>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >> Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to theCUBES Wall-To-Wall coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 virtual reinvented our coverage over three weeks over cloud. We're looking into the next decade of innovation. And with me are two great guests, Chris Wiborg is the Vice President of Product Marketing at Cohesity and Sabina Joseph is the General Manager for Americas Technology for Partners AWS. Folks, thanks for coming to theCUBE. Great to see you. >> Great to be here today. Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. It's great to see you and Chris, before we get into the partnership, I want to ask kind of what you've seen in the market, with the increased focus on data, digital business, obviously the last nine months, people have really shifted their priorities. How have you seen customers responding? >> Yeah, it's sort of strange to say this at a time. It's really hard for all of us dealing with a global pandemic, but the market has picked up in many ways and perhaps that's not surprising given a lot of folks have started to shift things to more virtual way of working and the data hasn't slowed down. And so with that we've also seen a little bit of a shift and this is part of the reason behind the announcement we're making of trying to accelerate for many organizations projects that had originally been planned to put in a data center to moving more towards the cloud. Part of this as a CapEx to OpEX shift. But I think it also in some cases all is under this umbrella of digital transformation, where they're trying to accelerate new ways of doing things while in some cases, people can't even get into data centers in some cases anymore. And so how can you do that more remotely? How can you go to a model to loot more Self-Help? And all that leads up to part of what we're going to be talking about today. So the market has been very busy because again, data growth hasn't slowed down. I think the one thing that I'd add to that is you'd see an uptake in terms of focus and interest in some of the things that we do because of all the ransomware attacks that are out there. That's another piece of it. >> I want to get into the announcement as well, but I mean, you're right, Chris, it's a very hexy, it's tough as it is for the climate. It's a good time to be in tech. It's even better if you're in cloud. So Sabina, I wonder if you'd had... I think you must have a lot of people in the ecosystem really wanting to work with you. >> We do, I think with the proliferation of data. And data across many different silos I think the key is, how do we provide customers more value from this data, that way they can make it optimal for their business. So, yes, we do have a lot of different partners wanting to work. >> Okay, so we're all busy. I feel like we've never worked so hard in our lives, but so Cohesity and AWS, you've announced a strategic collaboration. Tell me more about it. Why did you choose to collaborate together Chris, other than AWS is the number one cloud platform. What were some of the other factors that we should be focused on? >> I think it's the Sabina, please do chime in here as well. I think the big portion of it, Dave has to do with this shared vision that we have around. Really what we believe is the next chapter in data management. And so how do we make it simple for organizations to not only protect and secure and manage their data, but also get more value out of it and derive more value from that data, which is kind of what Sabina was hinting at. And a lot of the reasons that we think this is such a good match, given all the varying services Amazon has, that you can build off, given what Cohesity does. So Sabina, I know you going to start with customers. You always interviewed enough Amazon, and it was only us to know that's really the starting point, the prison from which you looked, but so from that prison, from your perspective, what's the collaboration? Why the collaboration? What does it bring for customers? >> So, you know, I've the saying here. I think there was a lot of alignment, both in terms of culture and working backwards from customers, customers session. And really kind of understand, what can we do right into the Intelligent Data Management Solution to enterprise and mid-sized customers and provide simplicity, flexibility, and reduced total cost of ownership. And that's where Cohesity and AWS, we really shared that vision. I would say over the last couple of years, Cohesity of course, has been a partner of AWS for quite some time now. And then when we started to talk to each other, we understood that these were some of the things we wanted to not just address, but also provide an opportunity for customers. So that's why we collaborated in this unique way to bring forward a Data Management as a service solution for our customers. >> All right, Chris, I really want to dig into this a little bit more because I've talked to a number of CEOs that have said, boy, our business resilience strategy was way to focused on DRA maybe too much focus on backup. We're now a digital business, because every business, so you're out of business, if you're not a digital business overnight. And so this notion of data management and data management as a service, what problems are you really focused on solving there? >> I think two things, Dave and let's go back to a Cohesity after solving as a company. And that's the problem with what we call mass data fragmentation, where you have data stored in many different locations, prem, cloud, edge, et cetera, typically in many different pieces of infrastructure. So there's a lot of silos going on there, and it's really hard to get your hands around the entirety of what you have. And first of all, make sure it is protected. And there's some