(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone, welcome back to Las Vegas, "theCube" is on our fourth day of covering AWS re:Invent, live from the Venetian Expo Center. This week has been amazing. We've created a ton of content, as you know, 'cause you've been watching. But, there's been north of 55,000 people here, hundreds of thousands online. We've had amazing conversations across the AWS ecosystem. Lisa Martin, Paul Gillan. Paul, what's your, kind of, take on day four of the conference? It's still highly packed. >> Oh, there's lots of people here. (laughs) >> Yep. Unusual for the final day of a conference. I think Werner Vogels, if I'm pronouncing it right kicked things off today when he talked about asymmetry and how the world is, you know, asymmetric. We build symmetric software, because it's convenient to do so, but asymmetric software actually scales and evolves much better. And I think that that was a conversation starter for a lot of what people are talking about here today, which is how the cloud changes the way we think about building software. >> Absolutely does. >> Our next guest, Holger Mueller, that's one of his key areas of focus. And Holger, welcome, thanks for joining us on the "theCube". >> Thanks for having me. >> What did you take away from the keynote this morning? >> Well, how do you feel on the final day of the marathon, right? We're like 23, 24 miles. Hit the ball yesterday, right? >> We are going strong Holger. And, of course, >> Yeah. >> you guys, we can either talk about business transformation with cloud or the World Cup. >> Or we can do both. >> The World Cup, hands down. World Cup. (Lisa laughs) Germany's out, I'm unbiased now. They just got eliminated. >> Spain is out now. >> What will the U.S. do against Netherlands tomorrow? >> They're going to win. What's your forecast? U.S. will win? >> They're going to win 2 to 1. >> What do you say, 2:1? >> I'm optimistic, but realistic. >> 3? >> I think Netherlands. >> Netherlands will win? >> 2 to nothing. >> Okay, I'll vote for the U.S.. >> Okay, okay >> 3:1 for the U.S.. >> Be optimistic. >> Root for the U.S.. >> Okay, I like that. >> Hope for the best wherever you work. >> Tomorrow you'll see how much soccer experts we are. >> If your prediction was right. (laughs) >> (laughs) Ja, ja. Or yours was right, right, so. Cool, no, but the event, I think the event is great to have 50,000 people. Biggest event of the year again, right? Not yet the 70,000 we had in 2019. But it's great to have the energy. I've never seen the show floor going all the way down like this, right? >> I haven't either. >> I've never seen that. I think it's a record. Often vendors get the space here and they have the keynote area, and the entertainment area, >> Yeah. >> and the food area, and then there's an exposition, right? This is packed. >> It's packed. >> Maybe it'll pay off. >> You don't see the big empty booths that you often see. >> Oh no. >> Exactly, exactly. You know, the white spaces and so on. >> No. >> Right. >> Which is a good thing. >> There's lots of energy, which is great. And today's, of course, the developer day, like you said before, right now Vogels' a rockstar in the developer community, right. Revered visionary on what has been built, right? And he's becoming a little professorial is my feeling, right. He had these moments before too, when it was justifying how AWS moved off the Oracle database about the importance of data warehouses and structures and why DynamoDB is better and so on. But, he had a large part of this too, and this coming right across the keynotes, right? Adam Selipsky talking about Antarctica, right? Scott against almonds and what went wrong. He didn't tell us, by the way, which often the tech winners forget. Scott banked on technology. He had motorized sleds, which failed after three miles. So, that's not the story to tell the technology. Let everything down. Everybody went back to ponies and horses and dogs. >> Maybe goes back to these asynchronous behavior. >> Yeah. >> The way of nature. >> And, yesterday, Swami talking about the bridges, right? The root bridges, right? >> Right. >> So, how could Werner pick up with his video at the beginning. >> Yeah. >> And then talk about space and other things? So I think it's important to educate about event-based architecture, right? And we see this massive transformation. Modern software has to be event based, right? Because, that's how things work and we didn't think like this before. I see this massive transformation in my other research area in other platforms about the HR space, where payrolls are being rebuilt completely. And payroll used to be one of the three peaks of ERP, right? You would size your ERP machine before the cloud to financial close, to run the payroll, and to do an MRP manufacturing run if you're manufacturing. God forbid you run those three at the same time. Your machine wouldn't be able to do that, right? So it was like start the engine, start the boosters, we are running payroll. And now the modern payroll designs like you see from ADP or from Ceridian, they're taking every payroll relevant event. You check in time wise, right? You go overtime, you take a day of vacation and right away they trigger and run the payroll, so it's up to date for you, up to date for you, which, in this economy, is super important, because we have more gig workers, we have more contractors, we have employees who are leaving suddenly, right? The great resignation, which is happening. So, from that perspective, it's the modern way of building software. So it's great to see Werner showing that. The dirty little secrets though is that is more efficient software for the cloud platform vendor too. Takes less resources, gets less committed things, so it's a much more scalable architecture. You can move the events, you can work asynchronously much better. And the biggest showcase, right? What's the biggest transactional showcase for an eventually consistent asynchronous transactional application? I know it's a mouthful, but we at Amazon, AWS, Amazon, right? You buy something on Amazon they tell you it's going to come tomorrow. >> Yep. >> They don't know it's going to come tomorrow by that time, because it's not transactionally consistent, right? We're just making every ERP vendor, who lives in transactional work, having nightmares of course, (Lisa laughs) but for them it's like, yes we have the delivery to promise, a promise to do that, right? But they come back to you and say, "Sorry, we couldn't make it, delivery didn't work and so on. It's going to be a new date. We are out of the product.", right? So these kind of event base asynchronous things are more and more what's going to scale around the world. It's going to be efficient for everybody, it's going to be better customer experience, better employee experience, ultimately better user experience, it's going to be better for the enterprise to build, but we have to learn to build it. So big announcement was to build our environment to build better eventful applications from today. >> Talk about... This is the first re:Invent... Well, actually, I'm sorry, it's the second re:Invent under Adam Selipsky. >> Right. Adam Selipsky, yep. >> But his first year. >> Right >> We're hearing a lot of momentum. What's your takeaway with what he delivered with the direction Amazon is going, their vision? >> Ja, I think compared to the Jassy times, right, we didn't see the hockey stick slide, right? With a number of innovations and releases. That was done in 2019 too, right? So I think it's a more pedestrian pace, which, ultimately, is good for everybody, because it means that when software vendors go slower, they do less width, but more depth. >> Yeah. >> And depth is what customers need. So Amazon's building more on the depth side, which is good news. I also think, and that's not official, right, but Adam Selipsky came from Tableau, right? >> Yeah. So he is a BI analytics guy. So it's no surprise we have three data lake offerings, right? Security data lake, we have a healthcare data lake and we have a supply chain data lake, right? Where all, again, the epigonos mentioned them I was like, "Oh, my god, Amazon's coming to supply chain.", but it's actually data lakes, which is an interesting part. But, I think it's not a surprise that someone who comes heavily out of the analytics BI world, it's off ringside, if I was pitching internally to him maybe I'd do something which he's is familiar with and I think that's what we see in the major announcement of his keynote on Tuesday. >> I mean, speaking of analytics, one of the big announcements early on was Amazon is trying to bridge the gap between Aurora. >> Yep. >> And Redshift. >> Right. >> And setting up for continuous pipelines, continuous integration. >> Right. >> Seems to be a trend that is common to all database players. I mean, Oracle is doing the same thing. SAP is doing the same thing. MariaDB. Do you see the distinction between transactional and analytical databases going away? >> It's coming together, right? Certainly coming together, from that perspective, but there's a fundamental different starting point, right? And with the big idea part, right? The universal database, which does everything for you in one system, whereas the suite of specialized databases, right? Oracle is in the classic Oracle database in the universal database camp. On the other side you have Amazon, which built a database. This is one of the first few Amazon re:Invents. It's my 10th where there was no new database announced. Right? >> No. >> So it was always add another one specially- >> I think they have enough. >> It's a great approach. They have enough, right? So it's a great approach to build something quick, which Amazon is all about. It's not so great when customers want to leverage things. And, ultimately, which I think with Selipsky, AWS is waking up to the enterprise saying, "I have all this different database and what is in them matters to me." >> Yeah. >> "So how can I get this better?" So no surprise between the two most popular database, Aurora and RDS. They're bring together the data with some out of the box parts. I think it's kind of, like, silly when Swami's saying, "Hey, no ETL.". (chuckles) Right? >> Yeah. >> There shouldn't be an ETL from the same vendor, right? There should be data pipes from that perspective anyway. So it looks like, on the overall value proposition database side, AWS is moving closer to the universal database on the Oracle side, right? Because, if you lift, of course, the universal database, under the hood, you see, well, there's different database there, different part there, you do something there, you have to configure stuff, which is also the case but it's one part of it, right, so. >> With that shift, talk about the value that's going to be in it for customers regardless of industry. >> Well, the value for customers is great, because when software vendors, or platform vendors, go in depth, you get more functionality, you get more maturity you get easier ways of setting up the whole things. You get ways of maintaining things. And you, ultimately, get lower TCO to build them, which is super important for enterprise. Because, here, this is the developer cloud, right? Developers love AWS. Developers are scarce, expensive. Might not be want to work for you, right? So developer velocity getting more done with same amount of developers, getting less done, less developers getting more done, is super crucial, super important. So this is all good news for enterprise banking on AWS and then providing them more efficiency, more automation, out of the box. >> Some of your customer conversations this week, talk to us about some of the feedback. What's the common denominator amongst customers right now? >> Customers are excited. First of all, like, first event, again in person, large, right? >> Yeah. >> People can travel, people meet each other, meet in person. They have a good handle around the complexity, which used to be a huge challenge in the past, because people say, "Do I do this?" I know so many CXOs saying, "Yeah, I want to build, say, something in IoT with AWS. The first reference built it like this, the next reference built it completely different. The third one built it completely different again. So now I'm doubting if my team has the skills to build things successfully, because will they be smart enough, like your teams, because there's no repetitiveness and that repetitiveness is going to be very important for AWS to come up with some higher packaging and version numbers.", right? But customers like that message. They like that things are working better together. They're not missing the big announcement, right? One of the traditional things of AWS would be, and they made it even proud, as a system, Jassy was saying, "If we look at the IT spend and we see something which is, like, high margin for us and not served well and we announced something there, right?" So Quick Start, Workspaces, where all liaisons where AWS went after traditional IT spend and had an offering. We haven't had this in 2019, we don't have them in 2020. Last year and didn't have it now. So something is changing on the AWS side. It's a little bit too early to figure out what, but they're not chewing off as many big things as they used in the past. >> Right. >> Yep. >> Did you get the sense that... Keith Townsend, from "The CTO Advisor", was on earlier. >> Yep. >> And he said he's been to many re:Invents, as you have, and he said that he got the sense that this is Amazon's chance to do a victory lap, as he called it. That this is a way for Amazon to reinforce the leadership cloud. >> Ja. >> And really, kind of, establish that nobody can come close to them, nobody can compete with them. >> You don't think that- >> I don't think that's at all... I mean, love Keith, he's a great guy, but I don't think that's the mindset at all, right? So, I mean, Jassy was always saying, "It's still the morning of the day in the cloud.", right? They're far away from being done. They're obsessed over being right. They do more work with the analysts. We think we got something right. And I like the passion, from that perspective. So I think Amazon's far from being complacent and the area, which is the biggest bit, right, the biggest. The only thing where Amazon truly has floundered, always floundered, is the AI space, right? So, 2018, Werner Vogels was doing more technical stuff that "Oh, this is all about linear regression.", right? And Amazon didn't start to put algorithms on silicon, right? And they have a three four trail and they didn't announce anything new here, behind Google who's been doing this for much, much longer than TPU platform, so. >> But they have now. >> They're keen aware. >> Yep. >> They now have three, or they own two of their own hardware platforms for AI. >> Right. >> They support the Intel platform. They seem to be catching up in that area. >> It's very hard to catch up on hardware, right? Because, there's release cycles, right? And just the volume that, just talking about the largest models that we have right now, to do with the language models, and Google is just doing a side note of saying, "Oh, we supported 50 less or 30 less, not little spoken languages, which I've never even heard of, because they're under banked and under supported and here's the language model, right? And I think it's all about little bit the organizational DNA of a company. I'm a strong believer in that. And, you have to remember AWS comes from the retail side, right? >> Yeah. >> Their roll out of data centers follows their retail strategy. Open secret, right? But, the same thing as the scale of the AI is very very different than if you take a look over at Google where it makes sense of the internet, right? The scale right away >> Right. >> is a solution, which is a good solution for some of the DNA of AWS. Also, Microsoft Azure is good. There has no chance to even get off the ship of that at Google, right? And these leaders with Google and it's not getting smaller, right? We didn't hear anything. I mean so much focused on data. Why do they focus so much on data? Because, data is the first step for AI. If AWS was doing a victory lap, data would've been done. They would own data, right? They would have a competitor to BigQuery Omni from the Google side to get data from the different clouds. There's crickets on that topic, right? So I think they know that they're catching up on the AI side, but it's really, really hard. It's not like in software where you can't acquire someone they could acquire in video. >> Not at Core Donovan. >> Might play a game, but that's not a good idea, right? So you can't, there's no shortcuts on the hardware side. As much as I'm a software guy and love software and don't like hardware, it's always a pain, right? There's no shortcuts there and there's nothing, which I think, has a new Artanium instance, of course, certainly, but they're not catching up. The distance is the same, yep. >> One of the things is funny, one of our guests, I think it was Tuesday, it was, it was right after Adam's keynote. >> Sure. >> Said that Adam Selipsky stood up on stage and talked about data for 52 minutes. >> Yeah. Right. >> It was timed, 52 minutes. >> Right. >> Huge emphasis on that. One of the things that Adam said to John Furrier when they were able to sit down >> Yeah >> a week or so ago at an event preview, was that CIOs and CEOs are not coming to Adam to talk about technology. They want to talk about transformation. They want to talk about business transformation. >> Sure, yes, yes. >> Talk to me in our last couple of minutes about what CEOs and CIOs are coming to you saying, "Holger, help us figure this out. We have to transform the business." >> Right. So we advise, I'm going quote our friends at Gartner, once the type A company. So we'll use technology aggressively, right? So take everything in the audience with a grain of salt, followers are the laggards, and so on. So for them, it's really the cusp of doing AI, right? Getting that data together. It has to be in the cloud. We live in the air of infinite computing. The cloud makes computing infinite, both from a storage, from a compute perspective, from an AI perspective, and then define new business models and create new best practices on top of that. Because, in the past, everything was fine out on premise, right? We talked about the (indistinct) size. Now in the cloud, it's just the business model to say, "Do I want to have a little more AI? Do I want a to run a little more? Will it give me the insight in the business?". So, that's the transformation that is happening, really. So, bringing your data together, this live conversation data, but not for bringing the data together. There's often the big win for the business for the first time to see the data. AWS is banking on that. The supply chain product, as an example. So many disparate systems, bring them them together. Big win for the business. But, the win for the business, ultimately, is when you change the paradigm from the user showing up to do something, to software doing stuff for us, right? >> Right. >> We have too much in this operator paradigm. If the user doesn't show up, doesn't find the click, doesn't find where to go, nothing happens. It can't be done in the 21st century, right? Software has to look over your shoulder. >> Good point. >> Understand one for you, autonomous self-driving systems. That's what CXOs, who're future looking, will be talked to come to AWS and all the other cloud vendors. >> Got it, last question for you. We're making a sizzle reel on Instagram. >> Yeah. >> If you had, like, a phrase, like, or a 30 second pitch that would describe re:Invent 2022 in the direction the company's going. What would that elevator pitch say? >> 30 second pitch? >> Yeah. >> All right, just timing. AWS is doing well. It's providing more depth, less breadth. Making things work together. It's catching up in some areas, has some interesting offerings, like the healthcare offering, the security data lake offering, which might change some things in the industry. It's staying the course and it's going strong. >> Ah, beautifully said, Holger. Thank you so much for joining Paul and me. >> Might have been too short. I don't know. (laughs) >> About 10 seconds left over. >> It was perfect, absolutely perfect. >> Thanks for having me. >> Perfect sizzle reel. >> Appreciate it. >> We appreciate your insights, what you're seeing this week, and the direction the company is going. We can't wait to see what happens in the next year. And, yeah. >> Thanks for having me. >> And of course, we've been on so many times. We know we're going to have you back. (laughs) >> Looking forward to it, thank you. >> All right, for Holger Mueller and Paul Gillan, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCube", the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(techno intro music) >> Hey everyone, good afternoon from sin city. This is Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are in full swing of theCUBE's four days of coverage of AWS re:invent 2022. North of 50,000 people are here. We're nearing hundreds of thousands online. Dave, this has been, this is a great event. We've had great conversations. We're going to be having more conversations. One of the things we love talking about on theCUBE is AWS and its ecosystem of partners, and we are going to do just that right now. Brian Henderson joins us, Director of Marketing at Dell Technologies. Marc Trimuschat, Director of Worldwide Storage Specialists at AWS is also here. Guys, it's great to have you. >> Great to be here. >> Great to be here, yeah. Feeling the energy of the show. >> Isn't it great? >> Mark: I know, amazing. >> It's amazing. It started out high and it has not dropped since Monday night. Brian, talk a little bit about Dell, what you're doing with customers on their Cloud journeys. Every customer, every industry is on one at different points in their journey, but what's Dell helping out with there? >> What we're here to talk about is the progression that we've seen, right, Cloud has changed a lot over the years and Dell has really put out a strategy to help people with their Cloud journey, kind of wherever they are. So a lot of people have moved full shift. A lot of people see that as another location, and what we're showing at the booth is the idea of taking these enterprise capabilities that people know and trust from Dell, courting them to the Cloud. In some cases not courting, but just delivering that software in the Cloud, as well as taking some of the Kubernetes integrations, EKS Anywhere, bringing that on-prem. So we've got some storage, data protection, and our Kubernetes integration to talk about at the show. >> Awesome, Mark, talk about the role from Amazon's point of view that third party vendors like Dell Technologies plays in AWS's expanding vision of Cloud. >> Great, well, we're really excited to be partnering with Dell. What we see that historically is, you know, AWS is focused on builders, people, and really the developer community who are building those components themselves, putting together really resilient infrastructure and applications. What we're seeing today is a shift also to the type of customers that we're seeing, more traditional enterprise customers, who are demanding really performance, the scalability, also the resiliency of what they had on-premises, and they want that on the Cloud as well. So with Dell, and we've got some great solutions that we're partnering on, including Dell PowerFlex that provides that linear scalability and some of the high performance capabilities that customers are demanding. And also, another big trend that we're seeing is customers being affected by things like unfortunately malware events, right, and data protection. So Dell provides some great solutions in both those areas that allow enterprise customers to really experience that mission critical capability and resiliency that they have on-premises in the Cloud. >> You know, Brian, we've been at this a long time. >> Brian: Oh yeah, great to see you again. >> And I've been hearing my whole career that storage is going to get commoditized. And I guess if you're talking about spinning discs or flash drives, it's probably true, but as Mark was just saying if you want resilient storage and things that are recoverable, that don't go down all the time, they're not commodities. >> Brian: Yeah. >> It's real engineering. And you built the stack up, so talk about how that connection, what value you bring to the Cloud and your customers. >> Yeah, so what we see is people are always looking out for enterprise grade capabilities. So there's going to be a set of offerings, and AWS has a fantastic foundation for building on top of with the marketplace. So what we're able to do is really bring, in some cases, decades worth of investment in software engineering and put these advanced capabilities, whether it be PowerFlex with its linear scale. We'll have a file offering very soon. These products have been built from the ground up to do a very unique purpose. Giving that to people in the Cloud is just another location for us, AWS being the market leader. We're the market leader in storage. So us working together for the benefit of customers is really where it's at. >> Can you double click on that, Brian, what Dell and AWS? Give us all those juicy details. >> Sure, sure, sure, so what we've done right before this show is we put a product called PowerFlex, if you go back to 2018 scale IO, and you're taking this really linear scaling software defined architecture, and you're putting that in the Cloud. What that allows you to do is get that really advanced linear scale performance. You can even span clusters across AWS regions, as well as zones. So it's a really unique capability that allows us to be able to check in and do that. And in the data protection space, it's a whole separate category. We've been at this actually quite a while. We've got about 14 exo bytes of data that's already being protected on the AWS Cloud. So we've been at that for quite a while. And the two levels are really, do you want to back that up? Do you want to take a traditional back up application, maybe it's a lift and shift, and I want to back it up the way I used to, and you can do that in the Cloud now. Or we're seeing cyber resiliency come up a lot more, and we were just talking right before, it's a question of when, not if, and so we have to give our customers the option to not only detect that failure event early, but also to separate that copy with a logical air gap. >> The cyber resiliency is a topic we are talking more and more about. It's absolutely critical. We've seen the threat landscape change dramatically in the last couple of years. To your point, Brian, it's no longer, when we think of ransomware, it's no longer are we going to get hit? It's when, it's how often. What's the damage going to be? I think I saw a stat recently that there's one ransomware attack every 11 seconds. The average cost of reaches is in the millions, so what you're doing together on cyber resiliency for businesses in any industry is table stakes. >> Yeah, we just saw a survey that, it was done earlier this year survey, 66% unfortunately of corporations have experienced a malware attack. And that's an 80% increase from last year. >> Lisa: Wow. >> So again, I think that's an opportunity. It's a threat, but an opportunity, and so the partnership with Dell really helps bridge that and helps our customers, our mutual customers, recover from those incidents. >> A lot of people might say, this is interesting. A storage guy from Amazon, a storage guy from Dell, two leaders. And one might think, why didn't they just throw in a dash three, right, but you guys are both customer driven, customer obsessed. In the field, what are customers saying to you in terms of how they want you to work together? >> Well I think there's a place for everything. When you say throw in to S3, so S3 today, one of the big trends when you're looking here is just the amount of data, you know, we hear that rhetoric, you know, we've been in storage for many years, and the data has all increased up and to the right. But, you know, AWSI, S3 today, we have over 280 trillion objects in our, driving a hundred million transactions per second right now, so that's scale. So there's always a place for those really, we have hundreds of thousands of customers running their data links, so that's always going to be that really, you know, highly reliable, highly durable, high available solution for data links. But customers, there's a lot of different applications out there. So where customers are asking are those enterpise. So we have EBS, for example, which is our great, you know, scalable block search, elastic block store. We introduced some new volume types, like GP2, GP2, and IO2VX, which will have that performance. But there's still single availability zone. So what customers have done historically is they maybe the application layer, they put an application layer replication or resiliency across, but customers on-prem, they've relied on storage layers to do that work for them. So, with PowerFlex, that'll stand either using instant storage or EBS, building on that really strong foundation, but provide that additional layer to make it easy for customers to get that resiliency and that scalability that Brian talked about. >> Yep, yep. >> Anything you can add to that? >> Yeah, I mean to your question, how do we work together is really, it's all customer driven. So we see customers that are shifting workloads in the Cloud for the first time. And it might make sense to take an object, like PowerFlex or another storage technology, maybe you want to compress it a little bit before you send it to the Cloud. Maybe you don't want to lift and shift everything. So we have a team of people that works very closely with AWS to be able to determine how are you going to shift that workload out there? Does this make the right sense for you? So it's a very collaborative relationship. And it's all very customer driven because our customers are saying, I've got assets in the public Cloud, and I want them to be managed in a similar fashion to how I'm doing that on-prem. >> So customer obsession is clearly on both sides there. We know that. >> It's where it starts. >> Exactly, exactly. Going back to PowerFlex for a second, Brian, and I'd love to get an example of a joint customer that really is showing the value of what Dell and AWS are doing together. The question for you on PowerFlex, talk about the value that it offers to the public Cloud. And why should customers start there if they are early in this journey? >> All right, yeah, so the two angles are basically, are you coming from PowerFlex or you're coming from Cloud. If you're Cloud native, the advantage would be things like a really, really advanced block file system that has been built from the ground up to be software defined and pretty much Cloud native. What you're getting is that really linear scale up to about 1,000 nodes. You can span that across regions, across availability zones, so it's highly resilient. So if there's a node failure in one site, you're going to rebuild really fast, depending on the size of that cluster. So it's a very advanced architecture that's been built to run, you know, we didn't have to change a single line of code to run this product in the Cloud because it was Cloud native by default, so. >> Well that's the thing. We also see, and you've seen that with some of the other solutions, but customers really want that. Enterprise customers are, they want us to make sure those mission critical applications are working and stay up. So they also want to use the same environment. So we were talking before, we also see use cases where maybe they're using PowerFlex on-premises today and they want to be able to replicate that to PowerFlex that's in the Cloud. So we're seeing those, and the familiarity with that infrastructure really is that easy path, if you will, for those more conservative mission critical customers. >> We've learned a lot over the years from AWS's entry into the marketplace. Two recent teams working backwards. We talk about customer obsession. And also the Cloud experience. It brings me to APEX. >> Oh yeah. >> Dave: How does APEX fit in here? >> Yeah, so APEX is the categorization for all the things that we're doing around a modern Cloud experience for Dell customers. So we're taking them also on a journey, kind of as a service model. There's a do-it-yourself model. And anything that we do that touches Cloud is now being kind of put under that APEX moniker. So everything that we're doing around Project Alpine, enterprise software capabilities in the Cloud. Do you want someone else to manage it for you? Do you want it in a polo? That might be the right fit for you. It's all under that APEX umbrella and journey. So we're kind of still just getting started there, but we're seeing a lot of great traction. People want to pay as they go, you know, it's a very popular model that AWS has pretty much set the foundation for. So pay as you go, utility based pricing, this is all things our customers have been asking for. >> Yeah, so APEX, you basically set a baseline. You can dial it up, dial it down, very much pay by the drink. >> Absolutely. >> And, you know, like you said, it's early days. >> Brian: Yeah. >> But that's, again, AWS has influenced the business in a lot of different ways. >> Again, with the Dell, you know, the trust customers that Dell has built over the years and having those customers come in. We obviously are getting, again, it's an accelerated option for financial services to healthcare and all these customers that have relied on Dell for years, moving to the Cloud, having that trusted name and also that infrastructure that's similar and familiar to them. And then the resilience of the foundation that we have at AWS, I think it works really well together for those customers. >> I think it underscores to the majority of both AWS and in a lot of ways Dell, right. In the early days of Cloud, it was like uh oh, and now it's like oh, actually big market. Customers are demanding this. There's new value that we can create working together. Let's do it. >> Yeah, I mean, it didn't take us that long to get to it, but I'd say we had little fits and starts over the years, and now we've recognized like, this is where the future is. It's going to be Cloud, it's going to be on-prem, it's going to be Edge, it's going to be everything. It's going to be an and world. And so just doing the right thing for customers I think is exactly where we landed. It's a great partnership. >> Do you have a favorite customer story that you think really shines the light on the value of the Dell AWS partnership in terms of the business impact they're making? >> We have several large customers that I can't always like drop the names, but one of them is a very large video game production company. And we do a lot of work together where they're rendering maybe in house, they're sending to a shared location. They're copying data over to S3. They're able to let all their editors access that. They bring it back when it's compressed down a little bit and deliver that. We're also doing a lot of work with, I think I can say this, Amazon Thursday night football games. So what they've done there, it's a partner of ours working with AWS. All the details inside of that roaming truck that they drive around, there's a lot of Dell gear within there, and then everything connects back to AWS for that exact same kind of model. We need to get to the editors on a nightly basis. They're also streaming directly form that truck while they're enabling the editors to access a shared copy of it, so it's really powerful stuff. >> Thursday night prime is pretty cool. You know, some people are complaining cause I can't just switch channels during the commercials. It's like, first of all, you can. Second of all, the stats are unbelievable, right. You can just do your own replay when you want to. There's some cool innovations there. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. >> Very cool innovations. I've got one more question for each of you before we wrap. Marc, a question for you, we're making a fun Instagram reel. So think about a sizzle reel of if you were to summarize the show so far, what is AWS's message to its massive audience this year? >> Well, that's a big question. Because we have such a wide, as we mentioned, such a wide ranging audience. I really see a couple key trends that we're trying to address. One is, again don't forget, I'm a storage guy, so it's going to come from an angle from data, right. So, I think it's just this volume of data and that customers are bringing into the Cloud, either moving in from enterprises today or organically, just growing. You know, a couple years ago, megabytes were a lot, and now, you know, we're talking about petabytes every day. Soon it's going to be exo bytes are going to become the norm. So the big, I'd say, point one is the trend that I see is just the volume of data. And so what we're doing to address that is obviously we talked a little bit about S3 and being able to manage volumes of data, but also things like DataZone that we introduced because customers are looking to make sure that the right governance and controls to be able to access that data. So I think that's one big thing that I see the theme for the show today. The second thing is around, as I said, really these enterprise customers really wanted to move in these mission critical applications into the Cloud, and having that infrastructure to be able to support that easily from what they're doing today and move in quickly. The third area is around data protection, making sure the data protection and malware recovery, that's the theme that we see is really unfortunately that's today. But being able to recover quickly, both having native services and native offerings just built in resiliency into the core platforms, like S3 with object application, et cetera. And also partnering with Dell with cyber recovery and some of the solutions with Dell. >> Excellent, and Brian, last question for you. A bumper sticker that succinctly and powerfully describes why Dell and AWS are such awesome partners for customer issues. >> Best of both worlds, right? >> Lisa: Mic drop. >> Mic drop, done. >> That's awesome. You said that a lot more succinctly. (people laughing) >> Enterprise in Cloud, Cloud comin' to enterprise. >> Yeah, leader meets leader, right? >> Yeah, right. >> Love it, leader meets leader. Guys, it's been a pleasure having you on theCUBE. We appreciate hearing the latest from AWS and Dell from a storage perspective and from a Cloud perspective and how you're helping customers manage the explosion of data that's not going to slow down. We really appreciate you coming by the set. >> Thank you. >> Great, thanks so much, appreciate it. >> My pleasure. