(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of splunk.com 2021 virtual. We're here live in the Splunk studios. We're all here gettin all the action, all the stories. Garth Fort, senior vice president, Chief Product Officer at Splunk is here with me. CUBE alumni. Great to see you. Last time I saw you, we were at AWS now here at Splunk. Congratulations on the new role. >> Thank you. Great to see you again. >> Great keynote and great team. Congratulations. >> Thank you. Thank you. It's a lot of fun. >> So let's get into the keynote a little bit on the product. You're the Chief Product Officer. We interviewed Shawn Bice, who's also working with you as well. He's your boss. Talk about the, the next level, cause you're seeing some new enhancements. Let's get to the news first. Talk about the new enhancements. >> Yeah, this was actually a really fun keynote for me. So I think there was a lot of great stuff that came out of the rest of it. But I had the honor to actually showcase a lot of the product innovation, you know, since we did .conf last year, we've actually closed four different acquisitions. We shipped 43 major releases and we've done hundreds of small enhancements, like we're shipping code in the cloud every six weeks and we're shipping new versions twice a year for our Splunk Enterprise customers. And so this was kind of like if you've seen that movie Sophie's Choice, you know, where you have to pick one of your children, like this was a really hard, hard thing to pick. Cause we only had about 25 minutes, but we did like four demos that I think landed really well. The first was what we call ingest actions and you know, there's customers that are using, they start small with gigabytes and they go to terabytes and up to petabytes of data per day. And so they wanted tools that allow them to kind of modify filter and then route data to different sort of parts of their infrastructure. So that was the first demo. We did another demo on our, our visual playbook editor for SOAR, which has improved quite a bit. You know, a lot of the analysts that are in the, in the, in the SOC trying to figure out how to automate responses and reduce sort of time to resolution, like they're not Python experts. And so having a visual playbook editor that lets them drag and drop and sort of with a few simple gestures create complex playbooks was pretty cool. We showed some new capabilities in our APM tool. Last year, we announced we acquired a company called Plumbr, which has expertise in basically like code level analysis and, and we're calling it "Always On" profiling. So we, we did that demo and gosh, we did one more, four, but four total demos. I think, you know, people were really happy to see, you know, the thing that we really tried to do was ground all of our sort of like tech talk and stuff that was like real and today, like this is not some futuristic vision. I mean, Shawn did lay out some, some great visions, visionary kind of pillars. But, what we showed in the keynote was I it's all shipping code. >> I mean, there's plenty of head room in this market when it comes to data as value and data in motion, all these things. But we were talking before you came on camera earlier in the morning about actually how good Splunk product and broad and deep the product portfolio as well. >> Garth: Yeah. >> I mean, it's, I mean, it's not a utility and a tooling, it's a platform with tools and utilities. >> Garth: Yeah >> It's a fully blown out platform. >> Yeah. Yeah. It is a platform and, and, you know, it's, it's one that's quite interesting. I've had the pleasure to meet a couple of big customers and it's kind of amazing, like what they do with Splunk. Like I was meeting with a large telco on the east coast and you know, they actually, for their set top boxes, they actually have to figure out in real time, which ads to display and the only tool they could find to process 15 million events in real time, to decide what ad to display, was Splunk. So that was, that was like really cool to hear. Like we never set out to be like an ad tech kind of platform and yet we're the only tool that operates at that level of scale and that kind of data. >> You know, it's funny, Doug Merritt mentioned this in my interview with him earlier today about, you know, and he wasn't shy about it, which was great. He was like, we're an enabling platform. We don't have to be experts in all these vertical industries >> Garth: Yep >> because AI takes care of that. That's where the machine learning >> Garth: Yeah >> and the applications get built. So others are trying to build fully vertically integrated stacks into these verticals when in reality they don't have to, if they don't want it. >> Yeah, and Splunk's kind of, it's quite interesting when you look across our top 100 customers, you know, Doug talks about like the, you know, 92 of the fortune 100 are kind of using Splunk today, but the diversity across industries and, you know, we have government agencies, we have, you know, you name the retail or the vertical, you know, we've got really big customers, they're using Splunk. And the other thing that I kind of, I was excited about, we announced the last demo I forgot was TruSTAR integration with Enterprise Security. That's pretty cool. We're calling that Splunk Threat Intelligence. And so That was really fun and we only acquired, we closed the acquisition to TruSTAR in May, but the good news is they've been a partner with us like for 18 months before we actually bought em. And so they'd already done a