(bright music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS Summit 2022. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Two days of coverage, AWS Summit 2022 in New York city's coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. Events are back. theCUBE is back. Of course, with theCUBE virtual, CUBE hybrid, the cube.net. Check it out, a lot of content this year more than ever. A lot more cloud data, cloud native, modern applications, all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, CUBE alumni, CEO of Observe, Inc. in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data, observability. Jeremy, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Always great to come and talk to you on theCUBE man. It's been a few years. >> Well, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability space, hot area, but also you've been a senior executive. President of Dell, EMC, 11 years ago you had a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> And it's here. You predicted it 11 years ago. Look around, it's cloud meets big data. >> Yeah, the cloud thing I think was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for sort of catching that bus early, We were on the bus early and I think it was only inevitable. Like if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you could find out things you could never possibly imagine. >> So you're close to a lot of companies that we've been covering deeply. Snowflake obviously are involved. The board level, the founders, the people there, cloud, Amazon, what's going on here? You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, chief of Observe, Inc., which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data, engineering, large scale integrations, data as code, integrating into applications. It's a whole another world developing, like you see with Snowflake, it means Snowflake is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's this wave we're on? How would you describe the wave? >> Well, a couple of things. People are, I think, riding more software than ever before. Why? Because they've realized that if you don't take your business online and offer a service, then you become largely irrelevant. And so you you've got a whole set of new applications. I think more applications now than any point, not just ever, but the mid nineties. I always looked at as the golden age of application development. Now, back then people were building for Windows. Well now they're building for things like, AWS is now the platform. So you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data and the transactions, what you bought today or something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry data, all the exhaust fumes. And I think people really are realizing that their differentiation is not so much their application. It's their understanding of the data. Can I understand who my best customers are? What I sell today? If people came to my website and didn't buy, then why not? Where did they drop off? All of that they want to analyze. And the answers are all in the data. The question is, can you understand it? >> In our last startup showcase, we featured data as code. One of the insights that we got out of that, and I want to get your opinion on or reaction to is, is that data used to be put into a data lake and turns into a data swamp or throw into the data warehouse, and then we'll do some queries, maybe a report once in a while. And so data, once it was done, unless it was real time, even real time was not good anymore after real time. That was the old way. Now you're seeing more and more effort to say, let's go look at the data, 'cause now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once, they're iterating. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting That's a Silicon Valley story. That's like how startups were, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have this data concept that's now part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole new cycle of data being reused and repurposed, then figure it out. >> Yeah, yeah, I'm a big fan of, years ago, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee, at the MIT labs. I spent time with and he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look, he said, I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you have enough data, you can answer any question. And this has going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and certainly, research is on the forefront. But I think starting to see that mindset of the MIT research be mainstream in enterprises. They're realizing that, yeah, it is about the data. If I can better understand my data better than competitor, then I've got an advantage. And so the question is how? What technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to allow me to do that? >> So let's talk about Observe, Inc. You're the CEO. Given you've seen the waves before, you're in the front lines of observability, which again is in the center of all this action. What's going on with the company? Give a quick minute to explain Observe for the folks who don't know what you guys do. What's the company doing? What's the funding status? What's the product status? And what's the customer status? >> Yeah, so we realized, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago. Look, the way people are building applications is different. They're way more functional. They change every day. But in some respects there are a lot more complicated. They're distributed, microservices architectures. And when something goes wrong, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not going to fly because you had so much change going into production on a daily basis. It was hard to tell like where the problem was. And so we thought, okay, it's about time. Somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and all the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot and make sense of the problems that they're seeing. So that's observability. It's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was, a guy called, like everything in tech, it's a reinvention of something from years gone by, but there's a guy called Rudy Coleman in 1960s, kind of term. And the term was been able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for the best part of four years now. It took us three years just to build the product. I think what people don't appreciate these days often is the barrier to entry in a lot of these markets is quite high. You need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. So yeah, this last year, we did our first year selling. We've got about 40 customers now. We got great investors Sutter Hill Ventures. Mike Speiser who was really the first guy in the Snowflake and the initial investor. We're fortunate enough to have Mike on our board. And part of the Observe story is closely knit with Snowflake because all of that telemetry data, we store in there. >> So I want to pivot to that. Mike Speiser, Snowflake, Jeremy Burton, theCUBE kind of same thinking. This idea of a super cloud or what Snowflake became. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> Snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. And now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of Snowflake. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> So that's become an entrepreneurial story that we think that to go big in the cloud, you can have a cloud on a cloud, like as Jerry Chen in Greylock calls it, castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you're doing some stuff with Snowflake's. So as a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a Snowflake or an AWS, because again, you got to go where the data is. You need all the data. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> What's your take on that? >> Having enough gray hair now. Again, in tech, I think if you want to predict the future, look at the past. And 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a smaller company called Oracle. And an Oracle was the database company and their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms. One, Windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operating system was the platform. And then that was the ecosystem that you would compete on top of. And then there were companies like SAP that built applications on top of Oracle. So then wind the clock forward 25 years, gray hairs, the platform isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, Google cloud. I probably look around if I say that in. >> It's okay. But Hyperscale. >> Yeah. >> CapEx built out. >> That is the new platform. And then Snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generated data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. And I think they they've done an amazing job doing for the, I'd say the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and of course my ambition would be, look, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of Snowflake, as they were on top of Oracle, then we'd probably be quite happy. >> So you're building on top of Snowflake? >> We're building on top of Snowflake a hundred percent. And I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that's a risk. >> Are you still on the board? >> Yeah, I'm still on the board. Yeah. That's a risk I'm prepared to take. I am long on Snowflake. >> It sounds, well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board then you'll know as going on. Okay, seriously, this is a real dynamic. >> Jeremy: It is. >> It's not a one off. >> Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS, it is an order of magnitude more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows. And so I believe the opportunity for folks like Snowflake and folks like Observe, it's an order magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old world. >> Yeah, and I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you got to be on a platform. >> Yeah and it's quite easy. >> Or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how many seats are at that table left. >> Well, value migrates up over time. So when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, rack space and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure for service, platform as a service. My old employee EMC, we had Pivotal. Pivotal was a platform as a service. You don't hear so much about it these days, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to extract a real business, you got to move up, you got to add value, you got to build databases, then you got to build applications. >> It's interesting. Moving from the data center to the cloud was a dream for starters 'cause they didn't have to provision the CapEx. Now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on top of that, you got Snowflake. Now you got on top of that. >> The assumption is almost that compute and storage is free. I know it's not quite free. >> Yeah, it's almost free. >> But as an application vendor, you think, well, what can I do if I assume compute and storage is free, that's the mindset you've got to get into. >> And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm going to get a serious multiple of value in what I'm paying. Most people don't even blink at their AWS bills unless they're like massively huge. Then it's a repatriation question or whatever discount question. But for most startups or any growing company, the Amazon bill should be a small factor. >> Yeah, a lot of people ask me like, look, you're building on Snowflake. You're going to be paying their money. How does that work with your business model? If you're paying them money, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. We could build a database as well in Observe, but then I've got half the development team working on something that will never be as good as Snowflake. And so we made the call early on that, no, we want to innovate above the database. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and the same is true with something like Amazon, like Snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >> Yeah and what's interesting is that Dave Vellante and I have been pointing this out and he's obviously more on Snowflake. I've been looking at Databricks and the same dynamics happening. The proof is the ecosystem. >> Yeah. >> If you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and Databricks, it's exploding. The shows are selling out. This floor space is booked. That's the old days at VMware. The old days at AWS. >> One and for Snowflake and any platform provider, it's a beautiful thing because we build on Snowflake and we pay their money. They don't have to sell to us. And we do a lot of the support. And so the economics work out really, really well if you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of ecosystems. >> And then also you get a trajectory of economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of Snowflake, integrations, new products, you're scaling and step function with them. >> Yeah, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. When I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had one petabyte customer. And so at Observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so being able to rely on a platform that can manage that is invaluable. >> Well, Jeremy, great conversation. Thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. We got a couple minutes left, put a plug in for Observe. What do you guys do? You got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You get in traction. >> Yeah >> Scales around the corner sounds like. Is that where you at? Pre-scale? >> We've got a big announcement coming up in two or three weeks. We've got new funding, which is always great. The product is really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, at which point can you just start hiring salespeople and the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. We've got about 40 SaaS companies that run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting enterprise type customers. We're F5 networks. We're POC in right now with Capital One. We've got some interesting news around Capital One coming up. I can't share too much, but it's going to be exciting. And like I said, Sutter Hill continue to stick. >> And I think Capital One's a big Snowflake customer as well, right? >> They were early and one of the things that attracted me to Capital One was they were very, very good with Snowflake early on and they put Snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. And today that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts. >> Capital One, very innovative cloud. Obviously, AWS customer and very innovative. certainly in the CISO and CIO. On another point on where you're at. So you're pre-scale meaning you're about to scale. >> Jeremy: Right. >> So you got POCs. What's that trajectory look like? And you see around the corner, what's going on? What's around the corner that you're going to hit the straight and narrow and gas it fast? >> Yeah, the key thing for us is we got to get the product right. The nice thing about having a guy like Mike Speiser on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage. His questions at the board are always about like, is the product right? Is the product right? Have you got the product right? 'Cause we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and the revenue will take care of itself. So right now all the attention is on the product. This year, the exciting thing is we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that back in the day you could do with the New Relics and AppDynamics, the last generation of APM tools. You're going to be able to do that within Observe. And we've already got the logs and the metrics capability in there. So for us this year is a big one 'cause we complete the trifecta, the logs. >> What's the secret sauce of observe if you put it into a sentence, what's the secret sauce? >> I think, an amazing founding engineering team, number one. At the end of the day, you have to build an amazing product and you have to solve a problem in a different way and we've got great long term investors. And the biggest thing our investors give is, actually it's not just money, it gives us time to get the product right. Because if we get the product right, then we can get the growth. >> Got it. Final question while I got you here. You've been on the enterprise business for a long time. What's the buyer landscape out there? You got people doing POCs, Capital One scale. So we know that goes on. What's the appetite at the buyer side for startups and what are their requirements that you're seeing? Obviously, we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their business, restructure. So a lot of happening in cloud. What's the criteria? How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >> Yeah, enterprises, they know they've got to spend money transforming the business. I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but what we were saying five years ago is happening. Everybody needs to figure out a way to take their business to this digital world. Everybody has to do it. So the nice thing from a startup standpoint is they know at times they need to risk or take a bet on new technology in order to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that A, have money, B, are prepared to take risks, and it's a race against time to get their offerings in this new digital footprint. >> Final, final question. What's the state of AWS? Where do you see them going next? Obviously, they're continuing to be successful. How does cloud 3.0? Or they always say it's day one, but it's maybe more like day 10, but what's next for AWS? Where do they go from here? Obviously, they're doing well and they're getting bigger and bigger. >> Yeah, it's an amazing story. We are on AWS as well. And so I think if they keep nurturing the builders and the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They have an early leads. And if you look at where, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the late nineties, it was they stopped really caring about developers and the folks who are building on top of their ecosystem. In fact, they started buying up their ecosystem and competing with people in their ecosystem. And I see with AWS, they have an amazing head start. And if they did more, if they do more than that, that's what's going to keep this juggernaut rolling for many years to come. >> They got the Silicon and they got the Stack developing. Jeremy Burton inside theCUBE, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called Observe, Inc. In the middle of all the action and the board of Snowflake as well. Great startup. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Always a pleasure. >> Live from San Francisco's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Stay with us. More coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. (soft music)

