your goals are obviously number one KPIs speed to help shave seconds, awesome time, but also cost just the simplicity of setting up the infrastructure is-- >> That's exactly right. It's speed, speed, speed. So we want applications absolutely fly, get to actionable results quicker, get answers from our simulations quicker. The other area that speed's really critical is our applications are also evolving prototypes and we're always, the models are getting bigger. The simulations are getting bigger and they need more and more resource and being able to spin up resource and provision things without being a bottleneck is a big challenge in SimpliVity. It gives us the means of doing that. >> So did you consider any other options or was it because you had the factory knowledge? It was HCI was very clearly the option. What did you look at? >> Yeah, so we have over five years of experience in the factory and we eliminated all of our legacy infrastructure five years ago. And the benefits I've described at the track we saw that in the factory. At the track we have a three-year operational life cycle for our equipment. When in 2017 was the last year we had legacy as we were building for 2018, it was obvious that hyper-converged was the right technology to introduce. And we'd had years of experience in the factory already. And the benefits that we see with hyper-converged actually mattered even more at the edge because our operations are so much more pressurized. Time is even more of the essence. And so speeding everything up at the really pointy end of our business was really critical. It was an obvious choice. >> Why SimpliVity, why'd you choose HPE SimpliVity? >> Yeah. So when we first heard about hyper-converged way back in the factory, we had a legacy infrastructure overly complicated, too slow, too inflexible, too expensive. And we stepped back and said there has to be a smarter way of operating. We went out and challenged our technology partners, we learned about hyperconvergence, would enough the hype was real or not. So we underwent some PLCs and benchmarking and the PLCs were really impressive. And all these speed and agility benefits we saw and HPE for our use cases was the clear winner in the benchmarks. So based on that we made an initial investment in the factory. We moved about 150 VMs and 150 VDIs into it. And then as we've seen all the benefits we've successfully invested and we now have an estate in the factory of about 800 VMs and about 400 VDIs. So it's been a great platform and it's allowed us to really push boundaries and give the business the service it expects. >> Awesome fun stories, just coming back to the metrics for a minute. So you're running Monte Carlo simulations in real time and sort of near real-time. And so essentially that's if I understand it, that's what ifs and it's the probability of the outcome. And then somebody got to make, then the human's got to say, okay, do this, right? Was the time in which you were able to go from data to insight to recommendation or edict was that compressed and you kind of indicated that. >> Yeah, that was accelerated. And so in that use case, what we're trying to do is predict the future and you're saying, well and before any event happens, you're doing what ifs and if it were to happen, what would you probabilistic do? So that simulation, we've been running for awhile but it gets better and better as we get more knowledge. And so that we were able to accelerate that with SimpliVity but there's other use cases too. So we also have telemetry from the car and we post-process it. And that reprocessing time really, is it's very time consuming. And we went from nine, eight minutes for some of the simulations down to just two minutes. So we saw big, big reductions in time. And ultimately that meant an engineer could understand what the car was doing in a practice session, recommend a tweak to the configuration or setup of it and just get more actionable insight quicker. And it ultimately helps get a better car quicker. >> Such a great example. How are you guys feeling about the season, Matt? What's the team's sentiment? >> I think we're optimistic. Thinking our simulations that we have a great car we have a new driver lineup. We have the Max Verstapenn who carries on with the team and Sergio Cross joins the team. So we're really excited about this year and we want to go and win races. And I think with COVID people are just itching also to get back to a little degree of normality and going racing again even though there's no fans, it gets us into a degree of normality. >> That's great, Matt, good luck this season and going forward and thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> It's my pleasure. Great talking to you again. >> Okay. Now we're going to bring back Omer for quick summary. So keep it right there. >> Narrator: That's where the data comes face to face with the real world. >> Narrator: Working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise is a hugely beneficial partnership for us. We're able to be at the cutting edge of technology in a highly technical, highly stressed environment. There is no bigger challenge than Formula One. (upbeat music) >> Being in the car and driving in on the limit that is the best thing out there. >> Narrator: It's that innovation