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (techno music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and ETR this is breaking analysis with Dave vellante the ascendancy of AWS under the leadership of Andy jassy was marked by a tsunami of data and corresponding cloud services to leverage that data now those Services they mainly came in the form of Primitives I.E basic building blocks that were used by developers to create more sophisticated capabilities AWS in the 2020s being led by CEO Adam solipski will be marked by four high-level Trends in our opinion one A Rush of data that will dwarf anything we've previously seen two a doubling or even tripling down on the basic elements of cloud compute storage database security Etc three a greater emphasis on end-to-end integration of AWS services to simplify and accelerate customer adoption of cloud and four significantly deeper business integration of cloud Beyond it as an underlying element of organizational operations hello and welcome to this week's wikibon Cube insights powered by ETR in this breaking analysis we extract and analyze nuggets from John furrier's annual sit-down with the CEO of AWS we'll share data from ETR and other sources to set the context for the market and competition in cloud and we'll give you our glimpse of what to expect at re invent in 2022. now before we get into the core of our analysis Alibaba has announced earnings they always announced after the big three you know a month later and we've updated our Q3 slash November hyperscale Computing forecast for the year as seen here and we're going to spend a lot of time on this as most of you have seen the bulk of it already but suffice to say alibaba's cloud business is hitting that same macro Trend that we're seeing across the board but a more substantial slowdown than we expected and more substantial than its peers they're facing China headwinds they've been restructuring its Cloud business and it's led to significantly slower growth uh in in the you know low double digits as opposed to where we had it at 15 this puts our year-end estimates for 2022 Revenue at 161 billion still a healthy 34 growth with AWS surpassing 80 billion in 2022 Revenue now on a related note one of the big themes in Cloud that we've been reporting on is how customers are optimizing their Cloud spend it's a technique that they use and when the economy looks a little shaky and here's a graphic that we pulled from aws's website which shows the various pricing plans at a high level as you know they're much more granular than that and more sophisticated but Simplicity we'll just keep it here basically there are four levels first one here is on demand I.E pay by the drink now we're going to jump down to what we've labeled as number two spot instances that's like the right place at the right time I can use that extra capacity in the moment the third is reserved instances or RIS where I pay up front to get a discount and the fourth is sort of optimized savings plans where customers commit to a one or three year term and for a better price now you'll notice we labeled the choices in a different order than AWS presented them on its website and that's because we believe that the order that we chose is the natural progression for customers this started on demand they maybe experiment with spot instances they move to reserve instances when the cloud bill becomes too onerous and if you're large enough you lock in for one or three years okay the interesting thing is the order in which AWS presents them we believe that on-demand accounts for the majority of AWS customer spending now if you think about it those on-demand customers they're also at risk customers yeah sure there's some switching costs like egress and learning curve but many customers they have multiple clouds and they've got experience and so they're kind of already up to a learning curve and if you're not married to AWS with a longer term commitment there's less friction to switch now AWS here presents the most attractive plan from a financial perspective second after on demand and it's also the plan that makes the greatest commitment from a lock-in standpoint now In fairness to AWS it's also true that there is a trend towards subscription-based pricing and we have some data on that this chart is from an ETR drill down survey the end is 300. pay attention to the bars on the right the left side is sort of busy but the pink is subscription and you can see the trend upward the light blue is consumption based or on demand based pricing and you can see there's a steady Trend toward subscription now we'll dig into this in a later episode of Breaking analysis but we'll share with you a little some tidbits with the data that ETR provides you can select which segment is and pass or you can go up the stack Etc but so when you choose is and paths 44 of customers either prefer or are required to use on-demand pricing whereas around 40 percent of customers say they either prefer or are required to use subscription pricing again that's for is so now the further mu you move up the stack the more prominent subscription pricing becomes often with sixty percent or more for the software-based offerings that require or prefer subscription and interestingly cyber security tracks along with software at around 60 percent that that prefer subscription it's likely because as with software you're not shutting down your cyber protection on demand all right let's get into the expectations for reinvent and we're going to start with an observation in data in this 2018 book seeing digital author David michella made the point that whereas most companies apply data on the periphery of their business kind of as an add-on function successful data companies like Google and Amazon and Facebook have placed data at the core of their operations they've operationalized data and they apply machine intelligence to that foundational element why is this the fact is it's not easy to do what the internet Giants have done very very sophisticated engineering and and and cultural discipline and this brings us to reinvent 2022 in the future of cloud machine learning and AI will increasingly be infused into applications we believe the data stack and the application stack are coming together as organizations build data apps and data products data expertise is moving from the domain of Highly specialized individuals to Everyday business people and we are just at the cusp of this trend this will in our view be a massive theme of not only re invent 22 but of cloud in the 2020s the vision of data mesh We Believe jamachtagani's principles will be realized in this decade now what we'd like to do now is share with you a glimpse of the thinking of Adam solipsky from his sit down with John Furrier each year John has a one-on-one conversation with the CEO of AWS AWS he's been doing this for years and the outcome is a better understanding of the directional thinking of the leader of the number one Cloud platform so we're now going to share some direct quotes I'm going to run through them with some commentary and then bring in some ETR data to analyze the market implications here we go this is from solipsky quote I.T in general and data are moving from departments into becoming intrinsic parts of how businesses function okay we're talking here about deeper business integration let's go on to the next one quote in time we'll stop talking about people who have the word analyst we inserted data he meant data data analyst in their title rather will have hundreds of millions of people who analyze data as part of their day-to-day job most of whom will not have the word analyst anywhere in their title we're talking about graphic designers and pizza shop owners and product managers and data scientists as well he threw that in I'm going to come back to that very interesting so he's talking about here about democratizing data operationalizing data next quote customers need to be able to take an end-to-end integrated view of their entire data Journey from ingestion to storage to harmonizing the data to being able to query it doing business Intelligence and human-based Analysis and being able to collaborate and share data and we've been putting together we being Amazon together a broad Suite of tools from database to analytics to business intelligence to help customers with that and this last statement it's true Amazon has a lot of tools and you know they're beginning to become more and more integrated but again under jassy there was not a lot of emphasis on that end-to-end integrated view we believe it's clear from these statements that solipsky's customer interactions are leading him to underscore that the time has come for this capability okay continuing quote if you have data in one place you shouldn't have to move it every time you want to analyze that data couldn't agree more it would be much better if you could leave that data in place avoid all the ETL which has become a nasty three-letter word more and more we're building capabilities where you can query that data in place end quote okay this we see a lot in the marketplace Oracle with mySQL Heatwave the entire Trend toward converge database snowflake [ __ ] extending their platforms into transaction and analytics respectively and so forth a lot of the partners are are doing things as well in that vein let's go into the next quote the other phenomenon is infusing machine learning into all those capabilities yes the comments from the michelleographic come into play here infusing Ai and machine intelligence everywhere next one quote it's not a data Cloud it's not a separate Cloud it's a series of broad but integrated capabilities to help you manage the end-to-end life cycle of your data there you go we AWS are the cloud we're going to come back to that in a moment as well next set of comments around data very interesting here quote data governance is a huge issue really what customers need is to find the right balance of their organization between access to data and control and if you provide too much access then you're nervous that your data is going to end up in places that it shouldn't shouldn't be viewed by people who shouldn't be viewing it and you feel like you lack security around that data and by the way what happens then is people overreact and they lock it down so that almost nobody can see it it's those handcuffs there's data and asset are reliability we've talked about that for years okay very well put by solipsky but this is a gap in our in our view within AWS today and we're we're hoping that they close it at reinvent it's not easy to share data in a safe way within AWS today outside of your organization so we're going to look for that at re invent 2022. now all this leads to the following statement by solipsky quote data clean room is a really interesting area and I think there's a lot of different Industries in which clean rooms are applicable I think that clean rooms are an interesting way of enabling multiple parties to share and collaborate on the data while completely respecting each party's rights and their privacy mandate okay again this is a gap currently within AWS today in our view and we know snowflake is well down this path and databricks with Delta sharing is also on this curve so AWS has to address this and demonstrate this end-to-end data integration and the ability to safely share data in our view now let's bring in some ETR spending data to put some context around these comments with reference points in the form of AWS itself and its competitors and partners here's a chart from ETR that shows Net score or spending momentum on the x-axis an overlap or pervasiveness in the survey um sorry let me go back up the net scores on the y-axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the survey is on the x-axis so spending momentum by pervasiveness okay or should have share within the data set the table that's inserted there with the Reds and the greens that informs us to how the dots are positioned so it's Net score and then the shared ends are how the plots are determined now we've filtered the data on the three big data segments analytics database and machine learning slash Ai and we've only selected one company with fewer than 100 ends in the survey and that's databricks you'll see why in a moment the red dotted line indicates highly elevated customer spend at 40 percent now as usual snowflake outperforms all players on the y-axis with a Net score of 63 percent off the charts all three big U.S cloud players are above that line with Microsoft and AWS dominating the x-axis so very impressive that they have such spending momentum and they're so large and you see a number of other emerging data players like rafana and datadog mongodbs there in the mix and then more established players data players like Splunk and Tableau now you got Cisco who's gonna you know it's a it's a it's a adjacent to their core networking business but they're definitely into you know the analytics business then the really established players in data like Informatica IBM and Oracle all with strong presence but you'll notice in the red from the momentum standpoint now what you're going to see in a moment is we put red highlights around databricks Snowflake and AWS why let's bring that back up and we'll explain so there's no way let's bring that back up Alex if you would there's no way AWS is going to hit the brakes on innovating at the base service level what we call Primitives earlier solipsky told Furrier as much in their sit down that AWS will serve the technical user and data science Community the traditional domain of data bricks and at the same time address the end-to-end integration data sharing and business line requirements that snowflake is positioned to serve now people often ask Snowflake and databricks how will you compete with the likes of AWS and we know the answer focus on data exclusively they have their multi-cloud plays perhaps the more interesting question is how will AWS compete with the likes of Specialists like Snowflake and data bricks and the answer is depicted here in this chart AWS is going to serve both the technical and developer communities and the data science audience and through end-to-end Integrations and future services that simplify the data Journey they're going to serve the business lines as well but the Nuance is in all the other dots in the hundreds or hundreds of thousands that are not shown here and that's the AWS ecosystem you can see AWS has earned the status of the number one Cloud platform that everyone wants to partner with as they say it has over a hundred thousand partners and that ecosystem combined with these capabilities that we're discussing well perhaps behind in areas like data sharing and integrated governance can wildly succeed by offering the capabilities and leveraging its ecosystem now for their part the snowflakes of the world have to stay focused on the mission build the best products possible and develop their own ecosystems to compete and attract the Mind share of both developers and business users and that's why it's so interesting to hear solipski basically say it's not a separate Cloud it's a set of integrated Services well snowflake is in our view building a super cloud on top of AWS Azure and Google when great products meet great sales and marketing good things can happen so this will be really fun to watch what AWS announces in this area at re invent all right one other topic that solipsky talked about was the correlation between serverless and container adoption and you know I don't know if this gets into there certainly their hybrid place maybe it starts to get into their multi-cloud we'll see but we have some data on this so again we're talking about the correlation between serverless and container adoption but before we get into that let's go back to 2017 and listen to what Andy jassy said on the cube about serverless play the clip very very earliest days of AWS Jeff used to say a lot if I were starting Amazon today I'd have built it on top of AWS we didn't have all the capability and all the functionality at that very moment but he knew what was coming and he saw what people were still able to accomplish even with where the services were at that point I think the same thing is true here with Lambda which is I think if Amazon were starting today it's a given they would build it on the cloud and I think we with a lot of the applications that comprise Amazon's consumer business we would build those on on our serverless capabilities now we still have plenty of capabilities and features and functionality we need to add to to Lambda and our various serverless services so that may not be true from the get-go right now but I think if you look at the hundreds of thousands of customers who are building on top of Lambda and lots of real applications you know finra has built a good chunk of their market watch application on top of Lambda and Thompson Reuters has built you know one of their key analytics apps like people are building real serious things on top of Lambda and the pace of iteration you'll see there will increase as well and I really believe that to be true over the next year or two so years ago when Jesse gave a road map that serverless was going to be a key developer platform going forward and so lipsky referenced the correlation between serverless and containers in the Furrier sit down so we wanted to test that within the ETR data set now here's a screen grab of The View across 1300 respondents from the October ETR survey and what we've done here is we've isolated on the cloud computing segment okay so you can see right there cloud computing segment now we've taken the functions from Google AWS Lambda and Microsoft Azure functions all the serverless offerings and we've got Net score on the vertical axis we've got presence in the data set oh by the way 440 by the way is highly elevated remember that and then we've got on the horizontal axis we have the presence in the data center overlap okay that's relative to each other so remember 40 all these guys are above that 40 mark okay so you see that now what we're going to do this is just for serverless and what we're going to do is we're going to turn on containers to see the correlation and see what happens so watch what happens when we click on container boom everything moves to the right you can see all three move to the right Google drops a little bit but all the others now the the filtered end drops as well so you don't have as many people that are aggressively leaning into both but all three move to the right so watch again containers off and then containers on containers off containers on so you can see a really major correlation between containers and serverless okay so to get a better understanding of what that means I call my friend and former Cube co-host Stu miniman what he said was people generally used to think of VMS containers and serverless as distinctly different architectures but the lines are beginning to blur serverless makes things simpler for developers who don't want to worry about underlying infrastructure as solipsky and the data from ETR indicate serverless and containers are coming together but as Stu and I discussed there's a spectrum where on the left you have kind of native Cloud VMS in the middle you got AWS fargate and in the rightmost anchor is Lambda AWS Lambda now traditionally in the cloud if you wanted to use containers developers would have to build a container image they have to select and deploy the ec2 images that they or instances that they wanted to use they have to allocate a certain amount of memory and then fence off the apps in a virtual machine and then run the ec2 instances against the apps and then pay for all those ec2 resources now with AWS fargate you can run containerized apps with less infrastructure management but you still have some you know things that you can you can you can do with the with the infrastructure so with fargate what you do is you'd build the container images then you'd allocate your memory and compute resources then run the app and pay for the resources only when they're used so fargate lets you control the runtime environment while at the same time simplifying the infrastructure management you gotta you don't have to worry about isolating the app and other stuff like choosing server types and patching AWS does all that for you then there's Lambda with Lambda you don't have to worry about any of the underlying server infrastructure you're just running code AS functions so the developer spends their time worrying about the applications and the functions that you're calling the point is there's a movement and we saw in the data towards simplifying the development environment and allowing the cloud vendor AWS in this case to do more of the underlying management now some folks will still want to turn knobs and dials but increasingly we're going to see more higher level service adoption now re invent is always a fire hose of content so let's do a rapid rundown of what to expect we talked about operate optimizing data and the organization we talked about Cloud optimization there'll be a lot of talk on the show floor about best practices and customer sharing data solipsky is leading AWS into the next phase of growth and that means moving beyond I.T transformation into deeper business integration and organizational transformation not just digital transformation organizational transformation so he's leading a multi-vector strategy serving the traditional peeps who want fine-grained access to core services so we'll see continued Innovation compute storage AI Etc and simplification through integration and horizontal apps further up to stack Amazon connect is an example that's often cited now as we've reported many times databricks is moving from its stronghold realm of data science into business intelligence and analytics where snowflake is coming from its data analytics stronghold and moving into the world of data science AWS is going down a path of snowflake meet data bricks with an underlying cloud is and pass layer that puts these three companies on a very interesting trajectory and you can expect AWS to go right after the data sharing opportunity and in doing so it will have to address data governance they go hand in hand okay price performance that is a topic that will never go away and it's something that we haven't mentioned today silicon it's a it's an area we've covered extensively on breaking analysis from Nitro to graviton to the AWS acquisition of Annapurna its secret weapon new special specialized capabilities like inferential and trainium we'd expect something more at re invent maybe new graviton instances David floyer our colleague said he's expecting at some point a complete system on a chip SOC from AWS and maybe an arm-based server to eventually include high-speed cxl connections to devices and memories all to address next-gen applications data intensive applications with low power requirements and lower cost overall now of course every year Swami gives his usual update on machine learning and AI building on Amazon's years of sagemaker innovation perhaps a focus on conversational AI or a better support for vision and maybe better integration across Amazon's portfolio of you know large language models uh neural networks generative AI really infusing AI everywhere of course security always high on the list that reinvent and and Amazon even has reinforce a conference dedicated to it uh to security now here we'd like to see more on supply chain security and perhaps how AWS can help there as well as tooling to make the cio's life easier but the key so far is AWS is much more partner friendly in the security space than say for instance Microsoft traditionally so firms like OCTA and crowdstrike in Palo Alto have plenty of room to play in the AWS ecosystem we'd expect of course to hear something about ESG it's an important topic and hopefully how not only AWS is helping the environment that's important but also how they help customers save money and drive inclusion and diversity again very important topics and finally come back to it reinvent is an ecosystem event it's the Super Bowl of tech events and the ecosystem will be out in full force every tech company on the planet will have a presence and the cube will be featuring many of the partners from the serial floor as well as AWS execs and of course our own independent analysis so you'll definitely want to tune into thecube.net and check out our re invent coverage we start Monday evening and then we go wall to wall through Thursday hopefully my voice will come back we have three sets at the show and our entire team will be there so please reach out or stop by and say hello all right we're going to leave it there for today many thanks to Stu miniman and David floyer for the input to today's episode of course John Furrier for extracting the signal from the noise and a sit down with Adam solipski thanks to Alex Meyerson who was on production and manages the podcast Ken schiffman as well Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight helped get the word out on social and of course in our newsletters Rob hoef is our editor-in-chief over at siliconangle does some great editing thank thanks to all of you remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen you can pop in the headphones go for a walk just search breaking analysis podcast I published each week on wikibon.com at siliconangle.com or you can email me at david.valante at siliconangle.com or DM me at di vallante or please comment on our LinkedIn posts and do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the Enterprise Tech business this is Dave vellante for the cube insights powered by ETR thanks for watching we'll see it reinvent or we'll see you next time on breaking analysis [Music]

>> From the theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Welcome to this week's Wikibon, theCUBE's insights powered by ETR. As we exited the isolation economy last year, supercloud is a term that we introduced to describe something new that was happening in the world of cloud. In this Breaking Analysis, we address the 10 most frequently asked questions we get around supercloud. Okay, let's review these frequently asked questions on supercloud that we're going to try to answer today. Look at an industry that's full of hype and buzzwords. Why the hell does anyone need a new term? Aren't hyperscalers building out superclouds? We'll try to answer why the term supercloud connotes something different from hyperscale clouds. And we'll talk about the problems that superclouds solve specifically. And we'll further define the critical aspects of a supercloud architecture. We often get asked, isn't this just multi-cloud? Well, we don't think so, and we'll explain why in this Breaking Analysis. Now in an earlier episode, we introduced the notion of super PaaS. Well, isn't a plain vanilla PaaS already a super PaaS? Again, we don't think so, and we'll explain why. Who will actually build and who are the players currently building superclouds? What workloads and services will run on superclouds? And 8-A or number nine, what are some examples that we can share of supercloud? And finally, we'll answer what you can expect next from us on supercloud? Okay, let's get started. Why do we need another buzzword? Well, late last year, ahead of re:Invent, we were inspired by a post from Jerry Chen called "Castles in the Cloud." Now in that blog post, he introduced the idea that there were sub-markets emerging in cloud that presented opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs that the cloud wasn't going to suck the hyperscalers. Weren't going to suck all the value out of the industry. And so we introduced this notion of supercloud to describe what we saw as a value layer emerging above the hyperscalers CAPEX gift, we sometimes call it. Now it turns out, that we weren't the only ones using the term as both Cornell and MIT have used the phrase in somewhat similar, but different contexts. The point is something new was happening in the AWS and other ecosystems. It was more than IaaS and PaaS, and wasn't just SaaS running in the cloud. It was a new architecture that integrates infrastructure, platform and software as services to solve new problems that the cloud vendors in our view, weren't addressing by themselves. It seemed to us that the ecosystem was pursuing opportunities across clouds that went beyond conventional implementations of multi-cloud. And we felt there was a structural change going on at the industry level, the supercloud, metaphorically was highlighting. So that's the background on why we felt a new catch phrase was warranted, love it or hate it. It's memorable and it's what we chose. Now to that last point about structural industry transformation. Andy Rappaport is sometimes and often credited with identifying the shift from the vertically integrated IBM mainframe era to the fragmented PC microprocesor-based era in his HBR article in 1991. In fact, it was David Moschella, who at the time was an IDC Analyst who first introduced the concept in 1987, four years before Rappaport's article was published. Moschella saw that it was clear that Intel, Microsoft, Seagate and others would replace the system vendors, and put that forth in a graphic that looked similar to the first two on this chart. We don't have to review the shift from IBM as the center of the industry to Wintel, that's well understood. What isn't as well known or accepted is what Moschella put out in his 2018 book called "Seeing Digital" which introduced the idea of "The Matrix" that's shown on the right hand side of this chart. Moschella posited that new services were emerging built on top of the internet and hyperscale clouds that would integrate other innovations and would define the next era of computing. He used the term Matrix because the conceptual depiction included not only horizontal technology rose like the cloud and the internet, but for the first time included connected industry verticals, the columns in this chart. Moschella pointed out that whereas historically, industry verticals had a closed value chain or stack and ecosystem of R&D, and production, and manufacturing, and distribution. And if you were in that industry, the expertise within that vertical generally stayed within that vertical and was critical to success. But because of digital and data, for the first time, companies were able to traverse industries, jump across industries and compete because data enabled them to do that. Examples, Amazon and content, payments, groceries, Apple, and payments, and content, and so forth. There are many examples. Data was now this unifying enabler and this marked a change in the structure of the technology landscape. And supercloud is meant to imply more than running in hyperscale clouds, rather it's the combination of multiple technologies enabled by CloudScale with new industry participants from those verticals, financial services and healthcare, manufacturing, energy, media, and virtually all in any industry. Kind of an extension of every company is a software company. Basically, every company now has the opportunity to build their own cloud or supercloud. And we'll come back to that. Let's first address what's different about superclouds relative to hyperscale clouds? You know, this one's pretty straightforward and obvious, I think. Hyperscale clouds, they're walled gardens where they want your data in their cloud and they want to keep you there. Sure, every cloud player realizes that not all data will go to their particular cloud so they're meeting customers where their data lives with initiatives like Amazon Outposts and Azure Arc, and Google Anthos. But at the end of the day, the more homogeneous they can make their environments, the better control, security, cost, and performance they can deliver. The more complex the environment, the more difficult it is to deliver on their brand promises. And of course, the lesser margin that's left for them to capture. Will the hyperscalers get more serious about cross-cloud services? Maybe, but they have plenty of work to do within their own clouds and within enabling their own ecosystems. They had a long way to go a lot of runway. So let's talk about specifically, what problems superclouds solve? We've all seen the stats from IDC or Gartner, or whomever the customers on average use more than one cloud. You know, two clouds, three clouds, five clouds, 20 clouds. And we know these clouds operate in disconnected silos for the most part. And that's a problem because each cloud requires different skills because the development environment is different as is the operating environment. They have different APIs, different primitives, and different management tools that are optimized for each respective hyperscale cloud. Their functions and value props don't extend to their competitors' clouds for the most part. Why would they? As a result, there's friction when moving between different clouds. It's hard to share data, it's hard to move work. It's hard to secure and govern data. It's hard to enforce organizational edicts and policies across these clouds, and on-prem. Supercloud is an architecture designed to create a single environment that enables management of workloads and data across clouds in an effort to take out complexity, accelerate application development, streamline operations and share data safely, irrespective of location. It's pretty straightforward, but non-trivial, which is why I always ask a company's CEO and executives if stock buybacks and dividends will yield as much return as building out superclouds that solve really specific and hard problems, and create differential value. Okay, let's dig a bit more into the architectural aspects of supercloud. In other words, what are the salient attributes of supercloud? So first and foremost, a supercloud runs a set of specific services designed to solve a unique problem and it can do so in more than one cloud. Superclouds leverage the underlying cloud native tooling of a hyperscale cloud, but they're optimized for a specific objective that aligns with the problem that they're trying to solve. For example, supercloud might be optimized for lowest cost or lowest latency, or sharing data, or governing, or securing that data, or higher performance for networking, for example. But the point is, the collection of services that is being delivered is focused on a unique value proposition that is not being delivered by the hyperscalers across clouds. A supercloud abstracts the underlying and siloed primitives of the native PaaS layer from the hyperscale cloud and then using its own specific platform as a service tooling, creates a common experience across clouds for developers and users. And it does so in a most efficient manner, meaning it has the metadata knowledge and management capabilities that can optimize for latency, bandwidth, or recovery, or data sovereignty, or whatever unique value that supercloud is delivering for the specific use case in their domain. And a supercloud comprises a super PaaS capability that allows ecosystem partners through APIs to add incremental value on top of the supercloud platform to fill gaps, accelerate features, and of course innovate. The services can be infrastructure-related, they could be application services, they could be data services, security services, user services, et cetera, designed and packaged to bring unique value to customers. Again, that hyperscalers are not delivering across clouds or on-premises. Okay, so another common question we get is, isn't that just multi-cloud? And what we'd say to that is yes, but no. You can call it multi-cloud 2.0, if you want, if you want to use it, it's kind of a commonly used rubric. But as Dell's Chuck Whitten proclaimed at Dell Technologies World this year, multi-cloud by design, is different than multi-cloud by default. Meaning to date, multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of what we've called multi-vendor or of M&A, you buy a company and they happen to use Google Cloud, and so you bring it in. And when you look at most so-called, multi-cloud implementations, you see things like an on-prem stack, which is wrapped in a container and hosted on a specific cloud or increasingly a technology vendor has done the work of building a cloud native version of their stack and running it on a specific cloud. But historically, it's been a unique experience within each cloud with virtually no connection between the cloud silos. Supercloud sets out to build incremental value across clouds and above hyperscale CAPEX that goes beyond cloud compatibility within each cloud. So if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0, that's fine, but we chose to call it supercloud. Okay, so at this point you may be asking, well isn't PaaS already a version of supercloud? And again, we would say no, that supercloud and its corresponding superPaaS layer which is a prerequisite, gives the freedom to store, process and manage, and secure, and connect islands of data across a continuum with a common experience across clouds. And the services offered are specific to that supercloud and will vary by each offering. Your OpenShift, for example, can be used to construct a superPaaS, but in and of itself, isn't a superPaaS, it's generic. A superPaaS might be developed to support, for instance, ultra low latency database work. It would unlikely again, taking the OpenShift example, it's unlikely that off-the-shelf