>>Oh, welcome back to the Cube here at aws Reinvent 22. As we continue our coverage here, the AWS Global Showcase, the Startup Showcase, John Wall is here hosting for the Cube as we've been here all week. Hope you're enjoying our coverage here. This is day three, by the way. We're wrapping it up shortly with us to talk about what's going on in the, kind of the hotel world in it and what's going on in the cloud, especially at I hg is Eric Norman, head of infrastructure, architecture, and innovation at I H G Hotels and Resorts. Eric, good to see you, >>Sir. Oh, thank you. And thank you for inviting me. Yeah, >>You bet. Glad to have you board here on the queue. First time, I think too, by the way, right? >>It is. And can I just tell you who IHG is >>Real quick? Yeah, wait a second. First I want another rest. I got Introduc to Rod Stuller, who is the Vice president and of Solutions marketing at Aviatrix and Rod. Good to see you, sir. Thanks a lot. Now let's talk about I ih. >>Great. Well, IHGs a a hospitality company, it's been around for 200 years, that has 17 brands globally in over a hundred countries. We sleek, you know, up could up to 888,000 people a night. So it's a pretty large company that we compete with, you know, all the hotel companies globally. >>So let's talk about your, your footprint right now in, in terms of what your needs are, because you've mentioned obviously a lot of, you have a lot of customers needs, you have a lot of internal stakeholder needs. Yeah. So just from that perspective, how are you balancing out, you know, the products you wanna launch as opposed to the, on the development side and the maintenance side? >>Yeah, I mean we, we have focused our, our attention to our, our guests and our hotels globally and, and taking technology and from a foundation, getting it at, at the edge so that way the consumer and the hotel owner can deliver a quality product to a guest experience. You know, we've have moved larger, a large deployment of our mission critical applications over the last five years really, of moving into more SaaS and infrastructure like AWS and GCP and, and leveraging their global scale to be able to deliver at the edge or get closer to the edge. And so we've, you know, I'm pretty sure you've seen, you know, kind of people building, you know, mission critical apps. You know, probably in the last three years it's probably escalating and more of like a hockey stick of moving stuff. I'd love to hear what AVIA is seeing. Oh >>Yeah. Now we're, we're seeing that quite a bit, right? As people move into the cloud, it's now business critical applications that are going there. So good enough isn't good enough anymore, right? It has to be, you know, a powerful capability that's business critical, can support that, give people the ability to troubleshoot it when something goes wrong. And then multi-cloud, you mentioned a couple different cloud companies, a lot of enterprises are moving to multiple clouds and you don't want to have to do it differently in every cloud. You want a infrastructure management layer that allows you to do that across >>Clouds. So how do you go about that, you know, deciding what goes where. I mean, it sounds like a simple question, but, but if you are dealing in a lot of different kinds of environments, different needs and different requirements, whatever, you know, how are you sorting out, delegating, you know, you know, you're, you're you're gonna be working here, you're gonna be >>Working there. Yeah. So we built some standards base that says, you know, certain types of apps, you know, transactional base, you know, go to this cloud provider and data analytics that's gonna go to another, another cloud provider based on our decision of key capability, native capability, and, and also coverage. You know, cuz we are in China, right? You know, you know, I, I've gotta be able to get into China and, and build not only a network that can support that, but also business apps locally to meet, compete with compliance, regulatory type activities. I mean, even in, in the US market, I got, you know, California privacy laws, you know, you have globally, you've gotta deal with getting data applications into compliance for those globally, right? >>Yeah. So, so you got that compliance slash governance Yeah. Issue. Huge issue. Yeah. I would think for you, you gotta decide who's gonna get to what when, and also we have to meet certain regulatory standards as you pointed out. And not just there, but you got European footprint, right? I mean, you're global. Yeah. So, so you know, handling that kind of scope or scale, what kind of nightmares or challenges does that provide you and how's Aviatrix helping you solve >>That? Yeah, in the early days, you know, we were using cloud native, you know, constructs for networking and a little bit of a security type angle to it. What we found was, you know, you can't get the automation you need. You can't get the, the scalability, you know, cuz we're, we're trying to shift left our, you know, our DevOps and our ability to deploy infrastructure. Aviatrix had come in and, and provided a, a solution that gets us there quicker than anybody else. It's allow us to, you know, build a mesh network across all our regions globally. I'm able to deploy, you know, new landing zones or, you know, public cloud fairly quickly with my, you know, networking construct. We also, we found that because we are a multi hybrid cloud, we, we