[Music] hello welcome to this cube conversation i'm john furrier the palo alto studios for the cube i'm your host here with jeremy burton who's the ceo of observe inc just launched their product they launched their company before that they're doing great jeremy great to see you oh no thanks uh always great to be back on yeah there's there's certainly a lot going on the start of my day job which is running observing my night job which is uh obviously working with uh snowflake and it's not great to see both going on at the same time you've done very well with the snowflake relationship being a board member and all and being in that ecosystem and a lot of people are doing well in this shift you're part of it again you're on the inside but also now on the outside building a business and it's exciting because it's highly competitive it's a big category and it's really moving fast so give us a quick update on what's going on in the landscape and your recent launch you just had yeah i mean i i think most businesses be the you know new businesses cloud native businesses as we call it upon in the cloud businesses are old um that they're really uh trying to deliver like new services to reach customers and it's harder for an incumbent business because they've got to do a lot of reinvention or modernization or i guess the term de jure is digitization um and ultimately a lot of that means writing they've got to start writing software again you know it comes naturally maybe to the newer companies uh the sas companies uh but the biggest of the big have got you know really got to start riding software again and and as they push a new code into production every day they've got to make sure it works and so this new market for observability i think really uh helps people troubleshoot problems with this you know these new applications um and the goal obviously is to make sure that you know you avoid customer churn and any kind of a bad experience which um i think is what every sas company dreads um you know it's a big problem you know getting all these metrics in one place is really key i want to get into your launch 2.0 yeah we could bring in dave vellante my co-host was thecube always a favorite to bring on the analysis i know dave dug in heavily on the launch dave good to see you we'll get you hey guys how are you doing how are you doing jeremy good to see you yeah john i mean jeremy your your first launch was was really a company launch right and now now you're given the the product update so what do we need to know yeah so we i mean you're right when we first went out it was sort of like this is observing this is what observability um is we we sort of glossed over a lot of product details because i think like a lot of startups we you know we had a chunk of initial functionality but we knew there was a lot missing and so so previously you know in the last six months since we did that announcement we're now trying to you know fill out the product and a couple of the big features that we knew we needed um i mean one was metrics um and although we've always been able to ingest metrics uh most people maybe know you know time series type data we hadn't built all of the functionality you know in our language or in the user interface for the user to be able to manipulate them um so that was a big lift um which we got done and then and very closely related once you've got metrics the next thing people want to do is they want to start alerting on things hey tell me when this metric is is out of whack and one of our sort of big differentiators are one of the things that we always bring to bear on any kind of data we manage is to link data together so we're always trying to provide more context for the data that the user's looking at so metrics and alerts they sort of tie into our core value prop of being able to relate data jeremy if i don't mind you don't mind ask answering i'd like to get your take on this because one question i ask all these analytics companies is yeah data's great data lakes and it's all good about getting the data in this kind of environment but most people just want to shape the data and they want to just get insights out of it fast they don't want to they don't want to do a lot of prep they want to have it in position whether it's querying it or just having it available and sometimes it's not always there so they're constantly reshaping it and so the idea of just shaping it and making getting some insights which is basically quickly distill out of it turns into i got to reshape i got to go back to the well if you will or the lake in this case and pull out the data how are you guys solving that because this is like the um the simple construct make it easy yeah it's funny i mean even going right back to data warehouse in days of old the big frustration is is etl right it was so painful to transform the data into the right shape to get into the database i mean some of these projects i mean i think like 70 of those projects never even completed um the the big big difference now and certainly a lot of the data we deal with is it's unstructured inherently it's generated by machines we we just sort of dump it all into observe and then we let users pause it on the fly and so it can be one shape one day in a different shape the next and then we'll we'll backfill all of the data automatically into the new shape that the users define so these systems have really got to be set up to do um like ad hoc analysis you know when if you only did a couple of updates to your application uh a year the the environment wasn't that dynamic it didn't change very much and most of the problems you saw you you've seen before and now with code changing every day the application looks different every day so the issues that you see look different every day so it's really really important that these systems are incredibly dynamic and don't get locked into one particular shape from the get-go jeremy you you took a somewhat different approach i mean a lot of companies in this space will choose to do like a purpose-built database specifically for observability and metrics and so forth and that that's talking about a heavy lift that could take take many years you're choosing to put your emphasis do your heavy lift elsewhere yeah that obviously gives you a time to market advantage can you talk a little bit about that philosophy and what that gets you yeah it was probably one of the biggest decisions that we made when we founded observe was was do we build our own database like almost everyone who'd gone before um or do we go with a commercial offering and when we first started building against snowflake three years ago we we did we weren't actually sure it could do what we wanted to do and so it was one of the biggest areas of technical risk um but certainly at this point we've got ourselves very comfortable that it's going to be able to do what we need it to and it saves us building a database and uh i mean like this week at the snowflake summit i think snowflake just announced an additional 30 compression on data it's like okay so we did nothing and now you know all of those folks who are sending terabytes a day to us they get an extra 30 compression and and so that's the value of building on a commercial platform you know snowflake has got 300 engineers working away on on their database and they deliver benefits to us and we focus on the application so we know obviously frank we talk to him all the time and he's unequivocal about your cloud we're not doing a halfway house we're not doing on-prem but you're i'm sure familiar with the uh the a16z narrative from from an uh from from martin casado and sarah wong basically the premise for those of you don't know is you know for startups and as you're growing cloud is a no-brainer but at scale it becomes fifty percent of your cost of revenue it becomes uh an albatross to your operating leverage what do you think about that do you buy that uh do you ever see like a snowflake going going back on prem what's your thoughts on that i mean i feel like yeah i mean we used to put wells in our back gardens and generators in our basement and you know they're cheaper too right but the problem is i've got to dig a freaking well right and and then what am i not doing while i'm digging my well and and so i i don't know i i mean i get the general premise but i don't want half the company going and building not just like a database all of the infrastructure that's underneath why because it's not what our customers pay for like if we can add more value on top of that platform we can charge more so it's sort of like well if all those companies had actually started out building their own infrastructure and everything would they have would they have built the application experience that made them successful i mean you so the the i mean i i get the paper i think it's very very well written i'm just i'm just not sure it's a big distraction like we don't care about the underlying infrastructure we just want it to be there you know and you know and if we were doing that then we might observe might not be as good as it currently is you know well i think it's a question to me john is where's the customer value is the customer value in you know the valuation of the company or is it in what you can deliver and how fast you can hold on let me just put context to martin casado's little thing there it's the paradox um paper so there's a paradox there and his thesis is do you focus on cost of goods sold or do you drive more revenue and his whole part point was at some point you got to look at the cost right and and i then weaved into i hit him up on twitter immediately and i said oh so you must have a bunch of companies who aren't growing right so so because if you look at what's going on the mckinsey paper we covered this at our last startup event startup event is that the companies that are driving new revenue it's coming from a lot of re-platforming and refactoring but also net new use cases so a lot of clients are making more money by introducing new products so so that's a new revenue so you you are either going to be on one side of the paradox you're going to be inside of i'd rather refactor for new revenue yeah then save money by reducing costs so i still think we haven't cleared the runway on this growth so i think there's plenty of trillions left to create so i'm on the side of i'm on the side of you know if you're worried about pennies in the cloud to the well point that jeremy mentioned then you might either look at other things yeah it's about growth i mean i feel certainly younger companies and and observe and i mean also snowflake that we were just talking about i mean uh the snowpack announcement this week of going and running spark jobs well yeah they could do that or they could go build a data center i mean to reduce costs and to me um the right call is to do more with customers data um and and the the i don't know the somewhat um i mean the counterpoint to that would be well let's make it a more profitable business but you know to me that doesn't add up for the majority of new companies jeremy how should we look uh i'm gonna ask how should we think about this space because you have you got guys like splunk that have been doing log analytics for a while now you got you got the elk stack coming in with an open source and you know it's it's open source but it also brings complexity you've got big players now like cisco who's made you know the apple the acquisition of appd you've got kind of who's now a legacy a new relic we talked about purpose-built databases before so everybody's coming at this from all different sides how do you think about it look at it and where do you fit yeah i think you've got the big players i mean you've you've named quite a few of them then and and look most of my career i've i've been on that side right and and typically what you do as a big company is it's harder to innovate and so you use your balance sheet for innovation you go buy innovation and and then you try and integrate and um that that i mean it's very very doable and um but it just takes a long time and the risk is that as you integrate you're never really getting your architecture on a solid foot and you're sort of band-aiding things together and we're selling multiple things to the same customer versus really coming back to first principles and saying well how should this really have been built so i actually tend to worry a little bit less about the bigger companies um and then look there's a set of startups that have from like observed from first principles thought well if we were to build a system to to look at all the telemetry data that applications and infrastructure generate then then how would we do it um so you know we certainly uh banking on the fact that the more modern architecture um as time goes by because i still think we're you know we're in in baseball terms we're probably in the first inning still of observability um that that modern architecture will will come to bear over time we'll be able to do things that the other guys won't be able to do and and one of those is actually the simple task of relating data you know why because all of our data is in one place and it's in a relational database you know it's it's that simple i think one of the things that's worth calling out and it's pointing out is that you guys are also on the snowflake so you you're riding that wave to your point about i which i agree with by the way you're in you're focusing on innovation not kind of moving the deck chairs around on stuff but i want to get a question about this event you had because one of the things that you guys are becoming known for is to eliminate the headaches for sres and devops engineers who have been conditioned to accept you know the old ways of kind of handcrafting and the people who do it first tend to be the most bloody when they when they come out of it but as it becomes easier right and we discovered this at the red hat summit dave and jeremy is that this notion of an sre is becoming more prominent in engineering schools and computer science programs as kind of replacement for it i don't mean like i t is dead but like it's turning into ai ops git ups whatever people want to call it it's cloud native so the notion of an sre is on the teams of these modern development teams so you're seeing this end-to-end workflow visibility so so that means that if they're going to have that they're going to have these new team members sres and dev and sec together and they need the data so this is where you guys are and i think you guys hit this and correct me if i'm wrong if you don't mind explaining how does that the observability equation change when the teams change because teams are changing in the modern architecture yeah i mean it's it's it's probably a cliche but the the you know there's tooling and then this process change and as as as people move to things like continuous delivery um they get maniacally focused on uh delivery of of new features and new capabilities to the customer and then focused on the experience that the customers have in and i think the you know the role of the sre becomes critical because they try and understand not just what the customer is doing with the application but the problems that the customer is experiencing and that's going to work hand in glove you know with the engineering team who ultimately is going to implement the new features that the customers want and one of our sort of big missions here is to is to lessen the burden on the devops team which has been providing essentially infrastructure and tooling for for the sre and engineering teams to use right now they're overwhelmed to deliver just the basics and candidly the engineering and sre teams are not not happy with what's been delivered so we if we can lighten the burden on the devops team you should then get a richer experience for the sre and engineering teams for them to do ultimately what they want to do which is customer satisfaction and and engage their customers uh in in new ways and and there's just the quality of what is surface to those teams right now is just not very good because it's hard so jeremy you mentioned the first innings your uniforms are still white you you got the starting picture how's it how's it feeling how's the arm feel what's the early customer interactions like where are you getting traction yeah it's it's been interesting because um you know when you start with no customers i mean obviously we've been on the wall here at work our first customer 2500 bucks and i've never been so thrilled to get a sales order for twenty five hundred dollars um but no it it it's we we've targeted largely sas companies uh or tech tech centric companies and and one of the guys that we're going to be highlighting is uh topgolf which um i'm sure anyone who's been there and and you know enjoys going and hitting a golf ball around and playing angry birds but um look they're a tech centric company um customer experience for them is everything they're not in the in the it business per se but it enables them to deliver these amazing customer experiences and so you know when they've got issues when they need to troubleshoot problems they need to do it quickly and and so we tend to you know help those kind of companies um improve the experience they're providing um but yeah we've got about 20 paying customers so far um it's it's it's very different actually getting a customer paying you money versus a sort of friend a family member said yeah i'll give that a whirl um you know it certainly should happens the point on the feedback and and really that's what we need right now i mean i think every startup strives to get to what we call market fit which is can we sell this product repeatedly to thousands of customers um i don't think we're quite there yet but we certainly have got the volume of customers and the feedback coming back to engineering that that you know can get we know what to bill put it that way to get us to that point well smart what you do when you're starting with the sas companies the service providers you so you're not you know you're not jumping off the cliff into the enterprise for every custom deal you know get the product market fit and then understand the retention and then expand your tam from there yeah yeah you try and build a solid foundation and you know when you go to the enterprise you're going to need features like role-based access control and more of the manageability capabilities but you know if you were to build all of that out first then you wouldn't know whether you've got a compelling experience for an sre or an engineering team and so what you tend to do is is defer a lot of the management type capabilities try and build compelling features when you see the features are compelling then you sort of build out the supporting infrastructure that allows you to go to bigger companies so it's uh i mean it it the enterprise is what i've always dealt in sort of enterprise software is it's it's not easy um and and my old boss joe tucci had a great saying on this like you know if you're in a hurry take a bit more time and i think that that's sort of our mantra right now we're in a hurry everyone wants to go but like if we don't get the product right it'll it'll bite us later yeah the other expression in the enterprise is everyone makes it all complicated and everything it's all too complicated um which is the enterprise if it's not complicated they make it more complicated right so uh welcome to the edge too now there's every huge there's every edge case you can think of which is why you've got to be careful early on because we we can't afford we don't have time to deal with edge cases we've got to deal with you know what's up the power alley and then once we've got that going then you can start to deal with more of the edge cases yeah we're in the same boat on our end too jeremy i'd like to get uh to end the segment here by giving a quick update and recap of uh the event real quick and what you guys are doing as a company and and what you did at the launch and where your sweet spot is what are you looking for the what's the type of customers that you're looking for right now what is that power alley that you're focused on yeah three to four thousand sas companies in in north america is where we're after um and we tend to help folks on more efficient troubleshooting of applications we help them with tool consolidation um and we help them with security audit and compliance so there if you like the the key use cases that our initial customers have brought us into and um yeah we started off really focusing on on logging and log analytics and then you know yesterday we added to that you know the metrics the time series data analysis um and also the alerting and and we've also got really running in-house the the more apm-like visualizations around tracing so maybe a little bit of a hint at what's coming up later this year yeah i want to get your thoughts too there's been some commentary on twitter like you know we want to get things simpler a little bit more calmer i think there's a comment like it's not the mid we want more of the midwest vibe not so much that the coastal elite silicon valley shiny new toy yeah what's your take on that because it's culturally the shift people want to reduce the tools i mean they got the tool shed of you know every single tool that's been shipped every company comes out is selling a tool don't be the don't be a fool with a tool as the as the expression says no no if we're not careful observability we can define it to be this nichey thing and and you know in silicon valley out here it's probably the worst because there's almost this attitude of well i'm not sure you're smart enough to do observability you're doing it all wrong and our approach i think and i think the market in general wants like they've got issues and our approach needs to be well give show us what you're doing today give us the data that you're generating today we'll make that better and then we'll show you where the blind spots are and so you can have a much more iterative approach to getting to that desired end goal but we've got to stop defining observability as almost this this niche that silicon valley companies uh use i mean i i always joke that we want more of our customers watching netflix not listening to engineers from netflix explain observability yeah david call the flyover enterprise now it's a new category of enterprise yeah i i i i want to encourage people to go check out the the launch it's i presume it's up on your website jeremy so not the typical mumbo jumbo you guys have a lot of fun you started off you're like what and it's it's just it's pretty hilarious and then you know you get into the meat of it but so good job on that yeah thanks yeah we had a local san francisco comedian uh and that helped us out she was awesome i think and i think it's been a software engineer at uh surveymonkey back in the days right right always great stuff jeremy thanks for coming on thecube thanks for the update and uh we'll see you around see you in real life soon very soon great thanks guys always a pleasure to be on okay it's thecube conversation i'm john furrier dave vellante on analysis on this cube conversation segment soon we'll be in real life we'll be at mobile world congress for our first physical event in a long long time first event since 2019 for mobile world congress a lot has changed since that time and we'll be on there for the first hybrid event and then we have two more hybrid events coming up as well adf's reinforced as well as ada's reinvent cube virtual and cube physical all together stay with us thanks for watching [Music] you

