>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS reinvent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, live here in Las Vegas, this is theCUBE exclusive coverage, but still going to angle media, I'm John Furrier the founder, still going to hang out with Keith Towson, my cohost this week, our next guest, Chris Jordan the chief CEO of IOLAP, online transaction processing for all database geeks out there, Chris welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So you guys were part of the team that worked with Amazon on Alexa for business, which believe me, rushing into the market is an understatement. They needed to get this into the market. >> Chris: Sure, absolutely. >> Alexa is the most popular lightning in a bottle. When we saw her come out, we were like, this is going to be awesome. Of course we've got some new cool stuff with the wireless cameras, and amazing set of services. But, in the industry track on Tuesday, the number one repeat session, 'cause that's kind of an indicator, people want more demand was Alexa, anything to do with Alexa. Voice is hot, so tell us about your role with Alexa for business, how did you guys get involved? How far along were you with Amazon before they launched it? Tell us about your relationship with Amazon. >> Right so our relationship with Amazon really started with when they launched red shift five years ago, right. We're a traditional analytics big data, data warehousing type company, and when red shift came out it became really compelling to us. We were already interested in Amazon, or AWS prior to that, got real interested with red shift. Two years ago when Alexa came out, we started playing with it, immediately put it in our innovation lab, and started trying to figure out how can we use this in an enterprise setting? How can we get it into the business place and make use of it? And we almost immediately started working with a couple of our customers one of whom, who was one of the launch partners today in the keynote, with looking at what we can build, and how we can use Alexa in that environment, and what we found was a lot of roadblocks. Alexa was a, Echos and Dots, is a consumer product, right. And it really wasn't right for the enterprise, and so we started building out components that help us get to the enterprise. Ten months ago we started working with the Alexa for business team, and worked real closely with them. When they made the keynote announcement this morning, there was I think eight launch partners that are listed on the website today, one of which we are. We feel like we have a pretty different approach to where we want to use Alexa in the enterprise. >> Alright, so voice is hard. I mean Alexa is great, in fact my wife actually moved Alexa from the kitchen into my room because she thinks Alexa is listening to her. So, some security issues there. But Alexa is great, you talk get some impact. But in the rating of the databases, and normal enterprise stuff is hard. Look at voiceover IP, look how hard that was to jam into an enterprise. So I mean, that's. >> The number one channel is the first thing we bumped into was user authentication if you've got an Alexa device sitting in a room, anybody that comes in and asks a question is going to get the answer if it's built to do it. You can't have that in an enterprise setting. So we had to come up with an authentication method, some active directory integration or something like that, and that was well the first component that we built, and integrated into our platform. That allows us to understand and enable access control and. >> Alright, so let's go down and look at where the challenges were with Alexa for business that they had to overcome, and ones that got a knock down going forward. Either directly through AWS or through Ecosystem Partners. Go ahead. >> Well the first challenge was device management, and that's the biggest thing that they solved with Alexa for businesses. If I'm a company that wants to roll out a hundred devices across the organization, or a thousand devices in hotel rooms or something like that. How do I manage that? How do I deploy it? How do I sign the users and all that? Alexa for business solved that today. >> So let's go down this MDM path a little bit. Alexa is not just a service that runs on a Dot, or an Echo. There are screen use cases for it. I personally don't like just talking to a hailless unit. What are some of the other MDM integration points, not Android, Apple, iOS applications, hailless devices, just apps as a use case for (mumbles). >> Yeah definitely, so the services that are already built, and actually there were actually announced last year at reinvent here Lex and Poly, with those we can build applications that were interacting on our phone either via voice through text with a chat bot like interface but we can also do a display so we can be showing results while we are asking and getting a response. Show results on a screen, either on a device like an echo show, or on a television with a fire stick plugged in it, or on a computer screen with a URL launch. >> So, I'm really