compliance implications to that and so on. And then also again, how can you not only protected, but do more with it and get better transparency and more value out of that data that today might be dark, might be opaque because a, do you know where it is? And b, even if you do, what more can you do with it? And so that's kind of the first problem we're setting out to solve. And why as we look at moving to doing what we're doing with AWS, providing an alternate consumption option is also really important, we think. So some people have staff and skills to roll their own, to do their selves and cohesively we'll continue to support those customers, obviously, as we do today. But what we also want to provide a new option for those that want to make that shift from CapEx to OpEX, and more from a management of their environment doing it themselves to having somebody else manage it for them, and really reducing that cost and overhead associated with running your own data center effectively. And so bringing valuable Cohesity leaders to the cloud is the second piece of that, where we want to make sure we carry that bigger vision along where we're not just doing one thing, we're doing multiple things. And so Data Management in our sense is not just about backup, although that's the first thing you'll see. We're also going to tackle that dr problem, you raised as well. If you look closely a couple of weeks ago, we made an announcement around what we're doing with a product we call Site Continuity on the on-prem world, guess what that's going to come real soon to AWS. And then beyond that files and objects, test data management and as we'll get to a little bit later more when we start leveraging the value and the power of some of the advanced services, AWS hasn't been to the table for things like compliance and so on. >> Great, thank you for that. And so Sabina, I mean, we run on AWS, we're small, but still we go into the console and there's this buffet of services and we have a lot of options. So, I wonder if you could talk about customer choice, your philosophy around that, why that's important, how you're providing different deployment models. And the example I would use is why is backup as a service? Not enough, why do we need to go beyond that? >> First of all, thank you very much for being our customer. >> Welcome. >> And I think the key behind this solution that Cohesity is building on top of AWS is to really provide one platform and one user interface. Yes, backup as a service is the first service that we will start with and we are starting with, but I think we all realize that customers do many different things, but get data. They do disaster recovery, they have file services, Dev and test, and then the value add services, which we'll talk about in a bit around analytics compliance, machine learning and so on. So those are all the different value, at least we want to provide the date with that data. In addition of course, backup as a service disaster recovery, as a service file services and so on. Well the backup services comprehensive that we are launching with and provide some rich protection across all of this data, but at the end of the day, it's customer's choice whether they want to manage your own data and infrastructure or Cohesity kind of manage this across the infrastructure for them both in a hybrid model and in a cloud model. And we have many customers kind of wanting to look at both options because they had both environments. I don't know Chris, if you want to talk about Dolby a little bit, but I can certainly get into it. I don't know if you want to get a little bit into Dolby and how they're using it. >> Yeah, that's a great example, actually Sabina. So, I think Dave, Sabina is suggesting, one of our early design partners on this was Dolby and they're an existing Cohesity customer. Today they're very happy what we're doing on-prem. And so I asked them why would you be interested in managing data also in the cloud? And his answer was, well, "look for me, it's really all about the self-help option. "I have a lot of clients, I do well centrality, "I have a lot of clients in my organization, "but I want to point to do their own thing "and not have to directly manage them. "This is going to be the perfect option for them. "They can just go sign up, connect and protect "to get started. All right, Step one." >> I talked to another customer who commented well in this sort of hybrid configuration that Sabina suggests the stuff that they have on-prem today. They'll probably protect on-prem, but workloads like let's say Microsoft 365, mailboxes or something like that, it's in the cloud. Why would they back haul that into their data center? Why not just protect it there in the cloud itself? It just seems to make sense. And then we also have customers we're talking to that, there are large distributed organizations where maybe the stuff that's in the branch office, the remote office, they want to backup to the cloud because of land back, haul costs and so on. It's easier to do it that way. And then the central stuff is still central. So we going to give as Sabina said, customers that choice. You can do cloud only if you want to, you can do prem only with us, or you can do both. And we expect a lot of customers loaded up in a third bucket and that sort of hybrid scenario and let them choose why they do it and use that combination. The great thing is when you go to Cohesity Helio's, that's going to be the control center, if you will, for both things on-prem and also in this new DevOps offering in cloud. So one experience from a manageability standpoint, that's just the only thing I'd add to Sabina's answer about what's great about this and why you want to do more than just one thing. Well, if you sort of solve this problem of infrastructure silos and in your traditional data center, and