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. >>Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 I'm John Farrow, your hosts. We've got the cube virtual. We're not there in person with remote this year, and we're excited to cover three weeks of wall-to-wall coverage. It's virtual events, so they don't over three weeks. We're in week three, day two. Um, and if you're watching this live on the platform tomorrow, Thursday at two o'clock Andy Jassy, we'll be live here on the cube with one-on-one with me to address all the hard questions, but here we're doing a day two of week three analysis with Jeremy Burton industry legend entrepreneur. Now the CEO of observe Inc, um, formerly the CMO of Dell technologies before that EMC has done a variety of ventures, seeing many ways of innovation, friend of the cube. Jeremy, thank you for coming on. >>Yeah, my pleasure. Great. Always great to be on the cube. >>Uh, great to have you on in particularly because, um, yesterday Verner, Vogel's talked a lot about observability and I noticed you got your observed shirt on, uh, observe Inc is your company's name, which is one of the many, uh, hot startups around observability, where you're making a business out of basically what he talked about yesterday. Um, and today's keynote. You had the extended cloud, uh, edge applications. You had bill Vass who leads up both edge and quantum. And then you had Rudy Valdez who, who talked a lot about, uh, evolution of cloud architecture. And of course you finally had, um, David Richardson, who is the VP of serverless. So you got edge. Quantum serverless architecture speaks to the sea change, Jeremy, and you have a good read on these big waves. When you look at serverless and then quantum, you look at, uh, edge, which is data, and you look at, um, all this coming together and on their architecture, Verner's keynote yesterday kind of makes sense. It's a systems architecture and this new observability trend, isn't like a point product. It's a broader concepts. You have a complete rethinking of distributed computing in the cloud. This is kinda what this Amazon feels like. What's your, what's your take? >>Yeah, it's a, it's a good observation. You know, the, the, the, the sort of punchline is, is that people are building applications differently. Um, so the, the, the, the, the technologies that people are using to build apps are different, um, the way in which they build applications is different. Um, the way folks released codes into production is different, and it stands to reason. Therefore, you're going to need a different approach, uh, when you want to troubleshoot these applications. So, uh, when you find, uh, you know, w w what is show when you want to find out what issues customers are having? So what, what we fell a couple of three years ago when we started to observe was that, um, uh, a new approach was required, what you're going to need to monitor your application. And, you know, 2020 is not the same as what you needed in 2015 or 2010. >>And we felt very strongly that this new wave was, was going to be called observability. It, it brings a tear to my eye to hear a Verner, talk about it, because as much as we observe, you know, believe that we can do big things in future. It's the big vendors today that can move markets. And so the Amazon and vulnerable particular talk about observability, I think it lends more credence to the topic. Um, we think that organizations should have observability teams. We think there should be a head of observability. And again, you know, Amazon and Dawson this, uh, I think means that there's a much stronger chance that that's going to happen. And they're going to start, start to shine a light on, I think, a topic that almost everybody needs to pay attention to as they build their next generation of applications. >>When you guys, I know you guys are launched and you have couple of campaign customers now and growing rapidly, um, well-funded, um, uh, get some great investors have found that the investors of snowflake also, um, invested in you guys. So they see this cloud trend LC snowflake when public, and I know you're on the board of snowflake as well. So, uh, you, you, you know, a little bit about what's going on with Amazon and the opportunity when you look at observability, okay, you're building a business around it. And again, you think about head of observability. That's not like a small thing when you make, put someone in charge of something. So why do you say that? I mean, what, I mean, you know, some would say, you know, Hey, it's a feature, not a company. I mean, this is two mindsets that are different. How do you address that? >>Yeah, the, the, the, the thing I'd say is, look, the number one job in America is, um, is a software engineer is writing code. The number two job is fixing it. And so, you know, th th the job think about that for a second. The job of fixing our applications is almost as big as the job of creating our applications. Uh, something has to change, right? I know the job of fixing cars is not as big as the auto industry. Why, because over time that industry has matured and there are better tools to diagnose cars. Uh, and so they're, they, they become easy to fix over time. We've, we've not made that leap with our applications. Um, the tools that the engineering team use to debug and troubleshoot their application are often still very different to what the dev ops team is using, um, which is very different to what maybe the SRE team is using. >>And so it's a huge problem in our industry. Um, really not being able to diagnose troubleshoot issues when they arise. It, it costs the industry, a fortune, it costs, you know, sort of in indirect wasted productivity of development teams, but it also costs in terms of customer experience. Um, I mean, you know, you and I both know is, look, if we're, if we're having a bad experience with maybe a new service that we're trying out online, w w we're probably going to go somewhere else. And so the there's never been like a more important time for people to invest in observing the entire environment, the entire customer experience, not only will you have happier customers, you might actually reduce the costs and improve the productivity in your engineering team as well. So I feel like the opportunity there is, is, is, is, is vast. Um, I also think longer term, um, it doesn't just apply to troubleshooting distributed applications. >>Um, I think the security systems are very related to the way we build software. Um, I mean, I think in, in, in the news in recent days, we've, we've come attuned, uh, uh, to, to software defects, um, or malware in software causing breaches and government agencies. Um, Hey, that, that could be anybody's software right there. Yeah. And so security has got a role to play in observability and the customer experience. It doesn't stop when they have a bad experience on the website. What if they complain? You know, what if a help desk ticket get, how do you track that? >>Yeah, I'm going to, I have a lot of questions for chassis tomorrow. One of them I'm going to ask him, and I want to get your thoughts on it. Cause you brought that up. And I think it's a key point, you know, building applications and supporting them and fixing them. It kind of reminds me of the old adage of, um, you know, you know, you gotta run it running the operation, 70% of the budget using to running it. If you look at what's happening and if you talk to customers and this is what I'm going to ask chassis tomorrow, Verner actually talked about, I on day two operations in his keynote. Yeah. I mean, this is Amazon they're, they're targeting builders. And so I talked to, um, a few other entrepreneurs, um, who were growing companies and some CIA CIOs and CEOs and the basic enterprises. >>They don't want to be building things like they, that's not their DNA. They don't build things like, that's not what they do. I mean, first of all, I love the builder mentality and with Amazon. Um, but they might be at a time where there might not be enough builders, Jeremy right out there. So you've got skill shortages and then ultimately are enterprises really builders. Yeah. They'll build something, but then they just run it it's. So, so at what point do they stop building or they build their own thing in the cloud and then they got to run it. So I think Amazon is going to shift quickly to day two operations, get bill, bill, bill run, run, run. >>Yeah. That's a great topic of conversation. I think what you sort of poking out is, is sort of the maturation of this digital age in the state that we're at. Um, I mean, if you, if you go back, you, you know, to, you know, 10, 10, 20 years, um, I mean, look at the mid nineties, um, there were a lot of people building custom applications, right? I mean, you know, it was innovation, it was all about building custom apps. And I think that golden era of application development whack that now, um, and, and customers in order to get competitive advantage, they are building their own applications. When you talk about digital transformation, what does that mean? Well, it means, you know, often a traditional company building a new digital experience for services that they've potentially offered in a physical way, uh, in the past. So make no mistake, P people are builders or they are writing code, they are becoming digital. >>I think what you'll find at some point as the industry's mature, some of these digital experience is become packaged. And so you can buy those off the shelf. And so there's less building required. But I think as we sit today, um, that there's probably more code been written in anger by more organizations that at any point in the last 30 years. And, and I think this is another reason why observability is so important, um, as you're building that code and as you're developing that customer experience, you want to be able to understand, um, where the issues are and, and, um, uh, like along the way, you don't want to wait until there's a, a big customer disaster on the day of you roll that, something to production before you start investigate. And you want to do that as you go. >>Yeah. And I think that's a kill. I do agree with you, by the way. I think the, there is a builder mentality, but it's probably right. But remember those days back in it, if you want to put our, our time machine hat on and go through the time machine is, you know, that was during the mainframe client server transition. And it was called spaghetti code. You know, it's like the monoliths were built and then it had to be supported and that became legacy. So I kind of see that happening today, where, um, people are moving to the cloud, they are building, but at some point you got to build your thing in the cloud. If I'm a company. And again, this isn't some dots trying to connect in real time. I got serverless, which is totally cool. I'm gonna have quantum has headroom for compute. >>I'm going to have, um, kind of a S a SOA service oriented architecture with web services, with observability. I'm gonna have all these modern apps great that, or run them. And I'm now I'm gonna shift them. Multiple clouds is so, you know, maybe the private cloud waves coming back, you're seeing telco clouds. You start to see these new tier. I won't say tier two clouds, but I mean, people will build their own cloud environment. There's no doubt as going to the cloud. And Steve Malania, Aviatrix kind of made this point yesterday in his analysis where he's like, he thinks private cloud will be back. I was just, it'll just be public cloud. People will build their own clouds and run them. >>Yeah. I feel well, what happens over time is, is the, the sort of line above which you would add value rises. So I kind of feel like, look, cloud is just going to the infrastructure. We can debate, you know, private cloud, public cloud. Is it a public cloud, or is it a private cloud served up by a public cloud provider? My view is, is look, all of that is, is, um, just going to be commodity, right? Um, it's going to be served up for an ever decreasing cost. And so then it's incumbent on organizations to innovate above that line. And, you know, 20 years ago, you know, we, we built our own data centers. Um, and now increasingly that, that seeming like a crazy idea. Um, and you know, now you can get almost all of your infrastructure from the cloud. The great thing is, I mean, look at observe. >>We have no people running data center operations, none, right? We have no people building a database, non, you know, we use snowflake in the cloud. It runs on AWS. We have, we have one dev ops, uh, engineer. And so all the people in the company right now, we're focused on adding value, helping people understand and analyze data, uh, above that line. And we just pay for a service level and, and look, uh, as time goes by, there's going to be more and more services and that line's going to rise. And so, you know, what, what I care about and what I think a lot of CEOs care about is are most of my resources innovating above that sort of value creation line, um, because that's what people are going to pay for in our business. And I think that's, what's going to represent you, you know, sort of value add for you, you know, organizations big and small. >>Yeah. That's a good point. I want to shift to the next topic and then we'll get into some observability questions I have for you and update on your company. Um, complexity has been a big theme. That's come out of all the conversations with analysts that have come on the cube, as you hear it with Amazon, a lot of undifferentiated, heavy lifting, being extracted away to your point about value layers and competing on value. Amazon continues to do that all great stuff, but some are saying, and we had said on the cube, yes, two days ago you put them complexity behind the curtain. It's still complexity, right? So, so complexity with the edge is highlighted. Uh, even though they got green, uh, I, um, edge core Greengrass, which has core thing, IOT core, a lot of cool things happening, but it's still not yet super easy. So complexity tends to slow things down became striction, what's your view on this? Because taming, the complexity seems to be a post COVID pandemic mandate for cloud journeys. What's your thing. >>Yeah, I totally agree. I think, I think in certainly you look organizations that have been in existence, but you know, 30, 40 years, or maybe even 10 years look at there's an amount of technical debt and complexity that you build up over time. Um, but even newer companies, um, the way that people are building modern distributed applications and in some respects is, is more complex than in days gone by, you know, microservices. Um, some of which maybe you own some of which maybe you don't, and what you've gotta be able to do is, is see the big picture, you know, w w when, when there's something in my code, but then when am I making a call out to maybe a third party microservice and, and that microservices bailing out on me, like people have got to see the big picture. And I think what hasn't been available as people have changed the architecture and their applications, there hasn't been an equivalent set of innovation or evolution in the tools that they use to manage that environment. And so you, you, you, you've got this sort of dichotomy of, uh, a better way for software developers to write code and deploy it into production microservices. But at the same time, you don't have good information and good tools to make sense of that complexity. >>That's great stuff. Jeremy Burton is here. He's the CEO of observe Inc cube, alumni, VIP cube alumni, by the way, has been on the cube every year, since the Q has been around 2010, when he took the new job as the CMO of EMC prior to being bought by Dell, Jeremy, you're a legend in the industry, certainly on as an executive and a marketer. And as an entrepreneur, um, I gotta ask you observe Inc, your company now, um, you're right in the middle of all this, you, you got a big bet going on. Could you share, in your opinion, your words, what is the big bet that you're making with observing? Uh, what are you betting on? How do you see the preferred future unfolding and where are you guys going to capture that value? >>Yes, I I'll big bat. Hey, uh, really is to take a new approach, um, in, in, in, in terms of enabling people to observe their systems, that the term observability actually goes back, uh, to a guy in control systems theory in the sixties. And then it's got quite a simple definition, which is, you know, being able to determine the, uh, I've been able to diagnose a system by the telemetry data that it emits. So let's look at the external outputs. And then based on that, can I determine the internal state of the application? And so from the get-go, we felt like observability was not about building another tool, right? We're not, you know, it's not about building another monitoring tool, a logging tool. Um, it's about analyzing data. And I, I was struck many years ago. Uh, I spent a bit of time with, with Andy McAfee, uh, from the sea sail lab at MIT. >>And he made a statement that I thought at the time was quite profound, which he said, look, everything's a matter of data. If you have enough data, you can solve any problem. And that stuck with me for a long time. And, um, you know, observe really what we do is we ingest vast quantities of telemetry data. We treat everything as events and we try and make sense of it. And the economics of the infrastructure now is such, that is you truly can ingest all the Alltel telemetry data and it's affordable, right? I mean, one of the wonderful things that Amazon has done is they've brought you, you know, very cheap, affordable storage. You can ingest all your data and keep it forever. Um, but, but now can you make sense of it? Well, you know, compute is pretty cheap these days and you've got amazing processing engines like snowflake. >>And so I was sense was that if we could allow folks to ingest all of this telemetry data process, that data and help people easily analyze that data, then they could find almost any problem that existed, uh, in their applications or in their infrastructure. So we really set out to create a data company, which I think is fundamentally different to, to really what everybody else is doing. And today we're troubleshooting distributed applications, but I think in future, we, my hope is that we can, we can help people analyze almost anything around their applications or infrastructure. >>And what's the use case problem statement that you're entering the market on? Is it just making sure microservices can be deployed as a Kubernetes? Is it managing containers? Is there a specific, um, customer adoption use case that you're focused on right now? >>Yeah, we've tried to target our ideal customer if you like has been the three or 4,000, uh, uh, SAS companies. Uh, we're, we're really focused on the U S right now, but three to 5,000 SAS companies, um, predominantly, uh, obviously running on AWS often, uh, Kubernetes infrastructure, but, you know, people who, uh, having a hard time, uh, understanding the complexity of the application that they've created, and they're having a hard time understanding, uh, the experience that their customers are having and tracking that back to root cause. So, you know, really helping those SAS companies troubleshoot their applications and having a better customer experience that's where the early customers are. And if we can do a good job in that area, I think we can, you know, over time, you know, start to take on some of the bigger companies and maybe some of the more established companies that are moving in this, this digital direction. >>Jeremy, thanks for sharing that. And I got one last set of questions for you around the industry, but before I get there, give a quick plug for observe. What are you guys looking to do hire, I mean, give a quick, uh, a PSA on what's going on with observed. >>Yeah, so we're, uh, the company is now what a rough and tough. About