>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018 brought to you by Amazon web services, Intel and their ecosystem partners. >> Good to have you here on theCUBE, as we continue our coverage at AWS re:Invent. We're at day three here in Las Vegas in the Sands Expo Hall D, and we got about a half hour. Come by and say hi to us if you would. I'm here with Rebecca Knight, John Walls, and two gentleman here to join us. One from GitLab, Brendan Jung, who is the vice president of alliances. Brendan, good to see you sir. >> Thank you for having us. >> And Alex Hale, platform engineering at Beacon Platform. >> Hello, Alex, how are you doing? >> Not bad, I'm surviving the whole experience. >> It's a test! >> Well, let's talk about the whole experience (mumbles) What have you picked up this week? >> I've picked up that AWS is going very much into this sort of enterprise space. We saw that theme last year, and I think this year it's even more so that they're really catering towards how enterprise and then big organizations are getting in. And I think that's been a big. You can see it in how they're doing their storage strategies, how they're doing their network strategies, and how they're just really targeting towards security, and compliance, and governance. And I think that's a big theme that's from last year to this year, and I think it's going to continue on. >> Yeah, they've been waving a big flag for sure telling the enterprise it's safe to come onboard the public cloud's open for ya. >> Yes. >> Oh yeah for sure. >> Brendan, if you would, you were telling a story that you worked at Google for quite some time. >> I was, yes. >> Worked on some fairly high profile projects >> there, and you've been >> Yes. at GitLab for five months now. Instant transition for ya? >> Five months, yes. >> What was behind that? >> So a couple of it is, I mean when we get down to it sometimes you're either a builder or a runner just in the way you're oriented. And I'm a builder, so the biggest thing was love building that from the ground up with Google. Amazing team they did amazing job. We got to do a lot of really fun things. Was looking for something kind of new, and I'd worked with GitLab since I ran the partner organization for a lot of the partners at Google. I had worked with them for a number of years and it's rare when you work regularly with the company that you get surprised. So the kind of the point that I was like, "Oh, I really need to look into this more deeply," is I've done detailed work with GitLab for years. And I was in a meeting with Sid, our CEO. And he kind of, "Hey, you know what we're up to." And I'm like, "Oh, of course I know what we're up to." Right, cuz that's you always answer that. I mean you don't answer the question, "No, I have no idea what you're up to." We met four weeks ago, of course I know what you're up to. And he's really humble. But simply like oh hey, you want to see me insert. Hey, this is what we're working on. Slides across the floors to report, and he's like, oh, in the CI space, under three years we went from no product to the very best of the business. Beat out Microsoft, and CloudBees, and all these. And I was like wait, I didn't know you were in the CI space. I shouldn't say this publicly, >> Alright it's alright. >> but I went like I didn't know that. >> It's okay. You got the job. >> No, I'm safe, but the ability that's just the speed that the company moves. Everyone says it, but when you can go that fast with that kind of quality, I was like I got to dig deeper. And so we just kind of went down that path, and it's been quite an adventure. >> Good. >> Obviously, Microsoft buying GitHub has made for a whole lot of discussions in a whole lot of different ways for us. And competition's good, so it's been a lot of fun. >> Well, we definitely want to talk about the GitLab and Beacon Platform partnership, but I want to first ask you, Alex. Tell our viewers a little bit more about the Beacon Platform. >> So Beacon Platform is a company that came out of the financial services from the large banks; the Goldman Sachs, the J.P. Morgans, the Bank of Americas. And in those places, internally they have to have this quite open source like culture where there is people contributing in the same codebase, there's a lifecycle of how things are done, and it's rapid moving. And people don't associate them with large banks, but there is these products out there. In fact, some of the Goldman Sachs partners refer to those as the golden source, so they secret source. And if large banks can do it, why can't someone else. So we've taken those experiences that people have done for years to build these communities, best practices, and prescriptions, and turn it into a product. So we've taken the same model of here is a set of financial tooling, and infrastructure, and toolboxes to make financial applications. And we've brought it to the smaller bunch; so your insurance companies, even your large banks, Komodo used firms, insurance people. They can take our platform, and then bring their own analytics, and then build financial applications that they want on top of it and whilst doing so be ensured that they're compliant with security. We've done the governance for you. We've done the security for you. All you have to do is put your good ideas to use and make applications. >> So give us some examples of the business problems that this platform solves. >> So typically in the financial space, the people that have the great ideas are pawns, and they're by nature mathematicians. They're not developers. They're not UX people. They're not UI designers. They're certainly not security people. And yet they are are the people that are driving the core business and the value. And so the question is how do we make them be productive? How do we make sure that their lives are easier? Which means that you give them an idea. You give them a lifecycle for software that they can start saying, "Ooh, I've got an idea. I'll hack it up." And when it's hacked, they can publish it. It comes out the other end, and all the reporting is underneath there. Their security is there. The compliance is there. All the authentication is there. And that idea is now being actualized in the matter of days, weeks rather than months and years. And that means that our customers can take these ideas that they've been working on or just conceiving and turn it into reality in a very short amount of time. And then be comfortable that whole platform itself remains secure, compliant, and all the same thing that Amazon is actually counting to us. >> You know it seems like if your focus, your core competence, was or is financial services. I mean you're starting at a very high level of demand client, right? >> Yes. >> And appropriately so, and so there are a lot of lessons that migrate to other businesses that I assume are quite attractive to them, >> Yes. >> because if you mention your client, BOA, if they've got comfort, I have comfort. Right, because how much of that do you see that the experiences that you've developed or that you have put them through translate in a very positive way to other sectors? >> We've found out some of our customers are starting off in the cloud, and they're making their cloud journey. They're financial companies that want to take the journey to the cloud, but don't really know how to. And so we as a company which has already running on the cloud, as a company we don't actually own a physical single server. We're all on the cloud, all in. And they, our customers, come to us to say, "How are you in the cloud? What do you do? "You have the experience. You've worked at these places. "How does that all work?" And so we give them a sort of in the same way that out platform does. Prescriptive advice on how things are going to be done. And our customers come along with us on the journey. And so we take the customers on their cloud journey whereas our customers are taking us on their needs, and bringing their needs, and what they need to us to say, "I want to build an application like this. "What more do I need to do? What do I have to do?" And so it's a very collaborative relationship doing our customers to say, "I can help you in the cloud space. "You can help us in the financial ideas space, "and together we can actually make applications." Whatever we build ourselves, becomes we can resell it to others whilst the customers intellectual property can stay with them. It's a really interesting collaboration of. >> Symbiotic in many respects, right? >> Yes. >> You're leaning on them. And what about the relationship between the two of you again in terms of. >> Sure yeah, so as much as Beacon is very financial services focused, we're a DevOps tool and end DevOps tool for anyone, right. So in many ways what Beacon is doing is taking what GitLab's done about builing that whole tool chain, 'cause there's really a tool chain crisis out there. If you start looking at what needs to be set up for a developer, they want to live in their IDE, do their development, and publish as he said. But you start looking at what that needs to be set up after that, you're talking often times on a company 12, 15 other steps to go through. And that was kind of our aha was there's an opportunity to treat that as one full application