lot of the work to integrate. And so they had a running start in that regard, But other, one other one that was kind of a, it was a small thing. I didn't get to demo it, but we talked about the, the content pack for application performance monitoring. And so, you know, in some ways we compete in the APM level, but in many ways there's a ton of great APM vendors out there that customers are using. But what they wanted us to do was like, hey, if I'm using APM for that one app, I still want to get data out of that and into Splunk because Splunk ends up being like the core repository for observability, security, IT ops, Dev Sec Ops, et cetera. It's kind of like where the truth, the operational truth of how your systems works, lives in Splunk. >> It's so funny. The Splunk business model has actually been replicated. They call it data lake, whatever you want to call it. People are bringing up all these different metaphors. But at the end of the day, if you guys can create a value proposition where you can have data just be, you know, stored and dumped and dumped into whatever they call it stored in a way >> Garth: We call it ingest >> Ingested, ingested. >> Garth: Not dumped. >> Data dump. >> Garth: It's ingested. >> Well, I mean, well you given me a plan, but you don't have to do a lot of work to store just, okay, we can only get to it later, >> Garth: Yep. >> But let the machines take over >> Garth: Yep. >> With the machine learning. I totally get that. Now, as a pro, as a product leader, I have to ask you your, your mindset around optimization. What do you optimize for? Because a lot of times these use cases are emerging. They just pop out of nowhere. It's a net new use case that you want to operationalize. So balancing the headroom >> Yep. >> Or not to foreclose those new opportunities for customers. How are customers deciding what's important to them? How do you, because you're trying to read the tea leaves for the future >> Garth: A little bit, yeah. >> and then go, okay, what do our customers need, but you don't want to foreclose anything. How do you think about product strategy around that? >> There's a ton of opportunity to interact with customers. We have this thing called the Customer Advisory Board. We run, I think, four of them and we run a monthly. And so we got an opportunity to kind of get that anecdotal data and the direct contact. We also have a portal called ideas.splunk.com where customers can come tell us what they want us to build next. And we look at that every month, you know, and there's no way that we could ever build everything that they're asking us to, but we look at that monthly and we use it in sort of our sprint planning to decide where we're going to prioritize engineering resources. And it's just, it's kind of like customers say the darndest things, right? Sometimes they ask us for stuff and we never imagined building it in a million years, >> John: Yeah. >> Like that use case around ads on the set top box, but it's, it's kind of a fun place to be like, we, we just, before this event, we kind of laid out internally what, you know, Shawn and I kind of put together this doc, actually Shawn wrote the bulk of it, but it was about sort of what do we think? Where, where can we take Splunk to the next three to five years? And we talked about these, we referred to them as waves of innovation. Cause you know, like when you think about waves, there's multiple waves that are heading towards the beach >> John: Yeah. >> in parallel, right? It's not like a series of phases that are going to be serialized. It's about making a set of investments. that'll kind of land over time. And, and the first wave is really about, you know, what I would say is sort of, you know, really delivering on the promise of Splunk and some of that's around integration, single sign-on things about like making all of the Splunk Splunk products work together more easily. We've talked a lot in the Q and a about like edge and hybrid. And that's really where our customers are. If you watch the Koby Avital's sort of customer keynote, you know, Walmart by necessity, given their geographic breadth and the customers they serve has to have their own infrastructure. They use Google, they use Azure and they have this abstraction layer that Koby's team has built on top. And they use Splunk to manage kind of, operate basically all of their infrastructure across those three clouds. So that's the hybrid edge scenario. We were thinking a lot about, you mentioned data lakes. You know, if you go back to 2002, when Splunk was founded, you know, the thing we were trying to do is help people make sense of log files. But now if you talk to customers that are moving to cloud, everybody's building a data lake and there's like billions of objects flowing into millions of these S3 buckets all over the place. And we're kind of trying to think about, hey, is there an opportunity for us to point our indexing and analytics capability against structured and unstructured data and those data lakes. So that that'll be something we're going to >> Yeah. >> at least start prototyping pretty soon. And then lastly, machine learning, you know, I'd say, you know, to use a baseball metaphor, like in terms of like how we apply machine learning, we're like in the bottom of the second inning, >> Yeah. >> you know, we've been doing it for a number of years, but there's so much more. >> There's so, I mean, machine learning is only as good as the data you put into the machine learning. >> Exactly, exactly. >> And so if you