three years old, we got about 40 people. Uh we're well-funded by sort of Hill ventures. Uh, they were the original investors in, in snowflake. Um, and, um, yeah, I mean, we we've, we've well, more than doubled in size since the COVID lockdown began. We had about 15 people when that began. We've got almost 40 now. Um, and I would anticipate in the next year we're, we're probably going to double in size again, but, um, yeah, really the core focus in the company is, is understanding and analyzing vast quantities of data. And so anybody who is interested in, uh, that space look us up >>Mainly any areas, obviously engineering and the other areas okay. >>Near in all over. I mean, we, you know, w w w as you'll see, if you go to observing.com, we've got a pretty slick front end. Uh, we invested very early on in design and UX design. So we believe that you are, can be a differentiator. So we've got some amazing engineers on the front end. Uh, so going to can always do with the help there, but obviously, um, you know, there's a data processing platform here as well. Um, we, uh, we do run on top of snowflake. We, we do have a number of folks here who are very familiar, uh, you know, with the snowflake database and, and how to write efficiency equals. So, so front and backend. Um, we very soon, I think we'll be starting to expand the sales team. Um, we're really starting to get our initial set of customers and the feedback loop rule in rolling into engineering. And my hope would be, you know, probably early part of next year, we re we really start to nail the product market fit. Um, and we've got a huge release coming in the early part of next year where that the metrics and alerting functionality will be in the product. So, yeah, it's, it's sort of all systems go right now. >>Congratulations. Love to see the entrepreneurial journey. We'll keep an eye out for you and you're in a hot space. So we'll be riding, you'll be riding that wave, uh, question for you on the, um, just kind of the industry, uh, you're in the heart of Silicon Valley. Like I am honestly, I'm fellow Alto, you're up in the Hillsborough area. Um, I think you're in Hillsborough, right? That's where you, where you live. Um, San Francisco, the Valley, the pandemic pretty hard hit right now. People are sheltering in place, but still a lot of activity. Um, what are you hearing in, um, in, in the VC circles, startup circles, as everyone looks at coming out of the pandemic and you look at Amazon and you look at what snowflake has done. I mean, snowflake was built on top of Amazon competing against Redshift. Um, okay. They were hugely successful at doing that. So there's kind of this new playbook emerging. What are, what are people talking about? What's the scuttlebutt. >>Yeah. I mean, clearly TAC has done very well throughout what has been, you know, like just a terrible environment. Um, I think both kind of socially and economically, and I think what's going on in the stock market right now is probably not reflective of the, of the economic situation. And I think a lot of the indices are dominated by tech companies. So you, if you're not careful, you can get a little bit of a false read. Um, but look, what is undisputed is, is that the world is going to become more digital, more tech centric than, than less. Um, so I think there is a very, very bright future, you know, for tech, um, that there is certainly plenty of VC money, um, available. Um, you know, that is not really changed materially in the last year. Um, so if you have a good idea, if you're on one of these major trends, I think that there is a very good chance that you can get the company funded. >>Um, and you know, our, our expectation is that, you know, next year, obviously industries are going to return to work that have been dominant maybe for the last six, nine months. And so some parts of the economy should pick up again, but I would also tell you, I think certain, uh, sort of habits are not going to die. I mean, I think more things are going to be done online and we've gotten used to that way of working and, and you know, what, not, some of it is measurable. I don't know about cocktails over zoom, but working with customers, um, in some respects is easier because they're not traveling, we're not traveling. So we both have more time. Uh, it's sometimes easy to get meetings with people that you would never get. Now. Now, can you do an efficient sales process, education proof of concept? You know, those processes maybe have to grow up a little bit to be taken online, but I think the certain parts of the last, maybe six to nine months that we don't want to throw away and go back to the way we were doing it, because I think, you know, maybe this way of doing it is, is more efficient. >>What do you think about the, uh, entrepreneurial journeys out there? Obviously, um, Amazon we're here covering re-invent is really kind of, you know, building a massive compute engine. They've got higher level services and, you know, I've been speculating for years. I think snowflake is the first kind of big sign. That points to kind of what I said five years ago, which is there's going to be an opportunity for these other clouds as specialty clouds. I called them might be the wrong word, but snowflake basically built on top of Amazon, you know, most valuable company ever on wall street, uh, IPO on someone else's cloud. So is that a playbook? I mean, is that a move? I mean, this is kind of like a new thing. >>Yeah. I mean, that's, I mean, I, I feel like on databases, I've got a lot of history on management, Oracle almost 10 years. And you know, what snowflake does they did was they, they rearchitected the database explicitly for the cloud. I mean, you can run Oracle on the cloud, but, but it, but it doesn't do things the way that snowflake does it. Right. I mean, snowflake uses commodity storage. It uses S3 it's elastic. And so when you're not using it, you're not paying it. And these things sound very simple and very obvious now, which is I think what, what, what the genius of the founders, you know, Ben Warren and Tre, uh, work, and, and I think there will be other costs, you know, categories of infrastructure that will get rearchitected and reinvented for the cloud. And, you know, I've got equally big opportunities. Um, and so, yeah, I mean, I think the model, I believe firmly that the model is if you're a startup, you don't need to waste a lot of time, like reinventing the wheel on data center, infrastructure and databases, and a lot of the services that you would use to construct an application. >>You, you, you can start, you know, if, if the building that you're trying to build is like 12 floors, you can start at the eighth or ninth floor. Um, you know, I've, I've got like what three or 400 quality engineers at snowflake that are building our database. I don't, I don't need to do that. I can just piggyback on top of what they've done and add value. And, you know, the, the, the beautiful thing, you know, now, if you're a business out there thinking of, of, of, of becoming digital and reinventing yourself, or you're a startup just getting going, there's a lot of stuff you just don't have to build anymore. You just don't even have to think about it. >>Yeah. This is the new program of bull internet. It's internet, truly 2.0 or 3.0, whatever 4.0, a complete reset of online. And I think the pandemic, as you pointed out on many cube interviews and Andy Jassy send his keynote is on full display right now. And I think the smart money and smart entrepreneurs are going to see the opportunities. Okay. >>Yeah. It comes back to ideas and a great, I mean, I've always been a product person. Um, but look at great idea, a great product idea and a great product idea that, that capitalizes on the big trends in the industry. I think there's always going to be funding for those kinds of things. I don't know a lot about the consumer world I've always worked in, in B2B, but, um, you know, the kind of things that you're going to be able to do in future. I mean, think about it. If storage is essentially free and compute is essentially free. Just imagine what you could do, right. Jeremy, >>This is the new consumer. Get out. Let's understand that. Finally, B2B is the new consumer enterprise is hot. I was, again, it was riffing on this all week. All the things going on in enterprise is complex is now the new consumers now all connected. It's all one thing. The consumerization of it, the condition of computing has happened. It's going on. So you're a leader. Thank you for coming on. Great to see you as always, um, say hi to your family and stay safe. >>Yeah, you too. Thanks for the invite. Always, always a pleasure. >>Jeremy Burton breaking down the analysis of day two of week three of re-invent coverage. I'm John furry with the cube virtual. We're not in person anymore. Virtualization has allowed us to do more interviews over 110 interviews so far for re-invent and tomorrow, Thursday at two o'clock, Andy Jassy will spend 30 minutes with me here on the cube, looking back at re-invent the highs, the lows, and what's next for Amazon web services. I'm chef Aria. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios where we have a quarantine crew and we're doing remote interviews with thought leaders in the industry and people who have been around the block, beat it through three industry cycles but also can share their perspectives on the COVID-19 situation that we're in, the challenges and the opportunities. And I have with me, Jeremy Burton, a good friend of theCUBE. Have been a CUBE alumni now for 10 years, now the CEO of Observe, it's a stealth startup. I got a little taste of it, it's a Cloud thing. It's going to be part of this whole new guard. Jeremy, great to see you. You're sheltering in place, we're sheltering in the studio. Thanks for joining me. >> No, thanks for the offer. I mean, it's funny these days I welcome chance to actually speak to somebody and particularly, somebody that's not at Observe. So this is a rare treat in the last three weeks. >> Telling the wife and kids, "Hey, I'm going to go talk to theCUBE guy." So you know, I'm going to have some fun for a while. Look, I want to just have a candid fun conversation 'cause I think one of the things that's interesting to me in one, things that we're spending a lot of time doing media on is getting the word out about some of the things that are going on. People do have anxiety, they're sheltering in place for the folks that've been in the tech industry, working at home and being virtual has been part of the thing. It's not a big thing but from some of the people it's like a first time thing. And also it's also highlighting a disruption that kind of is off the books if you will, the classic continuous operations and disaster recovery was also confined to power outages or hurricanes or all those things that we people are protected against. But this is just a surge of the herd of the people going home. It's causing an at scale problem and showing these challenges, but there's also opportunities. What's your take on this? How do you see this evolving? What's your view of the current situation and some of the comments? >> Yeah, I think for most of us we're in a little bit unchartered territory. I don't really know a whole lot about medicine or the details of the virus or how pandemics happen. But we obviously have to, we deal with the consequences of it. And so I think right now although, I think it's a fairly bad situation for a lot of people, just having been through a couple of recessions where we all went through 9/11. The world does turn around and you come out the other side. And so the key thing is you start like a very much as a cliche, but you've got to live in the moment, "What can I do right now? "What can I affect right now? "How can I make sure that what I'm working on "is a value for when we come out the other side "and when more curveballs come along?" I think you've got a reason about that with the best information you have at the time. So I almost feel like you very much, you've got to just live solid like day to day, week to week, listen to the data and adapt based on that. But it's certainly starting to reinvent how work is done. I think we've all worked from home at some point. We've all worked using our equipment at home. But the prospect of working that way for months on end and it maybe been the new way of working, is a whole new ballgame. So I'm a big believer that this will fundamentally change the way we work. I don't think we're going to go 100% back to the way that we were, and there's going to be quite a lot of readjustments, and I think in that world, there's going to be some new companies come along that are big winners. And by definition, there's going to be some big losers as well. >> Well, people who know theCUBE know that I'm a big fan of you as an executive. I've seen the vision, you have also great technical shops and product shops, but also a good operational view. You've always been a fan of digital. And I think if you look at video conferencing, for instance, WebEx as a Cisco thing, great bulletproof of the enterprise, but Zoom has come across the scene. I've never seen so many Zoom parties. I did one with my family that they actually liked it. They were having fun. We had cocktails raising the wineglasses up. So people are Zooming their CUBE in, we're doing interviews. So video now is not just a corporate thing. You're seeing the engagement of digital taking on a new life and this is a whole new roles and responsibilities that we might reimagine how people do their business because with the events being canceled that are going on, whether they're concerts or just industry or tech events or any event, that physical space is gone, now it's going to digital. So how do you replicate the business value or personal value from physical face to face to digital? It's a whole new venue, there's new roles. It's complicated, it's a complex system. What's your thought on that? >> It is though, but what I have been pleasantly surprised by, I'd love it going in the office. I love the engagement with people and hanging out in the office. And so I was not really a big fan of remote working and virtually working, but I have to say, not only now where we virtually work in and we do the Zoom meetings and that's all well and good. It's a big cultural thing with at Observe to do a game night. And so we thought, "Well, why can't we do a virtual game night "and lending some trade secrets here? "But our favorite game was Secret Hitler." >> Yeah, that's a great game. One of my family's favorite. >> Turns out there's an online Secret Hitler. And you know what? The first time we played it, one of the nice thing is we've got less than 20 people in the company. So you got 12 or 14 people online. It's actually manageable. But I have to say, I'm almost embarrassed to say, it was almost as good sitting there with a drink playing virtual Secret Hitler as it was sitting around the desk. And so now I'm thinking when we go back to work, maybe we don't need to leave our desks and go have a drink together. We can just sit there on Zoom and play the secret Hitler online. Then you start looking around, "Well, what are the games can I play online?" Not like for one or two players or five players and I'm not talking about playing kind of Halo or something like that, but good collaborative games for tens of people to play at once. There's not as many as you think. So I feel like the social aspect of it, I mean, online gaming I think is huge. But even the video conferencing software, you would have thought that we would be done WebEx by now, right? I mean Skype and WebEx, we've had those for years, right? And so how does Zoom, which does guess what, video conferencing come along and start to clear up. And Zoom is not perfect by the way, but this is almost the crisis that they needed to make a fabulous business. I do believe as we start to come out the other side, I think there's going to be much, much investment in the VC world, on improving that remote work experience Because as much as me and you can talk to a video session, we can't collaborate and work together. The tools for doing that, I think still are relatively poor. >> I think you're onto something. Zoom by the way, had 10 million active dailies in December. This month was 200 million rocket ship. They got 90,000 universities. They essentially made some good moves. I think that's going to be good, but you bring up a good point about these new kinds of opportunities that are going to come out the other side, which is, think about Secret Hitler. For the folks who don't know, is a great game that you play with people, in your family or in friend group like Cards Against Me. And if you know that game, it's a similar thing concept, but you have different games. It's really fun, you should get it. Check it out online. But think about that online gaming or just what engagement means socially. I mean the old web days or just like a couple of months ago was individual engagement, "Did you like my tweet? "Did you like my Facebook post?" You're getting at something that's little bit more of a social organizational construct of group engagement, intimacy. >> Right, and the thing is we would do game night once a month and we'd get videos in and get the teamed together. Once a month was good when everybody had their own life to deal with. Now people are craving like, "Hey can we do this like every week?" And I wouldn't be surprised if the frequency increases from that, but I think that just almost speaks to human beings and that we crave social interaction. And even though most of the people at Observe are engineers and by definition should not enjoy as much social interaction, they do. They love it, right? And to me, that gaming and social direction, that's part of work. And so you have to have a virtual environment that can reproduce that. >> I mean, it's very interesting to see some of the entrepreneurial exercises or pitches that come out of this because I think it's going to be a Renaissance, it's not Renaissance 'cause it's going to come back. It's always been there. But the new kind of entrepreneurial products coming out are going to address these things. And the question I want to ask you, 'cause you've been on the big company, you've done extremely well in your career, than you get back down to your roots to doing startup, you're launching, you haven't yet launched. So you got hit right here, you're working at home sheltering in place. I was talking to a couple of VC buddies, venture capitalists, and they're saying, "I'm reading books and I'm doing research "but I really can't meet people." So their work has changed. How do you see the investment community reacting to this? Certainly valuations might come down. Obviously, their limited partners are being hit with the stock market. You're seeing a disruption. What do you see going on in the VC world around this cold hard time? >> I mean certainly all VCs are not created equal. So I think there's going to be different perspectives based on the background of the DNA of the VC involved. I think certainly at Observe, I feel very fortunate that we've got a sort of Hill Ventures. So these guys were the investors behind Snowflake and behind Pure Storage and many other good companies but they're very longterm investors and their advice to me has been, "Well look, "some of the most innovative times if you like, "have been during and after a major crisis. "And so if you make short term decisions "to get you through those crisis, "they're all terrible but they don't last forever "and there will be another side. "And so make good business decisions "and good investment decisions through this "because there will be winners "that emerge on the other side." And that's really what I try and get the team focused on is, "Guys for now, we're sort of hunkered down "and it feels bad, "but we're probably more privileged than most. "And we have an opportunity maybe on the other side, "to take advantage, we don't have a revenue stream, "we don't have existing customers. "We can sort of take this Greenfield business "that we've got and you go on the offensive "when things returned to assemblance of normal." So The Hill had been fantastic. And I would hope that most VCs retain that perspective, which is if it was a good company three weeks ago, it's probably still a good company today. And the best way to create value is to sort of empower I think the CEOs and executive teams to make the right sort of longer term decisions. Try and capitalize when you come out the other side because there will be losers as well. And I think the wrong decisions now can put you on the losing end of that equation in three, four, five months time. >> Yeah, that's a good point. If you are a good company just a few months ago or even weeks ago or a year ago, you're still a good company. That's really going to be a tell sign to what happens in some of these companies. If I got to ask you a more focused question on this whole, which side of the street are you on? Are you riding the wave or are you going to get taken away and washed away with it? Because there are bets and well, I want to get into Observe in a minute, but you mentioned Snowflake there in the Cloud wave. Obviously, that's pretty bullish. We're still bullish on that. Obviously, it's going to be game changer. But is there a tell sign for the kind of bets that those good management teams need to make now? Because I agree with you, when the Dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and really 2004 kicked back up again. 