now you're bringing in the cloud, why we create silos and best of breed things all over again, don't you want to consolidate some of that for ease of use and lower cost of ownership as well. And so that's one of the things we think we're going to bring to the table. It's pretty unique versus letting customers pick and choose, five or 10 different solutions and trying to merge those together. We think we've got a better way. >> Got it. So then let's come back to some of the comments you were making about added value. So what the customers really do with data, with data management as a service and AWS that maybe they couldn't do before. >> So the way I look at it, Cohesity and AWS are custodians of this data, on behalf of the customer, ultimately it is their data, but we want to unlock the value from this data versus having it being in different silos, different locations and so on. So the vision that we have, which we are on the road right now, in terms of unlocking this data is to really add additional services, maybe compliance as a service, analytics as a service, machine learning as a service. So let's just kind of walk through these three things, So if you think about compliance as a service, using Amazon Macie, which uses machine learning to really kind of discover, classify and protect sensitive data. And if you think about analytics as a service, using AWS Glue to run ETL on this data, Amazon Athena to run sequel queries and then potentially create data warehouse using Amazon Redshift. Then if you really start thinking about other machine learning services, right across the AWS machine learning stack, if you look at it at a high level, customers could use Amazon text tracks, Amazon transcribe to extract value from the Metadata to allow deeper business specific content that they need for their different solutions they have to end customers. For example, another logical use case could be Amazon comprehend medical using that to kind of distract extract medical information from this data. And then finally customers can also use Amazon SageMaker to build advanced machine learning models, to really start deriving even additional value and gain business insights from this data. So those are kind of the things we have in our mind, in terms of compliance to service, machine learning as the service, analytics as a service. And then of course, I want to bring in Chris here to talk a little bit about what they plan to do with their MarketPlace, the Cohesity Marketplace. >> Yeah, no, I think, it's a great Sabina. So we've always had this concept at Cohesity, Dave, of being able to do more with your data. And you've seen express so far in our marketplace, which is still going to be there. We just think plugging some of the additional services that Sabina mentioned. When you have a center of gravity for your data in the cloud is going to make that concept even more powerful. And so day one, when we GA just right now, actually during re:Invent you going to be able to do it yourself. You'll have data backed up into the cloud. For example, you can apply those services if you have the skill to do that. But over time, working in conjunction with Amazon, the goal is to be able to make those services something that you would just go in again to Helios and say, for example, turn on the compliance service. And behind the scenes we're invoking and it was on Macie doing all right thing with all the data under management like Cohesity already. And so you just get them to report back out if that's what you're aiming to do. And so we going to try and make this as simple and easy to use as possible, leveraging the power of all the great things that Amazon has does through the API that they have combined with what we do in an engineering effort that we'll be driving with our guidance, to really give a great value, add customers far beyond the insurance policy you get with backup and being able to do more with that data and add value to your organization. >> And that's okay. So you've announced at re:Invent GA of Cohesity dataprotect how should customers think about getting started? >> Well, they can get started today, since we're an LGA I just go to www.queasy.com and I have the ability to go ahead there and actually join in on a free trial and to get started. And if they decided to convert them, then they can go from there. So risk-free gone in, check it out. We welcome feedback as always from our customers and then stay tuned because right around the corner after we're done with one offer as part of the bigger DevOps umbrella, you'll see disaster recovery and additional services, really the whole value of the Cohesity platform over time delivered through AWS. >> As a service bring it on guys, Sabina and Chris, thanks so much, really appreciate you coming on and thank you for watching everyone. Keep it right there with digging deep into AWS and the re:Invent ecosystem. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Hello everyone and welcome back to the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite 2019 here in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co host Stu minimun. We are joined by Chris Weiberg. He is the vice president of product marketing at Cohesity. Thank you so much for coming on the show and for providing us with this great space, this prime real estate. We really appreciate it. >>Spot on the show floor and I hope this is working out for you guys here with uh, with all of us branding and so on behind >>it has been terrific as as we 26,000 people from around the world here at the orange County convention center. We'll talk about how the conference has been for you here at Cohesity. >>I think it's gone really, really well. I mean, apart from the loverly brute booth property we have right here, um, some of the keynote messages around the importance of hybrid