as a DevOps tool set across the entire board. Started down that journey really like three years ago, and that's kind of I think we kind of match up. The similar story; they wrap all the important financial data, all the other things that matter to a bank, right. And they're got to whole bunch of extra tooling, extra data, extra services. But at the core of it, they also leveraged GitLab both as a tool to develop their own product and also to offer it as a tool possibly to their own customers, right. So their other customers need to develop. They need a DevOps toolset, so we work back and forth a whole lot on this. They move so fast. It's been amazing, and so every time we sit down we're like wait, what if we did, okay cool let's iterate. And we can turn that around. We ship every month to our customers. You can run it anywhere you want. The majority of our customers, they love the fact that they can run anywhere. Which in fact while Beacon does runs on Amazon, their customer bases have to run on (mumbles), right? And while we're seeing that hybrid become more and more common which is great, that's the truth that's been there forever. That's the world that we've lived, they live everyday and have lived for a long time, and so it's kind of fun to come here and see that be like yes, oh yeah that does exist, and we're kind of like yeah that's existed for a long time. >> Everybody caught up. >> Right yeah, we're there and there's always going to be reasons for that on both directions. And so we work really well together on that side, and they push us hard. Right, so we're actually right on stage. We're sitting there in just this morning, he's like hey, you finally (mumbles). You know I've got all these merge requests that he wants in our product. (mumbles) opens, it's open. Everyone in the world, anyone that watches this, go put a merge request on GitLab. We're going to track it. You're going to know where it lands. You're going to know when it gets delivered. So and if you want to write the code, you can write it and it's in. So it's been actually a ton of fun. >> And have at it, right? >> Yes. >> Well if the relationship's working good to see. >> Yes. >> And you're five months in, and I'm sure the one year anniversary's right around the corner for you. I'll try to be able to wait. >> Be here before you'll know it right? >> Hell yeah. >> (mumbles) thanks for joining us. Good to have you here on theCUBE, and look forward to hearing about this continuous success down the road I'm sure. >> Thank you >> Thank you so much. >> (mumbles) having us. >> Thank you both. Back with more here on theCUBE. You're watching this live at AWS re:Invent Las Vegas. (techno music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent, 2018 brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Well, good morning. Welcome back, or good afternoon for that matter, if you're watching out on the East Coast. Good to have you have here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage here in Las Vegas. We're at the Sands Expo, Hall D to be exact, one of seven sites that are hosting the AWS re:Invent John Wallace here with Justin Warren. We're now joined by Ankur Shah, who is the vice president of Products, a public cloud security, Palo Alto Networks, and, Ankur, good to see you this morning. >> Yeah, happy to be here. >> Thank you for being with us. And Richard Wise, who is the cloud security engineer, or a cloud security engineer at Robert Half. Good morning to you, Richard. >> Good morning. >> Well, first off, let's tell us about Robert Half. So, you're a recruiting firm in a partnership with Palo Alto, but fill in a few more blanks for folks at home who might not know exactly what you do. >> Sure, we're a staffing and recruiting firm. We have offices worldwide. We have roughly 15,000 full-time employees. We also have many, many temporary employees, and, of course, we do recruiting. Many people I've met here at the conference, in fact, got their first job or one job in the past through Robert Half. And we also-- >> That's makes you a really popular guy-- >> Yes. when the show closes. >> And we also have Protiviti, our prestigious consulting arm. >> Okay, so now, about your partnership. How did you find Palo Alto, or how did Palo Alto find you? And talk about maybe that relationship, how it's developed and where it stands today. What are they doing for you? >> Sure, well, we found Palo Alto about two years ago. We're about seven years into our cloud journey, but it became very clear at a point in time that we needed to get a better handle on how we were managing and securing it. We were doing all the right things but we didn't have the visibility we needed, so we brought in Evident to do that. Also, compliance is very important to us, and the tools allowed us to ensure that we were conforming to all of the compliance standards that we needed to. >> So, maybe Ankur, you can get us in here. Explain how did this partnership get started? >> Yeah, so Robert Half is kind of prototypical customer for us at Palo Alto Networks. Customers moving to cloud. AWS is obviously one of the biggest clouds, so all our customers are migrating, a lot of their, you know, shutting down their data centers, and moving the work loads and applications to the cloud, but as they move to the cloud, they want to make sure that they have the visibility and the security controls to make sure that they are not in the news. So, that's how the partnership started. A lot of customers, just like Robert Half, starts with kind of, you know, I'd like to get a visibility into what's happening in my cloud environment, detect advance data breeches, like cryptojacking, stolen access keys, things of that nature, so that's how we kind of started this partnership. We've been kind of helping them kind of move more and more applications and more and more workloads in their AWS environments, and it's been a really amazing partnership. We've gotten some amazing feedback from them that has helped mature the product over the years. >> What's one of the more surprising things that you've noticed as part of this journey. What's something that you didn't realize that this was going to be a benefit to this partnership, and then, once you actually had Palo Alto come in there, it's like, oh wow, this is amazing. >> Well, there were a couple of things. First off, their RQL, the RedLock Query Language, is very powerful and flexible, and let's us take our compliance and security to the next level, but was really impressed when we first started talking to RedLock and Palo Alto, even before we had purchased the product, we saw some opportunities for product improvements, suggested them, and before we purchased it, within a couple of weeks, they were there. >> Wow. >> Yeah. >> That's pretty fast of all those cycles. I mean, that's what we're here for is rapid innovation. They're trying to change things at the speed of cloud. So, how do you do that safely and securely? Maybe you can tell us how does Palo Alto help do this rapid innovation but still keep everything really secure. >> Yeah, so our DNAs, obviously, network security is where the company started. Over a year now, the company has doubled down on public cloud security, and a lot of emphasis on, sort of, securing customers' cloud environment, helping a lot of customers migrate their applications into the cloud, and from a security standpoint, we look at it from different angles. One is kind of the basic configuration management aspects, making sure that customers don't leave open s3 buckets, permissive security groups, things of that nature. Above and beyond that, we also perform network analytics, so things like triple jacking, data exploration attempts. The platform is able to detect those kinds of advanced threats. Privileged activity monitoring, and anomaly detection is another thing we do, and last but not the least, host monitoring and host security aspects. That's something we do really, really well in the cloud as well, so when you combine all of that stuff, gives customers 360 visibility, as well as security for all things in the cloud. >> I'm sorry. Richard, how hard is your job these days? (laughing) And I mean that with all due respect. We've talked a lot about complexity. We've talked a lot about speed. We've talked a lot about versatility, and high demand, and all these things. Corner office is making demands on you, right? I mean, how tough is it to be in your shoes? >> If it was easy, it wouldn't be fun. I've been working in cloud about as long as Robert Half has, about seven years, and moving into the security role, it's been an incredibly interesting challenge. Yes, it's hard. I do stay up at night on occasion worrying about, did I check this, did I check that? I'm fortunate that our management has a really good understanding of the importance of security and of cloud, and I've gotten a lot of support in my role there so, in that respect, it hasn't been too hard. >> And where is it that security, in terms of a deployment? So, you think about function, right, right? >> Yeah. >> What are we going to get done here? But is it a close second, is it a tie? Because, especially in your business, I mean, you have a lot of personal information with which you're working that you've got to