introduced on the edge a a new network. We had to introduce a performance hub architecture that's using Equinix that sits in every region in every public cloud and partner. Cuz all our partners, you know, we, we've moved a lot of stuff to sas. You know, Amadeus is our centralized reservation system. That's our key, you know? Sure. You know, reservation tool, it's so sourced out. I need to bring them in and I need to get data that's closer to where, in a region to where it needs the land so I can process it. Right. >>And it's a big world out there too. I mean, you're, you're not in your head Rod. So talk about if you would share some of the, the aviatrix experience in that regard. When you have a client like this that has these, you know, multinational locations and, and yet you're looking for some consistency and some uniformity. You don't, you know, you can't be reinventing the wheel every time something pops up, right? >>Right. No. And then, and it's about agility and speed and, you know, being able to do it with less people than you used to have to do things, right? You, you want to be able to give the developers what they need when they need it. There was a time when people were going around it, swiping their credit card and, and saying, it doesn't give me what I need. And so cloud is supposed to change that. So we're trying to deliver the ability to do that for the developers a lot faster than had been done in the past. But at the same time, giving the enterprise the controls, the security, the compliance that they need. And sometimes those things got in the way, but now we're building systems that allow that to happen at, at the piece that developers needed to happen. >>But what Rod said about, you know, one of the big things you sparked my thinking is it also, you know, building a overlay of the cloud native construct allows for visibility that, you know, you didn't have, you know, from a developer or even a operations day two operations, now you get that visibility into the network space and controls and management of that space a lot easier now, you know? >>Yeah. I mean, business critical applications, right? People, the people, the business does not care about networking, right? They see it as electricity and if it's down somebody else's problem to fix it. But the people who do need to keep it up, they need the telemetry. They need the ability to understand, are we trending in the wrong direction? Should we be doing something so that we don't get to the point where it goes down? And that's the kind of information that we're providing in this multi-cloud environment. You mentioned Equinix, we, we just have a partnership with Equinix where we're extending the cloud operational model that Aviatrix delivers all the way out to Equinix and that global fabric that you're talking about. So this is allowing the, the comp companies to have that visibility, that operational ability all the way globally. >>Yeah. Because you know, when you start building all these clouds now and multi regions, multiple AZs or different cloud providers or SaaS providers, you're moving data all over the place. And if you, if you don't have a single pane of glass to see that entire network and be able to route stuff accordingly, it's gonna be a zoo. It's not gonna >>Work. We were, I was talking earlier with, with another guest and we were just talking about companies in your case, I, I IHG kind of knowing what you have and it's not like such a basic thing he said, but yeah, you'd be surprised how many people don't know what they have. Oh, yeah. And so they're trying to provide that visibility and, and, and awareness. So, so I'm kind of curious because you were just the next interview up, so sorry Ken, but, but do you know what you have, I mean, are you learning what you have or is how do you identify, prioritize? How valuable is this asset as opposed to this can wait? I mean, is that still an ongoing process for >>You? It, it's definitely an ongoing process. I mean, we've done over the last three years of constantly assessing all our inventory of what we have, making sure we have the right mo roadmaps for each of the apps and products that we have. Cause we've turned to more of a product driven organization and a DevOps and we're, we're moving more and more product teams onto that DevOps process. Yep. So we can shift left a lot of the activities that developer in the past had to go over a fence to ask for help and, and, you know, kind of the automation of the network and the security built in allows us to be able to shift that left. >>Did that, I, you were saying too three years, right? You've been on, on this path Yep. Going back then to 2019 right. Pandemic hits, right. The world changes. How has that affected this three year period for you? And where are you in terms of where you expected to be and, and Yep. And then what's your, what are your headlights seeing down the road as to what your, your eventual journey, how you want that to end? >>I probably, the biggest story that we have a success story is when the pandemic did happen, you know, all our call centers, all agents had to go home. We were able within 30 days be able to bring up remote desktops, you know, workspaces an a uws and give access to globally in China and in Singapore and in the Americas. There's >>No small task there, >>That's for sure. So we built a desktop, certified it, and, and agents were able to answer calls for guests, you know, you