OpenShift would be used to develop such a low latency superPaaS layer for ultra low latency database work. The point is supercloud and its inherent superPaaS will be optimized to solve specific problems like that low latency example for distributed databases or fast backup and recovery for data protection, and ransomware, or data sharing, or data governance. Highly specific use cases that the supercloud is designed to solve for. Okay, another question we often get is who has a supercloud today and who's building a supercloud, and who are the contenders? Well, most companies that consider themselves cloud players will, we believe, be building or are building superclouds. Here's a common ETR graphic that we like to show with Net Score or spending momentum on the Y axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR surveys on the X axis. And we've randomly chosen a number of players that we think are in the supercloud mix, and we've included the hyperscalers because they are enablers. Now remember, this is a spectrum of maturity it's a maturity model and we've added some of those industry players that we see building superclouds like CapitalOne, Goldman Sachs, Walmart. This is in deference to Moschella's observation around The Matrix and the industry structural changes that are going on. This goes back to every company, being a software company and rather than pattern match an outdated SaaS model, we see new industry structures emerging where software and data, and tools, specific to an industry will lead the next wave of innovation and bring in new value that traditional technology companies aren't going to solve, and the hyperscalers aren't going to solve. You know, we've talked a lot about Snowflake's data cloud as an example of supercloud. After being at Snowflake Summit, we're more convinced than ever that they're headed in this direction. VMware is clearly going after cross-cloud services you know, perhaps creating a new category. Basically, every large company we see either pursuing supercloud initiatives or thinking about it. Dell showed project Alpine at Dell Tech World, that's a supercloud. Snowflake introducing a new application development capability based on their superPaaS, our term of course, they don't use the phrase. Mongo, Couchbase, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Veeam, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler. Yeah, all of those guys. Yes, Cisco and HPE. Even though on theCUBE at HPE Discover, Fidelma Russo said on theCUBE, she wasn't a fan of cloaking mechanisms, but then we talked to HPE's Head of Storage Services, Omer Asad is clearly headed in the direction that we would consider supercloud. Again, those cross-cloud services, of course, their emphasis is connecting as well on-prem. That single experience, which traditionally has not existed with multi-cloud or hybrid. And we're seeing the emergence of companies, smaller companies like Aviatrix and Starburst, and Clumio and others that are building versions of superclouds that solve for a specific problem for their customers. Even ISVs like Adobe, ADP, we've talked to UiPath. They seem to be looking at new ways to go beyond the SaaS model and add value within their cloud ecosystem specifically, around data as part of their and their customers digital transformations. So yeah, pretty much every tech vendor with any size or momentum and new industry players are coming out of hiding, and competing. Building superclouds that look a lot like Moschella's Matrix, with machine intelligence and blockchains, and virtual realities, and gaming, all enabled by the internet and hyperscale cloud CAPEX. So it's moving fast and it's the future in our opinion. So don't get too caught up in the past or you'll be left behind. Okay, what about examples? We've given a number in the past, but let's try to be a little bit more specific. Here are a few we've selected and we're going to answer the two questions in one section here. What workloads and services will run in superclouds and what are some examples? Let's start with analytics. Our favorite example is Snowflake, it's one of the furthest along with its data cloud, in our view. It's a supercloud optimized for data sharing and governance, query performance, and security, and ecosystem enablement. When you do things inside of that data cloud, what we call a super data cloud. Again, our term, not theirs. You can do things that you could not do in a single cloud. You can't do this with Redshift, You can't do this with SQL server and they're bringing new data types now with merging analytics or at least accommodate analytics and transaction type data, and bringing open source tooling with things like Apache Iceberg. And so it ticks the boxes we laid out earlier. I would say that a company like Databricks is also in that mix doing it, coming at it from a data science perspective, trying to create that consistent experience for data scientists and data engineering across clouds. Converge databases, running transaction and analytic workloads is another example. Take a look at what Couchbase is doing with Capella and how it's enabling stretching the cloud to the edge with ARM-based platforms and optimizing for low latency across clouds, and even out to the edge. Document database workloads, look at MongoDB, a very developer-friendly platform that with the Atlas is moving toward a supercloud model running document databases very, very efficiently. How about general purpose workloads? This is where VMware comes into to play. Very clearly, there's a need to create a common operating environment across clouds and on-prem, and out to the edge. And I say VMware is hard at work on that. Managing and moving workloads, and balancing workloads, and being able to recover very quickly across clouds for everyday applications. Network routing, take a look at what Aviatrix is doing across clouds, industry workloads. We see CapitalOne, it announced its cost optimization platform for Snowflake, piggybacking on Snowflake supercloud or super data cloud. And in our view, it's very clearly going to go after other markets is going to test it out with Snowflake, running, optimizing on AWS and it's going to expand to other clouds as Snowflake's business and those other clouds grows. Walmart working with Microsoft to create an on-premed Azure experience that's seamless. Yes, that counts, on-prem counts. If you can create that seamless and continuous experience, identical experience from on-prem to a hyperscale cloud, we would include that as a supercloud. You know, we've written about what Goldman is doing. Again, connecting its on-prem data and software tooling, and other capabilities to AWS for scale. And we can bet dollars to donuts that Oracle will be building a supercloud in healthcare with its Cerner acquisition. Supercloud is everywhere you look. So I'm sorry, naysayers it's happening all around us. So what's next? Well, with all the industry buzz and debate about the future, John Furrier and I, have decided to host an event in Palo Alto, we're motivated and inspired to further this conversation. And we welcome all points of view, positive, negative, multi-cloud, supercloud, hypercloud, all welcome. So theCUBE on Supercloud is coming on August 9th, out of our Palo Alto studios, we'll be running a live program on the topic. We've reached out to a number of industry participants, VMware, Snowflake, Confluent, Sky High Security, Gee Rittenhouse's new company, HashiCorp, CloudFlare. We've hit up Red Hat and we expect many of these folks will be in our studios on August 9th. And we've invited a number of industry participants as well that we're excited to have on. From industry, from financial services, from healthcare, from retail, we're inviting analysts, thought leaders, investors. We're going to have more detail in the coming weeks, but for now, if you're interested, please reach out to me or John with how you think you can advance the discussion and we'll see if we can fit you in. So mark your calendars, stay tuned for more information. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Myerson who handles production and manages the podcast for Breaking Analysis. And I want to thank Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does a lot of editing and appreciate you posting on SiliconANGLE, Rob. Thanks to all of you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. It publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @DVellante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. And please do check out ETR.ai for the best survey data. And the enterprise tech business will be at AWS NYC Summit next Tuesday, July 12th. So if you're there, please do stop by and say hello to theCUBE, it's at the Javits Center. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (bright music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vallante. >> Welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. As we exited the isolation economy last year, Supercloud is a term that we introduced to describe something new that was happening in the world of cloud. In this "Breaking Analysis," we address the 10 most frequently asked questions we get around Supercloud. Okay, let's review these frequently asked questions on Supercloud that we're going to try to answer today. Look at an industry that's full of hype and buzzwords. Why the hell does anyone need a new term? Aren't hyperscalers building out Superclouds? We'll try to answer why the term Supercloud connotes something different from hyperscale clouds. And we'll talk about the problems that Superclouds solve specifically, and we'll further define the critical aspects of a Supercloud architecture. We often get asked, "Isn't this just multi-cloud?" Well, we don't think so, and we'll explain why in this "Breaking Analysis." Now, in an earlier episode, we introduced the notion of super PaaS. Well, isn't a plain vanilla PaaS already a super PaaS? Again, we don't think so, and we'll explain why. Who will actually build and who are the players currently building Superclouds? What workloads and services will run on Superclouds? And eight A or number nine, what are some examples that we can share of Supercloud? And finally, we'll answer what you can expect next from us on Supercloud. Okay, let's get started. Why do we need another buzzword? Well, late last year ahead of re:Invent, we were inspired by a post from Jerry Chen called castles in the cloud. Now, in that blog post, he introduced the idea that there were submarkets emerging in cloud that presented opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs. That the cloud wasn't going to suck the hyperscalers, weren't going to suck all the value out of the industry. And so we introduced this notion of Supercloud to describe what we saw as a value layer emerging above the hyperscalers CAPEX gift, we sometimes call it. Now, it turns out that we weren't the only ones using the term, as both Cornell and MIT, have used the phrase in somewhat similar, but different contexts. The point is, something new was happening in the AWS and other ecosystems. It was more than IS and PaaS, and wasn't just SaaS running in the cloud. It was a new architecture that integrates infrastructure, platform and software as services, to solve new problems that the cloud vendors, in our view, weren't addressing by themselves. It seemed to us that the ecosystem was pursuing opportunities across clouds that went beyond conventional implementations of multi-cloud. And we felt there was a structural change going on at the industry level. The Supercloud metaphorically was highlighting. So that's the background on why we felt a new catch phrase was warranted. Love it or hate it, it's memorable and it's what we chose. Now, to that last point about structural industry transformation. Andy Rapaport is sometimes and often credited with identifying the shift from the vertically integrated IBM mainframe era to the fragmented PC microprocesor based era in his HBR article in 1991. In fact, it was David Moschella, who at the time was an IDC analyst who first introduced the concept in 1987, four years before Rapaport's article was published. Moschella saw that it was clear that Intel, Microsoft, Seagate and others would replace the system vendors and put that forth in a graphic that looked similar to the first two on this chart. We don't have to review the shift from IBM as the center of the industry to Wintel. That's well understood. What isn't as well known or accepted is what Moschella put out in his 2018 book called "Seeing Digital" which introduced the idea of the matrix that's shown on the right hand side of this chart. Moschella posited that new services were emerging, built on top of the internet and hyperscale clouds that would integrate other innovations and would define the next era of computing. He used the term matrix, because the conceptual depiction included, not only horizontal technology rows, like the cloud and the internet, but for the first time included connected industry verticals, the columns in this chart. Moschella pointed out that, whereas historically, industry verticals had a closed value chain or stack and ecosystem of R&D and production and manufacturing and distribution. And if you were in that industry, the expertise within that vertical generally stayed within that vertical and was critical to success. But because of digital and data, for the first time, companies were able to traverse industries jump across industries and compete because data enabled them to do that. Examples, Amazon and content, payments, groceries, Apple and payments, and content and so forth. There are many examples. Data was now this unifying enabler and this marked a change in the structure of the technology landscape. And Supercloud is meant to imply more than running in hyperscale clouds. Rather, it's the combination of multiple technologies, enabled by cloud scale with new industry participants from those verticals; financial services, and healthcare, and manufacturing, energy, media, and virtually all and any industry. Kind of an extension of every company is a software company. Basically, every company now has the opportunity to build their own cloud or Supercloud. And we'll come back to that. Let's first address what's different about Superclouds relative to hyperscale clouds. Now, this one's pretty straightforward and obvious, I think. Hyperscale clouds, they're walled gardens where they want your data in their cloud and they want to keep you there. Sure, every cloud player realizes that not all data will go to their particular cloud. So they're meeting customers where their data lives with initiatives like Amazon Outposts and Azure Arc and Google Antos. But at the end of the day, the more homogeneous they can make their environments, the better control, security, costs, and performance they can deliver. The more complex the environment, the more difficult it is to deliver on their brand promises. And, of course, the less margin that's left for them to capture. Will the hyperscalers get more serious about cross cloud services? Maybe, but they have plenty of work to do within their own clouds and within enabling their own ecosystems. They have a long way to go, a lot of runway. So let's talk about specifically, what problems Superclouds solve. We've all seen the stats from IDC or Gartner or whomever, that customers on average use more than one cloud, two clouds, three clouds, five clouds, 20 clouds. And we know these clouds operate in disconnected silos for the most part. And that's a problem, because each cloud requires different skills, because the development environment is different as is the operating environment. They have different APIs, different primitives, and different management tools that are optimized for each respective hyperscale cloud. Their functions and value props don't extend to their competitors' clouds for the most part. Why would they? As a result, there's friction when moving between different clouds. It's hard to share data. It's hard to move work. It's hard to secure and govern data. It's hard to enforce organizational edicts and policies across these clouds and on-prem. Supercloud is an architecture designed to create a single environment that enables management of workloads and data across clouds in an effort to take out complexity, accelerate application development, streamline operations, and share data safely, irrespective of location. It's pretty straightforward, but non-trivial, which is why I always ask a company's CEO and executives if stock buybacks and dividends will yield as much return as building out Superclouds that solve really specific and hard problems and create differential value. Okay, let's dig a bit more into the architectural aspects of Supercloud. In other words, what are the salient attributes of Supercloud? So, first and foremost, a Supercloud runs a set of specific services designed to solve a unique problem, and it can do so in more than one cloud. Superclouds leverage the underlying cloud native tooling of a hyperscale cloud, but they're optimized for a specific objective that aligns with the problem that they're trying to solve. For example, Supercloud might be optimized for lowest cost or lowest latency or sharing data or governing or securing that data or higher performance for networking, for example. But the point is, the collection of services that is being delivered is focused on a unique value proposition that is not being delivered by the hyperscalers across clouds. A Supercloud abstracts the underlying and siloed primitives of the native PaaS layer from the hyperscale cloud, and then using its own specific platform as a service tooling, creates a common experience across clouds for developers and users. And it does so in the most efficient manner, meaning it has the metadata knowledge and management capabilities that can optimize for latency, bandwidth, or recovery or data sovereignty, or whatever unique value that Supercloud is delivering for the specific use case in their domain. And a Supercloud comprises a super PaaS capability that allows ecosystem partners through APIs to add incremental value on top of the Supercloud platform to fill gaps, accelerate features, and of course, innovate. The services can be infrastructure related, they could be application services, they could be data services, security services, user services, et cetera, designed and packaged to bring unique value to customers. Again, that hyperscalers are not delivering across clouds or on premises. Okay, so another common question we get is, "Isn't that just multi-cloud?" And what we'd say to that is yeah, "Yes, but no." You can call it multi-cloud 2.0, if you want. If you want to use, it's kind of a commonly used rubric. But as Dell's Chuck Whitten proclaimed at Dell Technologies World this year, multi-cloud, by design, is different than multi-cloud by default. Meaning, to date, multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of what we've called multi-vendor or of M&A. You buy a company and they happen to use Google cloud. And so you bring it in. And when you look at most so-called multi-cloud implementations, you see things like an on-prem stack, which is wrapped in a container and hosted on a specific cloud. Or increasingly, a technology vendor has done the work of building a cloud native version of their stack and running it on a specific cloud. But historically, it's been a unique experience within each cloud, with virtually no connection between the cloud silos. Supercloud sets out to build incremental value across clouds and above hyperscale CAPEX that goes beyond cloud compatibility within each cloud. So, if you want to call it multi-cloud 2.0, that's fine, but we chose to call it Supercloud. Okay, so at this point you may be asking, "Well isn't PaaS already a version of Supercloud?" And again, we would say, "No." That Supercloud and its corresponding super PaaS layer, which is a prerequisite, gives the freedom to store, process, and manage and secure and connect islands of data across a continuum with a common experience across clouds. And the services offered are specific to that Supercloud and will vary by each offering. OpenShift, for example, can be used to construct a super PaaS, but in and of itself, isn't a super PaaS, it's generic. A super PaaS might be developed to support, for instance, ultra low latency database work. It would unlikely, again, taking the OpenShift example, it's unlikely that off the shelf OpenShift would be used to develop such a low latency, super PaaS layer for ultra low latency database work. The point is, Supercloud and its inherent super PaaS will be optimized to solve specific problems like that low latency example for distributed databases or fast backup in recovery for data protection and ransomware, or data sharing or data governance. Highly specific use cases that the Supercloud is designed to solve for. Okay, another question we often get is, "Who has a Supercloud today and who's building a Supercloud and who are the contenders?" Well, most companies that consider themselves cloud players will, we believe, be building or are building Superclouds. Here's a common ETR graphic that we like to show with net score or spending momentum on the Y axis, and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR surveys on the X axis. And we've randomly chosen a number of players that we think are in the Supercloud mix. And we've included the hyperscalers because they are enablers. Now, remember, this is a spectrum of maturity. It's a maturity model. And we've added some of those industry players that we see building Superclouds like Capital One, Goldman Sachs, Walmart. This is in deference to Moschella's observation around the matrix and the industry structural changes that are going on. This goes back to every company being a software company. And rather than pattern match and outdated SaaS model, we see new industry structures emerging where software and data and tools specific to an industry will lead the next wave of innovation and bring in new value that traditional technology companies aren't going to solve. And the hyperscalers aren't going to solve. We've talked a lot about Snowflake's data cloud as an example of Supercloud. After being at Snowflake Summit, we're more convinced than ever that they're headed in this direction. VMware is clearly going after cross cloud services, perhaps creating a new category. Basically, every large company we see either pursuing Supercloud initiatives or thinking about it. Dell showed Project Alpine at Dell Tech World. That's a Supercloud. Snowflake introducing a new application development capability based on their super PaaS, our term, of course. They don't use the phrase. Mongo, Couchbase, Nutanix, Pure Storage, Veeam, CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler. Yeah, all of those guys. Yes, Cisco and HPE. Even though on theCUBE at HPE Discover, Fidelma Russo said on theCUBE, she wasn't a fan of cloaking mechanisms. (Dave laughing) But then we talked to HPE's head of storage services, Omer Asad, and he's clearly headed in the direction that we would consider Supercloud. Again, those cross cloud services, of course, their emphasis is connecting as well on-prem. That single experience, which traditionally has not existed with multi-cloud or hybrid. And we're seeing the emergence of smaller companies like Aviatrix and Starburst and Clumio and others that are building versions of Superclouds that solve for a specific problem for their customers. Even ISVs like Adobe, ADP, we've talked to UiPath. They seem to be looking at new ways to go beyond the SaaS model and add value within their cloud ecosystem, specifically around data as part of their and their customer's digital transformations. So yeah, pretty much every tech vendor with any size or momentum, and new industry players are coming out of hiding and competing, building Superclouds that look a lot like Moschella's matrix, with machine intelligence and blockchains and virtual realities and gaming, all enabled by the internet and hyperscale cloud CAPEX. So it's moving fast and it's the future in our opinion. So don't get too caught up in the past or you'll be left behind. Okay, what about examples? We've given a number in the past but let's try to be a little bit more specific. Here are a few we've selected and we're going to answer the two questions in one section here. What workloads and services will run in Superclouds and what are some examples? Let's start with analytics. Our favorite example of Snowflake. It's one of the furthest along with its data cloud, in our view. It's a Supercloud optimized for data sharing and governance, and query performance, and security, and ecosystem enablement. When you do things inside of that data cloud, what we call a super data cloud. Again, our term, not theirs. You can do things that you could not do in a single cloud. You can't do this with Redshift. You can't do this with SQL server. And they're bringing new data types now with merging analytics or at least accommodate analytics and transaction type data and bringing open source tooling with things like Apache Iceberg. And so, it ticks the boxes we laid out earlier. I would say that a company like Databricks is also in that mix, doing it, coming at it from a data science perspective trying to create that consistent experience for data scientists and data engineering across clouds. Converge databases, running transaction and analytic workloads is another example. Take a look at what Couchbase is doing with Capella and how it's enabling stretching the cloud to the edge with arm based platforms and optimizing for low latency across clouds, and even out to the edge. Document database workloads, look at Mongo DB. A very developer friendly platform that where the Atlas is moving toward a Supercloud model, running document databases very, very efficiently. How about general purpose workloads? This is where VMware comes into play. Very clearly, there's a need to create a common operating environment across clouds and on-prem and out to the edge. And I say, VMware is hard at work on that, managing and moving workloads and balancing workloads, and being able to recover very quickly across clouds for everyday applications. Network routing, take a look at what Aviatrix is doing across clouds. Industry workloads, we see Capital One. It announced its cost optimization platform for Snowflake, piggybacking on Snowflake's Supercloud or super data cloud. And in our view, it's very clearly going to go after other markets. It's going to test it out with Snowflake, optimizing on AWS, and it's going to expand to other clouds as Snowflake's business and those other clouds grows. Walmart working with Microsoft to create an on-premed Azure experience that's seamless. Yes, that counts, on-prem counts. If you can create that seamless and continuous experience, identical experience from on-prem to a hyperscale cloud, we would include that as a Supercloud. We've written about what Goldman is doing. Again, connecting its on-prem data and software tooling, and other capabilities to AWS for scale. And you can bet dollars to donuts that Oracle will be building a Supercloud in healthcare with its Cerner acquisition. Supercloud is everywhere you look. So I'm sorry, naysayers, it's happening all around us. So what's next? Well, with all the industry buzz and debate about the future, John Furrier and I have decided to host an event in Palo Alto. We're motivated and inspired to further this conversation. And we welcome all points of view, positive, negative, multi-cloud, Supercloud, HyperCloud, all welcome. So theCUBE on Supercloud is coming on August 9th out of our Palo Alto studios. We'll be running a live program on the topic. We've reached out to a number of industry participants; VMware, Snowflake, Confluent, Skyhigh Security, G. Written House's new company, HashiCorp, CloudFlare. We've hit up Red Hat and we expect many of these folks will be in our studios on August 9th. And we've invited a number of industry participants as well that we're excited to have on. From industry, from financial services, from healthcare, from retail, we're inviting analysts, thought leaders, investors. We're going to have more detail in the coming weeks, but for now, if you're interested, please reach out to me or John with how you think you can advance the discussion, and we'll see if we can fit you in. So mark your calendars, stay tuned for more information. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Myerson who handles production and manages the podcast for "Breaking Analysis." And I want to thank Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight. They help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE, who does a lot of editing and appreciate you posting on SiliconANGLE, Rob. Thanks to all of you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search, breaking analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. Or DM me @DVallante, or comment on my LinkedIn post. And please, do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. We'll be at AWS NYC summit next Tuesday, July 12th. So if you're there, please do stop by and say hello to theCUBE. It's at the Javits Center. This is Dave Vallante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis." (slow music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to this "CUBE" conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE", Here in Palo Alto, California, beginning in 2022, kicking off the new year with a great conversation. We're with folks from down under, two co-founders of Instaclustr. Peter Lilley, CEO, Ben Bromhead, the CTO, Intaclustr success. 'Cause he's been on "theCUBE" before, 2018 at Amazon re:Invent. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on "theCUBE". Thanks for piping in from Down Under into Palo Alto. >> Thanks, John, it's really good to be here, I'm looking forward to the conversation. >> So, I love the name, Instaclustr. It conjures up cloud, cloud scale, modern application, server list. It just gives me a feel of things coming together. Spin me up a cluster of these kinds of feelings. The cloud is here, open sources is growing, that's what you guys are in the middle of. Take a minute to explain what you guys do real quick and this open source cloud intersection that's just going supernova right now. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Instaclustr is on a mission to really enable the world's ambitions to use open source technology. And we do that specifically at the data layer. And we primarily do that through what we call our platform offering. And think of it as the way to make it super easy, super scalable, super reliable way to adopt open source technologies at the data layer, to build cutting edge applications in the cloud. Today used by customers all over the world. We started the business in Australia but we've very quickly become a global business. But we are the business that sits behind some of the most successful brands that are building massively scalable cloud based applications. And you did right. We sit at a real intersection of kind of four things. One is open source adoption which is an incredibly powerful journey and wave that's driving the future direction of IT. You've got managed services or managed operations and moving those onto a platform like Instaclustr. You've got the adoption of cloud and cloud as a wave, like open source is a wave. And then you've got the growth of data, everything is data-driven these days. And data is just excellent for businesses and our customers. And in a lot of cases when we work with our customers on Instaclustr today, the application and the data, the data is the business. >> Ben, I want to get your thoughts as a CTO because open source, and technology, and cloud, has been a real game changer. If you go back prior to cloud, open source is very awesome, still great, freedom, we've got code, it's just the scale of open source. And then cloud came along, changed the game, so, open source. And then new business models became, so commercial open source software is now an industry. It's not just open source, "Hey, free software." And then maybe a red hat's out there, or someone like a red hat, have some premium support. There's been innovation on the business model side. So, matching technology innovation with the business model has been a big change in the past, many, many years. And this past year in particular that's been key. And open source, open core, these are the things that people are talking about. License changes, this is a big discussion. Because you could be on the wrong side of history if you make the wrong decision here. >> Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think it's also worth, I guess, taking a step back and understanding a little bit about why have people gravitated towards open source and the cloud? Beyond kind of the hippie freedoms of, I can see the code and I have ownership, and everything's free and great. And I think the reason why it's really taken off in a commercial setting, in an enterprise setting is velocity. How much easier is it to go reach and grab a open-source tool? That you can download, you can grab, you can compile yourself, you can make it work the way you want it to do to solve a problem here and now. Versus the old school way of doing it which is with I have to go download a trial version. Oh no, some of the features are locked. I've got to go talk to a procurement or a salesperson to kind of go and solve the problem that I have. And then I've got to get that approved by my own purchasing department. And do we have budget? And all of a sudden it's way, way, way harder to solve the problem in front of you as an engineer. Whereas with open source I just go grab it and I move on. I've achieved something for the day. >> Basically all that friction that comes, you got a problem to solve, oh, open-source, I'm going to just get a hammer and hammer that nail. Wait, whoa, whoa. I got to stand in line, I got to jump over hoops, I got to do all these things. This is the hassle and friction. >> Exactly, and this is why it's often called one of the most impressive things about that. And I think on the cloud side it's the same thing, but for hardware, and capability, and compute, and memory. Previously, if you wanted to compute, oh, you're going to lodge a ticket. You've got to ask someone to rack a server in a data center. You've got to deal with three different departments. Oh my goodness. How painful is that just to get a server up to go run and do something? That's just pulling your hair out. Whereas with the cloud, that's an API call or clicking a few buttons on a console and off you go. You'd have to combine those two things. And I would say that software engineers are probably the most productive they've ever been in the last 20 years. I know sometimes it doesn't look like that but their ability to solve problems in front of them, especially using external stuff is way way, way better. >> Peter: I think when you put those two things together you get an- >> The fact of the matter is they are productive. They're putting security into the code right in the CICD pipeline. So, this is highly agile right now. So, coders are highly productive and efficient in changing the way people are rolling out applications. So, the game is over, open source has won, open core is winning. And this is where the people are confused. This is why I got you guys here? What's the difference between open source and open core? What's the big deal? Why is it so important? >> Yeah, no, great question. So, really the difference between open source and open core, it comes down to, really it's a business model. So, open core contains open-source software, that's a hundred percent true. So, usually what will happen is a company will take a project that is open source, that has an existing community around it, or they've built it, or they've contributed it, or however that genesis has happened. And then what they'll do is they'll look at all the edges around that open-source project. And I think what are some enterprise features that don't exist in the open-source project that we can build ourselves? And then sprinkle those around the edges and sell that as a proprietary offering. So, what you get is you get the core functionality is powered by an open-source project. And quite often the code is identical. But there's all these kinds of little features around the outside that might make it a little bit easier to use in an enterprise environment. Or might make it a bit easier to do some operations side of things. And they'll charge you a license for that. So, you end up in a situation where you might have adopted the open source project, but then now if you want a feature X, Y, or Z, you then need to go and fork over some money and go into that whole licensing kind of contract. So, that's the core difference between open core and open-source, right? Open core, it's got all these little proprietary bits kind of sprinkled around the outside. >> So, how would you describe your platform for your customers? Obviously, you guys are succeeding, your growth is great, we're going to get that second. But as you guys have been steadily expanding the platform of open source data technologies, what is the main solution that you guys are offering customers? Managing open source technologies? What's the main value that you guys bring to the customer? >> Yeah, definitely. So, really the main value that we bring to the customer is we allow them to, I guess, successfully adopt open source databases or database technologies without having to go down that open core path. Open core can be quite attractive, but what it does is you end up with all these many Oracles drivers. Still having to pay the toll in terms of license fees. What we do, however, is we take those open-source projects and we deliver that as a database, as a service on our managed platform. So, we take care of all the operations, the pain, the care, the feeding, patch management, backups. Everything that you need to do, whether you're running it yourself or getting someone else to run it, we'll take care of that for you. But we do it with the pure upstream open source