protect. >> Absolutely, so, people trust us with their data. We have personal information for many, many people, and we take very seriously our responsibility to manage and protect that. One of the things that we've done with Palo Alto's tools is ensuring that we're compliant with all of the various standards like ISO 27001, and compliance is kind of like brushing your teeth, right. Everybody needs to do it, and somebody doesn't want to be friends with somebody who doesn't brush their teeth. So, we ensure that we brush our teeth using tools like Palo Alto's. We can demonstrate to people that we're brushing our teeth. >> Right. >> With the innovation of RedLock now, we're able to take that to the next level, so we're not only brushing our teeth now, but we're also grooming our hair. >> You're technologically flossing as well, I'm sure. >> We are, we are. >> So, Ankur, I think that makes you the dentist of cloud security. (laughing) >> So, you've got people brushing their teeth, they're flossing. What comes next? What should they be looking at? Should they be going beyond just hygiene factors, and is there something they can do that's more than just brushing their teeth? >> Yeah, so I touched upon some of those areas. So, I think it all starts with the basic hygiene that we've talked about it, right. So, you got to do it. That's the, kind of, the fundamental, but the next-gen attacks are not going to be very simple, right, because the cloud fundamentally increases the attack factor, right, so the malicious actor, they're smarter, right. So, like I mentioned, things like cryptojacking, stolen access keys, a lot of the next-gen breeches are going to happen in the cloud, so customers have to constantly understand the kind of AWS services that they're adopting, understand the security implications, make sure they have the security guard rails, and like I mentioned, that once they understand that, look at it more holistically, both from, sort of, the basic hygiene perspective, as well as from network security, user activity, as well host monitoring perspective. Once they cover all of that stuff, you know, hopefully they'll have good teeth forever. (laughing) >> Strong cloud teeth. I don't think that's a phrase I wouldn't have thought I'd say until today. >> You know, we hear a lot about the cat and mouse game in security, right? You're trying to stay one step ahead of bad actors who are spending a lot of time, and a lot of resources, and a lot of energy to stay a step ahead of you. So, in today's world, how do you really win that battle? How do you predict where the next wrong turn is going to come, if you will, or where that invasion's going to try to occur, and prevent that, or are you in a prophylactic state all the time where it's about seeing where that action's going, and then trying to stop it once you've learned of it? See what I mean? It's a conundrum that I think you find yourself in. >> You know, I think 90% of the problems that happen where bad actors get hold of your sensitive data is because of common, silly mistakes. So, making sure that there is a user training across the board, not just security teams. Now, DevOps teams have to be part of the equation as well. They need to be trained, and coached, and understanding the security implications of their day-to-day operations. Once you train the users, you'll find that a lot of these problems will go away because most of these actors are using simple techniques to get into the customer's cloud environment because those mistakes are being made. So, start with the user training. Obviously, you need third party tooling and technologies like Palo Alto Networks to make sure you have that security guard rails all the time. Beyond that, you know, you just have to hire a lot of smart people like Richard just to insure that you're ahead of the game, thinking two steps in advance, yeah. >> It's about locking the door. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, and I want to touch on a couple of the things that Ankur said. He talked about building security into DevOps. So, there's this concept we call shifting left where you're trying to build security more upfront into the development and deployment process before you even get into the wild, and that's something Palo Alto is helping us with. The other thing is, we cannot hire enough people to keep up with the pace at which we're scaling our cloud environments, so we need tooling and automation like RedLock in order to ensure that we can get visibility and control on this vast set of resources with just a small number of people. >> Yeah. >> So necessity driving invention in that case, right? >> Yes. >> You need it. Well, gentlemen, thanks for the time. We appreciate the conversation. I feel like I need to go brush or floss. (laughing) >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> Very self-conscious all of a sudden, but thank you both. >> Thanks for having us. >> Brilliant discussion. Back with more from AWS re:Invent. You're watching theCUBE here in Las Vegas. (energetic electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back once again here, to Hall D in the Sands Expo. We're at AWS re:Invent for the third day of our three days of coverage here on theCUBE, of this fantastic show. Justin Warren, John Walls. We're now joined by Prashanth Chandrasekar, who is the SVP and GM of managed public cloud at Rackspace. Prashanth, good to see you this morning. >> Absolutely, thank you for having me. >> You bet, and Ajay Patel who is the SVP and GM of cloud provider services at VMware. Good morning, to you as well >> Glad to be here, good morning. >> Alright, first off, let's just talk about Rackspace, a little bit, if we can Prashanth. You're kind of going through this metamorphosis, right? This transformation of sorts. So kind of get us up to speed a little bit about your journey, about where you've been and where you're going. >> Yeah absolutely, I'd love to. I think Rackspace has been been on a phenomenal journey over the past 20 years. This is our 20th year anniversary as a company. So obviously we've been know historically for our managed hosting DNA and we came from that, a long time ago. But over the years, we very much are very, very focused on customers, just like Amazon is and VMware is and we really thought about, how do we make sure that we're at where our customers want to go. And so we evolved effectively to support the leading technologies in either the public cloud space, like an Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google, Alibaba or in the private cloud space with VMware and even our own OpenStack Private Cloud deployments, along with our traditional managed hosting business. So over the years, and also with a very, very phenomenal new owner in Apollo, we've been transforming as a company that's truly a next generation IT services company, looking to take enterprises into the future, at their pace by the way, meeting them where they are and really making sure that we bring to bare, really, best of read services, cloud services, to really kind of manage their transition into the cloud and to make the most of that investment. >> Yeah, use that carrot approach, right? Not the-- >> That's right, that's right. >> Bring them along gently which many people need. Alright, so each of you has your expertise. I'm talking about the companies here. But now this partnership, this synergy that you have, it's kind of like peanut butter and chocolate in a way, right? Great combination! Everybody's going to love it! Talk about that partnership and how it's come together and how that's playing out right now. >> Yeah-- >> So from a philosophy perspective, we're both goal aligned, right? We're starting to see this world being a multi-cloud world and more importantly, it's all about the customer on their journey. They're going to have existing assets, existing data centers, for a long time. They're going to need support in terms of the legacy applications but also they replatform, rehost, and modernize the application. And they need a strategic partner, so Rackspace sees the same way. Starting to provide that set of choice and help the customer on their journey, at their own pace, enabled by a common technology platform. And so us as a company, we've also transformed ourself from we're going to be a vSphere-only company, to starting to embrace public clouds. Whether it's VMware cloud on AWS or our recent CloudHealth acquisition, which allows us to start managing native public cloud. So in this journey, we're seeing ourself as peanut butter and chocolate, as you said, working together, hand-in-hand for the benefit of our customers. >> Yeah, I really love that analogy and thank you for it, because in some ways, VMware and Rackspace, are very much, our philosophies are exactly the same in terms of where the customer journey is, but we approach the problem with two different angles. One, we come from it from a technology-services angle, 'cause we're a service company at heart, right? We're fanatical experience and we're known for that, and VMware is obviously a phenomenal, technology platform company. But we both believe in a multi-cloud and a hyper-cloud world where we see that, hey, the journey to the cloud is a very, very, long-standing one. We're in the early innings