know, so it was a huge success to us. Sure. It did slow down. I mean, during the pandemic it did slow us down from what gets migrated. You know, our focus is, you know, again, back to what I was saying earlier is around our guests and our loyalty and, you know, how do we give value back to our hotel owners and our guests? >>And how do you measure that? I mean, how do you know that what you're doing is working with, with that key audience? >>We'd measured by, you know, one occupa >>There so many, how many people do we have in the rooms? Right? But in terms of the interface, in terms of the effectiveness, the applications, in terms of what you're offering. Yeah. >>It gets back to uptime of our systems and you know, being able to deploy an application in multiple regions elevates the availability of the product to our guest. You know, the longer I'm up, the more revenue I can produce. Right. So, you know, so we, we try to, you know, we measure also guest satisfaction at the properties, you know, them using our tech and that kind of stuff to >>Be so you surveying just to find out what, how they feel about, so some, >>Cause we have a lot of tech inside of our hotels that allow for, we have ISG connect, which allows for people to go from one hotel another and not ask for passwords and, you know, that kind of stuff. >>That would not be made by the way. I'd be begging for help. Let's talk about skills, because I hear that a lot. Talk a lot about that this week. Hearing that, that, you know, the advancement of knowledge is obviously a very powerful thing, but it's also a bit of a shortcoming right now in terms of, of having a need for skills and not having that kind of firepower horsepower on your bench. What, what do you see in that regard? And, and first off, what did you see about it? And then I'll follow >>Up with Yeah, I mean, over our journey, it started off where you didn't have the skills, you know, you didn't have the skill from an operations engineering architecture. So we went on a, you know, you know, how do we build training programs? How do we get, you know, tools to, to either virtual training, bringing teachers, we built, you know, daily, our weekly calls where we bring our experts from our vendors in there to be able to ask questions to help engineering people or architecture people or operations to ask questions and get answers. You know, we, we've been on a role of, you know, upscaling over the last three years and we continue to drive that, you know, we have lunch and learns that we bring people to. Yep. You know, and, and we, and we, we ta tailor the, the content for that training based on what we are consuming and what we're using as opposed to just a, you know, a broad stroke of, of public cloud or, it's >>Almost like you don't have to be holistic about it. You just need to, what do you need to know to >>Make >>Them successful, to be better at what you're doing here? Right. Sure. >>And that's been huge. And, >>And yeah, we, and we have a program called ace, which is AVIATRIX certified engineer. And there's a bunch of different types of classes. So if you're a networking person in the past it's like A C C I E, but we have about 18,000 people over the last three years who have gone through that training. One of them. One of them, right? Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. And, and this is not necessarily about aviatrix. What we're doing is trying to give multi-cloud, you know, networking expertise because a lot of the people that we're talking about are coming from the data center world. And networking is so different in the cloud. We're helping them understand it's not as scary as they might think. Right. If your whole career has been networking in the data center and all of a sudden there's this cloud thing that you don't really understand, you need somebody to help you sort of get there. And we're doing that in a multi-cloud way. And we have all kinds of different levels to teach people how to do, do infrastructure as code. That's another thing, you know, data center guys, they never did infrastructure as code. It was, you had to bolt it in and plug stuff in. Right. But now things are being done much faster with infrastructure as code. And we're teaching people how >>To do that. Yeah. I mean, yesterday, one of the keynotes is about the partner in the, the marketplace. And they use the image imagery of, of marathon runner, you know, a marathon runner. Yeah. You could do a marathon by yourself, but if you want to improve and become a, a great marathon runner, you need a coach, you need nutritionist, you need people running with you to, to make that engine go faster a little bit. Yeah, exactly. And you know, having a partner like Aviatrix helps you know the team to be successful. >>Well, it is, it is a marathon, not a sprint. That's for sure. And you've been on this kind of three year jog. You might feel like you've been running a marathon a little bit, but it sounds like you're really off to a great start and, and have a pretty good partnership here. So thank you. Congratulations on that, Eric. Thank you for being with us. And Rod, same to you. Thank you. Appreciate the time here on the AWS Global Showcase. I'm John Wal, you're watching The Cube. We're out in Las Vegas and of course the cube, as you well know, is the leader in high tech coverage.