2008, we saw that post and a lot of great companies were created. So what's your advice on which side of history do you need to be on here? I'll say Cloud is one. What is your view on that? >> Yeah, I mean we felt for many years, it's not just since I went to the startup, but I am a huge believer in this transition to digital businesses. Frictionless interactions, automation, yes, obviously people are required to run a business, but if you could run a business remotely, or the businesses automated in a way such that it doesn't require hands-on operation, then that's a beautiful thing. And my belief is that, this terrible situation will force people to really think seriously about what the digital business looks like. If you don't have one, then that you may not be able to be in business in a year, two, three years down the line, right? There'll be some carryover, but I think the smart businesses are going to be able to function in an environment such as this. >> Yeah, I think that's great. >> That's going to be playing on everybody's minds. Now more than ever, I think that the digital business is a necessity. >> Yeah, I was just talking to a colleague and we were just talking about how all of the events got canceled and you've had the history running some of those best events ever in the industry at EMC. And we participated in those and you know your staff when it comes to events, there's economic value in these physical events as a venue, Science Convention Center in Moscone here in San Francisco. I mean there's a lot of things that go on, a lot of decision-making that's been standardized over the years and there's an economic value that comes out of those events. Now that's gone, and then these little digital teams, some companies have like five people, two people, sometimes maybe if you're lucky you have 10 or more or a department. And then you've got demand generation. All these guys are being told now, "You have to make up for the shortfall "in not just leads but value." And this just has been a big burden for some of my friends out there who are like, "Wait a minute, you want to take that and move it over here?" It's been kind of a challenge. What is your view on this? Because a lot of people are trying to figure this particular problem out on how to make digital work today and have some extensibility and get success. What's your take? >> Well, I'm still a huge believer I mean, whereas sort of like we just saw digital marketing content is still very much King, right? If you can produce a compelling piece of content online, TV quality with a depth of knowledge that you're going to attract an audience, now can you then make that experience interactive? Can you engage the audience in a deeper way? Yeah, you're probably not going to have something which lasts for a full day or for three days online, but I think it's really going to force the creativity on the content side to another level, right? It can't just be talking heads and PowerPoint pictures. So that rethinking from first principles, what an online conference or an online experience actually looks like in a way that it engages the people who are watching. To me, those folks are going to go do very, very well. And the economics, I know how much it costs to put on a conference for 10 or 15,000 people. And by the way, I know how much it costs to put on a virtual event for 10 or 15,000 people. And the economics are astounding in that difference. Now if you're physically somewhere, you can feel things that you can't feel online. Come on though, this is a problem that requires some innovation to solve, right? We've talked about virtual reality and augmented reality, but it's still pretty clunky and relegated to sort of niche use cases and bad games. But at some point, that technology has to reach the point where it can be useful and engage in a new. You can approximate to that physical experience. But I think that is going to be critical but many businesses even beyond sort of marketing and virtual events and that kind of thing, many businesses are just going to have to reinvent how they engage and interact with their customers and the automation of their operations and how do you get by when you don't have as many people physically in an office or operating machines? Everybody's going to have to think through that. >> Yeah, I think that's great insight and that's going to be a great clip that I'll share and I think that's going to be inspirational for the folks trying to solve that problem. The things that we're focused in on, as you know, and this is something that we're doing a lot of work on, is the engagement with groups and you mentioned The Secret Hitler as the game, they're going to see some new clever things go on. And I think the group dynamic and having people in whether it's virtual and physical spaces exchanging credible things, ideas or jokes or whatever is going to be a new kind of dynamic. >> Yeah. >> Because that's going to have to fill the void. >> Yeah, I mean I've got a small company so we can play these individual games, but just think about some of these board type games where I want to have three teams and I want to divide the company up into three. The logistics of actually figuring that out is ridiculous and it shouldn't be that way, right? And so these are basics of human social interactions. We want to play a game together, we want to divide up into teams. But that sounds like a relatively trivial thing, but try and find the number of games available that allow you to easily do that and each team interaction independently of the others, it's almost impossible. >> It's going to be fun to watch and I think and I hope we're going to learn. Well, thanks for the device. Let's get back to your startup. Let's get a plug in for that, I want to get the plug in. I've seen you in stealth so you can't really go into great detail, but you have been talking to customers. You are obviously related, that's related to Snowflake, but you were going to do some things with Snowflake. You're in the Cloud. Can you just take a minute to give a plug for what you guys are doing for the people who want to know what you guys are leaning towards in terms of the value proposition? >> Yeah well, when I look back in my career, one of the times I enjoyed the most was the time at Oracle and working with data. And I've been fortunate enough for the last four and a half years or so to be on the board of Snowflake. Couple of ex Oracle guys, Benoit and Thierry founded the company and they've reinvented the database. And I felt like I've sat for 20 years looking for the second coming of the database and we all were sort of had fake thinking it was Hadoop. And turns out it wasn't. But I think Snowflake and the separation of storage and compute that allows them to sort of scale and have a usage-based pricing model, I just think is absolutely revolutionary and I think it's going to be one of the great companies of the new era. And so when I was there when I looked at Observe, really the thesis was that using a platform like Snowflake, you could potentially reason about unstructured log data. It's all like Splunk. You could reason about time series data, a little bit like Datadog or tracing data like AppDynamics or in fact any data, you could reason about it together. And today, if you look at the world, it's like if you want to do something with logs, you go get one product. If you want to do something with relational data, you get another, if you want to do time series data, you get another, you want to do tracing, you get an APM tool. And nobody has the big picture, right? Everybody's got their own little piece of data and their own perspective on where the issue might be in your company. But nobody really knows and it's usually put together in the brain of, of the smartest guy in the room. And so I thought it was quite simple. At Snowflake, you've got this commercial database that can do instruction data and time series data and relational data. And what if we could collect all data within an organization together, structure it, relate it, and then imagine what you could find out about your infrastructure, your applications, your business? >> Sort of unification? Does it have like unification kind of concept for users or IT? >> Yeah, I think the emerging category would be observability but it really is a collapsing of log analytics, metrics monitoring and tracing into this new category of observability. We don't necessarily just view that though as sort of data coming out of Kubernetes clusters or out of AWS or wherever. We actually could ingest security data. We could ingest data from people surfing using your app or surfing your website. We could take logs coming out of machines on a factory floor. So the way we built the product, it can be literally any kind of data. And we try and structure it and relate it and make sense of it and then make it very easy for people to navigate through it and determine issues and problems. So yeah, we're pretty excited about it. And like I said, we could not have built this even a couple of years ago because I don't think Snowflake would have been there. And in fact, that was one of the big risks when we started the company. Can we build it on Snowflake? And so here we are two years later and we think we can. Well, we're sure we can do it. >> Yeah, they've had a good run too. I mean, look at the growth of Snowflake. >> Yeah, it's crazy. I've never seen anything like it and in the last 20 years and B2B, I've never seen anything like it. So just like I felt in the mid 90s when I was at Oracle, people were making decisions to go with Oracle and then saying, "Hey, help me get all of my other data in that, "my mainframe data, my this, my that." I think Snowflake are going to go through the same sort of growth phase and hopefully with Observe, we can be like, "Hey, if you want to put "your unstructured data or time series data, "we can help you do that very easily." >> Well, this is exactly the current wave that you want to be on the right side of because like you said, just a year or so ago or a couple of years ago, it wasn't available. This is kind of the new capabilities. >> Yeah, I feel like there's going to be a lot of businesses, grow ridiculously. You talked about the Zoom numbers. These are ridiculous growth numbers and there are going to be companies come out the other side that take advantage of the new environment. And as they're growing, as they're scaling, as they build these new microservice-based applications, they're going to run into issues and we hope at least that it's products with our kind of architecture, that's going to be able to help these fast-growing businesses. So yeah, as I said, we're somewhat fortunate in that we don't have a product yet, but certainly on the other side of this, we think there's going to be plenty of opportunity to help a few folks. >> We know you got to do a launch and we're looking forward to hearing more and getting the briefing, and looking forward to hearing more about it when you go public. And yeah, thanks for coming on and taking the time today. I know you got your daughter's birthday party there and you're going to have some celebration. Thank you for sharing the insights on your vision of digital. I thought that was very compelling and great to see you and stay safe. >> Great to see you. Yeah, my 18-year-old, it's got a birthday party and she like always would worry, "What if no one shows up?" Well, today she knows no one's going to show up. >> Except for her family, yeah. >> It's going to be down in the family, yeah. So thanks for that and you guys stay safe and been great the last 10 years knowing theCUBE been that long but hopefully, here is the next 10 years after this current situation is over. >> Yeah, looking forward to it, it's going to be a lot of fun rye and get the content out there. And again, thanks for coming on during this important time and sharing your insights and also just making some entertainment here. We're getting some conversations so people can fill the void and play some games and have some fun. Jeremy, thanks. Great to see you. Jeremy Burton, senior executive in the industry. I've known him for years, been a CUBE alumni since theCUBE was formed. Now the CEO of Observe, sharing his insights on the industry but more importantly, how to be successful, how to come out the other side. Don't be too optimistic. Be focused on today and get through it. That's his advice. Of course, we're theCUBE bringing you all the data as we can now with remote interviews during this time. Thanks for watching, I'm John furrier. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios where we have a quarantine crew and we're doing remote interviews with thought leaders in the industry and people who have been around the block, beat it through three industry cycles but also can share their perspectives on the COVID-19 situation that we're in, the challenges and the opportunities. And I have with me, Jeremy Burton, a good friend of theCUBE. Have been a CUBE alumni now for 10 years, now the CEO of Observe, it's a stealth startup. I got a little taste of it, it's a Cloud thing. It's going to be part of this whole new guard. Jeremy, great to see you. You're sheltering in place, we're sheltering in the studio. Thanks for joining me. >> No, thanks for the offer. I mean, it's funny these days I welcome chance to actually speak to somebody and particularly, somebody that's not at Observe. So this is a rare treat in the last three weeks. >> Telling the wife and kids, "Hey, I'm going to go talk to theCUBE guy." So you know, I'm going to have some fun for a while. Look, I want to just have a candid fun conversation 'cause I think one of the things that's interesting to me in one, things that we're spending a lot of time doing media on is getting the word out about some of the things that are going on. People do have anxiety, they're sheltering in place for the folks that've been in the tech industry, working at home and being virtual has been part of the thing. It's not a big thing but from some of the people it's like a first time thing. And also it's also highlighting a disruption that kind of is off the books if you will, the classic continuous operations and disaster recovery was also confined to power outages or hurricanes or all those things that we people are protected against. But this is just a surge of the herd of the people going home. It's causing an at scale problem and showing these challenges, but there's also opportunities. What's your take on this? How do you see this evolving? What's your view of the current situation and some of the comments? >> Yeah, I think for most of us we're in a little bit unchartered territory. I don't really know a whole lot about medicine or the details of the virus or how pandemics happen. But we obviously have to, we deal with the consequences of it. And so I think right now although, I think it's a fairly bad situation for a lot of people, just having been through a couple of recessions where we all went through 9/11. The world does turn around and you come out the other side. And so the key thing is you start like a very much as a cliche, but you've got to live in the moment, "What can I do right now? "What can I affect right now? "How can I make sure that what I'm working on "is a value for when we come out the other side "and when more curveballs come along?" I think you've got a reason about that with the best information you have at the time. So I almost feel like you very much, you've got to just live solid like day to day, week to week, listen to the data and adapt based on that. But it's certainly starting to reinvent how work is done. I think we've all worked from home at some point. We've all worked using our equipment at home. But the prospect of working that way for months on end and it maybe been the new way of working, is a whole new ballgame. So I'm a big believer that this will fundamentally change the way we work. I don't think we're going to go 100% back to the way that we were, and there's going to be quite a lot of readjustments, and I think in that world, there's going to be some new companies come along that are big winners. And by definition, there's going to be some big losers as well. >> Well, people who know theCUBE know that I'm a big fan of you as an executive. I've seen the vision, you have also great technical shops and product shops, but also a good operational view. You've always been a fan of digital. And I think if you look at video conferencing, for instance, WebEx as a Cisco thing, great bulletproof of the enterprise, but Zoom has come across the scene. I've never seen so many Zoom parties. I did one with my family that they actually liked it. They were having fun. We had cocktails raising the wineglasses up. So people are Zooming their CUBE in, we're doing interviews. So video now is not just a corporate thing. You're seeing the engagement of digital taking on a new life and this is a whole new roles and responsibilities that we might reimagine how people do their business because with the events being canceled that are going on, whether they're concerts or just industry or tech events or any event, that physical space is gone, now it's going to digital. So how do you replicate the business value or personal value from physical face to face to digital? It's a whole new venue, there's new roles. It's complicated, it's a complex system. What's your thought on that? >> It is though, but what I have been pleasantly surprised by, I'd love it going in the office. I love the engagement with people and hanging out in the office. And so I was not really a big fan of remote working and virtually working, but I have to say, not only now where we virtually work in and we do the Zoom meetings and that's all well and good. It's a big cultural thing with at Observe to do a game night. And so we thought, "Well, why can't we do a virtual game night "and lending some trade secrets here? "But our favorite game was Secret Hitler." >> Yeah, that's a great game. One of my family's favorite. >> Turns out there's an online Secret Hitler. And you know what? The first time we played it, one of the nice thing is we've got less than 20 people in the company. So you got 12 or 14 people online. It's actually manageable. But I have to say, I'm almost embarrassed to say, it was almost as good sitting there with a drink playing virtual Secret Hitler as it was sitting around the desk. And so now I'm thinking when we go back to work, maybe we don't need to leave our desks and go have a drink together. We can just sit there on Zoom and play the secret Hitler online. Then you start looking around, "Well, what are the games can I play online?" Not like for one or two players or five players and I'm not talking about playing kind of Halo or something like that, but good collaborative games for tens of people to play at once. There's not as many as you think. So I feel like the social aspect of it, I mean, online gaming I think is huge. But even the video conferencing software, you would have thought that we would be done WebEx by now, right? I mean Skype and WebEx, we've had those for years, right? And so how does Zoom, which does guess what, video conferencing come along and start to clear up. And Zoom is not perfect by the way, but this is almost the crisis that they needed to make a fabulous business. I do believe as we start to come out the other side, I think there's going to be much, much investment in the VC world, on improving that remote work experience Because as much as me and you can talk to a video session, we can't collaborate and work together. The tools for doing that, I think still are relatively poor. >> I think you're onto something. Zoom by the way, had 10 million active dailies in December. This month was 200 million rocket ship. They got 90,000 universities. They essentially made some good moves. I think that's going to be good, but you bring up a good point about these new kinds of opportunities that are going to come out the other side, which is, think about Secret Hitler. For the folks who don't know, is a great game that you play with people, in your family or in friend