of this, where customer workloads are actually moving and this is, you can talk about the projections, you're literally probably over a trillion dollars spent over the next decade or so that's going to move >> in the cloud, exactly. >> with this very form factor, so it's a really exciting time and we're really, really aligned with our partners with VMware and of course AWS and the other public cloud partners. >> Yeah so, you mentioned that we are at the beginning. This is just the start of how things are working, So with customers who are looking at this transformation journey and trying to make this decision about, what do I keep onsite, what do I transform, what do I re-platform, what do I just completely replace with something new and let the old one die. How do you help customers make those decisions? >> Yes, absolutely, so this is the heart of what Rackspace is doing for our customers today, right? We are very much a company that's basically taking a very unbiased approach upfront. We're taking about literally, thinking about the planning stage and assessing their workloads, going through an application assessment and doing all the work that's required to understand, you know what, which workloads need to go on each of the public clouds? Which one runs well on Amazon? Which ones actually should be better leveraged on a VMware on AWS sort of scenario and so on, right? So there's a very deep assessment that's done upfront and then we go through the process of architecting and deploying, based on best practices that we've gained from, by the way, thousands of these customers that we've actually moved and then actually managing and operating in these environments, which we've been talking about at Rackspace, that's our DNA, and optimizing those environments, for cost and the greatest and latest of features that any of these providers provide. So that's the journey and the way we do that is, using a true next-generation cloud services set of capabilities which we announced a couple weeks ago in a press release and that includes something with a notion of service blocks, as we call at Rackspace, service blocks where you're literally able to mix and match all the things that I just mentioned along the journey, dependent on where the customer is on their journey. So we could say, let's focus just on architecting, deploying and migrating apps and that's it. That's what the enterprise wants, because they want to enable an internal, focused motion to manage these, and they want to skill up their internal people to do that. Or you might encounter a company that actually wants us to actually manage the whole thing, and that's fine too. And then maybe, by the way, nine months into their experience that they realize that or later down the line, they want us to help 'em with cost optimization or Kubernetes expertise to actually move into the container world. So that whole curve and the transitioning through that process, is our job to make sure, meet the customer where they are and make sure we deliver value very specifically at that point in time, for them, and not be, not put customers into some long-term, monolithic sort of contract. So really being agile around us. >> You know it's funny, it's very interesting, because as you see the complexity has only gone up. It hasn't gone down. That's when you talk about cloud benefits, the amount of services being launched, the complexity of all the different technologies. Rackspace is uniquely set up, they're going to have their VMware expertise and the AWS certified partners, that we can start to bring the value together. So we're excited about kind of mixing and matching and kind of this modular set of services and capability, that you can bring to bare for the customers. So I think, it actually puts us in a unique position in some ways, right? To be that trusted partner as we move on this journey. >> And to put some numbers around that, very specifically, that Ajay said, we have over a thousand, no, eleven hundred Amazon certified certifications at Rackspace. We have probably a very similar number of VMware, right? Over a thousand VMware people that actually service customers and that's all-- >> With Enterprise DNN Enterprise support, right? >> That's correct, that's right, and then ultimately we know that combination of expertise is very material in that scale for our customers to be able to leverage. >> So Ajay, you've got a long history with the Enterprise customers. The people have been using VMware for a long, long, time. What are you seeing from your existing customer base? What kind of technologies are they interested in? What are they moving to? Where is the momentum? >> So, clearly the excitement hype is around containers, Kubernetes, serverless, et cetera. But their bread and butter workloads, are existing applications. They're looking to optimize their data center costs, some trying to eliminate data centers, they're looking to lift and shift entire landscapes of application, move them to cloud. They're looking for expertise, building a center of excellence. Start up a prominent operation model or on a multi-cloud world So they're now starting to hit, what I call, real-world problems, where the experiments are working, they need to now create operational model around it and it's starting to go back to the trusted partners, VMware is a platform provider, Rackspace is a trusted managed services provider. Whether it's up front and design or to help operate. So we're starting to see this maturities coming in place and cost is not really the driver. They're starting to find that public out cost is actually an issue. So cost management too. If you just walk around the shop floor, it's all about cost management, security, visibility. These are all signs of a maturing market. >> And because of that, and you talk about a maturing market, if I'm just now making my entry, alright? I've decided, hey we're running our company, it's time to jump into the public cloud. Is there benefit to us being maybe a bit-- >> A bit more lore? >> more reticent yeah, than others, because there've been other growing pains, you've already kind of, you've found where the wrinkles were and so we will benefit by those past experiences? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> So I'm giving you a chance, I mean talk to somebody who hasn't made that commitment yet, and they're thinking I'm so far behind >> Yes. >> But they're not. >> Yeah, I mean I think this is a spot-on point, right? So when we work with enterprises, what we're really seeing is that, let's say a company has got 10 divisions within the company and you know, generally speaking, you've got maybe a couple divisions that have gone ahead of the pack. They've already done it, because they actually went with the cloud curve. They're leading the world internally. They're being the internal sponsors and the champions for the movement and you've got some laggards along the way as well. So Rackspace, our job is to really bring true up, if you will, the level of capability with the groups that are actually lagging. And also, not to do it in an artificial way, but actually do it on their terms, to say, you know what, you may not be ready for, a containerized world tomorrow. Maybe you actually start leveraging basic, easy to, and that's the way to get started. Which is fewer and fewer number of companies that are not there already, but the ability for you to move along and use advanced services, that's our job, to keep moving them and encouraging them to do it, bu enabling them through our tooling that we built and leveraging through partners like VMware or even on the top of each of the public clouds that we built, proprietary tooling, or through the expertise that we bring up to bat. So that's the combination. >> It's never to late to get started, so for customers who might've just decided that, actually I've decided, yes, it's time to go to cloud, I'm ready. How do they begin? How should they start on this journey? How would they start to engage with you? >> Yeah, I think for us, it's a what we've noticed, is that it's very important to just make sure that you take a success-based and phase-based approach. And so, starting with a place in the organization, where it actually makes a difference, there's a differentiated set of applications that are going to make a difference for the customer that they're trying to serve. Or it could be, listen, they have actually a problem where they have 27 DC's, as a customer that I was talking to yesterday that is about to join us, they're trying to consolidate down to six data centers over the next two years. So how do you go about that problem of doing DC consolidation and how do you figure out which workloads go on which platform, et cetera. So starting with some very specific problems, could be as big as a DC problem, or it could be as specific as, let's go work on this very specific differentiated critical application on the cloud et cetera, and that really creates a mushrooming effect, 'cause you notice the difference it makes in terms of developer productivity, your agility, your ability to deploy coded production multiple times and that just drives, you know, it gains the attention of, what we've seen is, that finally gets the attention of the CIO in the