cloud moving forward with what Microsoft's doing with arc and things like that, um, really resonate with how we see the market. So a couple of the announces we've made have been around support for Azure stack and for the AVS, the Azure VMware solution. And, uh, we, that's just what we see with our customers across the board. And I think Theresa actually mentioned this yesterday, that if you look forward at most organizations cloud journey, they end up somewhere in that hybrid range, right? They may not all be there today and maybe just a little bit of sass, Ooh, three 65 to start off with, for example. But, you know, looking ahead, unless you're natively born in the cloud, and that's typically small organizations. Most mid to large enterprises are hybrid cloud, >>yours that are not as familiar with Cohesity, which is a company that has growing from strength to strength. Tell us a little bit about what >>yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. So, uh, we are very much a software defined data management platform. And typically when I say that to people, I get blank stares to begin with, right? But let me, let me tell you really what we've thought about. And, and this goes back to, um, the heritage of our founder. He, uh, before he cofounded Newtanics, he was the lead engineer on the Google file system. And the, the philosophy has for Cohesity and the direction that we're going is very much based upon his experiences there. If you build a shared nothing distributed file system and you do that right, you establish a great platform to build upon, right? And so if you think about what Google did, they did that, um, with the file system that today runs many things, right? Uh, Gmail, YouTube, all the G suite apps. Um, but the first thing is, is they built that file system and then they figured out how to manage that in a distributed fashion, right? >>Because of their points of presence are all over the, the globe these days. Uh, and then on that they started delivering applications. But if you think back, the very first application Google delivered was what the search, right? That's, that's how that became known as, as, as a company, as Google search. And, and so for us, we're taking that same mindset towards dealing with enterprise data. So if Google does a great job with data and the consumer world for the, that they own and operate, organizations don't have that luxury of having Google come in and crawl and managing index all their data, right? We can help do that. So the journey begins with the genius behind our distributed file system that we call span Fs. And that's what a lot of the intellectual property has gone into is building that file system of that truly is, um, that's shared nothing architecture scales from a on-prem in your data center, core to the edge to the cloud. >>And then being able to produce a manageability layer on top of that, something we call Helio's that manages all the data across various sites you may have managed by Cohesity. And then our first app, if you will, on top of that platform really is data protection, right? So people may know as first and foremost as a backup and recovery company. And absolutely that's, that's something we're really, really good at. I would put us head to head against anybody else on the show floor here in, in that regard. And, and candidly, many large enterprise customers have done that with us and, and chosen us as their solution. Um, but I think from there the question is once you amass the data, uh, what can you do with it and, and how can you get more out of it? So if you look at backup and recovery, I think traditionally that's been largely viewed by it. >>Operators as an insurance policy, it's, there is something goes wrong. Uh, but we believe you can do more than that. You can not only have that insurance policy to help with things like disaster recovery and coming back from ransomware attacks and so on, but how can you do things like, uh, put analytics on top of it to get more out of it, get better insights out of it. Um, how can you have another customer? That store is all their customer care phone calls. It's a voice object, right? Kind of opaque, but they want to transcribe that. Why don't you do this transcription services on top of the data that you already have from that backup and recovery solution. And so, you know, get the data through backup, get the data through files and objects. I think David and I talked about that with you earlier. >>Uh, and that's a great way to start to aggregate and consolidate not only the data in your enterprise, but also all the infrastructure silos that are out there. And so that's problem one that we solve. And then we go from there. >> So Chris, when I think about all the various customers here, one thing they're dealing with, there's a lot of change. They've got their business challenges, whether it's adopting the cloud, looking at edge, right? Adopting containerization. Yeah. It's always defined by the change that's going on in their environment. Traditional backup and recovery was please don't change everything. I had my backup window, my administrator, I had the program that I'd used for 15 or 20 years that I trust. And I know, and I please don't sneeze on it because I've got it the way that I like it over the last like five years. >>Companies are because of that change. They're, they're looking at new solutions, they're looking at other environments. Tell us how Cohesity's riding that wave to move, you know, not like the enterprise is moving. Enterprises are moving fast. Right? But they're at least looking and that if they don't make some move, uh, you know, everybody else has, has moved along, so they need to at least be a little bit more agile and fast. >> Yeah. Well, I think, uh, you know, first of all, thank you for realizing that oftentimes our