group like Cards Against Me. And if you know that game, it's a similar thing concept, but you have different games. It's really fun, you should get it. Check it out online. But think about that online gaming or just what engagement means socially. I mean the old web days or just like a couple of months ago was individual engagement, "Did you like my tweet? "Did you like my Facebook post?" You're getting at something that's little bit more of a social organizational construct of group engagement, intimacy. >> Right, and the thing is we would do game night once a month and we'd get videos in and get the teamed together. Once a month was good when everybody had their own life to deal with. Now people are craving like, "Hey can we do this like every week?" And I wouldn't be surprised if the frequency increases from that, but I think that just almost speaks to human beings and that we crave social interaction. And even though most of the people at Observe are engineers and by definition should not enjoy as much social interaction, they do. They love it, right? And to me, that gaming and social direction, that's part of work. And so you have to have a virtual environment that can reproduce that. >> I mean, it's very interesting to see some of the entrepreneurial exercises or pitches that come out of this because I think it's going to be a Renaissance, it's not Renaissance 'cause it's going to come back. It's always been there. But the new kind of entrepreneurial products coming out are going to address these things. And the question I want to ask you, 'cause you've been on the big company, you've done extremely well in your career, than you get back down to your roots to doing startup, you're launching, you haven't yet launched. So you got hit right here, you're working at home sheltering in place. I was talking to a couple of VC buddies, venture capitalists, and they're saying, "I'm reading books and I'm doing research "but I really can't meet people." So their work has changed. How do you see the investment community reacting to this? Certainly valuations might come down. Obviously, their limited partners are being hit with the stock market. You're seeing a disruption. What do you see going on in the VC world around this cold hard time? >> I mean certainly all VCs are not created equal. So I think there's going to be different perspectives based on the background of the DNA of the VC involved. I think certainly at Observe, I feel very fortunate that we've got a sort of Hill Ventures. So these guys were the investors behind Snowflake and behind Pure Storage and many other good companies but they're very longterm investors and their advice to me has been, "Well look, "some of the most innovative times if you like, "have been during and after a major crisis. "And so if you make short term decisions "to get you through those crisis, "they're all terrible but they don't last forever "and there will be another side. "And so make good business decisions "and good investment decisions through this "because there will be winners "that emerge on the other side." And that's really what I try and get the team focused on is, "Guys for now, we're sort of hunkered down "and it feels bad, "but we're probably more privileged than most. "And we have an opportunity maybe on the other side, "to take advantage, we don't have a revenue stream, "we don't have existing customers. "We can sort of take this Greenfield business "that we've got and you go on the offensive "when things returned to assemblance of normal." So The Hill had been fantastic. And I would hope that most VCs retain that perspective, which is if it was a good company three weeks ago, it's probably still a good company today. And the best way to create value is to sort of empower I think the CEOs and executive teams to make the right sort of longer term decisions. Try and capitalize when you come out the other side because there will be losers as well. And I think the wrong decisions now can put you on the losing end of that equation in three, four, five months time. >> Yeah, that's a good point. If you are a good company just a few months ago or even weeks ago or a year ago, you're still a good company. That's really going to be a tell sign to what happens in some of these companies. If I got to ask you a more focused question on this whole, which side of the street are you on? Are you riding the wave or are you going to get taken away and washed away with it? Because there are bets and well, I want to get into Observe in a minute, but you mentioned Snowflake there in the Cloud wave. Obviously, that's pretty bullish. We're still bullish on that. Obviously, it's going to be game changer. But is there a tell sign for the kind of bets that those good management teams need to make now? Because I agree with you, when the Dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and really 2004 kicked back up again. 2008, we saw that post and a lot of great companies were created. So what's your advice on which side of history do you need to be on here? I'll say Cloud is one. What is your view on that? >> Yeah, I mean we felt for many years, it's not just since I went to the startup, but I am a huge believer in this transition to digital businesses. Frictionless interactions, automation, yes, obviously people are required to run a business, but if you could run a business remotely, or the businesses automated in a way such that it doesn't require hands-on operation, then that's a beautiful thing. And my belief is that, this terrible situation will force people to really think seriously about what the digital business looks like. If you don't have one, then that you may not be able to be in business in a year, two, three years down the line, right? There'll be some carryover, but I think the smart businesses are going to be able to function in an environment such as this. >> Yeah, I think that's great. >> That's going to be playing on everybody's minds. Now more than ever, I think that the digital business is a necessity. >> Yeah, I was just talking to a colleague and we were just talking about how all of the events got canceled and you've had the history running some of those best events ever in the industry at EMC. And we participated in those and you know your staff when it comes to events, there's economic value in these physical events as a venue, Science Convention Center in Moscone here in San Francisco. I mean there's a lot of things that go on, a lot of decision-making that's been standardized over the years and there's an economic value that comes out of those events. Now that's gone, and then these little digital teams, some companies have like five people, two people, sometimes maybe if you're lucky you have 10 or more or a department. And then you've got demand generation. All these guys are being told now, "You have to make up for the shortfall "in not just leads but value." And this just has been a big burden for some of my friends out there who are like, "Wait a minute, you want to take that and move it over here?" It's been kind of a challenge. What is your view on this? Because a lot of people are trying to figure this particular problem out on how to make digital work today and have some extensibility and get success. What's your take? >> Well, I'm still a huge believer I mean, whereas sort of like we just saw digital marketing content is still very much King, right? If you can produce a compelling piece of content online, TV quality with a depth of knowledge that you're going to attract an audience, now can you then make that experience interactive? Can you engage the audience in a deeper way? Yeah, you're probably not going to have something which lasts for a full day or for three days online, but I think it's really going to force the creativity on the content side to another level, right? It can't just be talking heads and PowerPoint pictures. So that rethinking from first principles, what an online conference or an online experience actually looks like in a way that it engages the people who are watching. To me, those folks are going to go do very, very well. And the economics, I know how much it costs to put on a conference for 10 or 15,000 people. And by the way, I know how much it costs to put on a virtual event for 10 or 15,000 people. And the economics are astounding in that difference. Now if you're physically somewhere, you can feel things that you can't feel online. Come on though, this is a problem that requires some innovation to solve, right? We've talked about virtual reality and augmented reality, but it's still pretty clunky and relegated to sort of niche use cases and bad games. But at some point, that technology has to reach the point where it can be useful and engage in a new. You can approximate to that physical experience. But I think that is going to be critical but many businesses even beyond sort of marketing and virtual events and that kind of thing, many businesses are just going to have to reinvent how they engage and interact with their customers and the automation of their operations and how do you get by when you don't have as many people physically in an office or operating machines? Everybody's going to have to think through that. >> Yeah, I think that's great insight and that's going to be a great clip that I'll share and I think that's going to be inspirational for the folks trying to solve that problem. The things that we're focused in on, as you know, and this is something that we're doing a lot of work on, is the engagement with groups and you mentioned The Secret Hitler as the game, they're going to see some new clever things go on. And I think the group dynamic and having people in whether it's virtual and physical spaces exchanging credible things, ideas or jokes or whatever is going to be a new kind of dynamic. >> Yeah. >> Because that's going to have to fill the void. >> Yeah, I mean I've got a small company so we can play these individual games, but just think about some of these board type games where I want to have three teams and I want to divide the company up into three. The logistics of actually figuring that out is ridiculous and it shouldn't be that way, right? And so these are basics of human social interactions. We want to play a game together, we want to divide up into teams. But that sounds like a relatively trivial thing, but try and find the number of games available that allow you to easily do that and each team interaction independently of the others, it's almost impossible. >> It's going to be fun to watch and I think and I hope we're going to learn. Well, thanks for the device. Let's get back to your startup. Let's get a plug in for that, I want to get the plug in. I've seen you in stealth so you can't really go into great detail, but you have been talking to customers. You are obviously related, that's related to Snowflake, but you were going to do some things with Snowflake. You're in the Cloud. Can you just take a minute to give a plug for what you guys are doing for the people who want to know what you guys are leaning towards in terms of the value proposition? >> Yeah well, when I look back in my career, one of the times I enjoyed the most was the time at Oracle and working with data. And I've been fortunate enough for the last four and a half years or so to be on the board of Snowflake. Couple of ex Oracle guys, Benoit and Thierry founded the company and they've reinvented the database. And I felt like I've sat for 20 years looking for the second coming of the database and we all were sort of had fake thinking it was Hadoop. And turns out it wasn't. But I think Snowflake and the separation of storage and compute that allows them to sort of scale and have a usage-based pricing model, I just think is absolutely revolutionary and I think it's going to be one of the great companies of the new era. And so when I was there when I looked at Observe, really the thesis was that using a platform like Snowflake, you could potentially reason about unstructured log data. It's all like Splunk. You could reason about time series data, a little bit like Datadog or tracing data like AppDynamics or in fact any data, you could reason about it together. And today, if you look at the world, it's like if you want to do something with logs, you go get one product. If you want to do something with relational data, you get another, if you want to do time series data, you get another, you want to do tracing, you get an APM tool. And nobody has the big picture, right? Everybody's got their own little piece of data and their own perspective on where the issue might be in your company. But nobody really knows and it's usually put together in the brain of, of the smartest guy in the room. And so I thought it was quite simple. At Snowflake, you've got this commercial database that can do instruction data and time series data and relational data. And what if we could collect all data within an organization together, structure it, relate it, and then imagine what you could find out about your infrastructure, your applications, your business? >> Sort of unification? Does it have like unification kind of concept for users or IT? >> Yeah, I think the emerging category would be observability but it really is a collapsing of log analytics, metrics monitoring and tracing into this new category of observability. We don't necessarily just view that though as sort of data coming out of Kubernetes clusters or out of AWS or wherever. We actually could ingest security data. We could ingest data from people surfing using your app or surfing your website. We could take logs coming out of machines on a factory floor. So the way we built the product, it can be literally any kind of data. And we try and structure it and relate it and make sense of it and then make it very easy for people to navigate through it and determine issues and problems. So yeah, we're pretty excited about it. And like I said, we could not have built this even a couple of years ago because I don't think Snowflake would have been there. And in fact, that was one of the big risks when we started the company. Can we build it on Snowflake? And so here we are two years later and we think we can. Well, we're sure we can do it. >> Yeah, they've had a good run too. I mean, look at the growth of Snowflake. >> Yeah, it's crazy. I've never seen anything like it and in the last 20 years and B2B, I've never seen anything like it. So just like I felt in the mid 90s when I was at Oracle, people were making decisions to go with Oracle and then saying, "Hey, help me get all of my other data in that, "my mainframe data, my this, my that." I think Snowflake are going to go through the same sort of growth phase and hopefully with Observe, we can be like, "Hey, if you want to put "your unstructured data or time series data, "we can help you do that very easily." >> Well, this is exactly the current wave that you want to be on the right side of because like you said, just a year or so ago or a couple of years ago, it wasn't available. This is kind of the new capabilities. >> Yeah, I feel like there's going to be a lot of businesses, grow ridiculously. You talked about the Zoom numbers. These are ridiculous growth numbers and there are going to be companies come out the other side that take advantage of the new environment. And as they're growing, as they're scaling, as they build these new microservice-based applications, they're going to run into issues and we hope at least that it's products with our kind of architecture, that's going to be able to help these fast-growing businesses. So yeah, as I said, we're somewhat fortunate in that we don't have a product yet, but certainly on the other side of this, we think there's going to be plenty of opportunity to help a few folks. >> We know you got to do a launch and we're looking forward to hearing more and getting the briefing, and looking forward to hearing more about it when you go public. And yeah, thanks for coming on and taking the time today. I know you got your daughter's birthday party there and you're going to have some celebration. Thank you for sharing the insights on your vision of digital. I thought that was very compelling and great to see you and stay safe. >> Great to see you. Yeah, my 18-year-old, it's got a birthday party and she like always would worry, "What if no one shows up?" Well, today she knows no one's going to show up. >> Except for her family, yeah. >> It's going to be down in the family, yeah. So thanks for that and you guys stay safe and been great the last 10 years knowing theCUBE been that long but hopefully, here is the next 10 years after this current situation is over. >> Yeah, looking forward to it, it's going to be a lot of fun rye and get the content out there. And again, thanks for coming on during this important time and sharing your insights and also just making some entertainment here. We're getting some conversations so people can fill the void and play some games and have some fun. Jeremy, thanks. Great to see you. Jeremy Burton, senior executive in the industry. I've known him for years, been a CUBE alumni since theCUBE was formed. Now the CEO of Observe, sharing his insights on the industry but more importantly, how to be successful, how to come out the other side. Don't be too optimistic. Be focused on today and get through it. That's his advice. Of course, we're theCUBE bringing you all the data as we can now with remote interviews during this time. Thanks for watching, I'm John furrier. (soft music)

>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group User Conference for Dell EMC. Happy to be joined by the keynote speaker for the event, Jeremy Burton, CMO of Dell. Jeremy great to see ya. >> Thanks Stu, always good to be on theCUBE. >> Yeah, so Jeremy, you've been on theCUBE since the inaugural event back at actually EMC World, here in Boston. >> Yeah. >> Just a short drive from where we are today >> I know, seven years. >> Yeah, seven years ago, 2010, wow, pretty amazing. One of the things you talk about Dell and EMC coming together, truly the scale and distribution is a big piece of that. So being here at a user conference for one of the partners of the company that been with Compellent since like the earliest days and with Dell and now with Dell EMC. You know, what is the importance of the channel to Dell and Dell EMC? >> Yeah I think, I mean look at relationships. A company like the Scots, they've been around 15 years. They've had wins with customers, they have trusted relationships there. And sometimes actually, they're better at presenting a solution to the customer than even we are. I mean we've got a lot of capabilities, but they're businesses deliver an outcome for the customer. And so at times they're pretty adept at really understanding you know, in local markets in particular, what that customer's business is and what the best solution for them is and giving them impartial advice. >> Yeah. Jeremy, in a recent interview you did with us, I was struck by, you talked about when we make strategy. We used to put together the five-year plan. These days, two years, things are changing drastically. >> Right. >> Turn back to, you've been with EMC and now Dell, you know, for seven years, you know, two years ago was just when Dell was looking to buy EMC. When you talked to your partners and your end user customers, how are they keeping up with change? What are some of the biggest challenges you're seeing from the user base? >> Yeah I think it's particularly difficult right now because, you know, we've all seen the cloud phenomenon. You've also got the digital thing going on at the same time. There's the big data thing going on at the same and also look, the computing devices that people use are starting to change. So, I think what you've always got to do and what we always try and do, we can't, we don't know exactly what's going to happen in future, but I think we've got a good idea of what the general themes are, and so I think the best thing we can do to help our users along with us is articulate those very clearly. What do we think of the next three, four, five years, the key themes that you should be watching are? And then you're right, like a couple of years you can have a product road map and then some aspirations beyond that what you might want to do, but the reality is if you lock into a three, four year road map and articulate it and get committed to it, I mean it could quite easily change and certainly it's more of the development team's move to like agile methodologies. There's not always really now the need to do that because you kind of build those cost corrections into the development process. >> Yeah, Jeremy, as the CMO I need to ask you about brand. >> Yeah, okay. >> So, you know, we're sitting here in the shadows of Fenway Park, used to be an EMC level, there's now a Dell EMC level. In the keynote you talked about really how