company and then the CIO is like, listen I better get control of this, because in some situations we have hundreds and thousands of Amazon accounts within these organizations, that they ultimately now want governance and visibility, and so that's when it starts creating a more holistic, enterprise-wide strategy around cloud and adoption and one of the various form factors they should use, to actually to keep moving on. So really it's mushrooming with a center of excellence and a sponsor or a line of business that's really starting and that's really where we've seen success. >> You know one other thing I'll add to that is, the guys who are fast followers now, are getting the benefit of hindsight of other partners, as you just said. And couple things I'm starting to see in the market. They're starting to make some strategic bets. They're picking a strategic technology partner from a technology platform perspective. They're looking for a strategic service provider partner, a managed service partner. And they're starting to look at them as trusted partners. The conversations are moving away from being transactional, to more success oriented. Now even Andy talk about that. It's really about outcomes and in this journey, I think you're starting to find the right partners, building the core competency within your organization and finding those sustaining technology platform choices that guide you through this hybrid world. That's what the world went with, the battlefield now is all about hybrid. It's no longer about private or public. Everyone's just, even Amazon finally recognized, the world is a hybrid with their outpost announcement, right? And starting to look at how do I work in this hybrid world and what's the right operating model. So it's a really interesting time to kind of make, say look, the world is going to be public and private, how do I operate in this? >> Cloud all the things >> Makes sense. I do want to say, before we say goodbye, that when Prashanth was talking about laggards, he was really looking at us (all laughing) an awful lot, but I don't know, I don't know what to make of that, but we won't take it too personally >> Might be the beard maybe. >> Thanks for being with us. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you for having us, >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you gentlemen. Back with more from AWS re:Invent. We're live in Las Vegas and you're watching the Cube. (relaxing music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their Ecosystem partners. >> Oh welcome back, to theCUBE. Continuing coverage here from AWS re:Invent, as we start to wind down our coverage here on the second day. We'll be here tomorrow as well, live on theCUBE, bringing you interviews from Hall D at the Sands Expo. Along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls, and we're joined by Jonathan Ballon, who's the Vice President of the internet of things at Intel. Jonathan, thank you for being with us today. Good to see you, >> Thanks for having me guys. >> All right, interesting announcement today, and last year it was all about DeepLens. This year it's about DeepRacer. Tell us about that. >> What we're really trying to do is make AI accessible to developers and democratize various AI tools. Last year it was about computer vision. The DeepLens camera was a way for developers to very inexpensively get a hold of a camera, the first camera that was a deep-learning enabled, cloud connected camera, so that they could start experimenting and see what they could do with that type of device. This year we took the camera and we put it in a car, and we thought what could they do if we add mobility to the equation, and specifically, wanted to introduce a relatively obscure form of AI called reinforcement learning. Historically this has been an area of AI that hasn't really been accessible to most developers, because they haven't had the compute resources at their disposal, or the scale to do it. And so now, what we've done is we've built a car, and a set of tools that help the car run. >> And it's a little miniature car, right? I mean it's a scale. >> It's 1/118th scale, it's an RC car. It's four-wheel drive, four-wheel steering. It's got GPS, it's got two batteries. One that runs the car itself, one that runs the compute platform and the camera. It's got expansion capabilities. We've got plans for next year of how we can turbo-charge the car. >> I love it. >> Right now it's baby steps, so to speak, and basically giving the developer the chance to write a reinforcement learning model, an algorithm that helps them to determine what is the optimum way that this car can move around a track, but you're not telling the car what the optimum way is, you're letting the car figure it out on their own. And that's really the key to reinforcement learning is you don't need a large dataset to begin with, it's pre-trained. You're actually letting, in this case, a device figure it out for themselves, and this becomes very powerful as a tool, when you think about it being applied to various industries, or various use-cases, where we don't know the answer today, but we can allow vast amounts of computing resources to run a reinforcement model over and over, perhaps millions of times, until they find the optimum solution. >> So how do you, I mean that's a lot of input right? That's a lot, that's a crazy number of variables. So, how do you do that? So, how do you, like in this case, provide a car with all the multiple variables that will come into play. How fast it goes, and which direction it goes, and all that, and on different axes and all those things, to make these own determinations, and how will that then translate to a real specific case in the workplace? >> Well, I mean the obvious parallel is of course autonomous driving. AWS had Formula One on stage today during Andy Jassy's keynote, that's also an Intel customer, and what Formula One does is they have the fastest cars in the world, and they have over 120 sensors on that car that are bringing in over a million pieces of data per second. Being able to process that vast amount of data that quickly, which includes a variety of data, like it's not just, it's also audio data, it's visual data, and being able to use that to inform decisions in close to real time, requires very powerful compute resources, and those resources exist both in the cloud as well as close to the source of the data itself at the edge, in the physical environment. >> So, tell us a bit about the software that's involved here, 'cause people think of Intel, you know that some people don't know about the software heritage that Intel has. It's not just about, the Intel inside isn't just the hardware chips that's there, there's a lot of software that goes into this. So, what's the Intel angle here on the software that powers this kind of distributed learning. >> Absolutely, software is a very important part of any AI architecture, and for us we've a tremendous amount of investment. It's almost perhaps, equal investment in software as we do in hardware. In the case of what we announced today with DeepRacer and AWS, there's some toolkits that allow developers to better harness the compute resources on the car itself. Two things specifically, one is we have a tool called, RL Coach or Reinforcement Learning Coach, that is integrated into SageMaker, AWS' machine learning toolkit, that allows them to access better performance in the cloud of that data that's coming into the, off their model and into their cloud. And then we also have a toolkit called OpenVINO. It's not about drinking wine. >> Oh darn. >> Alright. >> Open means it's an opensource contribution that we made to the industry. Vino, V-I-N-O is Visual Inference and Neural Network Optimization, and this is a powerful tool, because so much of AI is about harnessing compute resources efficiently, and as more and more of the data that we bring into our compute environments is actually taking place in the physical world, it's really important to be able to do that in a cost-effective and power-efficient way. OpenVINO allows developers to actually isolate individual cores or an integrated GPU on a CPU without knowing anything about hardware architecture, and it allows them then to apply different applications, or different algorithms, or inference workloads very efficiently onto that compute architecture, but it's abstracted away from any knowledge of that. So, it's really designed for an application developer, who maybe is working with a data scientist that's built a neural network in a framework like TensorFlow, or Onyx, or Pytorch, any tool that they're already comfortable with, abstract away from the silicon and optimize their model onto this hardware platform, so it performs at orders of magnitude better performance then what you would get from a more traditional GPU approach. >> Yeah, and that kind of decision making about understanding chip architectures to be able to optimize how that works, that's some deep magic really. The amount of understanding that you would need to have to do that as a human is enormous, but as a developer, I don't know anything about chip architectures, so it sounds like the, and it's a thing that we've been hearing over the last couple of days, is these tools allow