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCube, covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. (techno music) >> Welcome back to NAB, live from Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with theCube. Join me in welcoming our next guest, Rich Welsh CEO of Sundog Media Toolkit. Hey Rich welcome to theCube. >> Hi, thank you for having me. >> Great to have you. So, first and foremost, now that I got all my tongue twitches out of the way, I have to ask you, what is a sundog? >> A sundog is actually a weather affect. It's an optical illusion caused by ice crystals in cirrus clouds. And the crystals are hexagonal and they diffract the light and you get these two, they're called mock suns, or parhelians, and the aboriginal word for that is a sundog. And so, that's where that comes from. And because we're in the cloud and we're like hexagons, we have a hexagonal user inter-face in our system. So we thought this was a perfect name for the company. >> Very unique. So tell us a little bit more. Sundog is a cloud-native solution for post-production in the cloud. >> Yes. >> You were founded in 2013. Give us a little bit more of an understanding of what you're doing for post-production in the cloud. >> Okay, so the system is built around running the kind of processes that require a lot of heavy-lifting and need to scale, such as very complex image manipulation processes, restoration, format conversions, working with uncompressed content, high-dynamic range, 4K, high frame rate. These are things that become much easier in a cloud environment and you scale up and down with the workload, and how peaky demand of a production. Obviously productions come along, they do a load of work and then they shut down again. So it's really built around that kind of ability to scale in a very peaky environment. >> So given that, you mentioned 4K. There was the live stream from The International Space Station today via 4K here to Las Vegas, amazing. 4K, HG, UHG, AK, massive opportunities, generating massive content that requires agility, speed, et cetera, et cetera. Talk to us about really what the genesis was for Sundog. What opportunity did you see in the market to create this company? >> So my background is operations in post-production distribution. I worked for Dolby and then Technicolor, and while I was doing that work, I found that there was often issues again with the kind of workloads where the formats were constantly increasing, I mean, we see that now, more formats than ever in terms of not just the things people might think of in terms of downstream tablets, mobile, and so on, but even in the cinema, we have massive amounts of different picture formats, sound formats, and so on. And it makes that whole content creation process so much more complex. We felt, Chris Ralph, who is my business partner and the co-founder of Sundog, and we'd worked together in that environment, but we always had machines in a machine room in the basement. And that really was a big limiting factor to what you could do and how quickly you could adapt to new formats and new requirements for the customers, and just the workflows they may want to suddenly adopt. So we felt that building something in the cloud gave us a lot of flexibility to be able to adapt to those different workflows, to new formats very quickly because you don't worry so much about the actual difficulty of doing the processing, you're not buying boxes anymore, so speed of processing becomes a function of how much of the cloud you want to use. So it's very simple to be able to go well, if for a 4K show we have way more compute power just to keep us going at the same speed as we would have for an HD, when then as we move into things like AK, high-dynamic range, high frame rate, these things are all coming along. You can just adapt more or less instantaneously to those things as they happen without having the burden of capital expenditure and limitations of whatever you already have installed. >> So give us an idea, you mentioned cinema and I know that you work with Hollywood-level cinema organizations. You talked about the speed, the flexibility, the agility, that they get. Walk us through an example of a film studio. What's the transition like for them moving post-production to the cloud? Is it a straightforward process, multiple steps involved? >> No, there are definitely multiple steps involved. I wouldn't say it's straightforward. It's maybe not quite as difficult as people would think, but there are a lot of factors that you need to consider when you're moving to the cloud. I mean, the first obvious one is you have to move the data in. So traditionally, a broadband infrastructure is going to be something that you have to invest in over a fairly long period of time to get good cost-effective bandwidth when you're moving uncompressed data and particularly if you're now moving up and down to the cloud, but we're seeing telecoms providers moving to much more flexible business models basically. So they're installing very high bandwidth fiber, but then you have the actual amount of data that you want to move on-demand. These kind of models are enabling people to move their post-production to the cloud. And the next thing, obviously, is security. People do have concerns about security. But with that said, actually the really big cloud providers have worked very hard to lock down that element. And in fact, there are many other industries whose security requirements are very stringent. You know, military applications, pharmaceuticals, banking, oil