have, if you have gap in the data, the machine learning is going to have gaps in it. >> Yeah. And we have, we announced a feature today called auto detect. And I won't go into the gory details, but effectively what it does is it runs a real-time analytics job over whatever metrics you want to look at and you can do what I would consider more statistics versus machine learning. You can say, hey, if in a 10 minute period, like, you know, we see more errors than we see on average over the last week, throw an alert so I can go investigate and take a look. Imagine if you didn't have to figure out what the right thresholds were, if we could just watch those metrics for you and automatically understand the seasonality, the timing, is it a weekly thing? Is it a monthly thing? And then like tell you like use machine learning to do the anomaly detection, but do it in a way that's more intelligent than just the static threshold. >> Yeah. >> And so I think you'll see things like auto detect, which we announced this week will evolve to take advantage of machine learning kind of under the covers, if you will. >> Yeah. It was interesting with cloud scale and the data velocity, automations become super important. >> Oh yeah. >> You don't have a lot of new disciplines emerge, like explainable AI is hot right now. So you got, the puck is coming. You can see where the puck is going. >> Yeah >> And that is automation at the app edge or the application layer where the data has got to be free-flowing or addressable. >> Garth: Yeah. >> This is something that is being talked about. And we talked about data divide with, with Chris earlier about the policy side of things. And now data is part of everything. It's part of the apps. >> Garth: Yeah. >> It's not just stored stuff. So it's always in flight. It should be addressable. This is what people want. What do you think about all of that? >> No, I think it's great. I actually just can I, I'll quote from Steve Schmidt in, in sort of the keynote, he said, look like security at the end of the day is a human problem, but it kind of manifests itself through data. And so being able to understand what's happening in the data will tell you, like, is there a bad actor, like wreaking havoc inside of my systems? And like, you can use that, the data trail if you will, of the bad actor to chase them down and sort of isolate em. >> The digital footprints, if you will, looking at a trail. >> Yeah. >> All right, what's the coolest thing that you like right now, when you look at the treasure trove of, of a value, as you look at it, and this is a range of value, Splunk, Splunk has had customers come in with, with the early product, but they keep the customers and they always do new things and they operationalize it >> Garth: Yep. >> and another new thing comes, they operationalize it. What's the next new thing that's coming, that's the next big thing. >> Dude that is like asking me which one of my daughters do I love the most, like that is so unfair. (laughing) I'm not going to answer that one. Next question please. >> Okay. All right. Okay. What's your goals for the next year or two? >> Yeah, so I just kind of finished roughly my first 100 days and it's been great to, you know, I had a whole plan, 30, 60, 90, and I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to do. Like I'm really hoping, sort of, we get past this current kind of COVID scare and we get to back to normal. Cause I'm really looking forward to getting back on the road and sort of meeting with customers, you know, you can meet over Zoom and that's great, but what I've learned over time, you know, I used to go, I'd fly to Wichita, Kansas and actually go sit down with the operators like at their desk and watch how they use my tools. And that actually teaches you. Like you, you come up with things when you see, you know, your product in the hands of your customer, that you don't get from like a CAB meeting or from a Zoom call, you know? >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> And so being able to visit customers where they live, where they work and kind of like understand what we can do to make their lives better. Like that's going to, I'm actually really excited to gettin back to travel. >> If you could give advice to CTO, CISO, or CIO or a practitioner out there who are, who is who's sitting at their virtual desk or their physical desk thinking, okay, the pandemic, were coming through the pandemic. I want to come out with a growth strategy, with a plan that's going to be expansive, not restrictive. The pandemic has shown what's what works, what doesn't work. >> Garth: Sure. >> So it's going to be some projects that might not get renewed, but there's doubling down on, certainly with cloud scale. What would advice would you give that person when they start thinking about, okay, I got to get my architecture right. >> Yeah. >> I got to get my playbooks in place. I got to get my people aligned. >> Yeah >> What's what do you see as a best practice for kind of the mindset to actual implementation of data, managing the data? >> Yeah, and again, I'm, I'm, this is not an original Garth thought. It actually came from one of our customers. You know, the, I think we all, like you think back to March and April of 2020 as this thing was really getting real. Everybody moved as fast as they could to either scale up or scale scaled on operations. If you were in travel and hospitality, you know, that was, you know, you had to figure how to scale down quickly and like what you could shut down