version. So, that means you get full flexibility, full portability. And more importantly you're not paying those expensive license fees. Plus it's easy and it just works. You get that full cloud native experience and you get your database right now when you need it. >> And basically you guys solve the problem of one, I got this legacy or existing licensed technology I've got to pay for. And it may not be enabling modern applications, and they don't have a team to go do all the work (laughing). Or some companies have like a whole army of people just embedded in open-source, that's very rare. So, it sounds like you guys do both. Did I get that right, is that right? >> Yeah, definitely. So, we definitely enable it if you don't have that capability yourself. We are the outsourced option to that. It's obviously a lot more than that but it's one of those pressures that companies nowadays face. And if we take it back to that concept of developer velocity, you really want them working on your core business problems. You don't want them having to fight database infrastructure. So, you've also got the opportunity cost of having your existing engineers working on running this stuff themselves. Or running a proprietary or an open call solution themselves, when really you should be outsourcing preferably to Instaclustr. But hey, let's be honest, you should be outsourcing it to anyone so that your engineers can be focusing on your core business problems. And really letting them work on the things that make you money. >> That's very smart. You guys have a great business model. Because one of the things we've been reporting on "theCUBE" on SiliconANGLE as well, is that the database market is becoming so diverse for the right reasons. Databases are everywhere now and code is becoming horizontally scalable for the cloud but vertically specialized with machine learning. So, you're seeing applications and new databases, no one database rules the world anymore. It's not about Oracle anymore, or anything else. So, open source fits nicely into this kind of platform view. How do you guys decide which technologies go in to the platform that you support? >> Yeah, great question. So, we certainly live in a world of, I call it polyglot persistence. But a simple way of referring to that is the right tool for the right job. And so, we really live in this world where engineers will reach for a database that solves a specific problem and solves it well. As you mentioned, companies, they're no longer Oracle shops, or they're no longer MySQL shops. You'll quite often see services or applications of teams using two or three different databases to solve different challenges. And so, what we do at Instaclustr is we really look at what are the technologies that our existing customers are using, and using side-by-side with, say, some of the existing Instaclustr offerings. We take great lead from that. We also look at what are the different projects out there that are solving use cases that we don't address at the moment. So, it's very use case driven. Whether it's, "Hey, we need something that's better at," say, "Time series." Or we need something that's a little bit better at translatable workloads. Or something a bit of a better fit for a case, right? And we work with those. And I think importantly, we also have this view that in a world of polyglot persistence, you've also got data integration challenges. So, how do you keep data safe between these two different database types? So, we're also looking at how do we integrate those better and support our users on that particular journey. So, it really comes down to one, listening to your customers, seeing what's out there and what's the right use case for a given technology and then we look to adopt that. >> That's great, Ben, machine learning is completely on fire right now. People love it, they want more of it. AI everything, everyone's putting AI on every label. If it does any automation, it's magic, it's AI. So, really, we know what that's happening, it's just really database work and machine learning under the covers. Pete, the business model here has completely changed too, because now with open source as a platform you have more scale, you have differentiation opportunities. I'm sure business is doing great. Give us an update on the business side of Instaclustr. What's clicking for you guys, what's working? What's the success trajectory look like? >> Yeah, it's been an amazing journey for us. When you think about it we were founded it in 2013, so, we're eight years into our journey. When we started the business we were focused entirely on Cassandra. But as Ben talked about, we've gone in diversified those technologies onto the platform, that common experience that we offer customers. So, you can adopt any one to a number of open source technologies in a highly integrated way and really, really grow off the back of that. It's driving some phenomenal growth in our business and we've really enjoyed growth rates that have been 70, 80, 100 year on year since we've started the business. And that's led to an enormous scale and opportunities for us to invest further in the platform, invest further in additional technologies in a really highly opinionated way. I think Ben talked about that integrations, then that becomes incredibly complex as you have many, many kinds of offerings on the platform. So, Instaclustr is much more targeted in terms of how we want to take our business forward and the growth opportunity before us. We think about being deeply expert and deeply capable in a smaller subset of technologies. But those which actually integrate and inter operate for customers so they can build solutions for their applications. But do that on Instaclustr using its platform with a common experience. And, so we've grown to 270 people now around the world. We started in Australia, we've got a strong presence in the US. We recently acquired a business called credativ in Europe, which was a PostgreSQL specialist organization. And that was because, as Ben said before, talking about those technologies we bring onto our platform. PostgreSQL, huge market, disrupting Oracle, exactly the right place that we want to be as Instaclustr with pure open source offerings. We brought them into the Instaclustr family in March this year and we did that to accelerate it on our platform. And so, we think about that. We think about future technologies on their platform, what we can do, and introduced to even provide an even greater and richer experience. Cadence is new to our platform. Super exciting for us because not only is it something that provides workflow as code, as an open source experience, but as a glue technology to build a complex business technology for applications. It actually drives workloads across Cassandra, PostgreSQL and Kafka, which are kind of core technologies on our platform. Super exciting for us, a big market. Interesting kind of group of adopters. You've got Uber kind of leading the charge there with that and us partnering with them now. We see that as a massive growth opportunity for our business. And as we introduce analytics capabilities, exploration, visibility features into the platform all built on open source. So, you can build a complete top to bottom data services layer using open source technology for your platform. We think that's an incredibly exciting part of the business and a great opportunity for us. >> Opportunities to raise money, more acquisitions on the horizon? >> Well, I think acquisitions where it makes sense. I talked about credativ, where we looked at credativ, we knew that PostgreSQL was new to our market, and we were coming into that market reasonably late. So, the way we thought about that from a strategy perspective was we wanted to accelerate the richness of the capability on our platform that we introduced and became GA late last year. So, we think about when we're selecting that kind of technology, that's the perfect opportunity to consider an acquisition for us. So, as we look at what we're going to introduce in the platform over the next sort of two, three, four years, that sort of decision that will, or that sort of thinking, or frames our thinking on what we would do from an acquisition perspective. I think the other way we think about acquisitions is new markets. So, thinking about globally entering, say into the Japanese market. does that make sense because of any language requirements to be able to support customers? 'Cause one of the things that's really, really important to us is the platform is fantastic for scaling, growing, deploying, running, operating this very powerful open source technology. But so too is the importance of having deep operational open source expertise backing and being there to call on if a customer's having an application issue. And that kind of drives the need for us to have in country kind of market support. And so, when we think about those sort of opportunities, I think we think about acquisition there, isn't it like another string to the bow in terms of getting presence in a particular or an emerging market that we're interested in. >> Awesome, Ben, final question to you is, on the technology front what do you see this year emerging? A lot of changes in 2021. We've got another year of pandemic situation going on. Hopefully it goes by fast. Hopefully it won't be three years, but again, who knows? But you're seeing the cloud open source actually taking as a tailwind from the pandemic. New opportunities, companies are refreshing, they have to, they're forced. There's going to be a lot more changes. What do you see from a tech perspective in open-source, open core, and in general for large companies as opensource continues to power the innovation? >> So, definitely the pandemic has a tailwind, particularly for those companies adopting the cloud. I think it's forced a lot of their hands as well. Their five-year plans have certainly become two or three year plans around moving to the cloud. And certainly, that contest for talent means that you really want to be keeping your engineers focused on core things. So, definitely I think we're going to see a continuation of that. We're going to say the continuation of open source dominating when it comes to a database and the database market, the same with cloud. I think we're going to see the gradual march towards different adoption models within the cloud. So, server lists, right? I think we're going to see that kind of slowly mature. I think it's still a little bit early in the hype cycle there, but we're going to start to see that mature. On the ML, AI side of things as well, people have been talking about it for the last three or four years. And I'm sure to people in the industry, they're like, "Oh, we're over that." But I think on the broader industry we're still quite early in that particular cycle as people figure out, how do they use the data that they've got? How do they use that? How do they train models on that? How do they serve inference on that? And how do they unlock other things with lower down on their data stack as well when it comes to ML and AI, right? We're seeing great research papers come out from AI powered indexes, right? So, the AI is actually speeding up queries, let alone actually solving business problems. So, I think we're going to say more and more of that kind of come out. I think we're going to see more and more process capabilities and organizational responses to this explosion of data. I'm super excited to say people talking about concepts and organizational concepts like data mesh. I think that's going to be fundamental as we move forward and have to manage the complexities of dealing with this. So, it's an old industry, data, when you think about it. As soon as you had computers you had data, and it's an old industry from that perspective. But I feel like we're only just getting started and it's just heating up. So, we're super excited to see what 2022 holds for us. >> Every company will be an source AI company. It has to be no matter what. (Ben laughing) Well, thanks for sharing the data Pete and Ben, the co-founders of Instaclustr. We'll get our "CUBE" AI working on this data we got today from you guys. Thanks for sharing, great stuff. Thanks for sharing the open core perspective. We really appreciate it and congratulations on your success. Companies do need more Instaclustrs out there, and you guys are doing a great job. Thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. >> Thanks John, cheers mate. >> Thanks John. >> It's "theCUBE" Conversation here at Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>Good morning live from Las Vegas. It's the Q with AWS reinvent 2021. This is our fourth day of coverage. The third full day of the conference. Lisa Martin here with Dave Nicholson. Dave, we had had a tremendous number of conversations. In fact, we've two live sets over a hundred guests on the program, and I have another web. I've got two Dave's for you for the price of one. Dave trader joins us the field CSO client advisor at Presidio. We're going to be talking about ransomware and security, Dave, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. So it's looking at your background. You've got a very cool background. You hold numerous cybersecurity certifications, including CIS SP you've received numerous endorsements from the department of Homeland security, the FBI and NSA. And in 2018, you graduated from the FBI's CSO academy in Quantico. Wow. Yeah, it sounds like he's a man with a very special set of skills. I think you're right. I think you're right. One of the things that we have seen the cybersecurity landscape has changed dramatically in the last year and a half 22 months or so. I was reading some stats ransomware and the check happens delivery once every 11 seconds. It's now a matter of when not, if talk to us about some of the things that you're seeing, the threat landscape, changing ransomware as a service what's going on. >>The last part that you mentioned was ransomware as a service is key. The access to be able to launch a tax has become so simplified that the, the, the, uh, the attacker level doesn't have to be sophisticated. Really. You can get down to the 100 level brand new hackers that are just getting into the space. They can go to a help desk and they can purchase ransomware, and they can run this ransomware that has the comes with quality assurance, by the way. And if they didn't run correctly, they've got a help desk support system. That'll help them run this in a, you know, as a criminal enterprise. Um, the access is really what is, what has made this so prevalent, and it really exacerbated the problem to the massive scale that we're seeing today. Yeah. >>And of course, we're only hearing about the big ones, you know, re you know, Conti colonial pipeline. But as I mentioned, an attack occurring every 11 seconds, I also was reading the first half of calendar, 21, that ransomware was up nearly 11 X. So the trajectory it's going the wrong way, it's going up into the right and the way that we don't want it to go, are they becoming more brazen? Is it easier? Ransomware is the surface, but also they're able to be paid in Bitcoin and that's less traceable. >>Yeah. So, um, exponential is not even fair, right? Cause it, that's not even a fair assessment because that up and right, it's just, it's been so pervasive that we just see that continued growth. Uh, you know, there's how, you know, different ways and how we're going to stop that. And what we're, what we're doing from a national perspective is all coming into play and what we're going to do about it. You know? So the, one of the things that I'm seeing, that's kind of new is the taunting aspect. So the taunting aspect is, uh, you know, they've been in your network for a little while, the dwell times extended and they're collecting intelligence, but what they're doing is, you know, they used to let you, after they would present you with the ransomware note, they would let you kind of circle the wagons. And then you would come to a decision point as an organization. >>Is, am I going to pay or am I not well? And they would give you a little bit of time to deliberate. Well, now during your deliberation time, they're actually sending texts to the CEO and the CFO and there's, and they're, they're, they're showcasing their, their, uh, technical prowess and that they've got you, they own you at that point. And they're, they're texting on your personal device. And they're saying, you should go ahead and pay us, or we're going to make this worse. The taunting aspect is even twisting the knife and it's, uh, you know, out of box isn't even from a criminal aspect, I expect that to be out of bounds, no >>Crazy. And of course, you know, some of the things that we've seen, um, uh, the, the white houses, counter ransomware initiative, a coalition of 30 countries aimed to ramp up global efforts to attack that it's like, are you seeing cyber crime with the rise and the proliferation, you think there's gonna be more regulations and organizations that are going to be having to deal with? What do you think? Some of the things that we're going to see on that legal? >>Yeah. So we have to, we have to leverage compliance, and there's a lot of really great frameworks out there today that we are leveraging. And there's, there's good methodology on how to stop this. The issue is it's the adoption and really the, the, the knowledge, the subject matter expertise, and really that consultant side, that's the message that I try and get out to, to, to our customers and our clients. And I'm trying to really get them to understand what that evolution looks like and what, what is needed in each discipline, because there's various disciplines across the board and you almost have to have them all, um, you know, in order to be able to stop ransomware and solve for that ransomware problem. And I do think the regulation is going to be key. I also think that I need some air support from not only the federal government, but our internet service providers and, and we as a free country, we need to be careful of, you know, on, on some of that, some of those fronts. But I, I, I still think that I would appreciate, you know, my ISP doing a little bit of block and tackle for me, you know, and helping me out, even though I want the freedom to do and be able to do whatever I want. I still like them to say, you know, we're gonna block known that because, you know, it would just be nice to have a little bit of support even on that side. So how does >>An ISP prevent me from panning out my password and being fooled in a, in a, in a phishing attack is the, is the question that, is, that, is that still a real issue? >>So I wouldn't put that. I wouldn't put that on the ISP. I would put that more on the end point and some personal responsibility, right. Knowing, and I do, I do stress that a little bit, but relatively early >>Morning sarcasm in my bag. >>Yeah. So I do put that on, but there, but there are tremendous partners that I work with that are able to do that and automate a lot of that for you. And I need to make it simple, but simple as hard. And that's what you know is, especially in cybersecurity, we want to make it simple for it and really be able to remove the threat to the end user and protect the user. But in order to do that, there's a ton of things on a ton of sophistication and innovation that happens in the background. And we really need to be able to showcase how that's done. And, um, I, it's, obviously I'm excited about it, but we need more people that are able to just specialize in this. We need more good guys that are able to come in and help us on this front. >>I also think we need to break down some barriers for on the competition with, you know, market share and the partners we need to, we need to kind of elevate the conversation a little bit and we all need to work together because we're all in the same boat when it comes to how we're being attacked. Um, you know, from a national perspective on a global scale. And I think that if we elevate the conversation, our collective, uh, mindset in that, that, that, that, uh, that, that mind share is going to be able to really help us innovate and, and put a stop to this. >>So then how is Presidio and AWS, how are you helping them until you get to it? Ransomware and mitigation can talk to us about that. How are you going to be helping, especially there's cyber security skills gap that's gone on like five years. >>Sure. Yeah. That skills gap is going to continue to, we're going to continue to see that grow as well. And we're efforting that on many fronts, but I'm really excited about the ransomware mitigation kit that got, uh, unveiled yesterday. Um, I got a call earlier this year from, uh, AWS and, and, uh, we basically, the question was posed to me, you know, what are we going to do about this is from an AWS perspective, what can we do? Um, you know, cause th the cyber adversaries are, uh, are, are relatively unchecked and, and, and their attitude is what are you going to do about it? So AWS posed the question, what are we going to do about it? And what we came up with was, you know, as, as an isolated organization, or as an isolated discipline as with like a managed detection and response or endpoint protection, um, that silo could not by itself accomplish and the solve to eliminate ransomware or to make a dent in eliminate ransomware. >>So what we had to do was combine disciplines, and we reached over to BCDR disaster recovery and, and, and, and our backup teams. And we said, let's put together endpoint protection, MDR, and let's, let's merge the two of these. And let's automate that. So that what happens is, is when we detect the ransomware attack, there's, there's a specific indicators of compromise that happened in the attack, the end point protection, which is CrowdStrike in our case can see that and can notify that, and then can tell the backup and recovery team, Hey, we know that this is a, this is an indicator of compromise. We know that this system is, has been owned. And then there's an inflection point where we can ask the user if they want to manually intervene, or if they want us to automate that and intervene for them. So it really keeps production going full-time and, uh, it doesn't, it takes away the cyber adversaries ability to hold our data hostage. So this is an, it was this one, and I don't use PI verbally, uh, frequently, but this is a monumental, uh, uh, evolution of what, of what we're going to see and how to prevent ransomware. >>Wow. I was reading that, that ransomware is backups, or you talked about backup, the backup backup attacks are on the rise as well. How can organizations, how can they work with Presidio in AWS? You described this as monumental kind of game-changing, how can they work with you guys to, to implement this technology so that we can start dialing down the threats? >>Yeah. So we would love to, we would love to hear from you, right? Give us a, give us a call. Um, but, uh, our teams, you know, with, with CloudEndure and AWS CloudEndure and CrowdStrike and what they've really come up with, and, and you have to have these two things ahead of time. So I sit on our critical incident response team, and, you know, I, I do work with, you know, the, the bureau as often as I can on attribution, but you have to have these ahead of time. So your, your, your, your, uh, critical response plan needs to be in place. And if you have the two things that we, that we've really put a lot of effort into over the last eight months, if you've got CrowdStrike and you've got cloud on, on the backend, we can establish all of those, um, and, and really set this up for you to eliminate that threat. And, and that's what we're excited to showcase this week, and, you know, in the coming months, and we're going to, and we've also got additional things in additional features that we plan to add to that in the, in the coming months, Dave, >>Your thoughts on the partnership between private industry and government entities. Uh, you mentioned that the level of sophistication to engage in this bad behavior doesn't necessarily have to be the, have to rise to the level of state sponsored. Um, but can we do this in the private sector, by ourselves? What are your, what are your sort of philosophical? >>I will give you my, I will give you a statistic on this and it will, it'll be self-explanatory. But, um, 80% of our critical infrastructure in the United States is privately held. So we're unique in that perspective, we aren't like some other countries where they can just mandate the requirement that the government will control critical infrastructure. It's privately held here in the United States. So you almost have to invite the federal government to come in, even though you are a critical infrastructure, they still have to be invited to come help you. And that partnership is key in order to be able to defend yourself, but also to defend the nation. Our power grids are our water sources. I mean, you'll see those are private private companies, but we need that federal help. And I try and evangelize that partnership. I mean, you know, there's always the, um, you know, when you think about working with federal agencies, like the, like the FBI, um, there's a little bit of hesitation and you're not really quite sure. >>I will tell you that those, those men and women are, um, uh, they're amazing. They're amazing to work with they're, they're really good at what they do. And, and you're certainly it's a partnership and they have a whole division set up there's the office of the private sector is designed to have these conversations and help you prepare. And then in the unfortunate instance where you might have an attack there, right. They're trying to figure out who did that to you, you know, and, and you're a victim, you're a victim of a federal crime at that point. And they, they treat you with such care and, you know, they're, uh, they do such a great job. So I think we have to engage them in order to, and we should actually be able to help them with the technology and how, and make it easier for them to do their job, but something I'm also very interested in. >>Talk to me about your interests as the last question, in terms of what's going to go on here, we are wrapping up 2021 entering 2022, which hopefully will be a much better year for on many fronts, including the decrease in ransomware. What are some of the things that you're excited about? There's so much technology, there's so much opportunity and innovation going on with AWS and its partner ecosystem. What excites you, what opportunities do you see as we head into 2020? Yeah. >>So I do see some, I do see some threats that are going to evolve. Um, ransomware is certainly going to be more of the same until we get this out in this new methodology and what we've built until that becomes widely adopted. I think we, you know, we're not going to make a dent in the numbers that we're seeing just yet, but I'm hoping that that will change when, you know, when the industries do start to adopt that. The other thing that I'm seeing is I think operational technology is going to take a hit in 2022 because the bad guys have started to figure out how, um, you know, that, that, that, that operational technology is not as, uh, it's not front and center. And it's not top of mind for a lot of CSOs. So they're, they're targeting that weakness and going after that. So I think we really need to brace for that and, and really, uh, get in front of that. Uh, so that's one of the things that I'm prepping for is really the operational IOT conversation, and then how I can help, uh, organizations and even, even home users, you know, with some of the stuff that you've got, you know, maybe in your own home that could be used again, >>Right? Cause that work from anywhere is going to persist for quite some time. Dave, thank you so much for joining Dave Nicholson and me on the program this morning, talking about what's going on in the threat landscape ransomware, but also this monumental shift and from, from a technology and a partnership perspective that Presidio and AWS are doing to help customers and every industry, private and public sector. We appreciate your insights. Thank you >>For having me. Thanks >>For being here. Very Dave and Dave I'm Lisa you're watching the cube, the global leader in live tech coverage.

(bright music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021 in person. So a live event, physical in-person, also virtual hybrid. So a lot of great action online, check out the website. All the videos are there on theCUBE, as well as what's going on all of the actions on site and theCUBE's here. I'm John Furrier, your host with Dave Vellante, my cohost. Finally, we've got David Brown, VP of Elastic Compute Cloud. EC2, the bread and butter. Our favorite part of Amazon. David, great to have you back on theCUBE in person. >> John, it's great to be back. It's the first time I'd been on theCUBE in person as well. A lot of virtual events with you guys, but it's amazing to be back at re:Invent. >> We're so excited for you. I know, Matt Garman and I've talked in the past. We've talked in the past. EC2 is just an amazing product. It's always been the core block of AWS. More and more action happening and developers are now getting more action and there's well, we wrote a big piece about it. What's going on? The Silicon's really paying off. You've got to also general purpose Intel and AMD, and you've got the custom silicon, all working together. What's the new update? Give us a scoop. >> Well, John, it's actually 15 years of EC2 this year and I've been lucky to be on that team for 14 years and so incredible to see the growth. It's been an amazing journey. The thing that's really driven us, two things. One is supporting new workloads. And so what are the workloads that customers have available out there trying to do on the cloud that we don't support and launch new instance types. And that's the first thing. The second one is price performance. How do we give customers more performance at a continuously decreasing price year-over-year? And that's just driven innovation across EC2 over the years with things like Graviton. All of our inferential chips are custom silicon, but also instance types with the latest Intel Ice Lake CPU's, latest Milan. We just announced the AMD Milan instance. It's just constantly innovation across the ever-increasing list of instances. So super exciting. >> So instances become the new thing. Provision an instance, spin up an instance. Instance becomes, and you can get instances, flavors, almost like flavors, right? >> David: Yeah. >> Take us through the difference between an instance and then the EC2 itself. >> That's correct, yeah. So we actually have, by end of the year, right now we have over 475 different instances available to you whether it's GPU accelerators, high-performance computing instances, memory optimized, just enormous number. We'll actually hit 500 by the end of the year, but that is it. I mean, customers are looking for different types of machines and those are the instances. >> So the Custom Silicon, it's one of the most interesting developments. We've written about it. AWS secret weapon is one of them. I wonder if you could take us back to the decision points and the journey. The Annapurna acquisition, you started working with them as a partner, then you said, all right, let's just buy the company. >> David: Yeah. >> And then now, you're seeing the acceleration, your time to tapeout is way, way compressed. Maybe what was the catalyst and maybe we can get into where it's going. >> Yeah, absolutely. Super interesting story 'cause it actually starts all the way back in 2008. In 2008, EC2 had actually been around for just a little under two years. And if you remember back then, everybody was like, will virtualize and hypervisors, specialization would never really get you the same performances, what they were calling bare metal back then. Everybody's looking at the cloud. And so we took a look at that. And I mean, network latencies, in some cases with hypervisors were as high as 200 or 300 milliseconds. And it was a number of real challenges. And so we knew that we would have to change the way that virtualization works and get into hardware. And so in 2010, 2011, we started to look at how could I offload my network processing, my IO processing to additional hardware. And that's what we delivered our first Nitro card in 2012 and 2013. We actually offloaded all of the processing of network to a Nitro card. And that Nitro card actually had a Annapurna arm chip on it. Our Nitro 1 chip. >> For the offload? >> The offload card, yeah. And so that's when my team started to code for Arm. We started to work on our Linux works for Arm. We actually had to write our own operating system initially 'cause there weren't any operating systems available we could use. And so that's what we started this journey. And over the years, when we saw how well it worked for networking, we said, let's do it for storage as well. And then we said, Hey, we could actually improve security significantly. And by 2017, we'd actually offloaded 100% of everything we did on that server to our offload cards Leaving a 100% of the server available for customers. And we're still actually the only cloud provider that does that today. >> Just to interject, in the data center today, probably 30% of the general purpose cores are used for offloads. You're saying 0% in the cloud. >> On our nitro instances, so every instance we've launched since 2017, our C5. We use 0% of that central core. And you can actually see that in our instance types. If you look at our largest instance type, you can see that we're giving you 96 cores and we're giving you, and our largest instance, 24 terabytes of memory. We're not giving you 23.6 terabytes 'cause we need some. It's all given to you as the customer. >> So much more efficient, >> Much, much more efficient, much better, better price performance as well. But then ultimately those Nitro chips, we went through Nitro 1, Nitro 2, Nitro 3, Nitro 4. We said, Hey, could we build a general purpose server chip? Could we actually bring Arm into the cloud? And in 2018, we launched the A1 instance, which was our Graviton1 instance. And what we didn't tell people at the time is that it was actually the same chip we were using on our network card. So essentially, it was a network card that we were giving to you as a server. But what it did is it sparked the ecosystem. That's why we put it out there. And I remember before launch, some was saying, is this just going to be a university project? Are we going to see people from big universities using Arm in the cloud? Was it really going to take off? And the response was amazing. The ecosystem just grew. We had customers move to it and immediately begin to see improvements. And we knew that a year later, Graviton2 was going to come out. And Graviton2 was just an amazing chip. It continues to see incredible adoption, 40% price performance improvement over other instances. >> So this is worth calling out because I think that example of the network card, I mean, innovation can come from anywhere. This is what Jassy always would say is do the experiments. Think about the impact of what's going on here. You're focused on a mission. Let's get that processing of the lowest cost, pick up some workloads. So you're constantly tinkering with tuning the engine. New discovery comes in. Nitro is born. The chip comes in. But I think the fundamental thing, and I want to get your reaction to this 'cause we've put this out there on our post on Sunday. And I said, in every inflection point, I'm old enough, my birthday was yesterday. I'm old enough to know that. >> David: I saw that. >> I'm old enough to know that in the eighties, the client server shifts. Every inflection point where development changed, the methodology, the mindset or platforms change, all the apps went to the better platform. Who wants to run their application on a slower platform? And so, and those inflects. So now that's happening now, I believe. So you got better performance and I'm imagining that the app developers are coding for it. Take us through how you see that because okay, you're offering up great performance for workloads. Now it's cloud workloads. That's almost all apps. Can you comment on that? >> Well, it has been really interesting to see. I mean, as I said, we were unsure who was going to use it when we initially launched and the adoption has been amazing. Initially, obviously it's always, a lot of the startups, a lot of the more agile companies that can move a lot faster, typically a little bit smaller. They started experimenting, but the data got out there. That 40% price performance was a reality. And not only for specific workloads, it was broadly successful across a number of workloads. And so we actually just had SAP who obviously is an enormous enterprise, supporting enterprises all over the world, announced that they are going to be moving the S/4 HANA Cloud to run on Graviton2. It's just phenomenal. And we've seen enterprises of that scale and game developers, every single vertical looking to move to Graviton2 and get that 40% price performance. >> Now we have to, as analysts, we have to say, okay, how did you get to that 40%? And you have to make some assumptions obviously. And it feels like you still have some dry powder when you looked at Graviton2. I think you were running, I don't know, it's speculated anyway. I don't know if you guys, it's your data, two and a half, 2.5 gigahertz. >> David: Yeah. >> I don't know if we can share what's going on with Graviton3, but my point is you had some dry powder and now with Graviton3, quite a range of performance, 'cause it really depends on the workload. >> David: That's right. >> Maybe you could give some insight as to that. What can you share about how you tuned Graviton3? >> When we look at benchmarking, we don't want to be trying to find that benchmark that's highly tuned and then put out something that is, Hey, this is the absolute best we can get it to and that's 40%. So that 40% is actually just on average. So we just went and ran real world workloads. And we saw some