developers to have essentially superpowers, so you become an augmented intelligence yourself. Rather than just giving everything to an artificial intelligence, these tools actually augment the human intelligence and allow you to do things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do. >> And that's I think the key to getting mass market adoption of some of these AI implementations. So, for the last four or five years since ImageNet solved the image recognition problem, and now we have greater accuracy from computer models then we do from our own human eyes, really AI was limited to academia, or large IT tech companies, or proof-of-concepts. It didn't really scale into these production environments, but what we've seen over the couple of years is really a democratization of AI by companies like AWS and Intel that are making tools available to developers, so they don't need to know how to code in Python to optimize a compute module, or they don't need to, in many cases, understand the fundamental underlying architectures. They can focus on whatever business problem they're tryin' to solve, or whatever AI use-case it is that they're working on. >> I know you talked about DeepLens last year, and now we've got DeepRacer this year, and you've got the contest going on throughout this coming year with DeepRacer, and we're going to have a big race at the AWS re:Invent 2019. So what's next? I mean, or what are you thinking about conceptually to, I guess build on what you've already started there? >> Well, I can't reveal what next years, >> Well that I understand >> Project will be. >> But generally speaking. >> But what I can tell you, what I can tell you is what's available today in these DeepRacer cars is a level playing field. Everyone's getting the same car and they have essentially the same tool sets, but I've got a couple of pro-tips for your viewers if they want to win some of these AWS Summits that are going to be around the world in 2019. Two pro-tips, one is they can leverage the OpenVINO toolkit to get much higher inference performance from what's already on that car. So, I encourage them to work with OpenVINO. It's integrated into SageMaker, so that they have easy access to it if they're an AWS developer, but also we're going to allow an expansion of, almost an accelerator of the car itself, by being able to plug in an Intel Neural Compute Stick. We just released the second version of this stick. It's a USB form factor. It's got a Movidius Myriad X Vision processing unit inside. This years version is eight times more powerful than last years version, and when they plug it into the car, all of that inference workload, all of those images, and information that's coming off those sensors will be put onto the VPU, allowing all the CPU, and GPU resources to be used for other activities. It's going to allow that car to go at turbo speed. >> To really cook. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> Alright, so now you know, you have no excuse, right? I mean Jonathan has shared the secret sauce, although I still think when you said OpenVINO you got Justin really excited. >> It is vino time. >> It is five o'clock actually. >> Alright, thank you for being with us. >> Thanks for having me guys. >> And good luck with DeepRacer for the coming year. >> Thank you. >> It looks like a really, really fun project. We're back with more, here at AWS re:Invent on theCUBE, live in Las Vegas. (rhythmic digital music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back here to Las Vegas. We're in the Sands expo, we're in Hall D. If you happen to be at the show or dropping in just to watch, come on by and say hi to us. Love to see you here on theCUBE, as we continue our coverage, day two. And along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls. And now we're joined by a couple of gents from HUB International, Seth Morrell, who's the vice president of enterprise, architecture and design. Seth, good morning to you. >> Good morning. >> And Jeremy Embalabala, who is the director of security architecture and engineering, also at HUB International. Good morning, Jeremy. >> Good morning. >> Seth, by the way, playing hurt, broken finger with a snowblower in Chicago on Monday. >> On Monday. >> Yeah, good luck though with the winter. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, it started off well. >> Sorry to see that, but thanks for coming regardless. >> No problem. >> All right, tell us about HUB International a little bit, about primary mission and then the two of you, what you're doing for them primarily. >> Right, right, so HUB International is an insurance brokerage. Personal, commercial, we do employee benefits, retirement as well. We're based in the US in Chicago, operate in US and Canada. 500 plus locations, 12,000 employees. >> Okay, and then primary responsibilities between the two of you? >> Well, I'm the director of security architecture. I'm responsible for all things technical with regards to security, both on the architecture side, engineering and operations. >> All right, so yesterday we were talking about this early, you did a session, you're big Splunk guys, right? So let's talk about what you're doing with that, how that's working for you in general, if you would. >> Yeah, yeah, go ahead. >> Yeah, the reason Splunk Enterprise Security, the on-premise version we actually, people always ask me, are you using Splunk Cloud or Splunk On Prem? And I always joke, well we're using Splunk On Prem in the cloud in AWS. But for us, we're really focused on Splunk as a SIEM, to enable our security operations center to provide insights into our environment and help us detect and understand threats that are going on in the environment. So we have a manage partner that runs our security operations center for us. They also manage our Splunk environment. It helps us keep an eye on both our AWS environment that we have, our Azure environment, and our on-premise data center as well. >> A few people have sort of gotten wary of the idea of a SIEM. People have tried to use SIEMs and they haven't been very successful and they go, "Oh SIEM's a bit of a dirty word." But it sounds like SIEM's actually working for you really well. >> Yeah, I really view a SIEM as a cornerstone of security program. Specifically if you have a mature security operation center, it's really hard to operate that without a SIEM. SIEMs are tricky, they're tricky to implement, they're generally very costly and they require a lot of tuning, a lot of love, care, and feeding in order to be effective. Quite frankly, if you don't get that right, it can actually be detrimental to your security program. But if you put the proper care and feeding into a SIEM, it will be very beneficial to your organization. >> Okay, so what's some of the things that you've been able to do now that you've got Splunk in there and it's helping you manage the security? Because I saw some statistics earlier this morning, where security is basically the second biggest, most popular term here at AWS and at re:Invent. It's clearly front of mind for a lot of enterprises. So what is it that Splunk in helping you to achieve that you wouldn't have been able to go otherwise? >> The biggest thing for us is the aggregation of all of our logs, our data sources in AWS, data sources on prem, our Windows file servers, our network traffic flow data, all of that's aggregated into Splunk. And that allows us to do some correlation with third-party threat intelligence feeds. Take indicators of compromise that are streamed, that are observed out there in the real world, and apply those to data that we're seeing on our actual data sources in our environment. It allows us to detect threats that we wouldn't have been able to detect otherwise. >> Right, how does that translate through to what you're actually doing as a business? I mean, this is a very sort of technology-centric thing, but you're an insurance agent. So how does this investment in security translate into the business value? >> One, it just gives us visibility into the environment, and we can proactively identify potential threats and remediate them before they actually cause an impact to the business. Without these tools and without these capabilities, it'd be a much riskier endeavor. And so it's helped us throughout, and we've been good partners with Splunk, they're been good partners with us. And coupled with all the other things that we're doing in the security space and in the cloud space, we're able to build a nice secure environment for our customers and ourselves. >> We're also a very highly regulated industry, so we have regulations that we have to comply with for security. And our customers also care about security very, very deeply. So it allows us to be able to protect our customers' data and really assure our customers that their data is safe with us, whether that data is hosted on-prem or it's in the cloud. >> What about that battle? There's often a battle between private enterprise and regulation, just in general, right? It's making sure the policy makers understand capabilities and real threats as opposed to maybe perceptions or whatever. What do you see in terms of the federal regulatory environment and what you deal with in a Balkanized system where you're dealing with 50 