and creativity to ultimately achieves winning of this. >> Okay. We're back with Omer. Hey, what did you think about that interview with Matt? >> Great. I have to tell you, I'm a big formula One fan and they are one of my favorite customers. So obviously one of the biggest use cases as you saw for Red Bull Racing is track side deployments. There are now 22 races in a season. These guys are jumping from one city to the next they got to pack up, move to the next city, set up the infrastructure very very quickly. An average Formula One car is running the thousand plus sensors on, that is generating a ton of data on track side that needs to be collected very quickly. It needs to be processed very quickly and then sometimes believe it or not snapshots of this data needs to be sent to the Red Bull back factory back at the data center. What does this all need? It needs reliability. It needs compute power in a very short form factor. And it needs agility quick to set up, quick to go, quick to recover. And then in post processing they need to have CPU density so they can pack more VMs out at the edge to be able to do that processing. And we accomplished that for the Red Bull Racing guys in basically two of you have two SimpliVity nodes that are running track side and moving with them from one race to the next race to the next race. And every time those SimpliVity nodes connect up to the data center, collect up to a satellite they're backing up back to their data center. They're sending snapshots of data back to the data center essentially making their job a whole lot easier where they can focus on racing and not on troubleshooting virtual machines. >> Red bull Racing and HPE SimpliVity. Great example. It's agile, it's it's cost efficient and it shows a real impact. Thank you very much Omer. I really appreciate those summary comments. >> Thank you, Dave. Really appreciate it. >> All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Volante for theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover. Virtual experience Brought to you by HP >>Everybody welcome back to the Cube's continuous coverage of Discover 2020. That virtual experience. The Cube has been been virtualized really excited to have Marissa Freeman here. She's the chief brand officer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And, of course, he joined by Jim Jackson. Who's the CMO of HP? Guys, Great to see you Wish we were face to face. But thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >>Great to be here. Hope that you and your family and your friends are safe and well, >>and we're back at you both. Jim, let me start with you. So, uh, this kind of got dumped on you with this pandemic. Different mindset. You have to do a bit flip to goto virtual you talk about some of the things that you focused in on some of the things you want to keep. And some of the things you knew you couldn't. And you had to do things differently. >>Yeah, You know, we pretty much had to rethink everything about this event platforms, how we thought about messaging, how we thought about content. Um audience acquisition demos, really everything. And for us, it really all boiled down to having a vision. And our vision was to bring the Discover experience, all that energy, the excitement that you get the in person event. We wanted to bring that to all of our customers and our partners and our team members around the world. So for us, it wasn't about virtualized discover. It was about bringing the Discover experience to a 12 inch screen. In many cases for our customers and our partners and our team members, I think another thing that was really eye opening for us. Waas thinking of opening up the aperture and thinking, Hey, we can now take this and drive. This is the true global events and we can reach people all over the world, reach customers and partners that can't come to discover because they can't physically come to the event. That was a couple of things that really we had to put a lot of thought into, and it was really exciting for us. I think one other thing is now customers, and how we think about their experience at the event became very, very important for us because you know, at an in person event, it's three days, and we can you know, there's a lot of things people can do, but you have three days of content, and then people move on for us. Now. Our customers might go through three weeks or three months, and we really needed to think about that experience in a very simple, seamless, easy way for them so that they could to consume the content digitally in a way that made the most sense for them. So a lot of new thinking for us. But we're really excited about the opportunities that virtual brings in that digital brings >>now immerse. So I gotta ask you so No, no meter boards at least know for a physical meter boards, you know, How did you think about continuing that branding in a virtual event? >>Well, it's, uh, it's really a beautiful experience when you look at the the intro of the platform that we're on. It's beautifully branded all the way throughout. The branding is really coming through, though, in the content, um, and in the people, So we always say, Jim and I always say every year, Gosh, if we could just have every estimate on every prospect come to discover they would see