that were 55%. We saw some that were 25. It depends on what it was, but on average, it was around the 35, 45%, and we said 40%. And the great thing about that is customers come back and say, Hey, we saw 40% in this workload. It wasn't that I had to tune it. And so with Graviton3, launching this week. Available in our C7g instance, we said 25%. And that is just a very standard benchmark in what we're seeing. And as we start to see more customer workloads, I think it's going to be incredible to see what that range looks like. Graviton2 for single-threaded applications, it didn't give you that much of a performance. That's what we meant by cloud applications, generally, multi-threaded. In Graviton3, that's no longer the case. So we've had some customers report up to 80% performance improvements of Graviton2 to Graviton3 when the application was more of a single-threaded application. So we started to see. (group chattering) >> You have to keep going, the time to market is compressing. So you have that, go ahead, sorry. >> No, no, I always want to add one thing on the difference between single and multi-threaded applications. A lot of legacy, you're single threaded. So this is kind of an interesting thing. So the mainframe, migration stuff, you start to see that. Is that where that comes in the whole? >> Well, a lot of the legacy apps, but also even some of the new apps, like single threading like video transcoding, for example, is all done on a single core. It's very difficult. I mean, almost impossible to do that multi-threaded way. A lot of the crypto algorithms as well, encryption and cryptography is often single core. So with Graviton3, we've seen a significant performance boost for video encoding, cryptographic algorithms, that sort of thing, which really impacts even the most modern applications. >> So that's an interesting point because now single threaded is where the vertical use cases come in. It's not like more general purpose OS kind of things. >> Yeah, and Graviton has already been very broad. I think we're just knocking down the last few verticals where maybe it didn't support it and now it absolutely does. >> And if an ISV then ports, like an SAP's ports to Graviton, then the customer doesn't see any, I mean, they're going to see the performance difference, but they don't have to think about it. >> David: Yeah. >> They just say, I choose that instance and I'm going to get better price performance. >> Exactly, so we've seen that from our ISVs. We've also been doing that with our AWS services. So services like EMR, RDS, Elastic Cache, it will be moving and making Graviton2 available for customers, which means the customer doesn't have to do the migration at all. It's all done for them. They just pick the instance and get the price performance benefits, and so yeah. >> I think, oh, no, that was serverless. Sorry. >> Well, Lambda actually just did launch on Graviton2. And I think they were talking about a 35% price performance improvement. >> Who was that? >> Lambda, a couple of months ago. >> So what does an ISV have to do to port to Graviton. >> It's relatively straightforward, and this is actually one of the things that has slowed customers down is the, wow, that must be a big migration. And that ecosystem that I spoke about is the important part. And today, with all the Linux operating systems being available for Arm running on Graviton2, with all of the container runtimes being available, and then slowly open source applications in ISV is being available. It's actually really, really easy. And we just ran the Graviton2 four-day challenge. And we did that because we actually had an enterprise migrate one of the largest production applications in just four days. Now, I probably wouldn't recommend that to most enterprises that we see is a little too fast, but they could actually do that. >> But just from a numbers standpoint, that's insanely amazing. I mean, when you think about four days. >> Yeah. >> And when we talked on virtually last year, this year, I can't remember now. You said, we'll just try it. >> David: That's right. >> And see what happens, so I presume a lot of people have tried it. >> Well, that's my advice. It's the unknown, it's the what will it take? So take a single engineer, tell them and give them a time. Say you have one week, get this running on Graviton2, and I think the results are pretty amazing, very surprised. >> We were one of the first, if not the first to say that Arm is going to be dominant in the enterprise. We know it's dominant in the Edge. And when you look at the performance curves and the time to tape out, it's just astounding. And I don't know if people appreciate that relative to the traditional Moore's law curve. I mean, it's a style. And then when you combine the power of the CPU, the GPU, the NPU, kind of what Apple does in the iPhone, it blows away the historical performance curves. And you're on that curve. >> That's right. >> I wonder if you could sort of explain that. >> So with Graviton, we're optimizing just across every single part of AWS. So one of the nice things is we actually own that end-to-end. So when it starts with the early design of Graviton2 and Graviton3, and we obviously working on other chips right now. We're actually using the cloud to do all of the electronic design automation. So we're able to test with AWS how that Graviton3 chip is going to work long before we've even started taping it out. And so those workloads are running on high-frequency CPU's on Graviton. Actually we're using Graviton to build Graviton now in the cloud. The other thing we're doing is we're making sure that the Annapurna team that's building those CPUs is deeply engaged with my team and we're going to ultimately go and build those instances so that when that chip arrives from tapeout. I'm not waiting nine months or two years, like would normally be the case, but I actually had an instance up and running within a week or two on somebody's desk studying to do the integration. And that's something we've optimized significantly to get done. And so it allows us to get that iteration time. It also allows us to be very, very accurate with our tapeouts. We're not having to go back with Graviton. They're all A1 chips. We're not having to go back and do multiple runs of these things because we can do so much validation and performance testing in the cloud ahead of time. >> This is the epiphany of the Arm model. >> It really is. >> It's a standard. When you send it to the fab, they know what's going to work. You hit volume and it's just no fab. >> Well, this is a great thread. We'll stay on this 'cause Adam told us when we met with them for re:Invent that they're seeing a lot more visibility into use cases at the scale. So the scale gives you an advantage on what instances might work. >> And makes the economics works. >> Makes the economics work, hence the timing, the shrinking time to market, not there, but also for the apps. Talk about the scale advantage you guys have. >> Absolutely. I mean, the scale advantage of AWS plays out in a number of ways for our customers. The first thing is being able to deliver highly optimized hardware. So we don't just look at the Graviton3 CPU, you were speaking about the core count and the frequency and Peter spoke about a lot of that in his keynote yesterday. But we look at how does the Graviton3 CPU work with the rest of the instance. What is the right balance between the CPU and memory? The CPU and the Hydro. What's the performance and the drive? We just launched the Nitro SSD, which is now we've actually building our own custom SSDs for Nitro getting better performance, being able to do updates, better security, making it more cloudy. We're just saying, we've been challenged with the SSD in the parts. The other place that scales really helping is in capacity. Being able to make sure that we can absorb things like the COVID spike, or the stuff you see in the financial industry with just enormous demand for compute. We can do that because of our scale. We are able to scale. And the final area is actually in quality because I have such an enormous fleet. I'm actually able to drive down AFR. So annual failure rates, are we well below what the mathematical theoretical tenant or possibility is? So if you look at what's put on that actual sticker on the box that says you should be able to get a full percent AFR. At scale and with focus, we're actually able to get that down to significantly below what the mathematical entitlement was actually be. >> Yeah, it's incredible. I've got a great, and this is the advantage, and that's why I believe anyone who's writing applications that has includes a database, data transfer, any kind of execution of code will use the stack. >> Why would they? Really, why? We've seen this, like you said before, whether it was PC, then the fastest Pentium or somebody. >> Why would you want your app to run slower? >> Unix box, right? ISVS want it to run as fast and as cheaply as possible. Now power plays into it as well. >> Yeah, well, we do have, I agree with what you're saying. We do have a number of customers that are still looking to run on x86, but obviously customers that want windows. Windows isn't available for Arm and so that's a challenge. They'll continue to do that. And you know the way we do look at it is most law kind of died out on us in 2002, 2003. And what I'm hoping is, not necessarily bringing wars a little back, but then we say, let's not accept the 10%, 15% improvement year-over-year. There's absolutely more we can all be doing. And so I'm excited to see where the x86 world's going and they doing a lot of great stuff. Intel Ice Lakes looking amazing. Milan is really great to have an AWS as well. >> Well, I'm thinking it's fair point 'cause we certainly look what Pat's doing it at Intel and he's remaking the company. I've said he's going to follow on the Arm playbook in my mind a little bit, and which is the right thing to do. So competition is a good thing. >> David: Absolutely. >> We're excited for you and a great to see Graviton and you guys have this kind of inflection point. We've been tracking for a while, but now the world's starting to see it. So congratulations to your team. >> David: Thank you. >> Just a couple of things. You guys have some news on instances. Talk about the deprecation issue and how you guys are keeping instances alive real quick. >> Yeah, we're super customer obsessed at Amazon. And so that really drives us. And one of the worst things for us to do is to have to tell a customer that we no longer supporting a service. We recently actually just deprecated the ECG classic network. I'm not sure if you saw that and that's actually off the 10 years of continuing to support it. And the only reason we did it is we have a tiny percentage of customers still using that from back in 2012. But one of the challenges is obviously instance hardware eventually will ultimately time out and fail and have hardware issues as it gets older and older. And so we didn't want to be in a place, in EC2, where we would have to constantly go to customers and say that M1 small, that C3, whatever you were running, it's no longer supported, please move. That's just a text that customers shouldn't have to do. And if they still getting value out of an older instance, let them keep using it. So we actually just announced at re:Invent, in my keynote on Tuesday, the longevity support for EC2 instances, which means we will never come back to you again and ask you to please get off an instance, because we can actually emulate all those instances on our Nitro system. And so all of these instances are starting to migrate to Nitro. You're getting all the benefits of Nitro for now some of our older zen instances, but also you don't have to worry about that work. That's just not something you need to do to get off in all the instance. >> That's great. That's a great test service. Stay on as long as you want. When you're ready to move, move. Okay, final question for you. I know we've got time, I want to get this in. The global network, you guys are known for AWS cloud WAN serve. Gives you updates on what's going on with that. >> So Werner just announced that in his keynote and over the last two to three years or so, we've seen a lot of customers starting to use the AWS backbone, which is extensive. I mean, you've seen the slides in Werner's keynote. It really does span the world. I think it's probably one of the largest networks out there. Customers starting to use that for actually their branch office communication. So instead of going and provisioning the own international MPLS networks and that sort of thing, they say, let me onboard to AWS with VPN or direct connect, and I can actually run the AWS backbone around the world. Now doing that actually has some complexity. You got to think about transit gateways. You got to think about those inter-region peering. And AWS cloud when takes all of that complexity away, you essentially create a cloud WAN, connecting to it to VPN or direct connect, and you can even go and actually set up network segments. So essentially VLANs for different parts of the organization. So super excited to get out that out of there. >> So the ease of use is the key there. >> Massively easy to use. and we have 26 SD-WAN partners. We even partnering with folks like Verizon and Swisscom in Switzerland to telco to actually allow them to use it for their customers as well. >> We'll probably use your service someday when we have a global rollout date. >> Let's do that, CUBE Global. And then the other was the M1 EC2 instance, which got a lot of applause. >> David: Absolutely. >> M1, I think it was based on A15. >> Yeah, that's for Mac. We've got to be careful 'cause M1 is our first instance as well. >> Yeah right, it's a little confusion there. >> So it's a Mac. The EC2 Mac is with M1 silicon from Apple, which super excited to put out there. >> Awesome. >> David Brown, great to see you in person. Congratulations to you and the team and all the work you guys have done over the years. And now that people starting to realize the cloud platform, the compute just gets better and better. It's a key part of the system. >> Thanks John, it's great to be here. >> Thanks for sharing. >> The SiliconANGLE is here. We're talking about custom silicon here on AWS. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE. The global leader in tech coverage. We'll be right back with more covers from re:Invent after this break. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> We're back at AWS re:Invent 2021. It's the biggest hybrid event of the year. One of the few physical events and we're psyched to be here. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm really pleased to bring back the host emeritus, Stu Miniman, somebody I worked with side-by-side, Stu, for 10 years in a setting much like this, many like this. So, good to have you back. >> Dave, it's great to be here with theCUBE team, family here and re:Invent, Dave. I mean, this show, I remember back, Dave, going to you after the first re:Invent we talked, we were like, "We got to be there." Dave, remember the first year we came, the second year of re:Invent, this is the 10th year now, little card tables, gaming companies, all this stuff. You had Jerry Chen on yesterday and Jerry was comparing like, this is going to be like the next Microsoft. And we bet heavy on this ecosystem. And yeah, we all think this cloud thing, it might be real. 20,000 people here, it's not the 50 or 75,000 that we had in like 2018, 2019, but this ecosystem, what's happening in the cloud, multiple versions of hybrid going on with the event and the services, but yeah, phenomenal stuff. And yeah, it's so nice to see people. >> That's for sure. It's something that we've talked about a lot over the years is, and you remember the early days of re:Invent and to this day, just very a strong developer affinity that AWS has done a tremendous job of building that up and it's their raison d'etre, it's how they approach the market. But now you've been at Red Hat for a bit, obviously as well, developer affinity, what have you learned? Specifically as it relates to the cloud, Kubernetes, hottest thing going, you don't want to do an OpenShift commercial, but it's there, you're in the middle of that mix. What have you learned generally? >> Well, Dave, to the comment that you made about developers here, it's developers and the enterprise. We used to have a joke and say, enterprise developer is an oxymoron, but that line between developers doing stuff, early as a cloud, it was stealth computing. It's they're often doing this stuff and central IT is not managing it. So how do the pieces come together? How do apps and infrastructure, how do those pieces come together? And it's something that Red Hat has been doing a long time. Think about the Linux developer. They might've not have been the app developers, the people building Linux and everything, but they had a decent close tie to it. I'm on the OpenShift team. What we do is cloud, Dave, and we've got a partnership here with Amazon. We GAed our native cloud service earlier this year. Andy Jassy helped name it. It is the beautifully named Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS or ROSA. But we've done OpenShift on AWS for more than five years, basically since we were doing Kubernetes, it's been here because of course customers doing cloud, where are they? A lot of them are here in Amazon. So I've been loving talking to a lot of customers, understanding how enterprise adoption is increasing, how we can enable developers and help them move faster. And yeah, I mean the quick plug on OpenShift is our service. We've got an SRE team that is going to manage all of that. A friend of the program, Corey Quinn, says, "Hey, an SRE team like that, because you don't want to manage as an enterprise." You don't want to manage Kubernetes. Yeah, you need to understand some of the pieces, but what is important to your business is the applications, your data and all those things and managing the undifferentiated heavy lifting. That's one of the reasons you went to the cloud. So therefore changing your model as to how you consume services in the cloud. And what are we seeing with Amazon, Dave? They're trying to build more solutions, simplify deployments, and offer more solutions including with their ecosystem. >> So I want to ask you. You said enterprise developer is kind of an oxymoron, and I remember, years ago I used to hang around with a lot of heads of application development and insurance companies and financial services, pharmaceutical, and they didn't wear hoodies, but they didn't wear suits either. And then when I talked to guys like Jeff Clark, for instance. He talks about we're building an abstraction layer across clouds, blah, blah, blah, which by the way, I think it is the right strategy. I'm like, "Okay, I'll drink some of that Kool-Aid." And then when I come here, we talked to Adam Selipsky. John flew out and I was on the chime. He goes, "Yeah, that's not hybrid. No, this is nothing like, it's not AWS, AWS is cloud." So, square that circle for me, 'cause you're in both worlds and certainly your strategy is to connect those words. Is that cloud? >> Yeah, right. I mean, Dave, we spent years talking about like is private cloud really a cloud? And when we started coming to the show, there is only one cloud. It is the public cloud and Amazon is the paragon of, I don't know what it was. >> Dave: Fake clouds, cloud washing. >> So today, Amazon's putting lots of things into your data center and extending the cloud out to that environment. >> So that's cloud. >> That's cloud. >> What do we call that cloud? What about the reverse? >> What's happening at the edge is that cloud is that extension of what we said from Amazon. If you look at not only Outpost, but Wavelengths and Local Zones and everything else like that. >> Let's say, yes, that's cloud. The APIs, primitives, check. >> Dave, I've always thought cloud is an operating model, not a location. And the hybrid definition is not the old, I did an ebook on this, Dave earlier this year. It's not the decade old NIS definition of an application that spans because I don't get up in the morning as an enterprise and say, "Oh, let me look at the table of how much Google is charging me or Microsoft or Amazon," or wake up one morning and move from one cloud to the other. Portability, follow the sun type stuff, does it ever happen? Yes, but it is rare thing. Applications oftentimes get pulled apart. So we've seen if you talk about AI, training the cloud, then transact and do things at the edge. If I'm in an autonomous vehicle or in a geosynchronous satellite, I can't be going back to the cloud to process stuff. So I get what I need and I process there. The same thing hybrid, oftentimes I will do my transactional activity in the public cloud because I've got unlimited compute capability, but I might have my repository of data for many different reasons, governance or security, all these things in my own data center. So parts of an application might live there, but I don't just span to go between the public cloud in my data center or the edge, it's specific architectural decisions as to how we do this. And by the way the developer, they don't want to have to think about location. I mean, my background, servers, storage, virtualization, all that stuff, that was very much an infrastructure up look of things. Developers want to worry about their code and make sure that it works in production. >> Okay, let me test that. If it's in the AWS cloud and I think it's true for the other hyperscale clouds too, they don't have to think about location, but they still have to think about location on-prem, don't they? >> Well, Dave, even in a public cloud, you do need to worry about sometimes it's like, "Okay, do I split it between availability zones? How do I build that? How do I do that?" So there are things that we build on top of it. So we've seen Amazon. >> I think that's fair, data sovereignty, you have to think about okay. >> Absolutely, a lot of those things. >> Okay, but the experience in Germany is going to be the same as it is in DC, is it not? >> More or less? There are some differences we'll see off and Amazon will roll things out over time and what's available, you've got cloud. >> For sure, though that's definitely true. That's a maturity thing, right? You've talked a bit, but ultimately they all sort of catch up. I guess my question would be is the delta between, let's say, Fed adoption and East Coast, is that delta narrower, significantly narrow than what you might see on-prem? >> The services are the same, sometimes for financial or political things, there might be some slight differences, but yes, the cloud experience should be the same everywhere from Amazon. >> Is it from a standpoint of hybrid, on-prem to cloud, across cloud? >> Many of the things when they go outside of the Amazon data centers are limited or a little bit different or you might have latency considerations that you have to consider. >> Now it's a tug of war. >> So it's not totally seamless because, David Foyer would tell us there, "You're not going to fight physics." There are certain things that we need to have and we've changed the way we architect things because it's no longer the bottleneck of the local scuzzy connection that you have there, it is now (indistinct). >> But the point I'm making is that gets into a tug of war of "Our way is better than your way." And the answer is depends in terms of your workload and the use case. >> You've looked at some of these new databases that span globes and do things of the like. >> Another question, I don't know if you saw the Goldman Sachs deal this morning, Goldman Sachs is basically turning its business into a SaaS and pointing it to their hedge funds and allowing people to access their data, their tools, their software that they built for their own purposes. And now they're outselling it. Similar to what NASDAQ has done. I can't imagine doing that without containers. >> Yeah, so interesting point, I think. At least six years ago now, Amazon launched serverless and serverless was going to take over the world. I dug into the space for a couple of years. And you had the serverless with camp and you had the container camp. Last year at re:Invent, I really felt a shift from Amazon's positioning that many of the abstraction layers and the tools that help you support those environments will now span between Lambda and containers. The container world has been adding serverless functionality. So Amazon does Fargate. The open-source community uses something called Knative, and just breaking this week. Knative was a project that Google started and it looks like that is going to move over to the CNCF. So be part of the whole Kubernetes ecosystem and everything like that. Oracle, VMware, IBM, Red Hat, all heavily involved in Knative, and we're all excited to see that go into the CNCF. So the reason I say that, I've seen from Amazon, I actually, John and I, when we interviewed Andy Jassy back in 2017, I asked him a follow-up question because he said if he was to build AWS in 2017, "I would start with everything underneath it serverless." I would wonder if following up with Adam or Andy today, I'd said, "Would it be all serverless or would containers be a piece of it?" Because sometimes underneath it doesn't matter or sometimes it can be containers and serverless. It's a single unit in Amazon and when they position things, it's now that spectrum of unit, everything from the serverless through the containers, through... James Hamilton wrote a blog post today about running Xen-on-Nitro and they have a migration service for a mainframe. So what do we know? That one of the only things about IT is almost nothing ever goes away. I mean, it sounded like Amazon declared coming soon the end of life of mainframe. My friends over at IBM might not be quite ready to call that era over but we shall see. All these things take time. Everything in IT is additive. I'm happy to see. It is very much usually an end world when I look at the container and Kubernetes space. That is something that you can have a broad spectrum of applications. So some of my more monolithic applications can move over, my cool new data, AI things, I can build on it, microservices in between. And so, it's a broad platform that spans the cloud, the edge, the data center. So that cloud operating model is easier to have consistency all the places that I go. >> Mainframe is in the cloud. Well, we'll see. Big banks by the next site unseen. So I think Amazon will be able to eat away at the edges of that, but I don't think there's going to be a major migration. They claim it. Their big thing is that you can't get COBOL programmers. So I'm like, "Yeah, call DXC, you'll get plenty." Let's talk about something more interesting. (Stu laughs softly) So the last 10 years was a lot of, a lot about IT transformation and there was a lot more room to grow there. I mean, the four big hyperscalers are going to do 120 billion this year. They're growing at 35%. Maybe it's not a trillion, but there's a $500 billion market that they're going after, maybe more. It looks like there's a real move. You saw that with NASDAQ, the Goldman deal, to really drive into business, deeper business integration in addition to IT transformation. So how do you see the next decade of cloud? What should we be watching? >> So, one of the interesting trends, I mean, Dave, for years we covered big data and big data felt very horizontal in it's approach thing. Hadoop take over the world. When I look at AI solutions, when I look at the edge computing technologies that happen, they're very vertically driven. So, our early customers in edge adoption tend to be like telco with the 5G rollout manufacturing in some of their environments. AI, every single industry has a whole set of use cases that they're using that go very deep. So I think cloud computing goes from, we talked about infrastructure as a service to it needs to be more, it is solution, some of these pieces go together. When Adam got up on stage and talked about how many instance types they have on Amazon, Dave, it's got to be 2X or 4X more different instant types than if I went to go to HPE or Dell and buy a physical server for my environment. So we need to have areas and guidance and blueprints and heck, use some of that ML and AI to help drive people to the right solutions because we definitely have the paradox of choice today. So I think you will find some gravity moving towards some of these environments. Gravatar has been really interesting to watch. Obviously that Annapurna acquisition should be down as one of the biggest ones in the cloud era. >> No lack of optionality to your point. So I guess to the point of deeper business integration, that's the big question, will Amazon provide more solution abstractions? They certainly do with Connect. We didn't hear a ton of that this show. >> Interestingly. (Dave speaking indistinctly) So the article that you and John Furrier wrote after meeting with Adam, the thing that caught my eye is discussion of community and ecosystems. And one of the things coming after, some, big communities out there like, you and I lived through the VMware ecosystem in that very tight community. There are forming little areas of community here in this group, but it's not a single cloud community. There are those focus areas that they have. And I do love to see, I mean, obviously working for Red Hat, talking about the ecosystem support. I was very happy to hear Adam mention Red Hat in the keynote as one of the key hybrid partners there. So, for Amazon to get from the 60 million, the 60 billion to the trillion dollar mark down the road, it's going to take a village and we're happy to be a part of it. >> Hey, great to have you back, enjoy the rest of the show. This is, let's see, day three, we're wrapping up. We're here again tomorrow so check it out. Special thanks to obviously AWS is our anchor sponsor and of course, AMD for sponsoring the editorial segments of our event. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. See you tomorrow. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to this CUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We have a lot going on at this year's re:Invent with over 100 guests on the program, and I'm excited to welcome two of those guests here with me right now. We are joined by Ralph Munsen, the Chief Information Officer at Warner Music Group and Atif Khan, the CTO of Alkira and founder of Alkira as well. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. So glad to be here with you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah. Good old fashioned Zoom is become our best friend in the last 22 months or so I'm losing count. Atif, I'd like to start with you. I know Alkira has been on the key before, but it's been a while and you guys are a relatively young company. Give the audience an overview of Alkira and what it is that you deliver. >> Absolutely, Lisa. So we started back in may of 2018, and the Cloud networking space, multicloud networking. And we came out of stealth mode back in April of 2020, and launched the company. In fact, one of our first events coming out of stealth mode was a Cuban interview back in April of 2020. So here at Telecare, what we are doing is we are building a Cloud platform, which allows customers to build a common network across multiple Clouds with built-in network and security services, with the policy and management layer on top full end to end visibility and governance capabilities. And all of this is delivered as a service and consumed as a service as well. And I'm very glad to be here with Ralph, who is from Warner Music Group and is one of our marquee customers. So I'll let Ralph introduce himself, and tell us a bit more about Alkira and WMTS Cloud journey. >> That sounds great. Ralph, why don't you start by giving the audience? I'm sure everyone knows Warner Music Group, but in case there's anyone out there that might not. Give us a little bit of a background. >> Yeah, so the Warner Music Group has been around since 1950 and 1940 even it had its roots at Hollywood and out of Warner Brothers Pictures, Today, say global company in 79 countries we operated. If the 100 employees and we have two major divisions, we have our era recorded music division, which has the labels people commonly turn to Atlantic records, Warner brothers records, and so forth. And then we have our publishing division, which is more a chapel, which is where our songwriters live. And of course we have some singer songwriters that are on both sides of our business. But now currently people may know our artists. We have ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Cardi B, Blake Shelton and I could go on and on. But exciting, great year, we're having one of our best years ever. And I'm so glad to be here and partnering with an Alkira. >> Excellent. I love all of those artists that you mentioned. Fantastic. So let's talk a little bit now Ralph about the backstory. Talk to me about the IT infrastructure at Warner Music Group, what you had there and some of the challenges that you had that you came to Alkira to solve. >> Yeah, well initially when I took over about five years ago now, we were very much a data center based business with traditional networking and IT functions. Additionally with our foreign affiliates, IT was sort of decentralized in the sense that a lot of the networking and data center components were left to regions. And so while we operated globally, we didn't really operate globally, at Warner among our affiliates. So one of the challenges was how do we get out of the data center? Cloud was new. One of the big things that were coming with big data, which is absolutely right for moving, going straight to the Cloud, especially if you don't have anything on-prem and how do we rationalize all of these different locations and conduct all the M&A work we've been doing? So it was quite a challenge, really. At the end, we wanted to have one view of the network, and Alkira. I looked at many a company and Alkira seemed the best to provide that to us. So. >> Well, talk to me a little bit more about why Alkira, because as Atif was saying, they're very young. What came out of stealth mode during the pandemic Warner Music Group, being around since the 40s and 50s, the legacy institution, a great brand. What made you take a risk on such an early stage startup? >> Quite frankly, there was nothing in the space (chuckles) at the time you loved, there were companies that had components of it, of what Alkira does, which is basically network orchestration allowing us to use existing components. And nobody has the whole package, especially incorporating security. So, we figured why not take, take a chance? There's no, it won't hurt you no harm. And if anything is successful, it will give us a great ability to manage our network, much more efficiently taking things that took days down to hours and being able to do it much more efficiently with much fewer staff, as opposed to hiring a lot more because when you orchestrate all the components that are underneath, obviously it requires more bodies, more resources. >> Right. That efficiency and cost optimization is key there. Atif I have to ask you, talk to me about, this is only a few years ago, the gap in the market that you and your brothers saw a few years ago, when you founded the company, because as Rob was saying, there was nobody else in the market at the time that could do what you're doing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Lisa, as you know, myself and Amir, we were also a part of the founding team of Viptela, which was the SD-WAN Company. So back in the day when we did SD-WAN, the requirement was to connect sites together. So if you go back like 5, 10, 5, 7, 10 years ago, networking was done to connect sites together, which could be remote sites, data centers, sites to data centers, all of that together. But fast forward, a few more years with the adoption of Cloud, requirements changed from the networking perspective. So now your network is not just connecting sites together, but most of the traffic now is from sites or users, which could be sitting anywhere. If you look at, what's going on? in the pandemic people are working from all across the globe. They are not just sitting in campuses or sites. So traffic patterns are from sites or users mostly to the Cloud or SaaS applications. So now networks also need to evolve and they need to be built inside the Cloud rather than from outside or connecting into the Cloud. So Cloud access is one capability, but building a network inside the Cloud becomes a requirement. And secondly, now it's not just only about connectivity because security becomes even more important because your security perimeter is changing as well. So securing all these Cloud networks becomes very, very complicated. And now as Ralph can tell you, majority of the enterprises have a multicloud strategy and each Cloud is done differently. So the moment you bring in multiple Clouds, multiple regions across the globe, it becomes so complicated for enterprises to build and manage. They need something, or a platform which makes it easy, gives them one way of doing networking, building a common network across whether you're connecting multiple Clouds or Clouds to your on-prem locations or Clouds to internet or sites to internet. So that's where we saw this gap and we decided to build Alkira to tackle this problem. >> Got it. So Rob, let's talk now about what you've implemented as a team was saying we live in this, in this work from anywhere hybrid multicloud world. Talk to us about Warner, what you implemented and maybe a little bit about your multicloud strategy, if you've got one. >> Ralph: Yeah. So over the last five years, Warner has migrated entirely into Cloud. And to this point before it's multicloud, we're mainly in AWS, but we do have some pleasure and some Google Cloud. And with that, I was telling Atif and Amir. It was interesting and they built a Cloud on site. They totally forgot about the networking aspect. So (laughs), you have ease of use for services and servers inside (indistinct) cloud, but