Dell is a lot like Alphabet, which is the Google holding company. Dell, Dell EMC, Vergestry, Morrisey, Pivotal, VMware, all these pieces. All of the transformations going on. What do people look to the Dell family? Where do you make your mark in your brand? >> Yeah, I mean all of, the brand campaign that we're in right now, all of the effort is going and all of the money to the point is going to Dell Technologies. That was the new company that we created. And we want to make sure that people understand that Dell Technologies is maybe not what you thought. Dell was evolved. I mean most people think of Dell, they think of the PC. That's what Michael made his name selling. But Dell Technologies it goes a mile wide and a mile deep at this point and so really what we're trying to do with the brand campaign is put everything into Dell Technologies, understand the capabilities of that, and then look, over the next few years we can then reinforce what Dell, the PC business, Dell EMC, the data center business, VMware, Pivotal and so on, how they plug in. So really I think for the next year or so, we're going to kind of keep kind of beating on Dell Technologies and make sure everyone understands that. And then over time, you know, reinforce whether the ingredient brands. It really is, and Dell Technologies is a family of brands. That's the approach we're taking. >> Yeah, last thing I want to ask you, Jeremy. You talked about how we've seen the progression of kind of IT responding to the business and now IT really being a major driver for the business. >> Yeah. >> Maybe you could talk, you know, what are you seeing in customers, you know, how is it, you know, IT is a central point for so many companies? >> Yeah I mean it's exciting times. It's exciting and scary, I think, for the IT teams, because I'd even go further and say IT is the business in many companies now. I've seen many models, some companies have felt that their IT team couldn't adapt to be the new digital team and so they've created a second IT function. You know, sometimes you hear it mode one IT, mode two IT. But look, I've also been in companies where the CIO has really been like on it with the business, and they built out that capability within the existing IT structure, so I think the opportunity for IT folks is being more relevant than they've ever been in the past. And actually, supporting the business, doing real competitive differentiation, which it's maybe been a while since some IT departments landed there. And the threat though is that if you don't get on board, you could find yourself with your nose pressed against the window looking at a different IT operation doing the work that maybe you want to do as an IT pro. So it's exciting times and scary times together. >> Alright, well Jeremy Burton, appreciate you joining us here on theCUBE and we have lots of coverage here from the WTG Dell EMC User Event. Thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell, EMC. >> John: Okay, welcome back, everyone, this is theCUBE live in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017, our 8th year covering EMC World. Now, the first year covering Dell EMC World, I'm John Furrier, my co-host this week, Paul Gillin, on the blue set, two CUBES, two shot guns, double barrel shot gun of content. Our next guest, who's been on theCUBE every single year we've been in existence, since 2010, the Chief Marketing Officer of Dell Technologies and Dell EMC, Jeremy Burton, formerly the CMO of EMC and again, 2010 was your first year with EMC, now. >> That's right. >> Look, I mean, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, yeah the makeup takes a bit longer, I got to cover up more wrinkles, but you know. >> You're running the show, you're on stage, your son is doing some gigs up there. Where are you now mentally, I mean, 2010, when we started our journey with theCUBE was the first at EMC World in Boston, you just joined the company. Now, here, look where you're at. I mean, do you have the pinch me moments? How the hell did this happen? Look how big we are. What's, how do you feel? >> Yeah, it's great. I mean, I almost have this belief in tech, you can never plan more than a couple years. I mean, so I kind of laugh a little bit at the five year strategy or whatever. And I'm think even personally, if you're looking out maybe more than a couple years in your career as to what you want to do, its... it can all change. It's like the start of a race. You can have all the best plans in the world, but you don't know what's going to happen when you get around the first corner, right? So, yeah, I knew last year, when Michael asked me to take on the CMO role, that the marketing team could make a difference. I'm a big believer about story and making sure that people understand what we're trying to do. It was, for me at least, it was a challenge, and a real interesting role to take on. >> Certainly a big challenge, you got the merger going on, obviously bigger role, bigger company, more portfolio product. You also have a product background you usually were doing a lot of the product stuff. What's been the impact from a customer standpoint as you've been rolling out the brand of Dell Technologies which I know is a holistic brand. But you now have a lot of brands to deal with in your portfolio. >> Yeah, well the good news is we're bigger, we have more budget, we can do a bigger brand campaign and the real goal here is; most people, when they think of Dell, they think of a PC. When they think of EMC they think of a storage array. Dell Technologies, if you look at the breadth of the company now, it really is incredible what we can do in an organization. So the brand campaign is really about redefining the company. What is Dell Technologies stand for? Well, it's about transforming your business, Transforming IT, your workforce and security. If we can get across over the next couple of years, the impact that we can have on an organization that's really where the win is. Underneath that obviously, we want to say, hey look, if you're on a digital project, Pivotal's going to be lead. It if's a software-defined data center, it's VMWear. So first and foremost, it's getting the big story of Dell Technologies, and redefining how people perceive the company. >> Well, Jeremy, so what's the message? We've been trying to read the tea leaves here, about what's the theme coming out of the show. What is the single most important message you want customers to take away? >> Number one, first and foremost, it's about, look, if every company is going to become a digital company, if you want to become a digital company, trust Dell Technologies for your journey. >> Everybody's saying that, though. I mean, that's HP's pitch now, too. So why did you adopt digital transformation as a theme, when it has become such a buzzword in the industry? Are you trying to find a nuance there? >> No, because the thing is, is that's where the world is going. And we could make up something that's ours, but the problem with that, I've never been one for saying, oh, we're just going to make up a new category. The category, people are going to become digital companies without a doubt, and I think our differentiation, and this is in the ad campaign, and you see it around the show, here, it's about making it real. At some point, you got to realize that transformation. if you're going to go build a cloud native app with HP, good luck, they don't have any software. >> I think you said on theCUBE last year, or the year before, I forget which year it was. These eight years are blurring in, and... theCUBE's on it's eight year. I think you quote said, "never fight fashion," was a phrase you always say, so I do believe that digital transformation's a little bit boring, but it's a reality. >> Well and for us, I feel like our differentiation, whether it be EMC or Dell, is we're a very practical company. And if we can't make it real, nobody can. Which is why the ad campaign only focused on customers. It was, hey if you want to look at GE, if you're going to look at Colombia Sports Wear, Chitale Dairy, we got about ten different customers, cause I think, to your point, right, it is noisy. How do you make it believable? You have a real customer saying, "I bet on Dell Technologies and they transformed my business." >> So we were talking on the intro about the transformation I know there's a lot of herding cats with the new merged companies, and you got to get every thing they want on stage, limited time on stage, not a lot of customers on stage, so I got to ask you, look it, the business transformation is Isilon Onefs, so digital transformation really means the businesses. How do you evolve from speeds and feeds culture, to real business transformation? Cause that's kind of what I hear you saying. >> That is, if you look internally at how the company's got to transform, it's exactly that. We created around the time we brought the companies together a small group sales team called Dell Technologies Select and these are folks that actually don't... carry any one brand. They carry Dell Technologies, and they're working with fifty of our biggest most transformative customers. So obviously the goal here is over time, you want that fifty to be two hundred, to be a thousand. Really, you're going to grow the DNA within that group, because the difficulty is that, some companies are doing digital transformation, some people are not even doing IT transformation, some companies are still trying to figure out the last big issue that they had. The market doesn't, it's not an on-off switch, you've got early adopters, you've got 'luggards, and everything in between, so Dell Technologies Select, was really geared towards engaging with transformative customers in a different way, across the entire portfolio, instead of; a storage, a service, a virtualization. >> Can you dig a little deeper on the sales model? Because you had the merge of two great sales organizations, one enterprise focused, is account focused, another is channel focused, >> SMB >> And direct SMB. How are you getting them to work together, or trying to merge those cultures, or are you trying to use each for what it does best? >> It's a great question, cause I think this is where many companies fall down when they merge or acquire even, right? So think of the Dell Technologies Select at the very top of the pyramid, they're the biggest, most transformative projects we're engaged on, and have a set of folks who work across the portfolio. Beneath that, we have an enterprise sales team. That, is predominantly made up from the EMC sales team, prior to the merger; relationship selling, big accounts, you know there's three thousand accounts there. Bill Scannell runs that sales team. Beneath that, you've got the commercial sales team, and Marius Haas, who was from Dell. Marius runs that. And so we're trying to preserve the higher end relationship selling that Bill Scannell and his team did. And the transactional sales team that Dell had, and then even beneath that in Jeff Clarke's organization, you've got consumer and small business. So what we've tried to do is, not complicated things. Leave each area to do what they were good at. And then to the key point we made earlier, build this very broad digital capability. Kind of new DNA; start small and grow big. >> You know, EMC has always had good partner relations, they were storage and you had some swim lanes, some stuff to partner program, and all the different stuff you were involved in. The branding was phenomenal when you took over on that. But now my observation on this show, just from watching it over the years, is a whole lift in alliance and marketing partners. Intel Dan Bryan on stage, obviously Dell and Intel make a lot of sense together. That history is there. But the alliances in Microsoft, Cisco, now a whole new set of industry alliances now, at the disposal. Has that changed your thinking a bit? And how do you look at that? Because now that's not just like a merging, that's like pre-existing and exploding. >> No, you always need partners, right? I think both Dell and EMC never believed they do it all themselves, right? And I think here we are, together, we're a much bigger company, but we still need partners. I mean Intel, we're Intel's biggest customer, right? So that makes up more relevant to them, but whereas in the past, maybe we were always thought as on the EMC side as enemy of Microsoft because of the VMWare. Now, Microsoft's an alliance partner. And it's nice that folks like Satya, he's taken over the company, and he's made it very clear that he wants to build an ecosystem, or rebuild and ecosystem. The big companies like Intel and Microsoft, I mean Cisco, we still do two billion dollars of Vblock, right? And as much as I think... we do kind of jousting between vendors at times, ultimately the customer decides who partners, and who competes. We often partner because the customer wants us to partner. >> One of the things I always like about interviewing you, Jeremy, you have your toe in the water of the future. I heard you mention VR, virtual reality, and all kinds of reality on stage; AR, VR. AI is certainly the hottest thing in the world. Deep learning and machine learning... is getting integrated into some of the products. But as a brand marketer, how are you looking at these new trends? Cause they are great opportunities, you have a great show on stage, you had great entertainment, informative, colorful, but now, soon, as a marketer, you have to start integrating some of these awesome tools, into the marketing mix. >> It's incredible right now, because... one of the things I love about the coming together of Dell EMC, and maybe this is not intuitively obvious, but a lot of the client products, a lot of the VR and gaming business that Dell has built over the years, I mean all the guys who come here, are either gamers or have got kids who are gamers. And so getting access to the Alienware team, they've got relationships with the Minecraft team, working with the folks that work on the AR and VR headsets. To me it should make events like this much more engaging. I'm a big believer that over time, these events have got to become- >> And by the way, all those new startups, are going to be running Dell servers, potentially, so a lot of this stuff is going on, your hands in it. >> Yeah, we got to make this experiential for folks. And a lot of the client technology has got that, it grabs you, right? I'm looking forward to exploring- I mean particularly augmented reality. To me, that's a technology, which is going to be massive in future. I think the way we want to present the company, is not as consumer and business, or client and data center, I think we've got to show folks the end to end. If you're doing a service request as a field service worker, and you've got your augmented reality headset on, you're going to get data for the service request from a back office system, you're going to get your knowledge from an Isilon system but it's going to be rendered in real time in front of you, as you do your work. I think the customer wants to see the solution. >> We were talking with Peter Burris in the previous segment about... are we going back to the future? The old IBM, one throat to choke, IBM was in every market, they dominated almost every market. But they had the full range of products you could get from them, from one sales rep. Are we going back to that type of model now? >> Yes and no. If you want a good indication of the future, look at the past, right? And so, infrastructure clearly is consolidating, right? What we believe, as infrastructure consolidates, it can support fewer players. So, you got to be the big player. So, in infrastructure market, we have a consolidation play, and we're very open about that. We're going to be more efficient, more economic Even if that market's flat, we're going to take more- >> But it's still huge numbers, by the way. >> It's a huge number, and then look, there's the new cloud native world. We've got to play with Pivotal there. Look at the myriad of devices you're going to see in IRT. The IRT ecosystem is not a single, vertical integrated stack. You've got sprinklers, you've got things that attach to cows, you've got... sensors on cars. I think when on part of the tech industry starts to consolidate, and you get this, maybe fewer vendors, another area opens up, and you get this incredible ecosystem. I'd say, IoT, machine intelligence, cloud native apps, that's like the next frontier, and those ecosystems are thriving, as the prior ecosystem consolidates. >> Great, awesome comment there, I think you just encapsulated- well done, the consolidation, that's a huge number, by the way. That's massive. >> It's hundreds of billions of dollars. In fact, IDC would track it and say it's about three. >> A hyper conversion that's going on right now. I mean two years ago, that was a thriving ecosystem, now it's all consolidated- >> It's consolidating, because the macro category- >> It seems to happen faster. >> Yeah, you've got to, I think in infrastructure... It's interesting, we don't necessarily in our business need to be the first mover, like we weren't the first mover to hyperconverge. But we can't be asleep at the wheel, number one, and we have to bring our distribution scale to bear. Once something goes to mainstream, as we proved in our flash, and now we're proving in hyperconverge, we has zero revenue for VxRail a year ago, today it's the market leader. That's... we weren't first to market with the product, but we've got distribution scale. The reason why a lot of these small companies are struggling is because they spend all of their VC money, or their profits, it's all spent on building a distribution channel. And so that's where Wall Street doesn't value them anymore. >> Scales and new competitive advantage, we've said on theCUBE, we continue to say that, certainly Amazon web service has proven that. Scale is the new differentiator, it's the barred to entry, great point there. I got to ask you about a point we were discussing, with Peter Burris, and we were kind of riffing on this, kind of, meaning to joke at at some of the vendors out there. Everyone's claiming to be number one, at everything. It's like, we're number one at this! We're number one. Markel's number one, Dell's number one, HP's number one. So the question is, what is the scoreboard? So the answer in our little opening was; customers. That is the ultimate scoreboard. >> Yeah. >> How are you guys going to continue to push, because there's been some wins with the combination. That's ultimately going to be the scoreboard. Forget the market share from whatever research firm. How are you getting new customers, are you retaining them, are they valuing your products and services? Your thoughts. >> Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things there. And I think the history of Dell is pretty interesting, because the data shows that the best way for us to get into a new customer, believe it or not, is with a PC. And, it's our, probably lowest priced product, it's our, maybe the most frictionless sale. And the nice thing now is once we get in there with the PC, and maybe a low end server, there's a whole lot more value we can bring in behind it. Which is why a lot of our focus, is not just on product; it's distribution channel as well, because if that's working effectively, we can get that cross-sale going. We've already seen in the early days of the merger, customers who've got our storage, sometimes a great tactic is to go, ask the customer; "hey, can we have your server business?" And it's been amazing how many folks have come back and said, "okay," because we've got relationships. And so, adding for the next couple of years, that cross sale becomes absolutely critical for us. Because we get a new customer, but then we want to keep that customer. How do we keep them? We got to solve more of the problem. And that's called cross-sale. >> Jeremy, great to have you on theCUBE. I know you're super busy, I know you got Gwen Stefani's the entertainment tonight. Great attendance here at the show. Congratulations on the CMO role, of the huge organization that's Dell Technologies. Big brand challenge, a great opportunity for you personally. So my final question, as always on theCUBE, What are your priories for next year? When we come back, and look back... what are you trying to do this year? You've got a lot going on, give us the plan. >> I mean, I'll leave the Dell Technologies thing to Michael, he's probably talked about that already. But marketing specifically, look, 70% of the content on the internet is going to be video by 2020. So, as a marketer, we've got to get really great at producing really high quality video content. It's the way that marketing's going to be done. So the nice thing, the exciting thing for the marketing team is, hey, if you're great at doing PowerPoint or writing a white paper, you're going to be a media star in the future. But I'm a huge believer in the fact that we've got to get great at doing unique content, at scale, and that's how you cut through the noise and get people's attention, because the world is going to become more noisy, not less. So that's one of the big priorities, obviously there's a little bit of bedding in of this new marketing model, we only closed the deal back in September. We got to get the team- >> You got to big budget, that's for sure. >> Yeah but video, and storytelling, is huge. Up there, that's the biggest trend. >> And don't forget the gaming. You brought up the gaming. CGI is coming around the corner, we're going to have VR, AR... >> You're going to see a lot of that. >> Jeremy Burton, Chief Marketing Officer of Dell Technologies. Dell EMC, here on theCUBE. Here at the first Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris will be back with more live coverage, stay with us. (techno music)