our brand come to life they would feel are our purpose. They would understand, just with a new and different energized and fully charged a company, we are they would get to meet Antonio and Security. And Liz and Jennifer Income are honored and Jim and feel for themselves, uh, the power of the company. And now everyone can So the brand really is coming to life through the people. I appreciate that you love the the beautiful graphics, and we work really hard. Um, I'm all of that stuff, Sure, but the real branding is in the content itself. So >>now, Jim asses. Well, you were kind of lucky in the sense that, you know, this show wasn't in March or April. You had some time. So to see what others were doing. And you saw early on when this thing first hit, there were some the missteps there, There's there, still are even. But So what do you What do you tell people that is really unique about the Discover virtual experience? >>Yeah, I think a couple things and you're right. We did have a little more runway, and that was to our advantage. But we feel like we've taken full advantage of it. I think the first is coming back to that global experience that I talked about. So we're delivering this on 10 different with translating into 10 different languages, and that makes it easy for people to consume our key content around the world. We're truly delivering our content on time zones that are very appropriate, or our customers and our partners again, all around the world, in different Geos, we're bringing in our geo MVS where they are now having geo lounges, um, specific addresses and other things locally that really enables us to have that local experience. But derive it is making it part of a global event. I think another thing, Dave and you've been Teoh Discover. But you've seen that amazing Discover Expo Hall that we have out there with, you know, literally thousands of people and lots of demos. We had to figure out How do we bring that to a a ah, digital or a virtual experience? And I think the teams have done just an amazing job here. So what we did is we have 61 demos, and this is part of really 150 sessions. But if you just think of demos, we're going to deliver these live over 1717 100 times the first week. That's really, really powerful. This is >>live, meaning >>somebody from HP, a subject matter expert, talking to our customers, answering questions in real time. So that's unique. I think another thing that we're doing is we're not stopping after the first week. The first week is going to be extremely powerful and we can't wait for it. And but, you know, we're gonna extend, if you will, the value we're gonna double click and follow on Wave focused on SMB. Focus on software and containers for more of a developer, audience, Cloud services and other things like that, as well as data and storage. And then finally, I'll say, You know, we're really excited about the great speakers that we have Marissa >>talks >>about. You know, Antonio Qwerty, Irv etcetera. But we've got some great outside speakers as well. Lewis Hamilton from Mercedes Formula 16 time Formula One champion Simone Biles, uh, who's Olympian and world champion, 25 medals. We've got Steve Kerr and they're going to be part of a panel talking about performing under pressure, and we're all doing that. But it's gonna be again a great story we've got, um, John Chambers is going to be joining Antonio and talking about what great companies do during a crisis and how they prepare to come out of this kind of a situation to deliver better solutions to their customers. Soledad O Brien, who is moderating, are women leaders in I t session, and this is one of our most powerful sessions. In fact, Marissa is part of that as well. So we're really excited about this, the amount of things that we were able to bring together. And of course, we also have our CEO Summit and our Global Partner Summit happening at the same time. So we've got a lot of things that we've been able to coordinate all of this and really think about the experience from a digital in a virtual expect perspective to make it great for our customers and our partners and our attendees. A >>lot of rich content layers. Yeah. So what if you could talk about that here here to help Sort of the cultural aspects of that. What it means to your customers, your clients, your employees and your just broader community. >>Well, you know, Dave one when covert first hit the United States, we We had a lot of social media out there, a lot of digital media out there. And even before it came to the United States, when Italy and China were really suffering, we gathered as a team and audited every piece of content that we had pulled all back in. I met daily Jim and I and Jennifer temples. Teams met daily to talk about what is our tone of voice? What are we saying? How are we helping our customers get through? This time we knew how difficult it was for us with business continuity, remote workforce, we needed to help our customers and let them know that we were at the ready right now to help. So we chose to speak through the voices of our leaders. Antonio did several blocks and videos, and we rallied and redid the website completely to be all about over response and how we had many solutions for our cost. Most implement immediately from $2 billion financing