number one competitors that do nothing option, right? It's, I've done this forever, this way. Why change? Um, but, but to your comment about, you know, the backup window, well, there's no such thing anymore for most companies. It's seven by 24 by three 65. And so that alone I think is causing people to step back. And say, Hey, is the way that I used to do things still the right answer or is there a better way? >>And, and so that's often the beginning of a conversation we'll have where, you know, maybe, uh, their, their current, uh, contract with an existing provider is coming to a point where, uh, there's a window for renewal and they, and they want to look at something different. Um, but, but I do think, you know, and we had a customer panel earlier today at the show were a couple of law firms are talking about this. They just don't have the luxury of time they used to to deal with this. And so that, that sort of causes change whether you like it or not. And so that's often how we begin that conversation. Even though, to your point, these folks sometimes aren't the most, um, uh, risk embracing crowd in it, right? They're not on the bleeding edge all the time because if you're in the insurance policy, guys, you don't want to mess that up, right? >>Uh, but, but that's what we find is, is the disruption we're bringing in the market creates an opportunity to look at how you do things differently. Uh, w we had a, another customer panel back at VMworld in San Francisco this year where one of the customers had actually three different providers. One that was doing backup software, uh, one that was target storage and another that was the media gateways to handle some of their information. He was happy with all of those. But when he looked at that and he said, wait a second, instead of dealing with three companies that can do all the one and I can per data center eliminate about a half a rack of gear, he said that, that for me was it, that was a no brainer that led me to you guys. And so that's what we're saying. >>So we as a former it practitioner yourself, I'm curious to know how your background helps you get inside the brains of these people who are making decisions for, you said the do nothing option is compelling because? Because it's easy and yet it is the wrong way to go because in this ever changing world that that's risky in and of it. >>well it's, it's, it's always a risk reward balance. Right? And, and so I think whenever you're introduced to something new to the market and new concept, um, you ha, you feel the pain as, as a, as an organization. Cause you're having to educate people about there is a better way, right? I mean, I mean, think about, um, let's use Mohit form a company. Nutanix is an example of that. I remember the battles early on. People are scratching their heads, what is this HCI thing? I cause I do stories this way and I do, uh, compute this way and I do networking this way and I have my existing vendors, they put it all together and it took them awhile to get going. But when they did it that you really took off and, and I can think of multiple examples. I mean, Apple and the iPhone, what have you. >>Right. Um, and so I, we're sort of at that stage as a company where people are just starting to get their head around the opportunity we're putting on the table by disrupting the way things run and actually making their lives better. Um, and, and so it's, it's a, it's not just, you know, having an understanding of that from my background. Um, it's then being able to articulate the benefits, not just to the organizations looking to save money and do things more efficiently, but actually to the, the it operators themselves. Right? I mean, you talked to Theresa about this a bit yesterday. It burnout is a thing. And anything you can do to make manageability and automation easier, uh, the better off the folks actually doing the work are. And so that's something we care about deeply as well. It's not just, you know, saving money. >>It's, it's giving you a better way to do it. And, and ideally, uh, making, taking the complexity out of the puzzle you're managing today and, and making it easier. Simplifying it. So Chris, one of the challenges is as you were talking about, you can replace multiple solutions out there, but it means that there are multiple constituencies that you need to talk to and position your product. So, you know, with your marketing hat, how do you look at the roles and the message that we're going that you need to get to? Super, we're going to question. So my team will appreciate that you asked that. So one of the first things I did when I came onboard a few months back, let's say, Hey guys, we really need to sit down and think through the different personas, right? Classic marketing approach that we're talking to and really understand, um, what's in their heads, not only today but formerly and then what are they looking at going forward? Cause if you're going to cross that chasm, you need to understand that whole life cycle and what are the things that you can grab onto that draw their attention into the solutions we provide. And so we're going through an exercise right now to refresh those personas and be able to arm our field and our partners to have those conversations cause it does touch on different people in the data center. Absolutely true. >>So what, I wanted to return our conversation and come full circle with the very beginning of what is resonating with you here at this show. There've been so many new product announcements, started talking about Azure Ark as as sort of something that is catching your interest. What are you going to take back with you when the show's over? Chatting >>with some of our PM team, uh, earlier this week, um, we have our own management solution and we've done a lot to simplify it and make it easy to use. But as