safely. If you were like in the food delivery business, you had to figure out how you could scale up, like Chipotle hit two, what is it? $2 billion run rate on delivery last year. And so people scrambled as fast as they could to sort of adapt to this new world. And I think we're all coming to the realization that as we sort of exit and get back to some sense of new normal, there's a lot of what we're doing today that's going to persist. Like, I think we're going to have like flexible rules. I don't think everybody's going to want to come back into the office. And so I think, I think the thing to do is you think about returning to whatever this new normal looks like is like, what did we learn that was good. And like the pandemic had a silver lining for folks in many ways. And it sucked for a lot. I'm not saying it was a good thing, but you know, there were things that we did to adapt that I think actually made like the workplace, like stronger and better. And, and sort of. >> It showed that data's important, internet is important. Didn't break, the internet didn't break. >> Garth: Correct. >> Zoom was amazing. And the teleconferencing with other tools. >> But that's kind of, just to sort of like, what did you learn over the last 18 months that you're going to take for it into the next 18 years? You know what I mean? Cause there was a lot of good and I think people were creative and they figured out like how to adapt super quickly and take the best of the pandemic and turn it into like a better place to work. >> Hybrid, hybrid events, hybrid workforce, hybrid workflows. What's what's your vision on Splunk as a tier one enterprise? Because a lot of the news that I'm seeing that's, that's the tell sign to me in terms of this next growth wave is big SI deals, Accenture and others are yours working with and you still got the other Partnerverse going. You have the ecosystems emerging. >> Garth: Yep. >> That's a good, that means your product's enabling people to make money. >> Garth: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> And that's a good thing. >> Yeah, BlueVoyant was a great example in the keynote yesterday and they, you know, they've really, they've kind of figured out how, you know, most of their customers, they serve customers in heavily regulated industries kind of, and you know, those customers actually want their data in a Splunk tenant that they own and control and they want to have that secure boundary around that. But BlueVoyant's figured out how they can come in and say, hey, I'm going to take care of the heavy lifting of the day-to-day operations, the monitoring of that environment with the security. So, so BlueVoyant has done a great job sort of pivoting and figuring out how they can add value to customers and do, you know, because they they're managing not just one Splunk instance, but they're managing 100s of Splunk cloud instances. And so they've got best practices and automation that they can play across their entire client base. And I think you're going to see a lot more of that. And, and Teresa's just, Teresa is just, she loves Partners, absolutely loves Partners. And that was just obvious. You could, you could hear it in her voice. You could see it in her body language, you know, when she talked about Partnerverse. So I think you'll see us start to really get a lot more serious. Cause as big as Splunk is like our pro serve and support teams are not going to scale for the next 10,000, 100,000 Splunk customers. And we really need to like really think about how we use Partners. >> There's a real growth wave. And I, and I love the multiples wave in parallel because I think that's what everyone's consensus on. So I have to ask you as a final question, what's your takeaway? Obviously, there's been a virtual studio here where all the Splunk executives and, and, and customers and partners are here. TheCUBE's here doing all the presentations, live by the way. It was awesome. What would you say the takeaway is for this .conf, for the people watching and consuming all the content online? A lot of asynchronous consumption would be happening. >> Sure. >> What's your takeaway from this year's Splunk .conf? >> You know, I, it's hard cause you know, you get so close to it and we've rehearsed this thing so many times, you know, the feedback that I got and if you look at Twitter and you look at my Slack and everything else, like this felt like a conf that was like kind of like a really genuine, almost like a Splunk two dot O. But it's sort of true to the roots of what Splunk was true to the product reality. I mean, you know, I was really careful with my team and to avoid any whiff of vaporware, like what were, what we wanted to show was like, look, this is Splunk, we're acquiring companies, you know, 43 major releases, you know, 100s of small ones. Like we're continuing to innovate on your behalf as fast as we can. And hopefully this is the last virtual conf. But even when we go back, like there was so much good about the way we did this this week, that, you know, when we, when we broke yesterday on the keynote and we were sitting around with the crew and it kind of looking at that stage and everything, we were like, wow, there is a lot of this that we want to bring to an in-person event as well. Cause so for those that want to travel and come sit in the room with us, we're super excited to do that as soon as we can. But, but then, you know, there may be 25, 50, 100,000 that don't want to travel, but can access us via this virtual event. >> It's like a time. It's a moment in time that becomes a timeless moment. That could be, >> Wow, did you make that up right now? >> that could be an NFT. >> Yeah >> We can make a global cryptocurrency. Garth, great to see you. Of course I made it up right then. So, great to see you. >> Air bump, air bump? Okay, good. >> Okay. Garth Fort, senior vice president, Chief Product Officer. In theCUBE here, we're live on site at Splunk Studio for the .conf virtual event. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. >> All right. Thank you guys. (upbeat music)