Teoh setting up remote workforces, too, doing WiFi in parking lots and turning ships into hospitals. It ran the gamut, Um, and so it was really important to us that we conveyed a message of here to help. Ultimately, we ended up doing a television commercial. Antonio's voice. It was a personal letter from Antonio to his fellows, business leaders and engineers and said, Look, we know what you're going through. We're going through it ourselves. We're here to help. Here's how and it's been really motivating and successful and joy and driving people to find out more about what HP could do to help. So >>I would just add >>to what >>Murtha said. She outlined it really well. But we have some great customer examples and great customer stories as well. They're very emotional talking about how customers really needed our help and our combination of technology. People really came together to enable them to get their businesses up and running, or to address a pain point or problem for their audiences. The first point you know, there's the concept of here to help with the recovery and then here to help with the transformation as well as they look to the future. >>So how are you guys thinking about just sort of growth marketing strategies, branding strategies not only for HP but in the spirit of helping customers in this post isolation economy. Merson. Maybe you could start start us off. >>Well, we we've been talking about how this crisis has brought the future forward, nor our doorsteps. So where our customers may have been on a digital transformation path and they were accelerating it. Now there's there's an impetus to do it right now. So whether you're in recovery, um, or whether you're one of the customers for whom this crisis created a surge of demand and you needed to scale way up, these are the moments of transformation that our company is. Is there to help you with Jim? Do you want to build on that? >>Now? I think you hit the highlights there, Marissa, you know, again for us, I think we wanted to just be authentic and true to who we are as a company. And, you know, our purpose is to advance the way people live and work. And I think we live that during this time and will continue to live that as we go forward. It it's really core to who we are. And what we saw is that many of our customers really valued the fact that when they needed us the most, we were there for them and we were there for them all around the world. And, um, you know, and our goal is to continue to do that and continue to delight them and to be the best transformation partner for the future. >>I mean, culturally, we obviously re observe all this stuff, but culturally, you kind of be kind of had a heads down approach to all of this. I mean, there was there was not a hint of ambulance chasing in what you got. How you guys approach this. So I mean, I think I think culturally that here to help message it seemed like a very strong roots in citizenship. Um, you know, And then, of course, with social uprising, respect for individuals that seemed to shine through. I don't know. I know versus deliberate or that's just again cultural. Maybe >>it's it's all of the above. You can't change who you are and we need at Hewlett Packard Enterprise are people who care about other people our purpose. As Jim said, Our purpose is to advance the way people live in or every one of us every day gets up and goes to work or goes to work at home at HP to do just that. That is who we are. And so it would be an authentic for I think, true to this crisis in any other way. >>I think I wanna make an observation and see if you guys to respond. So we always talk about technology disruptions. Mercy you mentioned about, you know, the future was put forward. I'm sure you've seen the wrecking ball. You know, the folks in the building, the executives very complacent. A digital transformation not in my day. And in the 19 wrecking bald covert 19 survey, you probably saw that Who's who's leading your digital transformation CEO CTO or Covert 19. But it's really now. I mean, if you're not digital, you're not doing business. So but my observation is that it seems like despite all this technology that global disruptions are going to probably have a bigger impact in this coming decade, whether it's pandemics of social upheaval, of natural disasters, etcetera. But technology can play a huge role in supporting us through those things. Jim, I wonder if you have any thoughts on that comment. >>I mean, I think it's it's a great question, you know, if you think about it, What what happened with the macro economy Cove? It It's been a catalyst for, I think, everybody to understand that they needed to really accelerate their digital transformation. And, more importantly, they need a partner who can help them on that journey as well. I mean, if you just look at what we're talking about here >>with >>this event, right, most of h p e. And, um, you know, our >>competitors to >>cancel their virtual events >>are canceled their physical >>events rather, and they're moving now to a digital event in any way. This is going to be the new normal for us, right? So I think as we go >>forward, we're gonna >>see this only continue to accelerate. And for us, you know, our edge to cloud platform as a service strategy plays really well to helping