is the case for many providers, we are a building block in a bigger data center strategy. And, and so importantly, uh, while I love our console, a lot of people may not want to use it. We, we may not be the center of the management universe. And so something like arc and you saw this in, in what they demo now just being able to manage an Azure environment, but reaching across the aisle to AWS and so on. You know, we, we need to be able to fit into that management framework. And by the way, they're just one provider that does that. You know, the Atmos guys are out there and others. Um, and, and so the good news from a Cohesity standpoint is the products and built ground up with an API first approach. >>And what that means is, uh, you can take those declarative statements that you have in let's pretend someday as your Ark and use that to orchestrate deployment and management of Cohesity as well. And that, that is candidly one of the beauties of being a software defined solution. We thought about that from the ground up. And so I think we're not only ready for today, but also for the future. Alright. Uh, Chris, want to give you any other kind of customer aha moments or things that are brought through a final takeaways, uh, from, from Cohesity at the show? Yeah, I, I think, you know, uh, customers are still discovering us is, is an aha for me. The, the big change that I've seen in, in the booth behind us, uh, year over year as they think in the past, uh, we've only been an operations really selling for three years. >>It was who are you guys and what's up with all the green, right? This year the conversation has shifted to, Hey Cohesity, I know you guys are, I'm looking at changing things up in my software defined data center. I think you might be a part of that. So tell me why you're different. And so I'm really happy to be here and get the opportunity to have that discussion this year versus where we were last year. And again, I think, um, the types of questions that we're getting are much more focused on use case. How can you help me solve this pain point, this problem? Uh, you know, ransomware has been a constant conversation in the booth and, and the ability that we have because of what we've done, again, back down the file system to do what we call an instant mass restore. That's an interesting feature on a data sheet, but I'll tell you what, when you've been subject to a ransomware attack and you're, you're just lights out, that ability to bring back to the whole environment very quickly at once really is a differentiator for us. And so it's those sorts of conversations we're having this year, which is, which is a nice step forward. And so hopefully, you know, we'll come back next year and things are on that upward path even more. So. Thank you so much Chris. Wiborg pleasure having you on the show. Yeah, great to be here. Thanks guys. >>I'm Rebecca Knight for Sue minimun. Stay tuned for more of the cube.

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering the AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to to the home of the Stanley Cup Champion Washington Capitals. You're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, and my co-host John Furrier. Welcome to the program. Bret Dennis who's the head of product management with Helio campus. >> Thank you. >> Thanks so much for joining us. >> Go caps, thank you very much, appreciate it. >> Really bringing that [Inaudible] of having won the cup, lots of celebration, and there's a lot of energy here at this show. So we're heading into day two, what's your ... How do you feel about the show so far? >> It's good, it's been good. I did the Edstart program earlier in the week, and we did a sales pitch competition for startup Edtechs, so it's been really exciting, lot's of fun things going on. >> We've loved talking to startups here on theCUBE. I've talked to a number of companies, cyber-security, it's like, "Oh, okay, wait, which agency did you come out of." because of the NSA and the like. You have a similar story coming out of the University of Maryland >> Right. >> Give us a little bit of background on Helio campus. >> So we were spun out in 2016 from the University college. The Maryland board of regents had recognized the value that we'd brought to the University, over about six years of development in terms of the technology platform and the services we were bringing to the University and decided this would be really useful to other Universities, so let's spin it out into a company and go to market, and that's what we've been doing for the last two years. So it's been very exciting. >> Tell me about the product? What does it do? I mean obviously you guys incubate it in the college, so there's equity arrangements, you got a grant. Tell the story about the funding and then now, as you expand, what's that plan look like and how does Amazon fit into the whole mess? >> So we had an initial grant from the board of regions from the state of Maryland, and the idea was to assist colleges and Universities, to help them ask and answer their most pressing questions, but using data, and in order to effectively do that we wanted to bring a full solution that included platform technology as well as a services approach. So we're using Amazon Web Services and the Redshift database and platform to collect data from Universities, and then we have a services team that works with Tableau dashboards to not only help visualize data in meaningful ways, but also to explore how different data sets can be cross-seeded together across the student life cycle. >> Whose the user for you guys? Obviously big data analyst is awesome, we're seeing that clearly as one of those things where it's completely changing businesses >> Sure. And getting these kinds of insights that are actionable and different. Sometimes new questions can be