>> live from London, England. It's the queue covering a ws summat. London twenty nineteen Brought to you by Amazon Web services >> Hello and welcome to the Age Ws Summit live from London's Excel Center. I'm Susanna Street, and this is my co host on the Cube Day Volonte on. There are lots of breakout sessions taking place right across this venue. One of them all about Bring Thio life, the eight of us marketplace and really helping people, companies and stand cow to make that journey to the cloud. And my two guests here right now have been at that session trying to communicate that toe many delegates who were there here Mobile, who's from Computer Center. He is the public cloud lead for the UK and Ireland, and Garforth, who's a director off a ws marketplace. Thank you very much for joining us >> to be here >> Now there are riel complexities are their way. Just helping people navigate their way through. Tell me that a bit more about how marketplace has evolved because it's being rapid. Hasn't >> it? Has been rapid. We launched a CZ initial service in two thousand twelve, so we just had our seventh birthday last year. We started with pretty modest aspirations, and it was all about helping developers take advantage of the sea to and be able to take advantage of. A bus. Service is available at the time. So it was a cattle about two hundred fifty mostly open source applications that developers could sort of find, explore, discover and provisions straight from the council where they were doing their work. Overtime. We've added support for a lot of new product type, so we support SAS applications. All right, reinvent Last year, we announce support for Dr in being able to take Dr Images and deploy those into stage maker. We're talking about that earlier. Also support for containers. And so his customers are moving to more of a survivalist type architecture. We have already made set of container images that they could deploy directly into the S E. K s or far gate. I'd say one of more interesting sort of inflection point in our evolution was when people started buying real stuff for real money because I think when we got started serving the developers, I kind of think of that is kind of a Lamborghini kind of crowd. That's a customer, by the way, but, uh, Lamborghini guys just, you know, developers want to go as fast as they possibly can. They don't really care for speed limits, you know, they just want to get the job done as quick as they can. Um, we had an example, for example, our first million dollar transaction. Wait, We're surprised to see it. We woke up on Monday and we saw a million dollar transaction. So I told my finance team not to get too excited. I went to the customer and I said, Was this a mistake or did you intend >> to do >> that? And the developer team said No, that was the best software sale ever because I didn't have to talk to anybody. >> I couldn't make money while you sleep isn't absolutely, but they were >> able to. Basically, they didn't have to go through a lengthy process of procurement and legal reviews and everything else. They literally were able to subscribe to the product and get it deployed within seconds, and the estimated that it took about three months off of their engineering cycle was being able to go that fast. But >> the interesting thing on >> million dollar transactions is, there's a lot of other people that care about that. So I got a letter about eight weeks later from their corporate headquarters in New York. It said that Development team was not >> really authorized to spend that much money on that product, >> and so that is what I call the Volvo crowd. And there are big parts of our customer that are very, very interested in safety and airbags and collision avoidance and all that other fun stuff. And so what Marketplace has been really innovating on in the last couple of years is finding a way to modernize how companies buy and deploy softer in the cloud. Do that at speed. But do it in a way that's compliant with whatever regulations governing the things. >> So do it speed but variable speed, >> variable speed and just, you know, a lot of our customers in the public sector or in health care financial services. They're heavily regulated on on their own, and they have a certain way they need to do things. And so we've been building features like the private marketplace which we just launched actually allows the customer to go in and reason over our catalog We've got forty eight hundred listings in our catalog, fourteen hundred different vendors and they can decide on their own. Which one of those air fruit for use or not, >> because it's very hard to meet the procurement demands of various of public sector organization because they're so >> they are very diverse. But that's also one of the reasons, like I'm excited too heavy in here. We've been working for the last couple of years to figure out how we can more effectively work with partners to sort of serve our joint customers. So he and what's