networking is not really present, not to mention when it was built out, it wasn't made to go to competing Clouds. So most companies are facing this problem. How do you treat these environments as a single holistic environment? How do you turn things up, turn things down? How do you secure it, When every single one is different habits, selling unique ways of doing things? So that really was, how we ended up looking for an out Alkira, because I just kept looking at the costs and the profit print grow and grow and grow. And the complexity to a (indistinct) before is growing exponential. One change in one thing would lead to two changes to another. If you add another Cloud or you add another point on the network, you've got exponential growth and complexity, complexity, you have to deal with. So one stop shop. (chuckles) >> One stop shop and reducing that complexity. Talk to me about reducing complexity, and what you're accomplishing there. Especially, in the last year and a half as things have been so dynamic, shall we say? (chuckles) >> Yeah, well, I will say this. It was turnkey for the most part. It took a matter of months as opposed to years, because out of the box, there was a lot of integrations with the major network of players. So as of right now, you can buy firewalls, routing, VPC, things like this, they all exist, but they're not orchestrated together. Right? And then you have policies and security, again not orchestrating a different set of tools. So it really only took us two to three months to get it up and running, I acts, I just had a conversation (chuckles) with them when we were going to finish. So I think we'll be finishing this up completely in January and sometime. So, I was pretty sure. >> LISA: That's fantastic. So really, >> Yeah. >> Sorry Relaph fast time to market there with getting things implemented. Talk to me about from a business outcome perspective, you are CIO, what are some of the outcomes? That this technology is enabling you to deliver back to the business? >> Yeah, it really, the number 1, 2 big ones come to mind. One being able to provide them a secure enterprise. I know when there is the change it's made uniforms for our network without, some of older something's being forgotten about. So that's number one, security is big. You can imagine a company like more ever marquee brands, all brands, any company of marquee brands are targets today. That's number one. Number two is our time to market for eminent. So when we buy a company the time it takes us to get them to be completely part of Warner and therefore start realizing the business case and benefits sort of reasonably bought. Bought the company to begin with. So, we're buying a lot more and we're turning them up and turning those business cases up faster. But usually those cases would say things like six months to a year to integrate with us, and then we can unlock the set of benefits. Now it's more like, two to three months and you start to be able to lock the benefits sooner. And of course, those are different than a case by case basis, but that's. >> Sure, but significantly faster there, you're looking at a two to three X multiplier there, as you talked about. >> Ralph: right. >> Now, you mentioned multicloud Ralph. So here we are at re:Invent. I imagine part of your AWS as part of your Cloud infrastructure and they're a technology partner of ALkira's. >> Ralph: Correct. Yeah. So AWS is actually our biggest Cloud provider of the three, and yeah (laugh) they're their partner without cure. So Good. >> And Atif then you, Alkira's technology partner of AWS, correct? >> Yeas. Alkira is a technology partner of AWS, we are also available on AWS marketplace. So customers can consume, AlKira's platform from AWS marketplace as well. >> But given the fact that so many businesses in every industry are multicloud, I assume that you work with all the Cloud vendors. Atif Yeah? >> Absolutely. So our platform runs inside of the Cloud and runs in AWS is a Cloud as well. And from there it connects to multiple Clouds. So if customers need to connect to Azure or AWS from there or Oracle Cloud or any other Cloud, for that matter, they can connect from our platform and our platform is it scales horizontally. So as customers needs scale, it scales as well. And one of the key advantages is, it's consumed as a service. So there's no software to download or hardware to run for or to acquire for any of the customers. It's a software solution and it's consumed as a service. >> Got it. Ralph one on one more question for you before we wrap things up here, want to get your recommendations for IT Executives, CEOs, who might be in a similar situation to you, whether or not they are with a legacy organization, what are some of your recommendations that you say you need to be looking at a, B and C? >> Yeah, I would primarily say really need to be looking at some of these newer technologies that can help speed up, people, especially in this case to transition to the Cloud and that planning ahead of time, especially goal-setting, I find to be it's any of these places, providers is absolutely Paramount, because you can, if you don't make your own (indistinct) take that step forward and you can end up with shelter. So I make sure that it's very important that when you commit to that, you commit fully, you plan it out and you make sure you actually use it to get the benefits. One of my tech key is software. So. (chuckles) (Lisa Laughing) I'm a bit of it so. >> Well, you've been there and It costs a lot of money and it doesn't do any good. It doesn't move the business forward. And in this day and age, there is a competitor right behind the rear view mirror who might be smaller, more nimble, and more agile, who can take your place easily. >> Absolutely. >> If the organization isn't willing to take the risks and commit, as you said, Atif last question over for you, where are the customers go to learn more? I know you are at re:Invent your booth 1628, but what do you recommend folks go attendees of the event, as well as just other prospects to go to learn more about what you guys are delivering for companies like Warner Music Group. >> So if you're at re:Invent, please stop by our booth. And one of our Cloud specialists will give you a demo as well. So it's a very quick demo and you'll see, how we are reinventing networking for the Cloud narrow. You can also go to our website and you'll find a lot of information on our website. You can request a demo there as well. So look forward to seeing most of you at our booth and those who are not attending in person, please go visit our website. >> Lisa: Reinventing Networking. I like your play on words. They are Atif very appropriate. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today talking about Alkira, Warner Music Group, what you guys are doing together and how this new early stage technology is really quite transformative. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> For Ralph Munsen and Atif Khan, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Thanks for watching. (soft techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome everyone to this CUBE coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We have a lot going on at this year's re:Invent with over 100 guests on the program, and I'm excited to welcome two of those guests here with me right now. We are joined by Ralph Munsen, the Chief Information Officer at Warner Music Group and Atif Khan, the CTO of Alkira and founder of Alkira as well. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. So glad to be here with you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah. Good old fashioned Zoom is become our best friend in the last 22 months or so I'm losing count. Atif, I'd like to start with you. I know Alkira has been on the key before, but it's been a while and you guys are a relatively young company. Give the audience an overview of Alkira and what it is that you deliver. >> Absolutely, Lisa. So we started back in may of 2018, and the Cloud networking space, multicloud networking. And we came out of stealth mode back in April of 2020, and launched the company. In fact, one of our first events coming out of stealth mode was a Cuban interview back in April of 2020. So here at Telecare, what we are doing is we are building a Cloud platform, which allows customers to build a common network across multiple Clouds with built-in network and security services, with the policy and management layer on top full end to end visibility and governance capabilities. And all of this is delivered as a service and consumed as a service as well. And I'm very glad to be here with Ralph, who is from Warner Music Group and is one of our marquee customers. So I'll let Ralph introduce himself, and tell us a bit more about Alkira and WMTS Cloud journey. >> That sounds great. Ralph, why don't you start by giving the audience? I'm sure everyone knows Warner Music Group, but in case there's anyone out there that might not. Give us a little bit of a background. >> Yeah, so the Warner Music Group has been around since 1950 and 1940 even it had its roots at Hollywood and out of Warner Brothers Pictures, Today, say global company in 79 countries we operated. If the 100 employees and we have two major divisions, we have our era recorded music division, which has the labels people commonly turn to Atlantic records, Warner brothers records, and so forth. And then we have our publishing division, which is more a chapel, which is where our songwriters live. And of course we have some singer songwriters that are on both sides of our business. But now currently people may know our artists. We have ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Cardi B, Blake Shelton and I could go on and on. But exciting, great year, we're having one of our best years ever. And I'm so glad to be here and partnering with an Alkira. >> Excellent. I love all of those artists that you mentioned. Fantastic. So let's talk a little bit now Ralph about the backstory. Talk to me about the IT infrastructure at Warner Music Group, what you had there and some of the challenges that you had that you came to Alkira to solve. >> Yeah, well initially when I took over about five years ago now, we were very much a data center based business with traditional networking and IT functions. Additionally with our foreign affiliates, IT was sort of decentralized in the sense that a lot of the networking and data center components were left to regions. And so while we operated globally, we didn't really operate globally, at Warner among our affiliates. So one of the challenges was how do we get out of the data center? Cloud was new. One of the big things that were coming with big data, which is absolutely right for moving, going straight to the Cloud, especially if you don't have anything on-prem and how do we rationalize all of these different locations and conduct all the M&A work we've been doing? So it was quite a challenge, really. At the end, we wanted to have one view of the network, and now Alkira. I looked at many of companies and I'm curious in the best to provide that to us. So. >> Well, talk to me a little bit more about why Alkira, because as Atif was saying, they're very young. What came out of stealth mode during the pandemic Warner Music Group, being around since the 40s and 50s, the legacy institution, a great brand. What made you take a risk on such an early stage startup? >> Quite frankly, there was nothing in the space (chuckles) at the time you loved, there were companies that had components of it, of what Alkira does, which is basically network orchestration allowing us to use existing components. And nobody has the whole package, especially incorporating security. So, we figured why not take, take a chance? There's no, it won't hurt you no harm. And if anything is successful, it will give us a great ability to manage our network, much more efficiently taking things that took days down to hours and being able to do it much more efficiently with much fewer staff, as opposed to hiring a lot more because when you orchestrate all the components that are underneath, obviously it requires more bodies, more resources. >> Right. That efficiency and cost optimization is key there. Atif I have to ask you, talk to me about, this is only a few years ago, the gap in the market that you and your brothers saw a few years ago, when you founded the company, because as Rob was saying, there was nobody else in the market at the time that could do what you're doing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So Lisa, as you know, myself and Amir, we were also a part of the founding team of Viptela, which was the SD-WAN Company. So back in the day when we did SD-WAN, the requirement was to connect sites together. So if you go back like 5, 10, 5, 7, 10 years ago, networking was done to connect sites together, which could be remote sites, data centers, sites to data centers, all of that together. But fast forward, a few more years with the adoption of Cloud, requirements changed from the networking perspective. So now your network is not just connecting sites together, but most of the traffic now is from sites or users, which could be sitting anywhere. If you look at, what's going on? in the pandemic people are working from all across the globe. They are not just sitting in campuses or sites. So traffic patterns are from sites or users mostly to the Cloud or SaaS applications. So now networks also need to evolve and they need to be built inside the Cloud rather than from outside or connecting into the Cloud. So Cloud access is one capability, but building a network inside the Cloud becomes a requirement. And secondly, now it's not just only about connectivity because security becomes even more important because your security perimeter is changing as well. So securing all these Cloud networks becomes very, very complicated. And now as Ralph can tell you, majority of the enterprises have a multicloud strategy and each Cloud is done differently. So the moment you bring in multiple Clouds, multiple regions across the globe, it becomes so complicated for enterprises to build and manage. They need something, or a platform which makes it easy, gives them one way of doing networking, building a common network across whether you're connecting multiple Clouds or Clouds to your on-prem locations or Clouds to internet or sites to internet. So that's where we saw this gap and we decided to build Alkira to tackle this problem. >> Got it. So Rob, let's talk now about what you've implemented as a team was saying we live in this, in this work from anywhere hybrid multicloud world. Talk to us about Warner, what you implemented and maybe a little bit about your multicloud strategy, if you've got one. >> Ralph: Yeah. So over the last five years, Warner has migrated entirely into Cloud. And to this point before it's multicloud, we're mainly in AWS, but we do have some pleasure and some Google Cloud. And with that, I was telling Atif and Amir. It was interesting and they built a Cloud on site. They totally forgot about the networking aspect. So (laughs), you have ease of use for services and servers inside (indistinct) cloud, but networking is not really present, not to mention when it was built out, it wasn't made to go to competing Clouds. So most companies are facing this problem. How do you treat these environments as a single holistic environment? How do you turn things up, turn things down? How do you secure it, When every single one is different habits, selling unique ways of doing things? So that really was, how we ended up looking for an out Alkira, because I just kept looking at the costs and the profit print grow and grow and grow. And the complexity to a (indistinct) before is growing exponential. One change in one thing would lead to two changes to another. If you add another Cloud or you add another point on the network, you've got exponential growth and complexity, complexity, you have to deal with. So one stop shop. (chuckles) >> One stop shop and reducing that complexity. Talk to me about reducing complexity, and what you're accomplishing there. Especially, in the last year and a half as things have been so dynamic, shall we say? (chuckles) >> Yeah, well, I will say this. It was turnkey for the most part. It took a matter of months as opposed to years, because out of the box, there was a lot of integrations with the major network of players. So as of right now, you can buy firewalls, routing, VPC, things like this, they all exist, but they're not orchestrated together. Right? And then you have policies and security, again not orchestrating a different set of tools. So it really only took us two to three months to get it up and running, I acts, I just had a conversation (chuckles) with them when we were going to finish. So I think we'll be finishing this up completely in January and sometime. So, I was pretty sure. >> LISA: That's fantastic. So really, >> Yeah. >> Sorry Relaph fast time to market there with getting things implemented. Talk to me about from a business outcome perspective, you are CIO, what are some of the outcomes? That this technology is enabling you to deliver back to the business? >> Yeah, it really, the number 1, 2 big ones come to mind. One being able to provide them a secure enterprise. I know when there is the change it's made uniforms for our network without, some of older something's being forgotten about. So that's number one, security is big. You can imagine a company like more ever marquee brands, all brands, any company of marquee brands are targets today. That's number one. Number two is our time to market for eminent. So when we buy a company the time it takes us to get them to be completely part of Warner and therefore start realizing the business case and benefits sort of reasonably bought. Bought the company to begin with. So, we're buying a lot more and we're turning them up and turning those business cases up faster. But usually those cases would say things like six months to a year to integrate with us, and then we can unlock the set of benefits. Now it's more like, two to three months and you start to be able to lock the benefits sooner. And of course, those are different than a case by case basis, but that's. >> Sure, but significantly faster there, you're looking at a two to three X multiplier there, as you talked about. >> Ralph: right. >> Now, you mentioned multicloud Ralph. So here we are at re:Invent. I imagine part of your AWS as part of your Cloud infrastructure and they're a technology partner of ALkira's. >> Ralph: Correct. Yeah. So AWS is actually our biggest Cloud provider of the three, and yeah (laugh) they're their partner without cure. So Good. >> And Atif then you, Alkira's technology partner of AWS, correct? >> Yeas. Alkira is a technology partner of AWS, we are also available on AWS marketplace. So customers can consume, AlKira's platform from AWS marketplace as well. >> But given the fact that so many businesses in every industry are multicloud, I assume that you work with all the Cloud vendors. Atif Yeah? >> Absolutely. So our platform runs inside of the Cloud and runs in AWS is a Cloud as well. And from there it connects to multiple Clouds. So if customers need to connect to Azure or AWS from there or Oracle Cloud or any other Cloud, for that matter, they can connect from our platform and our platform is it scales horizontally. So as customers needs scale, it scales as well. And one of the key advantages is, it's consumed as a service. So there's no software to download or hardware to run for or to acquire for any of the customers. It's a software solution and it's consumed as a service. >> Got it. Ralph one on one more question for you before we wrap things up here, want to get your recommendations for IT Executives, CEOs, who might be in a similar situation to you, whether or not they are with a legacy organization, what are some of your recommendations that you say you need to be looking at a, B and C? >> Yeah, I would primarily say really need to be looking at some of these newer technologies that can help speed up, people, especially in this case to transition to the Cloud and that planning ahead of time, especially goal-setting, I find to be it's any of these places, providers is absolutely Paramount, because you can, if you don't make your own (indistinct) take that step forward and you can end up with shelter. So I make sure that it's very important that when you commit to that, you commit fully, you plan it out and you make sure you actually use it to get the benefits. One of my tech key is software. So. (chuckles) (Lisa Laughing) I'm a bit of it so. >> Well, you've been there and It costs a lot of money and it doesn't do any good. It doesn't move the business forward. And in this day and age, there is a competitor right behind the rear view mirror who might be smaller, more nimble, and more agile, who can take your place easily. >> Absolutely. >> If the organization isn't willing to take the risks and commit, as you said, Atif last question over for you, where are the customers go to learn more? I know you are at re:Invent your booth 1628, but what do you recommend folks go attendees of the event, as well as just other prospects to go to learn more about what you guys are delivering for companies like Warner Music Group. >> So if you're at re:Invent, please stop by our booth. And one of our Cloud specialists will give you a demo as well. So it's a very quick demo and you'll see, how we are reinventing networking for the Cloud narrow. You can also go to our website and you'll find a lot of information on our website. You can request a demo there as well. So look forward to seeing most of you at our booth and those who are not attending in person, please go visit our website. >> Lisa: Reinventing Networking. I like your play on words. They are Atif very appropriate. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today talking about Alkira, Warner Music Group, what you guys are doing together and how this new early stage technology is really quite transformative. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> For Ralph Munsen and Atif Khan, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Thanks for watching. (soft techno music)

>>And welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John ferry hosts of the cube. This segment is about surviving and thriving and with the digital revolution that's happening, the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with guardian life. Nick Volpi CIO of individual markets at guardian life and Kim golly CTO of life. And is at Accenture essentially, obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on, Kevin. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks John. Good to be here. >>So I wonder before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate, the good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can kind of see kind of what's happening because of the pandemic forced everyone to kind of identify what's working. What's not working what the double-down on innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic kind of relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses, Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what guardian lives doing kind of in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >>Yeah. Thanks John. So, you know, the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance traditionally, you know, life insurance, underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person fluids labs, uh, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke that all came to an abrupt halt, right doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, um, adopt the application and adopt our new medical questionnaires and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at, you know, certain limits and certain levels and how we, when we needed fluids. So we, we, we have pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about, uh, you know, 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to, you know, north of 98% across the board. >>Um, in addition, we kind of saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started taking a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing. Like kind of have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, you know, this digitation digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business, right? And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lift and shift. >>Kim, I want to get your perspective at a century I'm, I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months, lots of use cases with a central, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters get called in to like help out cause the cloud actually now isn't an enabler. Um, how do you see the impact of the, of the pandemic around reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >>So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact >>Is, you know, we talk about Nick raised the, you know, such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that? There's been talking on the table for a number of years. Um, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became a very informed, I became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about a prior. Um, but that's, it they'll think about it. I mean, even essentially we, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, uh, that we're easily able to adopt. Uh, but clients that weren't were really left behind. Um, so we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that weren't didn't have as much forethought as the likes of guardian, et cetera. >>Nick, that brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud, or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared people who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or how many active projects were even being full deployments in there did well, what's your take on that? >>Yeah, the, the enablement we had and, and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, and I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud at that point. Um, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their environments, but, you know, guardian had a strategy of getting out of the data center and moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. Um, so we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly, uh, when, when the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that, that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customer's needs. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey and at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >>So let's talk about the connection with, with the sensors, life insurance and annuity platform also known as a, I think the acronym is, uh, what was that? Why was that relevant? What, what was that all about? >>Yeah. So I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. Um, so >>It's essentially, >>I suspect you would write John, like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the, the, the, the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and his product continues to change. And you had regulations like 7,702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1st, 2022, we realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. >>And we just really got to a place where combination of our, our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible and be capable for our customers. Married really well with the, the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the Ayla platform, um, their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. You know, we're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut tests in times niggly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the CA the cloud capability and halo capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform, uh, coming up in live very soon here before. >>Well, I get to, um, a center's perspective. I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that. Nick, if you don't mind the, you basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring has you have you seen? What's your vision? I should say, what's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a playbook you get in the cloud replatform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources. Then you gotta look for innovation where you can start changing. What, how you do things to refactor the business model. >>Yeah. So I think that, you know, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability, right? So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities, right? Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives, what this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single rapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALA behind the scenes, you don't have that. You know, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a, uh, a trailer to it, right? And that's what we were doing today. Our digital front ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe backends by introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive, you know, trailer to it. Um, so it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front end innovation that we've been working on for, you know, two or three years prior. >>I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way, right? You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Um, can you talk about how you guys look at that Nick and terminally? Because a lot of CEO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >>Yeah. And I think that's, that's our exact, that's our exact path forward, right? We don't, we don't feel like we need to boil the ocean. Right. We're going after the surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers, right? So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there that are, you know, full, completely closed. They're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALA capability to the next generation of products. The next generation of customer needs understanding data, data capture is very important. And right. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured, what these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. Right. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can turn it faster. >>You have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way on the traditional systems. You're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern on these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALA coupled with em, with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >>Okay. I'm okay. CTO of a live as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have, this is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old, right? But in a way in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, the, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And I think, you know, this is, I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster and your customers don't have to build all that lower level abstractions. If you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Cause this is a real great use case. >>Yeah, it is. You know, our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel and with cloud and native services as AWS and, uh, provide w we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bets, we can get a great service. That's fully managed that has, uh, security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem. I'm focusing on that. And we will work together, uh, in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code, low code. You know, it's strange a modern system, like a lip has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. >>So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients that would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, but that's the ultimate goal. So alien, the no code, no code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is the cloud moving in calculating native services, using the built-in security that comes with all that, um, and extending the function and then being able to tap into, you know, the InsureTech FinTech internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay. Uh, it's, it's very strong part of the exercise, so you can have the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. >>You know, all programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. You know, there's one really small, simple example I can use. Um, I'd say guardian is one of our industries, market leaders, when, and when they approach the security, they really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very, um, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, you know, because we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business. So, and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is the product. Definitely. I think it is, uh, everything Nick said you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success. >>Yeah. Great, great call out there, Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get into the customer side of it. This enablement platform is kind of the new platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting because you have to take this kind of low code, no code capability, and you still got to code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast, um, platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction. >>Yeah. So I think, you know, I'll, I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALA, right? And here's the beauty of it. So we have something called launchpad where we're able to quickly stand up in AIDAP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful 85% or more of all the work we've done with Inala is configuration versus code. And I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. Um, so if our developers and even our, our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development buyer and start to play with, um, actuarial calculations, new product features and function, and then spin that to a more higher end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has the flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments. Whereas in days past you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And, you know, I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination available in AWS has really a new capability to guardian that we're really excited about. >>I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their, their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >>Yes. I'll, I'll give you real dates. Right? So we engage really engaged with Accenture on the ALA program. Right before Thanksgiving of last year, we had our environment stood up and running all of our vitamins dev set UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS. And we are about to launch our first product configuration into the, of the platform come November. So within a year we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the Ayla platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >>It's amazing. You know, that's just great example to me, uh, where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is kinda plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now on the customer side, you mentioned, um, you guys love, uh, providing value to the customers. What is the impact of the customer? Okay, now you're a customer guardian life's customer. What's the impact of them. Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >>Yeah, so, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream, right? Whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ad-lib, um, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new backend policy admin systems has really brought us to a new, a new level. Um, whether it be repricing, product innovation, um, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer may need. You know, we're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back end policy admin, going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new, more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with, with, >>Okay, final question. What's next for guardian life's journey year with Accenture. What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's what's on your mind? What's next? >>Uh, so that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Excentra, at least I've had it in my head. Um, we, we want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability or life insurance, and our newest, um, four systems that are kind of weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these, for new business capability, um, by end of 2024. And that's, you know, I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner, and then we begin to migrate the, the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then, you know, complete the product. >>But along the way, you know, given regulation, given new, uh, customer customer needs, you know, meeting the needs of the customers changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks, right? So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well, by the third quarter, fourth quarter of next year, that would be a success. As far as that. >>Awesome. You guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen kind of where the modernization trend is today and kind of where it's going. It's the Nick. Appreciate it, Kim. Thanks for coming out with a censure Nixon. It's an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. Um, this is, I got you here. You know, you guys are doing a lot of great work for other CEOs out there that are going through this right now, whether whatever they are on the spectrum missed the cloud way of getting in. Now this notion of refactoring and then replatforming, and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there, out there, or the CEOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >>Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CEOs, we go for the white hot core first, right? We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business should be fall over. Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? Right? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker, portals, um, beneficiary portals, uh, simple, you know, AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native new builds. Right? So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud. Like why, when you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful the conversation and move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business. Should it be >>What's the other expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever metaphor you. That's what you're essentially saying. There, get, get some, get some, get your sea legs, get, get practice >>Exactly. Then go for the hard stuff, right? >>It's such a valid point. John is, you know, we see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and, and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and you know, it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first from a weakest link until it's, the journey is complete, you're never going to maximize. So it was a, it was a very, uh, different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff. And then, >>Yeah. Well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that the talk about the impact of the personnel, Kim and Nick, because you know, there's a morale issue going on too. There's a, there's a, there's a training. I won't say training, but there's not re-skilling, but there's the rigor. If you're refactoring, you are, re-skilling, you're doing new things, the impact on morale and confidence. If you're not, you get the white, you don't wanna be in the white core unconfident. >>Maybe I should get first. Cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, but yeah. Um, what we see with a lot of insurance companies, uh, they grow through acquisition. Okay. They're very large companies grown over time, uh, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a ten-year staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, uh, those staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today, and they're not so, uh, fair with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through >>The final word here. Go for it. >>Yeah. John, I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention. We see here at guardian. I have a 50 year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto a lip and is one of the most essential. And I've actually had Accenture tell me if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new. I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of guardian, the kind of backing guardians putting behind this, right? We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50 year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves, and is now a key part of this implementation, >>Hey, who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in, right? I mean Barston magnet trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on. Great insight, Kim, great stuff for the century as always a great story here, right? At the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now, we're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model with powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story. Appreciate it. Thanks John. Appreciate it. Okay. So cube coverage of 80 of us executive summit at re-invent 2021. I'm John furrier, your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. This segment is about surviving and thriving with the digital revolution that's happening in the digital transformation that's turning into and changing businesses. We've got two great guests here with Guardian Life, Nick Volpe, CIO of Individual Markets at Guardian Life and Kim Gully, CTO of Life and Annuities at Accenture. Accenture obviously doing a lot of cutting-edge work, Guardian changing the game. Nick, thanks for coming on. Kim, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John, good to be here. >> So, well, before I get into the question, I want to just set the table a little bit. The pandemic has given everyone a mandate. The good projects are exposed. The bad projects are exposed. Everyone can see what's happening because the pandemic forced everyone to identify what's working, what's not working, what the double-down on. Innovation for customers is a big focus, but now with the pandemic relieving and coming out of it, the world's changed. This is an opportunity for businesses. Nick, this is something that you guys are focused on. Can you take us through what Guardian Life's doing in this post pandemic changeover as cloud goes next level? >> Yeah, thanks John. So the immediate need in the pandemic situation was about the new business capability. So those familiar with insurance, traditionally life insurance underwriting, disability underwriting is very in-person, fluids, labs, attending physician statements. And when March of 2020 broke, that all came to an abrupt halt. Doctor's office were either closed. Testing centers were either closed or inundated with COVID testing. So we had to come up with some creative ways to digitize our new business, adopt the application, and adopt our medical questionnaires, and also get creative on some of our underwriting standards that put us at certain limits and certain levels and when we needed the fluids. So we are pretty quickly, we're agile about decisions there. And we moved from about 40 to 50% adoption rate of our electronic applications to the north of 98% across the board. In addition, we saw some opportunities for products and more capabilities beyond new business. So after we weathered the storm, we started to take a step back. And like you said, look at what we were doing, that have a start, stop, continue conversation internally to say, this digitization is a new norm. How do we meet it from every angle, not just a new business. And that's where we started to look at our policy administration systems, moving more to the cloud and leveraging the cloud to its fullest extent versus just a lifted shift. >> Kim, I want to get your perspective at Accenture. I've done a lot of interviews with the past, I think 18 months. A lot of use cases with Accenture, almost in every vertical where you guys are almost like the firefighters, get called in to like help out 'cause the cloud actually now is an enabler. How do you see the impact of the pandemic reverbing through? I mean, obviously you guys come to the table, you guys bring in, I mean, what's your perspective on this? >> So, yeah, it's really interesting. I think the most interesting fact is we talk about, Nick raise such a strong area in our business of underwriting and how can we expedite that, is being talked on the table for a number of years, but the industry has been very slow or reluctant to embrace. And the pandemic became an enforcer in it to be honest. And a lot of the companies were thinking about it prior, but that's it, they'll think about it. I mean, even Accenture, we launched a huge three-year investment to get clients into cloud and digital transformation, but the pandemic just expedited everything. Now the upside is clients that were in a well-advanced stage of planning, they were easily able to adopt, but clients that weren't, were really left behind. So we became very, very busy just supporting the clients that didn't have as much forethought as likes of Guardian, et cetera. >> Nick, it brings up a good point. I want to get your reaction to see if you agree. I mean, people who didn't put their toe in the cloud or just jump in the deep end, really got flat-footed when the pandemic hit, because they weren't prepared. People who were either ingratiated in with the cloud or having active projects or even being full deployments in there did well. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, the enablement we had and the gift we were given by starting our cloud journey, in I want to say 2016, 17 was we really started moving to the cloud. And I think we were the only insurer that moved production load to the cloud. At that point, most of insurers were putting their development environments, maybe even their SIT environments, but Guardian had the strategy of getting out of the data center or moving to a much more flexible, scalable environment architecture using the AWS cloud. So we completed our journey into the cloud by 2018, 19, and we were at the point of really capitalizing versus moving. So we were able to move very quickly, very nimbly. When the pandemic hit or in any digital situation, we have that flexibility and capacity that AWS provides us to really respond to our customers, our customers need. So we were one of the more fortunate insurers that were well into our cloud journey. And at the point of optimization versus the point of moving. >> Let's talk about the connection with Accenture's life insurance and annuity platform also known ALIP, I think the acronym is. What was that? Why was that relevant? What was that all about? >> Yeah, so I'll go first and then Kim, you can jump in and see if you agree with me. >> He essentially help that, love it. (laughs) >> Yeah, you would suspect you would, right John? >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Like I said, our new business focus was the original, like the emergency situation when the pandemic hit. But as we went further into it and realized the mortality and morbidity and the needs and wants of our customers, which is a major focus of Guardian, really being, having the client at the center of every conversation we have, we realized that there was a real opportunity for product and it's product continues to change and you had regulations like 7702 coming out where you had to reprice the entire portfolio to be able to sell it by January 1, 2022. We realized our current systems are for policy admin. We're not matching our digital capabilities that we had moved to the cloud. So we embarked on a very extensive RFP to Accenture and a few other vendors that would come to the table and work with us. And we just really got to a place where combination of our desire to be on the cloud, be flexible, and be capable for our customers, married really well with the knowledge, the industry knowledge and the capabilities that Accenture brought to the table with the ALIP platform. Their book of business, their current infrastructure, their configuration versus development, really all aligned with our need for flexible, fast time to market. We're looking to cut development times significantly. We're looking to cut test in times significantly. And as of right now, it's all proving true between the cloud capability and the ALIP capability. We are reaping the benefits of having this new platform coming up in live very soon here. >> Before I get to Accenture's perspective, I want to just ask you a quick follow-up on that, Nick, if you don't mind. You basically talk us through, okay, I can see what's happening here. You get with Accenture, take advantage of what they got going on. You get into the cloud, you start getting the efficiencies, get the cultural change. What refactoring have you seen? What's your vision, I should say. What's your vision around what's next? Because clearly there's a playbook. You get in the cloud, re-platform, you get the cultural fit, you understand the personnel issues, how to tap the resources, then you've got to look for innovation where you can start changing, how you do things to refactor the business model. >> Yeah, so I think that, specifically to this conversation, that's around the product capability. So for all too long, the insurance companies have had three specific sleeves of insurance products. We've had individual life. We have an individual disability and we'd have individual annuities. Each of them serving a specific purpose in the customer's lives. What this platform and this cloud platform allows us to do is start to think about, can we create the concept of a single wrapper? Can we bring some of these products together? Can we centralize the buying process? And with ALIP behind the scenes, you don't have that, I kind of equate it to building a Ferrari and attaching a trailer to it, and that's what we were doing today. Our digital front-ends, our new business capabilities are all being anchored down or slowed down by our traditional mainframe back-ends. By introducing Accenture on the cloud in AWS, we now have our Ferrari fully free to run as fast as it can versus anchoring this massive trailer to it. So it really was a matter of bringing our product innovation to our digital front-end innovation that we've been working on for two or three years prior. >> I mean, this is the kind of the Amazon way. You decouple things, you decompose, you don't want to have a drag. And with containers, we're seeing companies look at existing legacy in a way that's different. Could you talk about how you guys look at that Nick internally because a lot of CIO's are saying, Hey, you know what? I can have the best of both worlds. I don't have to kill the old to bring in the new, but I can certainly modernize everything. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah. And I think that's our exact path forward. We don't feel like we need to blow the ocean. We're going after this surgically for the things that we think are going to be most impactful to our customers. So legacy blocks of business that are sitting out there, that are for completely closed, they're not our concern. It's really hitching this new ALIP capability to the next generation of products, the next generation of customer needs, understanding data. Data capture is very important. So if you look at the mainframes and what we're living on now, it's all about the owner of the policy. You lose connection with the beneficiary or the insured. What these new platforms allowed us to do is really understand the household around the products that they're buying. I know it sounds simple, but that data architecture, that data infrastructure on these newer platforms and in the cloud, you can churn it faster, you have scale to do more analysis, but you're also able to capture in a much cleaner way. On the traditional systems, you're talking about what we call intimately the blob on the mainframe that has your name, your first name, your last name, your address, all in one free form field sitting in some database. It's very hard to discern. On these new platforms, given our need and our desire to be deeper into the client's lives, understanding their needs, ALIP coupled with AWS, with our new business capabilities on the front-end really puts together that true customer value chain. That's going to differentiate us. >> Kim, okay, CTO of ALIP as he calls it, the acronym for the service you have. This is a great example. I hate to use the word on-ramp cause that sounds so old. But in a way, in vertical markets, you're seeing the power of the cloud because the data and the AI could be freed up and you can take advantage of all the heavy lifting by providing some platform or some support with Amazon, your expertise. This is a great use case of that, I think. And this is I think a future trend where the developments can be faster, that value can be faster, and your customers don't have to build all the lower level abstractions, if you will. Can you describe the essential relationship to your customers as you guys? Because this is a real great use case. >> Yeah, it is. Our philosophy is simple. Let's not reinvent the wheel. And with cloud and native services that AWS provide, we want to focus on the business of what the system needs to do and not all the little side bits. We can get a great service that's fully managed, that has security patches updates. We want to focus on the real deal. Like Nick wants to focus on the business and not so much what's underneath it. That's my problem, I'm focusing on that. And we will work together in a nice little gel. You've had the relatively new term, no code/low code. It's strange. A modern system like ALIP has been that way for a number of years. Basically it means, I don't want to make code changes. I just want to be able to configure it. So now more people can have access to make change, and we can even get it to the point where it's the people that are sitting there, dealing with the clients. That would be the ultimate, where they can innovate and come up with ideas and try things because we've got it so simple. We're not there yet, let's be realistic, but that's the ultimate goal. So ALIP, the no code/low code has been around for quite some time. And maybe we should take advantage of that, but I think we're missing one thing. So as good as the platform is, the cloud moving in, calculating native services using the built-in security that comes with all that and extending the function and then be able to tap into the InsurTech, FinTech, internet of things, and quickly adapt. I think the partnership is big. Okay, it's very strong part of the exercise. So you can add the product, but without the people that work well together, I think it's also a big challenge. All programs have their idiosyncrasies and there's a lot of challenges along the way. There's one really small simple example I can use. I'd say Guardian is one of our industries market leaders when they approach the security. They really do lead the way out there. They're very strict, very responsible, which is such a pleasure to say, but at the end of the day, you still need to run a business. So, 'cause we're a partnership because we all have the same challenges, we want to get to success. We were able to work together quite quickly. We planned out the right approach that maximize the security, but it also progressed the business and we applied that into the overall program. So I think it is a product definitely. I think it is everything Nick said, you actually elaborated on, but I'd like to point out, there's a big part of the partnership to make it a success as well. >> Yeah, great, great call out there. Nick, let's get your reaction on that because I want to get it to the customer side of it. This enablement platform is the new, I mean, platform has been around for awhile, but the notion of buying tools and having platforms are now interesting 'cause you have to take this low code/no code capability. I mean, you still got a code. I mean, there's some coding going on, but what it means is ease of use composing and being fast. Platforms are super important. That requires real architecture and partnership. What's your reaction? >> Yeah, so I think I'll tie it all together between AWS and ALIP, and here's the beauty of it. So we have something called LaunchPad where we're able to quickly stand up in ALIP instance for development capabilities because of our Amazon relationship. And then to Kim's point, we have been successful with 85% or more, of all the work we've done with an ALIP is configuration versus code and I'd actually I'd venture to say 90%. So that's extremely powerful when you think about the speed to market and our need to be product innovative. So if our developers and even our analysts that sit on the business side could come in and quickly stand up a development environment, start to play with actuarial calculations, new product features and function and then spin that to a more higher-end development environment. You now have the perfect coupling of a new policy administration system that has a flexibility and configuration with a cloud provider like Amazon and AWS that allows us to move quickly with environments, whereas in days past, you'd have to have an architecture team come in and stand up the servers. And I'm going way back, but like buy the boxes, put the boxes in place and wire them down. This combination of ALIP and AWS has really brought a new capability to Guardian and we're really excited about. >> I love that little comparison. Let me just quickly ask you, compared to the old way, give us an order of magnitude of pain and timing involved versus what you just described as standing up something very quickly and getting value and having people shift their intellectual capital into value activities versus undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> Yes, I'll give you real dates. So we really engaged with Accenture on the ALIP program right before Thanksgiving of last year. We had our environment stood up and running, all of our DEV, SIT, UAT up by February, March timeframe on AWS and we are about to launch our first product configuration into the ALIP platform coming November. So within a year, we've taken arguably decades of product innovation from our mainframes and built it onto the ALIP platform on the Amazon cloud. So I don't know that you can do that in any other type of environment or partnership. >> That's amazing. That's just great example to me where cloud scale and real refactoring and business agility is plays out. So congratulations. I got to ask you now, on the customer side you mentioned, you guys love providing value to the customers. What is the impact to the customer? Okay, now you're a customer, Guardian Life's customer. What's the impact to them? Can you share how you see that rendering itself in the marketplace? >> Yeah, so clearly AWS has rendered tons of value to the customer across the value stream whether it be our new business capability, our underwriting capability, our ability to process data and use their scale. I mean, it just goes on and on about the AWS, but specifically around ALIP, the new API environment that we have, the connectivity that we can now make with the new back-end policy admin systems has really brought us to a new level, whether it be repricing, product innovation, responding to claims capabilities, responding to servicing capabilities that the customer might need. We're able to introduce more self-service. So if you think about it from the back-end policy admin going forward to our client portal, we're able to expose more transactions to self-serve. So minimize calls to the call center, minimize frustration of hold times and allow them to come onto the portal and do more and interact more with their policies because we're on this new, more modern cloud environment and a new more modern policy admin. So we're delivering new capabilities to the customer from beginning to end being on the cloud with ALIP. >> Okay, final question. What's next for Guardian Life's journey year with Accenture? What's your plans? What do you want to knock down for the next year? What's on your mind? What's next? >> So that's an easy question. We've had this roadmap plan since we first started talking to Accenture, at least I've had it in my head. We want off all of our policy admin systems for new business come end of 2025. So we've got about four policy admin systems maintaining our different lines of business, our individual disability, our life insurance, and our annuities, for systems that are weighing us down a little bit. We have a glide path and a roadmap with Accenture as a partner to get off of all of these for new business capability by end of 2024. And I'm being gracious to my teams when I say that I'd like to go a little bit sooner. And then we begin to migrate the most important blocks of business that caused the most angst and most concerned with the executive leadership team and then complete the product. But along the way, given regulation, given new customer needs, meeting the needs of the customer's changing life, we're going to have parallel tracks. So I envision we continue to have this flywheel turning of moving, but then we begin another flywheel right next to it that says we're going to innovate now on the new platform as well. So ultimately John, next year, if I could have my entire whole life block, as it stands today on the new admin platform, and one or two new product innovations on the platform as well by the 3rd quarter, 4th quarter of next year, that would be a success as far as I'm concerned. >> Awesome, you guys had all planned out. I love, and I have such a passion for how technology powers business. And this is such a great story for next gen where the modernization trend is today and where it's going. So Nick appreciate it. Kim, thanks for coming out with Accenture. Nick, so just an easy question for you. I have to ask you another one. This is I got you here. You guys are doing a lot of great work. For other CIOs out there that are going through this right now, whatever they are on the spectrum, missed the CloudWave, getting in now, this notion of refactoring and then re-platforming and then refactoring business is a playbook we're seeing emerge. People can get the benefits of going to the cloud, certainly for efficiency, but now it opens up the aperture for different kinds of business models. With more data access, with machine learning. This refactoring seems to be the new hot thing where the best minds are saying, wow, we could do more, even more. What's your vision? How would you share those folks out there of the CIOs? What should they be thinking? What's their approach? What advice would you give? >> Yeah, so a lot of the mistakes we make as CIOs, we go for the white hot core first. We went the other way. We went for the newer digital assets. We went for the stuff that wasn't as concerning to the business. Should we fall over? Should there be an outage? Should there be anything? So if you avoid the white hot core, improve it with your peripherals, easier moves to the cloud portals, broker portals, beneficiary portals, simple AIX frames, moving to the cloud and making them cloud native, new builds. So we started with all those peripheral pieces of the architecture and we avoided the white hot core because that's where you start to get those very difficult conversations about, I don't know if I'm ready to move. And I don't see the obvious benefit of moving a dividend generating policy admin system to the cloud, like why? When you prove it in the pudding and you put the other things out there and prove you can be successful, the conversation to move your core and your white hot core out to the platform out to leverage the cloud and to leverage new admin platforms, it becomes a much easier conversation because you've kind of cut your teeth on something much less detrimental to the business should it go alright. >> What's the old expression, put water through the pipes, get some reps in and get the team ready to bring training, whatever your metaphor you use, that's what you're essentially saying there. Get some, your sea legs, get practice. >> Exactly. >> Then go for the hard stuff. >> It's such a valid point, John. We see a lot of different approaches across a lot of different companies and the biggest challenges, the core is the biggest part. And if you start with that, it can be the scariest part. And I've seen companies trip up big time and it becomes such a bubble spend, which really knocks you on for years, lose confidence in your strategy and everything else. And you're only as strong as your weakest link. So whether you do the outside first or the inside first, from a weakest link until the journey is complete, you never going to maximize. So it was a very different and new and great approach that they took by doing a learning curve around the easiest stuff and then hit in the core. >> Yeah, well, that's a great point. One quick, quick followup on that is that, talk about the impact to the personnel, Kim and Nick, because there's a morale issue going on too. There's a training. I won't say training, but there's a not re-skilling, but there's the rigor, if you're refactoring, you are re-skilling, you're doing new things. The impact of morale and confidence you get certainly. you don't want to be in the white core unconfident. >> Maybe I should get first 'cause it's Nick's stuff. So he probably might want to say a lot, yeah. What we see with a lot of insurance companies, they grow through acquisition. Okay, they're very large companies, grown over time, buying companies with businesses and systems and bringing it in. They usually bring a tenure staff. So getting the staff to the next generation, that staff is extremely important because they know everything that you've got today and then not so aware with what's coming up in the future. And there is a transition and people shouldn't feel threatened, but there is change and people do need to adopt and evolve and it should be fun and interesting, but it is a challenge at that turnover point on who controlling what, and then you get the concerns and get paranoid. So it is a true HR issue that you need to manage through. >> Nick you're the final word here. Go for it. >> Yeah, John. I'll give you a story that I think will sum the whole thing up about the excitement versus contention we see here at Guardian. I have a 50-year veteran on my legacy platform team and this person is so excited, got themselves certified in Amazon and is now leading the charge to bring our mainframes onto ALIP and is one of the most essential, and I've actually had Accenture tell me, if I had a person like this on every one of my engagements who is not only knowledgeable of the legacy, but is so excited to move to the new, I don't think I'd have a failed implementation. So that's the kind of Guardian, the kind of backing Guardian's putting behind this. We are absolutely focusing on rescaling. We are not going to the market. We're giving everyone the opportunity and we have an amazing take-up rate. And again, like I said, 50-year veteran who probably could have retired 10 years ago is so excited, reeducated themselves and is now a key part of this implementation. >> And who wouldn't want to drive a Ferrari when you see it come in. I mean, back in the trailer. Great story, Nick. Thank you for coming on, great insight. Kim, great stuff for the Accenture, as always a great story here. We're here at the heart of the real focus where all companies are feeling right now. We're surviving and thriving and coming out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and a business model powered by technology. So thanks for sharing the story, appreciate it. >> Thanks John, appreciate it. >> Okay, it's CUBE coverage of AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to AWS storage day. This is the Cubes continuous coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and we're going to talk about file storage. 80% of the world's data is in unstructured storage. And most of that is in file format. Devs want infrastructure as code. They want to be able to provision and manage storage through an API, and they want that cloud agility. They want to be able to scale up, scale down, pay by the drink. And the big news of storage day was really the partnership, deep partnership between AWS and NetApp. And with me to talk about that as Ed Naim, who's the general manager of Amazon FSX and Anthony Lye, executive vice president and GM of public cloud at NetApp. Two Cube alums. Great to see you guys again. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> So Ed, let me start with you. You launched FSX 2018 at re-invent. How has it being used today? >> Well, we've talked about MSX on the Cube before Dave, but let me start by recapping that FSX makes it easy to, to launch and run fully managed feature rich high performance file storage in the cloud. And we built MSX from the ground up really to have the reliability, the scalability you were talking about. The simplicity to support, a really wide range of workloads and applications. And with FSX customers choose the file system that powers their file storage with full access to the file systems feature sets, the performance profiles and the data management capabilities. And so since reinvent 2018, when we launched this service, we've offered two file system choices for customers. So the first was a Windows file server, and that's really storage built on top of Windows server designed as a really simple solution for Windows applications that require shared storage. And then Lustre, which is an open source file system that's the world's most popular high-performance file system. And the Amazon FSX model has really resonated strongly with customers for a few reasons. So first, for customers who currently managed network attached storage or NAS on premises, it's such an easy path to move their applications and their application data to the cloud. FSX works and feels like the NAZA appliances that they're used to, but added to all of that are the benefits of a fully managed cloud service. And second, for builders developing modern new apps, it helps them deliver fast, consistent experiences for Windows and Linux in a simple and an agile way. And then third, for research scientists, its storage performance and its capabilities for dealing with data at scale really make it a no-brainer storage solution. And so as a result, the service is being used for a pretty wide spectrum of applications and workloads across industries. So I'll give you a couple of examples. So there's this class of what we call common enterprise IT use cases. So think of things like end user file shares the corporate IT applications, content management systems, highly available database deployments. And then there's a variety of common line of business and vertical workloads that are running on FSX as well. So financial services, there's a lot of modeling and analytics, workloads, life sciences, a lot of genomics analysis, media and entertainment rendering and transcoding and visual effects, automotive. We have a lot of electronic control units, simulations, and object detection, semiconductor, a lot of EDA, electronic design automation. And then oil and gas, seismic data processing, pretty common workload in FSX. And then there's a class of, of really ultra high performance workloads that are running on FSX as well. Think of things like big data analytics. So SAS grid is a, is a common application. A lot of machine learning model training, and then a lot of what people would consider traditional or classic high performance computing or HPC. >> Great. Thank you for that. Just quick follow-up if I may, and I want to bring Anthony into the conversation. So why NetApp? This is not a Barney deal, this was not elbow grease going into a Barney deal. You know, I love you. You love me. We do a press release. But, but why NetApp? Why ONTAP? Why now? (momentary silence) Ed, that was to you. >> Was that a question for Anthony? >> No, for you Ed. And then I want to bring Anthony in. >> Oh, Sure. Sorry. Okay. Sure. Yeah, I mean it, uh, Dave, it really stemmed from both companies realizing a combined offering would be highly valuable to and impactful for customers. In reality, we started collaborating in Amazon and NetApp on the service probably about two years ago. And we really had a joint vision that we wanted to provide AWS customers with the full power of ONTAP. The complete ONTAP with every capability and with ONTAP's full performance, but fully managed an offer as a full-blown AWS native service. So what that would mean is that customers get all of ONTAP's benefits along with the simplicity and the agility, the scalability, the security, and the reliability of an AWS service. >> Great. Thank you. So Anthony, I have watched NetApp reinvent itself started in workstations, saw you go into the enterprise, I saw you lean into virtualization, you told me at least two years, it might've been three years ago, Dave, we are going all in on the cloud. We're going to lead this next, next chapter. And so, I want you to bring in your perspective. You're re-inventing NetApp yet again, you know, what are your thoughts? >> Well, you know, NetApp and AWS have had a very long relationship. I think it probably dates now about nine years. And what we really wanted to do in NetApp was give the most important constituent of all an experience that helped them progress their business. So ONTAP, you know, the industry's leading shared storage platform, we wanted to make sure that in AWS, it was as good as it was on premise. We love the idea of giving customers this wonderful concept of symmetry. You know, ONTAP runs the biggest applications in the largest enterprises on the planet. And we wanted to give not just those customers an opportunity to embrace the Amazon cloud, but we wanted to also extend the capabilities of ONTAP through FSX to a new customer audience. Maybe those smaller companies that didn't really purchase on premise infrastructure, people that were born in the cloud. And of course, this gives us a great opportunity to present a fully managed ONTAP within the FSX platform, to a lot of non NetApp customers, to our competitors customers, Dave, that frankly, haven't done the same as we've done. And I think we are the benefactors of it, and we're in turn passing that innovation, that, that transformation onto the, to the customers and the partners. >> You know, one is the, the key aspect here is that it's a managed service. I don't think that could be, you know, overstated. And the other is that the cloud nativeness of this Anthony, you mentioned here, our marketplace is great, but this is some serious engineering going on here. So Ed maybe, maybe start with the perspective of a managed service. I mean, what does that mean? The whole ball of wax? >> Yeah. I mean, what it means to a customer is they go into the AWS console or they go to the AWS SDK or the, the AWS CLI and they are easily able to provision a resource provision, a file system, and it automatically will get built for them. And if there's nothing that they need to do at that point, they get an endpoint that they have access to the file system from and that's it. We handle patching, we handle all of the provisioning, we handle any hardware replacements that might need to happen along the way. Everything is fully managed. So the customer really can focus not on managing their file system, but on doing all of the other things that they, that they want to do and that they need to do. >> So. So Anthony, in a way you're disrupting yourself, which is kind of what you told me a couple of years ago. You're not afraid to do that because if we don't do it, somebody else is going to do it because you're, you're used to the old days, you're selling a box and you say, we'll see you next time, you know, three or four years. So from, from your customer's standpoint, what's their reaction to this notion of a managed service and what does it mean to NetApp? >> Well, so I