states and Canada. So you've got your hands full, I assume. >> So at HUB, we view security and compliance a little differently. Instead of trying to build security programs and achieve compliance by abiding by all the regulations, we do the right thing from a security perspective. We make the right investments. We put the right controls into our environment. When those new regulations come out for provincial law in Canada or different states or GDPR in Europe, that we'll be 95% of the way there, by just building the right controls into our environment at a foundational level. Then we have to just spend our efforts just kind of aligning ourselves with the other 5% that vary from regulation to regulation. >> Was that a shift in management philosophy at all? Because quite often or maybe in the past, it's like, I'm only going to do something. I'm not saying HUB, but in general, when I have to. As opposed to you appear to be preemptive. Right, you're doing things because you should. So there's a different mindset there, right? >> It sounds like a much more strategic view of security rather than a tactical reactive kind of security. How long has that been the philosophy at HUB? >> So we really built out our a security program starting the beginning of last year. There's all new leadership that came in, Seth came in, myself came in, all new leadership across the organization. And that's really where that mindset came from. And the need and recognition to make an investment in security. We view security as a driver of business, not just a cost center. It's a way we can add to the bottom line and be able to generate revenue for the business by being able to show our customers that we really care about their data, and we're going to do our best to take of them. So with that mindset, we can actually help market, and use that as a marketing tool to be able to help drive business. >> So what are some of the things that you've seen here at the show that you're thinking about, well actually that will support my strategy? Some of the more longer term things. Is there anything that's sort of stuck out to you as sort of going, ooh, that's something that we should actually take back? >> Yeah, well, there's some tactical announcements that are very important to us. The announcement of Windows File Server support. File Server support is big deal for us. We're a heavy File Server organization. And having that native within AWS is very interesting. There's been some other announcements with SFTP. Other items that we're going to be trying to take advantage of in a fairly quick fashion. And we're excited about that. We've been on our journey to cloud since essentially the summer of 2017 through now. And we're kind of ready for the next steps, the next set of capabilities. And so, a conference like this and all these announcements, we're excited to take a look at the menu and start picking out what we want to eat. >> It's a great buffet. >> Yeah, yeah. >> In a city that's famous for it. >> That's true, that's true. >> All you can eat. >> Yeah. >> All right, so let's talk about the journey then. You said 2017, so it's been a year, year plus into that. And you're excited about what's coming, but what do you need? So I know you got this great buffet that you're looking at, but maybe you don't want the pork. Maybe you want the turkey. What do you need, what do you want the most, you think, to service your clients? >> Right, so, we spent most of our migration just essentially moving what we had over to the cloud. And so, what our next steps are, let's really understand our workloads, let's be smarter about how we're running them, let's take advantage of the appropriate technology, the menu items that are out there, per work load, just to be smarter. We're going to be spending much more time this year looking at more automation, orchestration, and basically maturing our cloud capabilities so that we're ready for the next big thing. And as we acquire another company or there's a new business need, we're working to be more proactive and being able to anticipate those needs with building a platform that we can really extend and build upon. >> I'm sorry, go ahead. >> I have a question on the choosing of workloads then. So are you going to be moving everything to the cloud? Or do you think that there'll be some things that will actually remain on-prem or is it going to be a hybrid cloud? >> Our goal is to go from a data center to a network closet. >> Right. >> So we have moved almost all of our application workloads out of our data center right now. We have a large VDI environment we're looking to move as well. Once that's done, we'll be down to our phone system and a couple other legacy applications that we're trying to determine what we actually want to do with strategically. >> Right, okay. That's a pretty common sort of story. There's a lot of people who are moving as much as they possibly can, and then there's a few little bits that just sort of sit there that you need to decide, do we rewrite this, do we actually need this at all, maybe we just turn it off. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> Are there any capabilities specific to your industry that you need or that you'd like to have refined? Something that would allow you to do your job, specifically in the insurance space, that would be unique to you? Anything floating out there that you say, if we had that, that'll fine-tune this to a better degree or a greater degree? >> So for us, it's all about flexibility. We grow very, very rapidly through our mergers and acquisitions. We bought 52 companies last year and we're on pace to do almost 70 companies this year. So for us, the cloud really enables us to be able to absorb those organizations that we acquire, bring them in much, much faster. Part of the story of our cloud migration, we were able to move the integration time for mergers and acquisitions from six months down to under 90 days. Because we're now able to move those workloads in much, much quicker with the clouds. For us that's really a key capability. >> Well you guys are used to writing checks, dinner's on them tonight, right? >> Definitely. >> Seth, Jeremy, thanks for being with us. >> Thank you. >> Glad to be here. >> We appreciate the time. Good luck with the winter, I think you might need it. >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. >> All right, we'll be back with more from AWS re:Invent. You're watching theCUBE from Las Vegas. (snappy techno music)

(upbeat music) [Announcer] Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Re:Invent, 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Hello, welcome back here to Las Vegas. We're at the Sands Expo in Hall D, perhaps a friend in the area, come on by, say hi to Justin Warren and John Walls here, on the set of theCUBE, joined here by David Cramer, who is the President of Digital Services Operations for BMC software. David, good to see you. >> Good to see you. Thanks for having me. >> All the way from Austin, Texas, deep in the Lone Star state. >> Yes sir. >> All right, so everyone's going to the cloud, right? That's obviously, why, you know, why so many people are here. What do you see it in terms of how they get in there, what are they doing there, and who hasn't made that move yet, and why not? >> Yeah, it's a great question. So a lot of people are in different spots in this journey. Some people are just starting out with the journey to cloud, which is surprising, but as popular as cloud is there are still some companies out there who just haven't made the move. Sometimes for regulatory reasons, sometimes for cost reasons, or sometimes they just don't have the business need, or they just don't see the opportunity. Then the majority of the customers I talk to are somewhere on that path. They've either begun to move applications or they're actually moving applications and building new applications to take advantage of the cloud. And so for us as a company, we see a tremendous opportunity to help our customers figure out the right way to move to cloud. Because it wasn't that long ago, just a few years back, when you heard people talking about cloud first, lift and shift, I'm moving everything to the cloud. I think people have stepped back from that and said, well, wait a minute, let's think about what cloud infrastructure, cloud services can provide us, and then let's optimize what we put in the cloud because certainly you can spend a lot of money using cloud services if you're not too careful. >> Yeah, you hit a big word there. Optimize. Right, it's about, it's kind of fun to just start throwing, I wouldn't say, mud on the wall, but just making the big move and also you realize you're into it for a little more money than maybe you thought you should have been. >> Absolutely, and there's a cultural phenomenon that's driving this, and that is DevOps and the desire to release more software to get new products, new features, innovation into the market means that you have to let your teams be autonomous. You can't have a command and control structure where every decision comes from the top. But that autonomy creates an opportunity for waste, creates an opportunity for mistakes, misconfigurations, security issues. So one of the reasons that I mention the everybody