interested in this, what John likes to call the white space of Amazon. They get involved in so many areas, good point is authentication. Eventually, Amazon is going to figure that out. So where are the white spaces, and where echo system partners can safely invest, add value to customers and Amazon, but at the same time stay in business? >> What we're doing is taking our years of domain experience, and innovating with our clients to come up with personas and use cases, and really develop those voice applications if you will. That become a almost like another interface into all of the enterprise systems that they've already built. And for us, we think that's what ultimately the business will be. Our platform is great and it solves some problems that aren't necessarily solved already, but I don't think there's anything that stops AWS from solving those problems themselves, in fact I would expect them to over time. >> Well they want The Ecosystem to step up. Eddie Jazzy told me when I had my meeting with him one on one last week prior the conference. I asked him straight up, I go, you know people might be afraid that you're going to roll over these awesome opportunities. And he said look our customers want us to do certain things like monitoring, but new relic is kicking ass, Mongo DB on the database side. So he wants to create, they want to create an environment for partners to thrive, no doubt about it. So you know even though that they might take over it all anyway at some point. But what is the opportunity for partners? 'Cause you guys are first in kind of jumping in the water with Amazon. This is going to be a massively intoxicating area for developers because it's voice. And if they can turn around these API's, I mean the innovation is spectacular. >> Yeah I think it's wide open to build out kind of prebuilt solutions, we've got five already that we think are interesting in the enterprise. At the very least it's a great conversation starter to have a KPI concierge for a CFO. And we've got prebuilt sort of garden path of questions and answers that we can guide the CFO down, and build out his group of KPI's, and that's a repeatable solution. We definitely think there's that solution type problem. The platform we think we've built some unique things there, to be able to integrate the visual assistant part of it, and I think. >> Well, you guys get to leverage your tech in a way that can be put into a new flywheel if you will, but Keith this is what we were talking about earlier. I want to ask Chris the question, because this is the real question. What would be the alternative without Amazon to roll in and roll out kiosks, buy a PC, full stack engineering, QA, I mean it would be ridiculous the cost would be, now you can just walk down and knock down potentially anything with an iPad. >> Right, we. >> You stick an iPad on, you got a kiosk. >> We had our first proof of concept up and running within three weeks, or three months I'm sorry. And we couldn't have done that if it wasn't for all of the platform and service that AWS had already built. >> Huge opportunity, not for startups, but for existing companies. Alright, so what's your advice for folks to end the segment here out there, you guys are on it. You're taking you're intellectual property, wrapping around Alexa, or Alexa is wrapping around you however it works. What's your advice to folks who want to jump in on this bandwagon? >> First thing is to jump in and start playing with voice, and see how it changes the way you interact with your systems. We discovered our customers jumped in, and we thought, there were things that way, they're like can we do this, can we do that? That we never thought of until we just jumped in and started doing it, so jump in. >> Alright, share one thing that people might not know about Alexa for business something that's part of your experience working with AWS on this early program. Share some color, a funny story, something anecdotal, something maybe crazy. Did Verde wear that t-shirt Seattle shirt every day? >> Well, definitely one of the it's not exactly an Alexa for business story, but the thing that really led me to need some form of authentication is when I first put my Echo at home, my children were playing with it, and within ten minutes had ordered a book on a hundred different ways to cook ramen noodles. And so I thought, I don't need them to be able to buy everything they can without me authenticating that somehow, and we need to get some authentication on this device. >> Exactly, all the crazy stuff that comes out. >> Yeah. >> Alright, Chris thanks for coming on. Congratulations on your success of your business. IOLAP, IOLAP, where you guys based out of? >> We're headquartered in Dallas, Texas area, Frisco. >> John: Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Alright, Alexa for business, hot topic. Let me see, probably a tsunami of integration going on. Again, this could move the needle big time, game changer. Hopefully create great apps. theCUBE, live coverage, day three here at reinvent, more coverage here after this short break. (upbeat music)