and gas. You can imagine all these very high-value industries that require really good security. And the big public clouds are geared towards that, so actually, you can have a lot of confidence as a studio or a broadcaster that if you implement it correctly, you can have really good, I would argue better than facility security, in a cloud environment, because they're actually dealing with stuff that cannot be lost. >> Right. We were actually, theCube, just at the Amazon Web Services Summit in San Francisco last week, and that was kind of a recurring theme that the security concerns really have been quite mitigated in the public cloud. Give us an idea in terms of maybe reducing the time from shot to post-production to actually showing a cinema in the theaters. How much reduction can a cinema, or film studio expect by moving to the cloud? >> Well, I mean, you can get incredible amounts of reduction because now if you can scale to that workload, let's say a big international release feature film might have three, 400 versions that will go out to cinemas, those versions in their current kind of paradigm have to be made manually in boxes, and with operators and then they have to be watched and qualified to make sure they're going to work, and then they get shipped to the theater. If you imagine moving that workflow wholesale to the cloud and we have done that work with some of the studios, now if you can get all of the elements together up front instead of having several weeks of work to get that out of the door and into theaters, you can literally do it in hours. There's no real limitation to the amount of compute resource that you would use in that scenario, certainly not going to trouble a really big data provider like Amazon, AWS. So you can get the assets out very quickly, but then you're actually able to leverage other features of the cloud such as content delivery networks to push those files to the cinemas. So in a real like joined up workflow in that way, I mean, we're not doing all of those things yet, but we will get there I'm absolutely certain and these things can take the release cycle from weeks down to days or hours. >> So dramatic, dramatic savings. Talk to us about, before we talk about the underlying infrastructure of Sundog, walk us through where Sundog is in that entire production pipeline. >> Okay, well actually Sundog's quite a broad platform in terms of the feature set, so we find the systems used by different productions at various different stages and that can be upfront in terms of dailies, and visual effects approvals, it can be right back at the distribution end when you're making all your foreign language versions, dubbed subtitles, and so on. And then we have a lot of processes which would typically take place in the middle of the post-production phase with things like image clean-up, de-noisers, we have super resolution converters, and actually a lot of tools that aren't available in hardware, simply because it's been very difficult to get a hardware platform that could reasonably process those elements in any amount of time. Again, we're finding that the cloud is becoming an environment for productizing those really complex algorithms and image processing techniques that just have not been available to creatives up till now. >> So with the customer journey, this transition that we talked about, what does, under the hood of Sundog in the cloud, compute, storage, networking, tell us about this ecosystem? >> So we took the approach from the start that we didn't want to deal with the storage element, that was for two reasons. The one is that customers really want to control their content themselves. So we felt if we could simply point the system to their storage, then that would be a much easier way for them to have to confidence that they know where their assets are and they're in control of them. So we work in a hybrid setup where you can have your assets stored anywhere you want. In a cloud, it will have to be a cloud environment, and then our system authenticates to it. Now the system itself is in Amazon, so all the compute, and data-base resource, and then all the kind of dynamic features around automation and so on, are built on the Amazon AWS platform, but the data may exist elsewhere so it might be in Amazon, it might be in Amazon S3 storage, but it could equally be somewhere else in the world in a different data center, it be on-prem in a cloud store that you've built yourself. So our architecture really is to provision and orchestrate that resource and scale, to provide the tools, so we have all these workflows with different manufacturers tools in there that you can call on-demand. But then when it comes to actually processing it, the data starts and finishes where you want it to go and gives you complete control. So it's quite a different architecture to a lot of solutions that are currently out there where you really have a box in the cloud with the storage attached to the box, and that's kind of it. >> Well not only do you have a very unique name with a great meaning, but you also seem to have quite differentiated technology. We thank you so much for stopping by theCube, we wish you the best of luck with Sundog, and have a great rest of your day three at NAB. >> Thank you very much. >> We want to thank you for watching. Again we are live at NAB in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, stick around we'll be right back. (techno music)