moves everything there and then says, wait a minute. Maybe that wasn't the right move, maybe we should be cloud smart instead of cloud first. >> Yeah. I do speak a lot with developers and companies in that ecosystem and there's a lot of talk about replatforming, taking applications that we had on our existing on-side infrastructure and then replatforming that to cloud because cloud requires doing things in a completely new way. Whereas, if you just take the old thing that you had, and just lift and shift and move it to cloud it tends not to work out quite so well. We're noticing a trend and we've heard that a lot today here at this show that people aren't moving everything to cloud and we now have a change in Amazon's view of the world, that actually, cloud is not the one true way, you are actually allowed to have some stuff on-site now. Some things can stay there and that's okay. So what is BMC doing with customers to help them decide which things should be moved and which things should stay where they are. >> It's a great point you brought up, because there were a lot of people who were saying let's rearchitect for the cloud and the applications that they were looking at weren't going to benefit from the elasticity or the things that cloud environment provides. And I've talked to lots of CIOs who will tell you I can deliver a virtual machine for a lot less money than the virtual machines the cloud vendors deliver. >> Yeah. >> So to answer the question, BMC has a rich history in the data center. So one of the first things we learn is that our performance data, our capacity data, and the information we have about the application architectures and the way they live in the data center, whether that be physical infrastructure, virtual infrastructure, containers, we can help a lot to identify what are the high value assets where you can save a lot of money by migrating them to a cloud. What are the assets that aren't going to save you a lot of money and you're just going to lift and shift and not get those benefits. So I say that from a performance and capacity optimization standpoint, that's one of the starting places. A second is application discovery and dependency mapping. One of the challenges in IT has long been is what do I have and how is it configured. If I'm going to move something to the cloud, I sure need to know what it looks like in my data center and we provide a lot of help there with our world class discovery technologies. >> Right. Another thing about moving to the cloud that we've heard with a bunch of previous guests here on theCUBE today, is security. >> Yes. >> Security is a fundamental thing that we have to get right, particularly when we move to cloud. So what are some of the things of BMC, what's your security story, Dave? >> Yeah, it's a very important part of the strategy and one that we developed because we began this journey ourselves about five years ago, as we looked at our customers and the way they wanted to consume services. We said, well, shoot, we should be building new apps in Amazon environments and we actually have services that leverage Amazon Lambda. So, we then said great, now we have to learn about running cloud-hosted applications or cloud-native applications and how to secure them. So a lot of our solutions came from our own learnings. Specifically our focus areas are around optimizing the security and configuration of the cloud infrastructure layer and the platform layer. A lot of customers don't realize the shared responsibility model that Amazon. They've done a great job of telling people about this model. But a lot of customers, like the ostrich in the sand, they're just not thinking, or they're not looking at it, and so they expect Amazon or someone else to take care of all these problems. And when you set up a service and Amazon, certainly, they're taking care of a lot of security but they're not securing the things that you put in that environment, your software, the middleware, the different services you connect together. So we're helping customers secure the configuration of those services, but we're also helping customers with spend, because one of the challenges we just talked about around DevOps and autonomy is if you give a developer access to Amazon and the suite of services they offer, it's like a kid in the candy store. And of course, they want gold-plated everything. I want the best environment with the best database, the most advanced services, and all that ends up costing a whole lot of money. >> Yeah, you got to put me in the candy store. That's exactly where I'm going. >> Right. >> Right. >> All right, so we've also been talking about volume, data volume, and how it kind of boggles the human mind now, right? >> Oh, yeah. >> And why automation is essential. You have to keep up. >> Huge part. >> Is it beyond our ability now to keep up with it as humans. >> I think, most people who we talk would agree that we're past human scale. You know, when you begin to look at the number of containers that services like Google Maps. If you do some research, they're spending up millions of containers every day and then spending them back down in some cases. So, you can't take old methods and old approaches to an environment like that where you're at hyper-scale some of the time, and you're not at hyper-scale other times. And so we've seen a huge shift in mindset. We used to talk about push button automation. 'Cause we've been selling automation in the data center, gosh, all the way back to the mainframe, BMC's been selling automation. But it was smart people figuring out what to automate and then hitting the button. What we're now seeing is trust, where they're allowing the automation routines to take over and actually run. Now in some cases that's driven by machine learning and really advanced algorithms. In other cases, it's very simple policy based. But we are seeing a big shift from I don't trust automation to gosh, I have to trust it. And I think some of that is based on Amazon themselves, with things like auto skill rules. >> It's still got to be hard to cede control like that when you're used to doing it yourself, and now to rely on another mechanism. That just runs against my nature. >> Yeah, and it runs against the DevOps cultural trend we talked about, where you're trying to let the teams be autonomous. Every CIO I've spoken to in the last five years cares about what they call guard rails or governance. They realize that it can't be top-down decision-making. They have to let the teams have some freedom, but they also realize that if they don't put up guard rails, and they don't restrict the choices, restrict the opportunity for mistakes, they're going to be in trouble from a cost or a security or even a performance perspective. >> Innovation is fabulous until you fall off a cliff and die. We do actually need to have a fence at the edge of that cliff. That would be a good plan. >> Well, yeah, if you talk to the DevOps teams themselves, one of the things I always like to ask is who are the ops guys in the room? And normally you have a bunch of developers, and you ask well, who cares about compliance. Nobody. They want to build cool new features. >> Right >> Who cares about code scanning and testing your software. Maybe one guy puts his hand up and says I'm the QA guy, or I'm the security guy. So there's also a cultural thing that we're seeing operations blend into these new models, and we're seeing operations teams who are classically central, IT-Ops teams, moving into the DevOps world, moving into the cloud-Ops world. >> We were just commenting before during the break about the nature of this show. And that IT pros, and your traditional infrastructure type people, they would be at different shows. They're all here now. >> They are. >> We are definitely seeing that real blend between what used to be purely developers, front-end software developers would be at this show. Now we have IT pros, we have all the infrastructure groups, we have all the companies. >> Security guys. >> Security guys. All of these people are now at this show, working together in that one team idea. >> Yeah, it's fascinating. We've talked a lot about ops everywhere. We've talked about development everywhere. Because if you go to any large enterprise, the new IT operators they're trying to hire, all have development skills. They all have programing backgrounds. And they're all coming to shows like this because they're being tasked with this concept that BMC calls run and reinvent. You've got to continue to run your existing business. Well who better than the IT operators to do that. They've been doing that for years. But you've also got to reinvent, and you've got to compete, and who better to do that than our innovators, our developers, the people out front trying to create that innovation that will transform or game-change an industry. So it's fascinating >> Reinvent. I mean, that'd be a great name for a trade show. >> And I didn't even do that on purpose. (laughing) >> David, thank you for sharing your time with us and good luck on down the road. >> Great. Thanks a lot. >> David Kramer, joining us from BMC software. We will be back from re:Invent in just a moment. We're live here in Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE. (lively music)