customers accelerate that digital transformation. And, you know, it just kind of comes back to what Marissa said. You know, here to help is very very HP in terms of it's authentic and it's here. We want to be here to help our customers in their biggest hour of need. And we're doing everything we can and will continue to do that for the future as well. >>Versus, you know, having done many, many discovers we've noticed over the last several years you guys made a much bigger emphasis on the sort of post discover which a lot of organizations don't have a big physical event, and it's sort of on to the next thing. And how do you see the post from a branding standpoint? Messaging, etcetera. How do you see taking advantage of that from a virtual standpoint? And what have you learned? >>Well, we've been on our own digital transformation journey, and, you know, through Jim's leadership, we have built a pretty serious digital engine, which allows us to have a personal relationship with the customer, meet them where they are on their terms. For example, with this platform, it's even using your now because we we actually will know what content would see what sessions, what demos someone interested in. Maybe they put it, you know, on their schedule, and then didn't get to do it. So we'll go back to them later and say, Hey, we saw that you wanted to do this. It's still here. Why don't you come and have a look and then watch to that We do sort of the Netflix engine, the been newsworthy playlist of If you like that, you like this. And if you like this, you like that and we bring them through the breadcrumbs all the way through. And it's a self directed journey, but we're there to help. And that is really the true power of digital is to have that interaction, that conversation with the customer and where they want to be and with what they want to learn and read about. We'll see. >>Yeah, And everything, of course, is instrumented gym. We'll give you the last word and you were involved, as was Marissa in sort of the new HP. The new branding and the whole purpose of that was really to get Hewlett Packard enterprise focus and really back to sort of the roots of innovation. And I wonder if you could comment on from a strategy standpoint, innovation and from a competitive standpoint, you know where you're at over the last several years, we've obviously transformed as a company and where you see your competitive posture going forward. >>Yeah, you know, for us, um, we're so excited about this event because this is a great opportunity for us to showcase progress against our edge to cloud platform as a service strategy, and we roll this out last year. It's differentiated. It's unique in the marketplace. It demonstrates the transformation happening across as a service and software at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. So we are a company in transition, aligned to what we feel, our companies, our customers, biggest pain points. And when you look at some of the acquisitions that we've made some of the organic investments that we've done, we're just very well positioned to deliver against, you know, some very unique pain points that our customers have. Plus, I think another thing is, at the end of the day, really, what our customers are saying is, help me take all this data and translate that data into insight and that insight into action. You're going to hear us talk about the age of insight and how we're really again unifying across edge the cloud to deliver that for our customers. Stone. We're excited for this event because you're going to hear a significant industry revealed, focused around cloud services around software and really a lot of the things that we've been talking about. And we're going to show a lot of progress as we continue on that journey. And then, you know, Murtha mentioned digital. I'm really excited about digital because that enables us to understand and learn and help our customers and deliver a better experience for them. And then finally, you know, huge opportunity for us. Two. Take this message out globally, you know? Ah, great opportunity for people all around the world who maybe haven't heard from HP for a while to see our message, to feel the new energy to see who we are to see. Uh, you know that we're doing some very interesting things that we can help them. So we're excited. There's a lot of energy right now inside the company, and, uh, we're ready to kick it off and get rolling here. >>Well, it's quite amazing. I mean, we started off 2020 with the gut punch, but the reality is, is that 20 twenties? A lot different than 20 pens. If it weren't for technology and companies like HP here to help center, you know, we would not be in such such good shape and good in quotes. But think about it. The technology is really helping his power through this. So Jim Morrison, Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. Thank you, HB. Everything you're doing for customers in the community. Really? Thank >>you for having us. Thank you for having me. Good to see you. >>Great to see you guys to and keep it right there. Everybody, this is Dave Volante for the Cube. Our continuous coverage of hpe discover virtual experience in 2020. We're right back right after this short break. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.