answered. Who's the buyer, who's the user, how is that working? >> So institutional research is a key stakeholder for us. They are traditionally seen as the data owners of Universities and colleges, do most of the research, do most of the numbers crunching, but our idea is that we want to really democratize access to data to enrollment managers, to admissions managers, even to financial managers that want to have their own power to explore and interrogate the data, but do it in such a way that's a very intuitive process, so they don't have to be SQL query writers or really hardcore database developers. We're trying to get to those functional types of users to give the access to data >> So business users basically who don't have to be a data scientist to know Python and wrangle data, you're thinking about more of like turning them into analysts on the fly. >> We want them to be able to ask and answer their own questions without needing the technical skills. Now that's precisely why we bring the services in, so if they decide I really want to use a predictive, algorithmic approach to forecasting, or to admissions modeling, and we have data scientists available to provide that services level on top of the platform. >> Wondering if you might be able to give us an example, either generically, or if you can mention a specific company, just to help illustrate how they're transforming the use of data. >> So we work with the system at the system level for the University of North Carolina. So they had a need where they had done a lot of work on building up base data extracts of their own, but they needed a way to get that data out to campuses in a more effective way using rich visualizations. So we won an RFP with them and were able to help them, not only at the system level, but also at the campuses to make sure that the campuses and the board of regents and the board of governors are getting the data that they need, to again, understand what are my patterns and trends for success. What are specific student populations that we want to help, and we want to use data to help get to those insights. So that's been a real success story for us. >> Talk about the public sector impact of Amazon, obviously Amazon's well known in the startup community, you can spin up a server, that kind of changed the whole provisioning of a data center, now they got large enterprises doing all kinds of stuff, taking databases from big Oracle systems. But public sector, certainly education, we've seen community colleges, all the way up to premier institutions like the University of Maryland, this is now a game changer. So how are you seeing that evolve in other universities? What are your peers doing? What's their mindset? Where are they on the progress bar using cloud, if you will, cloud native, are they thinking microservices, are they thinking about [Inaudible], are they thinking about containers, where are they on the evolution? >> Yeah it is a game changer, and it is because scalability and security are probably two themes that I would bring up. So regardless of the amount of data that you want to use as part of the analysis, there's no limit in terms of using AWS and performance, from a performance perspective, if we want to bring in a new data set, test it, see if there is correlation, see if it's useful in helping answer their key questions, we can do that. But also it goes with out saying, the security, so we don't really have to do a lot of selling in terms of the security of AWS because the level of approvals and the level of certifications at AWS far exceeds beyond what any University could get on their own, or what any vendor individually could do on their own. So that's a natural benefit that comes with a platform. >> What other features or services in AWS are important for what you build, obviously, scalability, security, kind of a given when you talk about AWS. >> The Redshift platform has been really useful to us. The way that we architect our model is that we use Tableau on the front-end for BI, but also any user could have access at the database level and go into Redshift, now we supply security models so that only authorized users can get to that. So it's very helpful to have the security model on top of it, but the Redshift data structure really enables us to provide that experience at any level depending on what the need is of each user. So not many functional users would be going to that level, but Redshift really enables us to have the technical users and the traditional SQL query writers, and the ones that are doing the cross-seeding of the data to have access at that level. >> It's interesting you have a services model built in because it kind of makes sense because one of the benefits of the cloud, obviously, is speed. You get performance, just raw performance, but also speed to value, so you don't have to do a lot of heavy lifting to kind of understand where the value points are. So how does that change the services speed because Amazon's constantly introducing new services, how are you seeing that evolve? Because you can do some heavy lifting, okay here's a data set, is that the way the services are? How is the services changing with cloud? >> So our services model is really to hire individuals from Universities that have the subject matter expertise. So we have x directors of institutional research, x admission officers, so from our perspective we want to leave the technical, the platform, the architecture, the security services to the experts in that realm, that's not what our Universities are asking us for. They want to know how can you bring us subject matter expertise in the functional areas where we're struggling, we want to not have to worry about the technical piece at all. So I think that's where, from a cloud perspective, we're able to rely on the expertise at AWS and Amazon