your story? How >> do you fit what? It's a good question. So I think Computer Center entered into the fray with eight of us, sort of circa reinvent twenty seventeen. So just a time where Marketplace was launching two partners, I guess in the mainstream on on, we looked at what the offering in partnership with these guys and what it would mean to our customers, and that was kind of very customer letters and organization if you know anything about us. Customers were asking for different ways to potentially by traditional software packages as they moved into the Ws Cloud, and they were moving at scale and that velocity that we talk about and it was about well, is this a product or a mechanism that can help them streamline? Can they simplify on the way? Can they cut some of that complexity on that journey? We see that very much as a Roald. Help them achieve that. This seems like a really good mechanism, so we fast forward through twenty eighteen. We do some great deals together, those sort of way talk about on way. See that this is becoming more mainstream for customers. Is their landing in a ws in the cloud and thinking about different ways? Different software titles challenging Do We Need to Do Things is normal, or should we do things a different way? What about this dynamic that we were just talking about? That garden was just saying about the procurement folk, the >> Volvo crowd versus the Lamborghini Cross You what do you have developed a workflow approval process that it worked? Yeah, well, unpack it a little bit, the the private marketplace allows, and every customer is a little bit different. Sometimes it's the chief security officer who kind of makes the final decision. Sometimes it's procurement. Sometimes the legal team has specific move constraints on what they what. They want to prove that not I really haven't found two customers that are identical in terms of how they're worked over an l O B manager. Correct CFO. I mean, you're right, lots of different roles. So we effectively, we did some surgery on the underlying service to create a new I am role. And so if Ian is the administrator for his organization, regardless of role, he's given permission to go approve and disapprove products. And some customers are kind of in a white list load, which is basically you can use, uh, only the things that I wait listed. So everything's forbidden until I've explicitly approved it. Other companies, like a lot of smaller companies that may not have that much process. We're more of a blacklist mode. We're sort of like everything in the marketplace is fair game, except the ones I've specifically said not to use on DH. So we just created this really flexible infrastructure that lets customers customize the marketplace to their needs. So you give superpowers to some admin and then the white list black blacklist, depending on what it is. And then it becomes frictionless. It becomes frictionless, and then the user experience the customer can actually have their own logo. They can put their own language around, kind of how they wantto sort of represent that to the developers. And then every developer in their organization then sees that experience and they can see what's been approved in what hasn't. OK, so you get a private label through the channel. Yeah, so that I, as a consumer see whatever brand that your customer yet need to see exactly. And then we've also got a facility because, you know, with over forty eight hundred listings in the marketplace, fourteen hundred different vendors, you know, nobody's got time to go reason over every single item, and we're adding hundreds every year, so that keeps growing. And so we've got a facility. If the developer has a specific technology that they really require, we've got a little simple work flow so developed could say, I need this widget to build this thing, and then we kick it off to the admin who could approve it. And as we were talking about for our video closet, you gonna have precise understanding of the pricing. You know this one hundred percent clarity. And then once you have that on you, Khun, split the pie hole, then you can split up and we did. But like one of the foundational technologies that we launched, twenty seventeen was this notion of a private offer. And so if I want to make a private offer to Ian at a price that he and I have negotiated on legal terms that he and I have agreed to, I can do that through marketplace. And then what with the way that would work in a large organization is once somebody's subscribes Once to that price, everybody in the organization that used that product is using it at the agreed price. OK, right. And then we extended that to enable Channel partners now. So for the ice fees that included center works with now, he's now able to go create private offers for his custom. So what, you're essentially created a two sided >> marketplace that effect? Yeah, I think the interface between the two organizations is really important. It becomes that sort of tripartite with the ice V, putting the customer right in the center. I think that's the signage is that we seem to organizations. >> Do you really see what your input has bean there items that are listed as well. Did you get that >> for, like, selection? >> Yeah, yeah, that that like, you know, >> saying it's pretty customer focused, you know, we work with customers we have. We have a set of people around the world that do what we call category management, and they theirjob is to work with customers and make sure that we're stocking the right