think the most important thing it does is it gives them investment protection. The wonderful thing about what we've built with Amazon in the FSX profile is it's a complete ONTAP. And so one ONTAP cluster on premise can immediately see and connect to an ONTAP environment under FSX. We can then establish various different connectivities. We can use snap mirror technologies for disaster recovery. We can use efficient data transfer for things like dev test and backup. Of course, the wonderful thing that we've done, that we've gone beyond, above and beyond, what anybody else has done is we want to make sure that the actual primary application itself, one that was sort of built using NAS built in an on-premise environment an SAP and Oracle, et cetera, as Ed said, that we can move those over and have the confidence to run the application with no changes on an Amazon environment. So, so what we've really done, I think for customers, the NetApp customers, the non NetApp customers, is we've given them an enterprise grade shared storage platform that's as good in an Amazon cloud as it was in an on-premise data center. And that's something that's very unique to us. >> Can we talk a little bit more about those, those use cases? You know, both, both of you. What are you seeing as some of the more interesting ones that you can share? Ed, maybe you can start. >> Yeah, happy to. The customer discussions that we've, we've been in have really highlighted four cases, four use cases the customers are telling us they'll use a service for. So maybe I'll cover two and maybe Anthony can cover the other two. So, the first is application migrations. And customers are increasingly looking to move their applications to AWS. And a lot of those are applications work with file storage today. And so we're talking about applications like SAP. We're talking about relational databases like SQL server and Oracle. We're talking about vertical applications like Epic and the healthcare space. As another example, lots of media entertainment, rendering, and transcoding, and visual effects workload. workflows require Windows, Linux, and Mac iOS access to the same set of data. And what application administrators really want is they want the easy button. They want fully featured file storage that has the same capabilities, the same performance that their applications are used to. Has extremely high availability and durability, and it can easily enable them to meet compliance and security needs with a robust set of data protection and security capabilities. And I'll give you an example, Accenture, for example, has told us that a key obstacle their clients face when migrating to the cloud is potentially re-architecting their applications to adopt new technologies. And they expect that Amazon FSX for NetApp ONTAP will significantly accelerate their customers migrations to the cloud. Then a second one is storage migrations. So storage admins are increasingly looking to extend their on-premise storage to the cloud. And why they want to do that is they want to be more agile and they want to be responsive to growing data sets and growing workload needs. They want to last to capacity. They want the ability to spin up and spin down. They want easy disaster recovery across geographically isolated regions. They want the ability to change performance levels at any time. So all of this goodness that they get from the cloud is what they want. And more and more of them also are looking to make their company's data accessible to cloud services for analytics and processing. So services like ECS and EKS and workspaces and App Stream and VMware cloud and SageMaker and orchestration services like parallel cluster and AWS batch. But at the same time, they want all these cloud benefits, but at the same time, they have established data management workflows, and they build processes and they've built automation, leveraging APIs and capabilities of on-prem NAS appliances. It's really tough for them to just start from scratch with that stuff. So this offering provides them the best of both worlds. They get the benefits of the cloud with the NAS data management capabilities that they're used to. >> Right. >> Ed: So Anthony, maybe, do you want to talk about the other two? >> Well, so, you know, first and foremost, you heard from Ed earlier on the, the, the FSX sort of construct and how successful it's been. And one of the real reasons it's been so successful is, it takes advantage of all of the latest storage technologies, compute technologies, networking technologies. What's great is all of that's hidden from the user. What FSX does is it delivers a service. And what that means for an ONTAP customer is you're going to have ONTAP with an SLA and an SLM. You're going to have hundreds of thousands of IOPS available to you and sub-millisecond latencies. What's also really important is the design for FSX and app ONTAP was really to provide consistency on the NetApp API and to provide full access to ONTAP from the Amazon console, the Amazon SDK, or the Amazon CLI. So in this case, you've got this wonderful benefit of all of the, sort of the 29 years of innovation of NetApp combined with all the innovation AWS, all presented consistently to a customer. What Ed said, which I'm particularly excited about, is customers will see this just as they see any other AWS service. So if they want to use ONTAP in combination with some incremental compute resources, maybe with their own encryption keys, maybe with directory services, they may want to use it with other services like SageMaker. All of those things are immediately exposed to Amazon FSX for the app ONTAP. We do some really intelligent things just in the storage layer. So, for example, we do intelligent tiering. So the customer is constantly getting the, sort of the best TCO. So what that means is we're using Amazon's S3 storage as a tiered service, so that we can back off code data off of the primary file system to give the customer the optimal capacity, the optimal throughput, while maintaining the integrity of the file system. It's the same with backup. It's the same with disaster recovery, whether we're operating in a hybrid AWS cloud, or we're operating in an AWS region or across regions. >> Well, thank you. I think this, this announcement is a big deal for a number of reasons. First of all, it's the largest market. Like you said, you're the gold standard. I'll give you that, Anthony, because you guys earned it. And so it's a large market, but you always had to make previously, you have to make trade-offs. Either I could do file in the cloud, but I didn't get the rich functionality that, you know, NetApp's mature stack brings, or, you know, you could have wrapped your stack in Kubernete's container and thrown it into the cloud and hosted it there. But now that it's a managed service and presumably you're underneath, you're taking advantage. As I say, my inference is there's some serious engineering going on here. You're taking advantage of some of the cloud native capabilities. Yeah, maybe it's the different, you know, ECE two types, but also being able to bring in, we're, we're entering a new data era with machine intelligence and other capabilities that we really didn't have access to last decade. So I want to, I want to close with, you know, give you guys the last word. Maybe each of you could give me your thoughts on how you see this partnership of, for the, in the future. Particularly from a customer standpoint. Ed, maybe you could start. And then Anthony, you can bring us home. >> Yeah, well, Anthony and I and our teams have gotten to know each other really well in, in ideating around what this experience will be and then building the product. And, and we have this, this common vision that it is something that's going to really move the needle for customers. Providing the full ONTAP experience with the power of a, of a native AWS service. So we're really excited. We're, we're in this for the long haul together. We have, we've partnered on everything from engineering, to product management, to support. Like the, the full thing. This is a co-owned effort, a joint effort backed by both companies. And we have, I think a pretty remarkable product on day one, one that I think is going to delight customers. And we have a really rich roadmap that we're going to be building together over, over the years. So I'm excited about getting this in customer's hands. >> Great, thank you. Anthony, bring us home. >> Well, you know, it's one of those sorts of rare chances where you get to do something with Amazon that no one's ever done. You know, we're sort of sitting on the inside, we are a peer of theirs, and we're able to develop at very high speeds in combination with them to release continuously to the customer base. So what you're going to see here is rapid innovation. You're going to see a whole host of new services. Services that NetApp develops, services that Amazon develops. And then the whole ecosystem is going to have access to this, whether they're historically built on the NetApp APIs or increasingly built on the AWS APIs. I think you're going to see orchestrations. I think you're going to see the capabilities expand the overall opportunity for AWS to bring enterprise applications over. For me personally, Dave, you know, I've demonstrated yet again to the NetApp customer base, how much we care about them and their future. Selfishly, you know, I'm looking forward to telling the story to my competitors, customer base, because they haven't done it. So, you know, I think we've been bold. I think we've been committed as you said, three and a half years ago, I promised you that we were going to do everything we possibly could. You know, people always say, you know, what's, what's the real benefit of this. And at the end of the day, customers and partners will be the real winners. This, this innovation, this sort of, as a service I think is going to expand our market, allow our customers to do more with Amazon than they could before. It's one of those rare cases, Dave, where I think one plus one equals about seven, really. >> I love the vision and excited to see the execution Ed and Anthony, thanks so much for coming back in the Cube. Congratulations on getting to this point and good luck. >> Anthony and Ed: Thank you. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube's continuous coverage of AWS storage day. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>>From around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>We continue our coverage here on the cube of AWS reinvent 2020 I'm John Wallace, glad to be with you here and glad that you've joined us for an important discussion. You know, a lot of companies and many industries are making a very concerted effort toward promoting greater diversity and inclusion within their various workforces. And the renewable energy industry is certainly a big part of that movement. And here to talk about how AWS is supporting that and what the industry itself is doing. I'm proud to and pleased to welcome three guests. We have Shannon Kellogg with us from AWS. He's the vice president of public policy for the Americas. Shannon, thanks for being with us here on the cube. >>You back. Thank you. And great >>Whetstone, who is the president and CEO of the American council on renewable energy. We're going to call it a core from here on out, and also joining us Colleen Pickford, who was the EVP at ACOR, and welcome to both of you. Glad we could have it here on the cube. Glad to be here. John's great. You bet. Absolutely looking forward to this discussion first off, Shannon, let me, let me turn it over to you. I know, uh, AWS had some fairly significant announcements, uh, very recently about renewable and, um, you know, launching that on, around reinvent 2020, if he would take us through that a little bit about that commitment and what exactly that news was all about. >>Well, thank you on, uh, Amazon overall, uh, made a very, uh, significant announcement, uh, last week of 26, uh, renewable energy projects around the world. Uh, so many of those here in the U S but also, uh, many of those, uh, internationally and, um, the announcements, uh, collectively last week, along with what we've already announced previously in renewable energy projects now makes us the largest, uh, corporate, uh, buyer of renewable energy in the world. And so we're really excited about that. Um, this is part of our longterm, uh, efforts, uh, to be a hundred percent renewable, um, in our, uh, uh, footprint around the AWS infrastructure, uh, footprint, uh, but also a part of the broader, uh, commitment that we have at Amazon, including around climate and sustainability. So, uh, we were really super excited about last week from now. >>Yeah. Can you give me an idea of the flavor of the projects? I mean, you're talking about more than two dozen, uh, and as you said there around the world, so I assumed pretty wide variety of impacts and, and of, uh, initiatives as well, but maybe just to give those watching at home and idea of what the scale at this point. >>Well, it's a mix of, uh, solar and wind, uh, projects. Uh, like I said, both in the U S and abroad. Um, we had previously announced, uh, uh, several, um, solar projects in the Commonwealth of Virginia. For example, with last week's announcements, we added more, uh, solar, uh, in Virginia, we had previously, uh, uh, announced, uh, wind projects in Ohio and we added more, uh, wind, uh, and, um, uh, you know, large scale utility scale projects in Ohio. And so we also included other States of course, are in the U S and in countries as well, including, uh, one of the first offshore, uh, projects, uh, offshore wind projects that we've done, uh, with, uh, in this case with, uh, off of the coast of Germany. >>All right, Greg, when you hear about that kind of commitment that AWS is making, uh, in terms of, uh, not only from a geographical standpoint, but from a variety of standpoint, we're talking about when we're talking about solar, um, I mean, what is, what stands out to you with regard to the, the impact of that kind of commitment and that kind of initiative >>Kale it's really impactful. It's such an impressive thing to be able to bring that many new renewable projects that are that big online in a single year, that the total amount of new clean generation is on the order of 4,000 megawatts. It wasn't that long ago. That would be a great year for the renewable sector as a whole in the United States. If you go back 10, 12 years. So the idea that one company is now procuring so much renewable power is phenomenally exciting, and we're just so proud of Amazon and it's big progress toward Amazon. So a hundred percent goal, uh, and really, uh, toward the broader effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions rapidly enough to stay within shouting distance of what scientists say we need to do in order to protect our planet's climate. >>Right. Great point. Uh, Colleen, I know you made an interesting point recently, you were talking about the accelerated membership program, which is, uh, an initiative that you've just launched, uh, in terms of trying to create greater diversity and equity and inclusion within the renewable energy, uh, workforce, uh, AWS big sponsor of that, um, founding partner. Uh, if you would tell us a little bit more about that program, uh, and, and what you see is what you hope it's near term or short term impact might be. And then maybe the long tail of that, you know, what kind of impact you can have eventually? >>Yeah, absolutely a core like toward like many in our industry, we've been looking at how we can play a role in creating a more equitable and just future. Um, and we were lucky because we have board members who went during our normal boring board meetings, and we're looking at our membership, asked me, they said, what are you doing to bring more diversity into a core membership? And I had to say, not enough, and that's really the Genesis for the accelerate program. And we were really fortunate to have Shannon and Amazon and our other board members work with us to develop a program that will create opportunities for companies that are owned or led by women or people of color to access a core in all of our benefits for two years and create additional resources for them to really grow their businesses in a way that they may not otherwise be able to. >>Yeah. Shannon did point out that you are board members, Colleen just, just mentioned, um, uh, of a core. What is it about this particular initiative that you think that has peaked the AWS entrust? >>This is Colleen said, uh, we were discussing at the board level, you know, ways that we could, um, do more as a or, uh, in this companies in this sector, promote diversity and inclusion. And we were brainstorming one day and came up with this, uh, with this idea, you know, it's, I'm really excited about it because, um, we're basically going out and offering a core membership and other services, uh, to entrepreneurs and small businesses in the sector led by, uh, minorities and, um, uh, women leaders. And this is just a fantastic opportunity to assist companies and organizations that are just getting started, uh, in an encourages innovation and encourages obviously diversity and inclusion. And so we're super excited about this effort. >>Is this, is this something that you can direct toward a company of any specific size? I mean, Shannon just touched on it, small business, um, but is, is this applicable? The, the, the accelerate program is this geared toward just the small businesses, larger >>Turn in Britain. Uh, we want to bring more diversity in the sector. We want to help. And it's really the smaller companies that need assistance and making those connections and participating, uh, and gaining the access, uh, and maybe mentoring pro bono services. Uh, we want to help those small companies become bigger, grow this sector and, and help enhance the diversity, the leadership in this sector from underrepresented communities. We want, you know, like much of the economy we recognize the renewable energy sector does not yet look like America looks and that's something we're all fighting to achieve. And it's, uh, incredibly helpful to have an Amazon is really the founding supporter of this program. And after Amazon stepped up, uh, seen a number of other companies join in and helping make this a reality. And we've got a lot of momentum now, very excited about the accelerate program. >>Colleen, I like to hear a little bit more from you on the partnership with AWS in general. Um, I know this isn't the first time that you all have partnered together. So if you would maybe fill in some of the blanks about that history that led us to this initiative, and then for them being the one of the founding partners along with the Berkshire Hathaway foundation. >>Sure. I mean, Amazon's been a member of our board for a number of years now, their commitment to the industry is clear and, you know, Shannon and his whole team actively participate across a core providing us with guidance and with insights like these. I think when you look at what we've done with the accelerate program, you know, it's not the first stop for a new small company organization like eight core, but we can have a measurable impact on their go to market strategies and their ability to grow their business. And Shannon and Amazon gave us that insight and they gave us some additional insights about what we could provide through the accelerate program that could really help make a difference for those companies. >>Hmm. You know, Greg, um, if I could just flip the script just a little bit here or, or, uh, get you back on to the discussion about climate change in general. I know that's just obviously, uh, the, the, a key driver to your organization's mission. Just your thoughts about, you know, where we stand, that you talked about trying to be within shouting distance of certain goals. I know there's been discussion about United States for joining the Paris accord, um, and committing to voluntary, uh, uh, emissions controls, just, I mean, where are we in your mind in terms of, of trying to seriously address the problem >>We're behind? I mean, the surprising thing is the renewable sector has been growing at a booming pace. We had over $60 billion in investment last year and wind and solar power, uh, one of the most important economic drivers for the country. Um, we're going to end up despite all of the difficulties presented by 2020 with a pandemic, we're going to have record renewable energy growth in 2020, we're going to bust through the old record, which was about 23,000 megawatts. And we'll be more like 27,000 megawatts. So that's great, but to get our arms around the climate issue, we know we have to grow much more rapidly. We've set a goal at a core of achieving a trillion dollars and investment by 2030, starting when we launched that program back in 2018, uh, and we made a lot of headway, but we're behind. We need to be investing closer to 90, a hundred billion a year in order to see that growth in logging at growth at a much higher rate, we feel really optimistic about getting a tailwind from the new administration, the desire to build back that, or, uh, the clear focus on policies and that value the ability to generate power, to make our economy grow and grow dramatically without greenhouse emissions, without adding to, uh, climate change. >>So, uh, um, I'm optimistic we can get there, but we know we gotta step it up as much as we've been growing as successful as we've been. It's not enough. And we know that >>Colleen, how does your organization in ACOR trumpet that, um, I know you talked about the nexus of finance and policy and technology. Obviously policy is what, uh, is at the center of this particular discussion, but, but how, how can you in the coming year, especially, um, be a, a key driver in that discussion? >>Well, I think, you know, we bring together a really unique stakeholder group from all across the renewable energy industry. And we take those stakeholders and it gives us a magnified voice to share the message of what's needed to really drive more Watts of renewable energy onto the grid. And what are those barriers in policy to making that possible? So, I mean, that's really how we do it is we bring together the most unique group together, >>But we appreciate the work. Uh, no question about that. It is a dire need that needs to be addressed. And we certainly thank you for that. Uh, Shannon, we thank AWS for their support, not only of this initiative, but of all that you're doing around the world. And, uh, we certainly wish you all the best of success with the accelerate membership program and creating these better hiring opportunities within your industry. So thank you all very much for joining us here on the cube.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 I'm Lisa Martin. Joining me next is one of our cube alumni. Breton McMillan is back the director of us, federal for AWS. Right. It's great to see you glad that you're safe and well. >>Great. It's great to be back. Uh, I think last year when we did the cube, we were on the convention floor. It feels very different this year here at reinvent, it's gone virtual and yet it's still true to how reinvent always been. It's a learning conference and we're releasing a lot of new products and services for our customers. >>Yes. A lot of content, as you say, the one thing I think I would say about this reinvent, one of the things that's different, it's so quiet around us. Normally we're talking loudly over tens of thousands of people on the showroom floor, but great. That AWS is still able to connect in such an actually an even bigger way with its customers. So during Theresa Carlson's keynote, want to get your opinion on this or some info. She talked about the AWS open data sponsorship program, and that you guys are going to be hosting the national institutes of health, NIH sequence, read archive data, the biologist, and may former gets really excited about that. Talk to us about that because especially during the global health crisis that we're in, that sounds really promising >>Very much is I am so happy that we're working with NIH on this and multiple other initiatives. So the secret greed archive or SRA, essentially what it is, it's a very large data set of sequenced genomic data. And it's a wide variety of judge you gnomic data, and it's got a knowledge human genetic thing, but all life forms or all branches of life, um, is in a SRA to include viruses. And that's really important here during the pandemic. Um, it's one of the largest and oldest, um, gen sequence genomic data sets are out there and yet it's very modern. It has been designed for next generation sequencing. So it's growing, it's modern and it's well used. It's one of the more important ones that it's out there. One of the reasons this is so important is that we know to find cures for what a human ailments and disease and death, but by studying the gem genomic code, we can come up with the answers of these or the scientists can come up with answer for that. And that's what Amazon is doing is we're putting in the hands of the scientists, the tools so that they can help cure heart disease and diabetes and cancer and, um, depression and yes, even, um, uh, viruses that can cause pandemics. >>So making this data, sorry, I'm just going to making this data available to those scientists. Worldwide is incredibly important. Talk to us about that. >>Yeah, it is. And so, um, within NIH, we're working with, um, the, um, NCBI when you're dealing with NIH, there's a lot of acronyms, uh, and uh, at NIH, it's the national center for, um, file type technology information. And so we're working with them to make this available as an open data set. Why, why this is important is it's all about increasing the speed for scientific discovery. I personally think that in the fullness of time, the scientists will come up with cures for just about all of the human ailments that are out there. And it's our job at AWS to put into the hands of the scientists, the tools they need to make things happen quickly or in our lifetime. And I'm really excited to be working with NIH on that. When we start talking about it, there's multiple things. The scientists needs. One is access to these data sets and SRA. >>It's a very large data set. It's 45 petabytes and it's growing. I personally believe that it's going to double every year, year and a half. So it's a very large data set and it's hard to move that data around. It's so much easier if you just go into the cloud, compute against it and do your research there in the cloud. And so it's super important. 45 petabytes, give you an idea if it were all human data, that's equivalent to have a seven and a half million people or put another way 90% of everybody living in New York city. So that's how big this is. But then also what AWS is doing is we're bringing compute. So in the cloud, you can scale up your compute, scale it down, and then kind of the third they're. The third leg of the tool of the stool is giving the scientists easy access to the specialized tool sets they need. >>And we're doing that in a few different ways. One that the people would design these toolsets design a lot of them on AWS, but then we also make them available through something called AWS marketplace. So they can just go into marketplace, get a catalog, go in there and say, I want to launch this resolve work and launches the infrastructure underneath. And it speeds the ability for those scientists to come up with the cures that they need. So SRA is stored in Amazon S3, which is a very popular object store, not just in the scientific community, but virtually every industry uses S3. And by making this available on these public data sets, we're giving the scientists the ability to speed up their research. >>One of the things that Springs jumps out to me too, is it's in addition to enabling them to speed up research, it's also facilitating collaboration globally because now you've got the cloud to drive all of this, which allows researchers and completely different parts of the world to be working together almost in real time. So I can imagine the incredible power that this is going to, to provide to that community. So I have to ask you though, you talked about this being all life forms, including viruses COVID-19, what are some of the things that you think we can see? I expect this to facilitate. Yeah. >>So earlier in the year we took the, um, uh, genetic code or NIH took the genetic code and they, um, put it in an SRA like format and that's now available on AWS and, and here's, what's great about it is that you can now make it so anybody in the world can go to this open data set and start doing their research. One of our goals here is build back to a democratization of research. So it used to be that, um, get, for example, the very first, um, vaccine that came out was a small part. It's a vaccine that was done by our rural country doctor using essentially test tubes in a microscope. It's gotten hard to do that because data sets are so large, you need so much computer by using the power of the cloud. We've really democratized it and now anybody can do it. So for example, um, with the SRE data set that was done by NIH, um, organizations like the university of British Columbia, their, um, cloud innovation center is, um, doing research. And so what they've done is they've scanned, they, um, SRA database think about it. They scanned out 11 million entries for, uh, coronavirus sequencing. And that's really hard to do in a typical on-premise data center. Who's relatively easy to do on AWS. So by making this available, we can have a larger number of scientists working on the problems that we need to have solved. >>Well, and as the, as we all know in the U S operation warp speed, that warp speed alone term really signifies how quickly we all need this to be progressing forward. But this is not the first partnership that AWS has had with the NIH. Talk to me about what you guys, what some of the other things are that you're doing together. >>We've been working with NIH for a very long time. Um, back in 2012, we worked with NIH on, um, which was called the a thousand genome data set. This is another really important, um, data set and it's a large number of, uh, against sequence human genomes. And we moved that into, again, an open dataset on AWS and what's happened in the last eight years is many scientists have been able to compute about on it. And the other, the wonderful power of the cloud is over time. We continue to bring out tools to make it easier for people to work. So what they're not they're computing using our, um, our instance types. We call it elastic cloud computing. whether they're doing that, or they were doing some high performance computing using, um, uh, EMR elastic MapReduce, they can do that. And then we've brought up new things that really take it to the next layer, like level like, uh, Amazon SageMaker. >>And this is a, um, uh, makes it really easy for, um, the scientists to launch machine learning algorithms on AWS. So we've done the thousand genome, uh, dataset. Um, there's a number of other areas within NIH that we've been working on. So for example, um, over at national cancer Institute, we've been providing some expert guidance on best practices to how, how you can architect and work on these COVID related workloads. Um, NIH does things with, um, collaboration with many different universities, um, over 2,500, um, academic institutions. And, um, and they do that through grants. And so we've been working with doc office of director and they run their grant management applications in the RFA on AWS, and that allows it to scale up and to work very efficiently. Um, and then we entered in with, um, uh, NIH into this program called strides strides as a program for knowing NIH, but also all these other institutions that work within NIH to use the power of the cloud use commercial cloud for scientific discovery. And when we started that back in July of 2018, long before COVID happened, it was so great that we had that up and running because now we're able to help them out through the strides program. >>Right. Can you imagine if, uh, let's not even go there? I was going to say, um, but so, okay. So the SRA data is available through the AWS open data sponsorship program. You talked about strides. What are some of the other ways that AWS system? >>Yeah, no. So strides, uh, is, uh, you know, wide ranging through multiple different institutes. So, um, for example, over at, uh, the national heart lung and blood Institute, uh, do di NHL BI. I said, there's a lot of acronyms and I gel BI. Um, they've been working on, um, harmonizing, uh, genomic data. And so working with the university of Michigan, they've been analyzing through a program that they call top of med. Um, we've also been working with a NIH on, um, establishing best practices, making sure everything's secure. So we've been providing, um, AWS professional services that are showing them how to do this. So one portion of strides is getting the right data set and the right compute in the right tools, in the hands of the scientists. The other areas that we've been working on is making sure the scientists know how to use it. And so we've been developing these cloud learning pathways, and we started this quite a while back, and it's been so helpful here during the code. So, um, scientists can now go on and they can do self-paced online courses, which we've been really helping here during the, during the pandemic. And they can learn how to maximize their use of cloud technologies through these pathways that we've developed for them. >>Well, not education is imperative. I mean, there, you think about all of the knowledge that they have with within their scientific discipline and being able to leverage technology in a way that's easy is absolutely imperative to the timing. So, so, um, let's talk about other data sets that are available. So you've got the SRA is available. Uh, what are their data sets are available through this program? >>What about along a wide range of data sets that we're, um, uh, doing open data sets and in general, um, these data sets are, um, improving the human condition or improving the, um, the world in which we live in. And so, um, I've talked about a few things. There's a few more, uh, things. So for example, um, there's the cancer genomic Atlas that we've been working with, um, national cancer Institute, as well as the national human genomic research Institute. And, um, that's a very important data set that being computed against, um, uh, throughout the world, uh, commonly within the scientific community, that data set is called TCGA. Um, then we also have some, uh, uh, datasets are focused on certain groups. So for example, kids first is a data set. That's looking at a lot of the, um, challenges, uh, in diseases that kids get every kind of thing from very rare pediatric cancer as to heart defects, et cetera. >>And so we're working with them, but it's not just in the, um, uh, medical side. We have open data sets, um, with, uh, for example, uh, NOAA national ocean open national oceanic and atmospheric administration, um, to understand what's happening better with climate change and to slow the rate of climate change within the department of interior, they have a Landsat database that is looking at pictures of their birth cell, like pictures of the earth, so we can better understand the MCO world we live in. Uh, similarly, uh, NASA has, um, a lot of data that we put out there and, um, over in the department of energy, uh, there's data sets there, um, that we're researching against, or that the scientists are researching against to make sure that we have better clean, renewable energy sources, but it's not just government agencies that we work with when we find a dataset that's important. >>We also work with, um, nonprofit organizations, nonprofit organizations are also in, they're not flush with cash and they're trying to make every dollar work. And so we've worked with them, um, organizations like the child mind Institute or the Allen Institute for brain science. And these are largely like neuro imaging, um, data. And we made that available, um, via, um, our open data set, um, program. So there's a wide range of things that we're doing. And what's great about it is when we do it, you democratize science and you allowed many, many more science scientists to work on these problems. They're so critical for us. >>The availability is, is incredible, but also the, the breadth and depth of what you just spoke. It's not just government, for example, you've got about 30 seconds left. I'm going to ask you to summarize some of the announcements that you think are really, really critical for federal customers to be paying attention to from reinvent 2020. >>Yeah. So, um, one of the things that these federal government customers have been coming to us on is they've had to have new ways to communicate with their customer, with the public. And so we have a product that we've had for a while called on AWS connect, and it's been used very extensively throughout government customers. And it's used in industry too. We've had a number of, um, of announcements this weekend. Jasmine made multiple announcements on enhancement, say AWS connect or additional services, everything from helping to verify that that's the right person from AWS connect ID to making sure that that customer's gets a good customer experience to connect wisdom or making sure that the managers of these call centers can manage the call centers better. And so I'm really excited that we're putting in the hands of both government and industry, a cloud based solution to make their connections to the public better. >>It's all about connections these days, but I wish we had more time, cause I know we can unpack so much more with you, but thank you for joining me on the queue today, sharing some of the insights, some of the impacts and availability that AWS is enabling the scientific and other federal communities. It's incredibly important. And we appreciate your time. Thank you, Lisa, for Brett McMillan. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020.