where, again, we're not having to worry about that and we can focus squarely on what the institutional needs are. >> So you're more efficient? >> I think so, yeah. >> You don't spend your time doing a lot wrangling of tech, standing up anything, just pretty much turnkey on the cloud side, focused on getting the users up and running with the tools that you guys have. >> Exactly, and we've had instenses where institutions have asked, "Oh, we want to do this research project, we need additional space." We can turn that up instantly through the value of the services provided through Amazon, which if we were to do that on our own it would be very expensive and a manual process. >> You can actually deliver services that values to the customer. I got to ask you a question, now looking forward, where's the head room? If you look at your business and how it's evolving, what's the head room that you see coming down the road that you're going towards, that you're going to bring to you customer base. >> Right, so with evolving technologies that we all know the buzzwords about, AI and machine learning, sort of taking the data science to the next level. I think that's what eventually we'll be asked to do, is to look at, "Well how can these be brought into education in a meaningful way? How can they provide us insight in ways that we're not doing today, again, more efficiently. We also value time or accelerating time to value, so again, I think right now we're moving data around and we're shifting data, and sometimes it can take a bit of time to do that. I think in the future we'll be able to turn up customers and start delivering that time to value in a much more accelerated way. >> So you said you attended some startup activity here at the show >> Yes. and also seen quite a few Universities here, so it sounds like you're learning to help build your business as well as from the customer standpoint, why don't you give us a little bit of insight as to the value that you get out of a show like this. >> Absolutely. So when the Universities attend we have meetings and we get an understandings of where they are now, what kinds of questions are they having, that's really what we want to get to, analytics is really nothing unless you understand what problem are you trying to solve. So being able to have those meaningful conversations in this type of environment is very helpful to us to understand, again, where are you now, what is your vision for where you want to go, how can we meet that at their point of need. >> What's the low-hanging fruit for these Universities use case wise? What are they using you guys for the most, if you had to look at the patterns? >> It can be arranged, so it can be I am not able to provide my stakeholders meaningful visualizations and insights and have them use data in a more meaningful way. So instead of giving you a table of lines and numbers, I can give you something that's actually actionable. That's really where we start at the dashboard level, the more advanced institutions, and everyone we work with has smart people on their teams but they may have other projects, they may not have time, they may not have the ability to hire expensive data scientists. So from that perspective on the advanced analytic side we can help with that advanced piece with our services team. >> They can get up to speed faster. Sometimes these projects can take months to stand up. >> It is, it's the acceleration that's huge. >> Great, what's the show vibe here? If you had to describe it for the folks that didn't make it. >> Yeah. >> What's the show about this year in your mind? What's the main big story here this year? >> It' a lot like last year for me, it is understanding, and I look at it from a data perspective of course, and it really is all about new technologies, and new vendors, and how we can understand, again, how these technologies can not only make us more efficient from a time perspective and cost perspective, but again, how can we more meaningfully answer the important questions that we have. >> Alright final question. Because you're a startup kind of within a cool environment at the University, which has got a lot of resources and access to some real use case data, what's the biggest thing you've learned over the past few years? Looking at the cloud, you're right in the middle of it, cloud native is super hot, there's people born in the cloud, people migrating the cloud, all kind of different levels of cloudifying businesses, some PurePlay cloud. What is the things that you learn the most? Looking back and saying, "Okay, these are the top three things that we learned." >> So I've worked for a foreign institution as well as for a number of different vendors in this space and I think the theme that I see is I want to go buy technology, "Oh I heard I need predictive analytics, Oh I heard that I need to have machine learning", well that's great that you know that, but have you really refined what your challenges and what you're trying to solve, and that goes for any technology whether it's cloud or a new server or a new application, really need to understand what is that core challenge and that's where we always start. Like any good product manager as we spoke about earlier, you've got to start with what problem you're trying to solve and then apply your solution in a meaningful way. So I think that would be my answer for that. >> Bret, thank for coming on theCUBE, thanks for sharing your story >> Thank you. Appreciate it, alright >> It was a pleasure. >> Bret Dennis here, spin out from University of Maryland, great startup doing big data analyst, obviously the clouds perfect for that and obviously creating more value. It's theCUBE bringing you the action here live in Washington D.C. I'm John Furrier and Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. (light electronic music)