inventory on the shelves, so to speak. So we get that input like every day, >> and then that helps you develop you new products, >> New continent, new products. And that's >> ahead of the competition. >> Wei. Try to think more about like, let's focus on our customers. Wei don't spend a lot of time chasing tail lights, but very customer obsessed. What things always >> interested me about the marketplaces. It's so complex in terms of region's >> tax laws, pricing considerations on and on and on so many permutations. You talk a little bit about how you've >> succeeded in just essentially making that all transparent and what what's behind that? >> Um well, I think you know Amazon >> and eight of us like we operate within the legal frameworks and all the countries where we operate in. So we have our own requirements in terms of how we remit and collect tax in countries compliant with local laws. Right. So we had to do that just to operate a to B S right way were able to leverage a lot of the same plumbing we had to build for ourselves and effectively make that available to our lives. So we have, like, there's a small eyes. We actually they've grown to be quite big. But here in the UK is a company called Matile Ian, who uses us exclusively a cz, their cloud channel. Um and we take him the HBS available eighteen regions marketplace on, and then everywhere we need to we will remit and collect tax on his behalf and then give him reports that he could share with his auditor to ensure compliance with local laws. And so we do a lot of that stuff. He's a small firm, you know, and for us to be able to sort of, like, extract and abstract all that complexity from him and just give him a nice monthly report that shows him all the taxes we can on his behalf. That's a big service right >> now. How's it transform your business? >> So I say transforming rather than transformed because it's a continuum thing all the time. I think it's absolutely that a different way of procurement is, firstly, the thing that customers are asking for. So it's just one cog in the wheel for a ws that customs picking up on. I think the point that golf is very well glossing over is that between us, we're doing the heavy lifting on behalf of the customer. I think that's today's point thing. That's that's the whole point here, where that we've all got a part to play in the ecosystem and it's it's all about customer experience. That's most important. I think what we're seeing is repeat customers come back. Actually, that's the biggest from if I look up from the start of twenty eighteen to the end, it was the repeat visits, so you get you know, the one million pound or dollar deal customer coming back twice or three times in the year to do the same thing again, >> but have any being put off by this new >> approach, but I haven't seen that so genuine. It hasn't appeared so far, so there's some education. Of course, that has to happen because it's different. It's not the norm. If you think about enterprise customers, they've been buying up a particular mode for twenty or thirty years or longer, a CZ we joke about. So this is just an education process that let them know what on how on then, what's there on the bandwagon? It kind of becomes that streamline process. >> Yeah, ad I'd build on top again. Sport like you kind of think about the way way >> customers thought about procuring infrastructure before eight of us existed, like back in way. But in the way big back of two thousand five, like buying hardware in storage and networking gear was crazy, hard and very difficult and long and laborious. And your racket and stacking everything else. And then a dubious comes along with services like Three and Easy to know what it makes provisioning access, the hard work. It's seconds, you know, not months of procurement, and in a way, we're kind of software is now catching up, and in a way, what marketplace is trying to do is to revolutionize the way people acquire software for the cloud in the same way that eight of us to infrastructure well, and you're creating a to be a consumer dynamic, not unlike my Amazon retail, where there's trust, simplicity, comfort levels on DH. You know, you even don't tell Jeff. I'Ll pay a little bit more from, you know, Amazon website cause I trust it. Yeah, you know, not too much, right? And you guys have to stay price competitive. Absolutely so. But that to me, is that it's that consumer like experience that you're obviously it is more complex but somewhat creating that way looked, we look to retail for all sorts of cool inspiration. You know, on the retail side, they have a retail marketplace, which is huge and thriving business with millions of merchants. And so we're constantly comparing notes and saying, like one of the things that you're doing for your merchants and are the things that can inspire us on our side kind of follow suit. I will note that you know, I when I get in front of customers I like to do, I'd like to show our user experience we have a pretty website and all that other good stuff. The vast majority of customers actually interfaced with us through command line and automation tools and all that other stuff. So retail analogy gets me so developers, >> thank >> you very much for it's really great to have you here, Director A ws marketplace and here mobile. As you say, >> we're in the midst of this transformation. It's really great to hear your story. So thank you very much for two years here >> on the Cube, on the aid everywhere summits in London That's all from us for now.