>> From The Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data driven insights from The Cube at ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> The reverse momentum in tech stocks caused by rising interest rates, less attractive discounted cash flow models, and more tepid forward guidance, can be easily measured by public market valuations. And while there's lots of discussion about the impact on private companies and cash runway and 409A valuations, measuring the performance of non-public companies isn't as easy. IPOs have dried up and public statements by private companies, of course, they accentuate the good and they kind of hide the bad. Real data, unless you're an insider, is hard to find. Hello and welcome to this week's "Wikibon Cube Insights" powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we unlock some of the secrets that non-public, emerging tech companies may or may not be sharing. And we do this by introducing you to a capability from ETR that we've not exposed you to over the past couple of years, it's called the Emerging Technologies Survey, and it is packed with sentiment data and performance data based on surveys of more than a thousand CIOs and IT buyers covering more than 400 companies. And we've invited back our colleague, Erik Bradley of ETR to help explain the survey and the data that we're going to cover today. Erik, this survey is something that I've not personally spent much time on, but I'm blown away at the data. It's really unique and detailed. First of all, welcome. Good to see you again. >> Great to see you too, Dave, and I'm really happy to be talking about the ETS or the Emerging Technology Survey. Even our own clients of constituents probably don't spend as much time in here as they should. >> Yeah, because there's so much in the mainstream, but let's pull up a slide to bring out the survey composition. Tell us about the study. How often do you run it? What's the background and the methodology? >> Yeah, you were just spot on the way you were talking about the private tech companies out there. So what we did is we decided to take all the vendors that we track that are not yet public and move 'em over to the ETS. And there isn't a lot of information out there. If you're not in Silicon (indistinct), you're not going to get this stuff. So PitchBook and Tech Crunch are two out there that gives some data on these guys. But what we really wanted to do was go out to our community. We have 6,000, ITDMs in our community. We wanted to ask them, "Are you aware of these companies? And if so, are you allocating any resources to them? Are you planning to evaluate them," and really just kind of figure out what we can do. So this particular survey, as you can see, 1000 plus responses, over 450 vendors that we track. And essentially what we're trying to do here is talk about your evaluation and awareness of these companies and also your utilization. And also if you're not utilizing 'em, then we can also figure out your sales conversion or churn. So this is interesting, not only for the ITDMs themselves to figure out what their peers are evaluating and what they should put in POCs against the big guys when contracts come up. But it's also really interesting for the tech vendors themselves to see how they're performing. >> And you can see 2/3 of the respondents are director level of above. You got 28% is C-suite. There is of course a North America bias, 70, 75% is North America. But these smaller companies, you know, that's when they start doing business. So, okay. We're going to do a couple of things here today. First, we're going to give you the big picture across the sectors that ETR covers within the ETS survey. And then we're going to look at the high and low sentiment for the larger private companies. And then we're going to do the same for the smaller private companies, the ones that don't have as much mindshare. And then I'm going to put those two groups together and we're going to look at two dimensions, actually three dimensions, which companies are being evaluated the most. Second, companies are getting the most usage and adoption of their offerings. And then third, which companies are seeing the highest churn rates, which of course is a silent killer of companies. And then finally, we're going to look at the sentiment and mindshare for two key areas that we like to cover often here on "Breaking Analysis", security and data. And data comprises database, including data warehousing, and then big data analytics is the second part of data. And then machine learning and AI is the third section within data that we're going to look at. Now, one other thing before we get into it, ETR very often will include open source offerings in the mix, even though they're not companies like TensorFlow or Kubernetes, for example. And we'll call that out during this discussion. The reason this is done is for context, because everyone is using open source. It is the heart of innovation and many business models are super glued to an open source offering, like take MariaDB, for example. There's the foundation and then there's with the open source code and then there, of course, the company that sells services around the offering. Okay, so let's first look at the highest and lowest sentiment among these private firms, the ones that have the highest mindshare. So they're naturally going to be somewhat larger. And we do this on two dimensions, sentiment on the vertical axis and mindshare on the horizontal axis and note the open source tool, see Kubernetes, Postgres, Kafka, TensorFlow, Jenkins, Grafana, et cetera. So Erik, please explain what we're looking at here, how it's derived and what the data tells us. >> Certainly, so there is a lot here, so we're going to break it down first of all by explaining just what mindshare and net sentiment is. You explain the axis. We have so many evaluation metrics, but we need to aggregate them into one so that way we can rank against each other. Net sentiment is really the aggregation of all the positive and subtracting out the negative. So the net sentiment is a very quick way of looking at where these companies stand versus their peers in their sectors and sub sectors. Mindshare is basically the awareness of them, which is good for very early stage companies. And you'll see some names on here that are obviously been around for a very long time. And they're clearly be the bigger on the axis on the outside. Kubernetes, for instance, as you mentioned, is open source. This de facto standard for all container orchestration, and it should be that far up into the right, because that's what everyone's using. In fact, the open source leaders are so prevalent in the emerging technology survey that we break them out later in our analysis, 'cause it's really not fair to include them and compare them to the actual companies that are providing the support and the security around that open source technology. But no survey, no analysis, no research would be complete without including these open source tech. So what we're looking at here, if I can just get away from the open source names, we see other things like Databricks and OneTrust . They're repeating as top net sentiment performers here. And then also the design vendors. People don't spend a lot of time on 'em, but Miro and Figma. This is their third survey in a row where they're just dominating that sentiment overall. And Adobe should probably take note of that because they're really coming after them. But Databricks, we all know probably would've been a public company by now if the market hadn't turned, but you can see just how dominant they are in a survey of nothing but private companies. And we'll see that again when we talk about the database later. >> And I'll just add, so you see automation anywhere on there, the big UiPath competitor company that was not able to get to the public markets. They've been trying. Snyk, Peter McKay's company, they've raised a bunch of money, big security player. They're doing some really interesting things in developer security, helping developers secure the data flow, H2O.ai, Dataiku AI company. We saw them at the Snowflake Summit. Redis Labs, Netskope and security. So a lot of names that we know that ultimately we think are probably going to be hitting the public market. Okay, here's the same view for private companies with less mindshare, Erik. Take us through this one. >> On the previous slide too real quickly, I wanted to pull that security scorecard and we'll get back into it. But this is a newcomer, that I couldn't believe how strong their data was, but we'll bring that up in a second. Now, when we go to the ones of lower mindshare, it's interesting to talk about open source, right? Kubernetes was all the way on the top right. Everyone uses containers. Here we see Istio up there. Not everyone is using service mesh as much. And that's why Istio is in the smaller breakout. But still when you talk about net sentiment, it's about the leader, it's the highest one there is. So really interesting to point out. Then we see other names like Collibra in the data side really performing well. And again, as always security, very well represented here. We have Aqua, Wiz, Armis, which is a standout in this survey this time around. They do IoT security. I hadn't even heard of them until I started digging into the data here. And I couldn't believe how well they were doing. And then of course you have AnyScale, which is doing a second best in this and the best name in the survey Hugging Face, which is a machine learning AI tool. Also doing really well on a net sentiment, but they're not as far along on that access of mindshare just yet. So these are again, emerging companies that might not be as well represented in the enterprise as they will be in a couple of years. >> Hugging Face sounds like something you do with your two year old. Like you said, you see high performers, AnyScale do machine learning and you mentioned them. They came out of Berkeley. Collibra Governance, InfluxData is on there. InfluxDB's a time series database. And yeah, of course, Alex, if you bring that back up, you get a big group of red dots, right? That's the bad zone, I guess, which Sisense does vis, Yellowbrick Data is a NPP database. How should we interpret the red dots, Erik? I mean, is it necessarily a bad thing? Could it be misinterpreted? What's your take on that? >> Sure, well, let me just explain the definition of it first from a data science perspective, right? We're a data company first. So the gray dots that you're seeing that aren't named, that's the mean that's the average. So in order for you to be on this chart, you have to be at least one standard deviation above or below that average. So that gray is where we're saying, "Hey, this is where the lump of average comes in. This is where everyone normally stands." So you either have to be an outperformer or an underperformer to even show up in this analysis. So by definition, yes, the red dots are bad. You're at least one standard deviation below the average of your peers. It's not where you want to be. And if you're on the lower left, not only are you not performing well from a utilization or an actual usage rate, but people don't even know who you are. So that's a problem, obviously. And the VCs and the PEs out there that are backing these companies, they're the ones who mostly are interested in this data. >> Yeah. Oh, that's great explanation. Thank you for that. No, nice benchmarking there and yeah, you don't want to be in the red. All right, let's get into the next segment here. Here going to look at evaluation rates, adoption and the all important churn. First new evaluations. Let's bring up that slide. And Erik, take us through this. >> So essentially I just want to explain what evaluation means is that people will cite that they either plan to evaluate the company or they're currently evaluating. So that means we're aware of 'em and we are choosing to do a POC of them. And then we'll see later how that turns into utilization, which is what a company wants to see, awareness, evaluation, and then actually utilizing them. That's sort of the life cycle for these emerging companies. So what we're seeing here, again, with very high evaluation rates. H2O, we mentioned. SecurityScorecard jumped up again. Chargebee, Snyk, Salt Security, Armis. A lot of security names are up here, Aqua, Netskope, which God has been around forever. I still can't believe it's in an Emerging Technology Survey But so many of these names fall in data and security again, which is why we decided to pick those out Dave. And on the lower side, Vena, Acton, those unfortunately took the dubious award of the lowest evaluations in our survey, but I prefer to focus on the positive. So SecurityScorecard, again, real standout in this one, they're in a security assessment space, basically. They'll come in and assess for you how your security hygiene is. And it's an area of a real interest right now amongst our ITDM community. >> Yeah, I mean, I think those, and then Arctic Wolf is up there too. They're doing managed services. You had mentioned Netskope. Yeah, okay. All right, let's look at now adoption. These are the companies whose offerings are being used the most and are above that standard deviation in the green. Take us through this, Erik. >> Sure, yet again, what we're looking at is, okay, we went from awareness, we went to evaluation. Now it's about utilization, which means a survey respondent's going to state "Yes, we evaluated and we plan to utilize it" or "It's already in our enterprise and we're actually allocating further resources to it." Not surprising, again, a lot of open source, the reason why, it's free. So it's really easy to grow your utilization on something that's free. But as you and I both know, as Red Hat proved, there's a lot of money to be made once the open source is adopted, right? You need the governance, you need the security, you need the support wrapped around it. So here we're seeing Kubernetes, Postgres, Apache Kafka, Jenkins, Grafana. These are all open source based names. But if we're looking at names that are non open source, we're going to see Databricks, Automation Anywhere, Rubrik all have the highest mindshare. So these are the names, not surprisingly, all names that probably should have been public by now. Everyone's expecting an IPO imminently. These are the names that have the highest mindshare. If we talk about the highest utilization rates, again, Miro and Figma pop up, and I know they're not household names, but they are just dominant in this survey. These are applications that are meant for design software and, again, they're going after an Autodesk or a CAD or Adobe type of thing. It is just dominant how high the utilization rates are here, which again is something Adobe should be paying attention to. And then you'll see a little bit lower, but also interesting, we see Collibra again, we see Hugging Face again. And these are names that are obviously in the data governance, ML, AI side. So we're seeing a ton of data, a ton of security and Rubrik was interesting in this one, too, high utilization and high mindshare. We know how pervasive they are in the enterprise already. >> Erik, Alex, keep that up for a second, if you would. So yeah, you mentioned Rubrik. Cohesity's not on there. They're sort of the big one. We're going to talk about them in a moment. Puppet is interesting to me because you remember the early days of that sort of space, you had Puppet and Chef and then you had Ansible. Red Hat bought Ansible and then Ansible really took off. So it's interesting to see Puppet on there as well. Okay. So now let's look at the churn because this one is where you don't want to be. It's, of course, all red 'cause churn is bad. Take us through this, Erik. >> Yeah, definitely don't want to be here and I don't love to dwell on the negative. So we won't spend as much time. But to your point, there's one thing I want to point out that think it's important. So you see Rubrik in the same spot, but Rubrik has so many citations in our survey that it actually would make sense that they're both being high utilization and churn just because they're so well represented. They have such a high overall representation in our survey. And the reason I call that out is Cohesity. Cohesity has an extremely high churn rate here about 17% and unlike Rubrik, they were not on the utilization side. So Rubrik is seeing both, Cohesity is not. It's not being utilized, but it's seeing a high churn. So that's the way you can look at this data and say, "Hm." Same thing with Puppet. You noticed that it was on the other slide. It's also on this one. So basically what it means is a lot of people are giving Puppet a shot, but it's starting to churn, which means it's not as sticky as we would like. One that was surprising on here for me was Tanium. It's kind of jumbled in there. It's hard to see in the middle, but Tanium, I was very surprised to see as high of a churn because what I do hear from our end user community is that people that use it, like it. It really kind of spreads into not only vulnerability management, but also that endpoint detection and response side. So I was surprised by that one, mostly to see Tanium in here. Mural, again, was another one of those application design softwares that's seeing a very high churn as well. >> So you're saying if you're in both... Alex, bring that back up if you would. So if you're in both like MariaDB is for example, I think, yeah, they're in both. They're both green in the previous one and red here, that's not as bad. You mentioned Rubrik is going to be in both. Cohesity is a bit of a concern. Cohesity just brought on Sanjay Poonen. So this could be a go to market issue, right? I mean, 'cause Cohesity has got a great product and they got really happy customers. So they're just maybe having to figure out, okay, what's the right ideal customer profile and Sanjay Poonen, I guarantee, is going to have that company cranking. I mean they had been doing very well on the surveys and had fallen off of a bit. The other interesting things wondering the previous survey I saw Cvent, which is an event platform. My only reason I pay attention to that is 'cause we actually have an event platform. We don't sell it separately. We bundle it as part of our offerings. And you see Hopin on here. Hopin raised a billion dollars during the pandemic. And we were like, "Wow, that's going to blow up." And so you see Hopin on the churn and you didn't see 'em in the previous chart, but that's sort of interesting. Like you said, let's not kind of dwell on the negative, but you really don't. You know, churn is a real big concern. Okay, now we're going to drill down into two sectors, security and data. Where data comprises three areas, database and data warehousing, machine learning and AI and big data analytics. So first let's take a look at the security sector. Now this is interesting because not only is it a sector drill down, but also gives an indicator of how much money the firm has raised, which is the size of that bubble. And to tell us if a company is punching above its weight and efficiently using its venture capital. Erik, take us through this slide. Explain the dots, the size of the dots. Set this up please. >> Yeah. So again, the axis is still the same, net sentiment and mindshare, but what we've done this time is we've taken publicly available information on how much capital company is raised and that'll be the size of the circle you see around the name. And then whether it's green or red is basically saying relative to the amount of money they've raised, how are they doing in our data? So when you see a Netskope, which has been around forever, raised a lot of money, that's why you're going to see them more leading towards red, 'cause it's just been around forever and kind of would expect it. Versus a name like SecurityScorecard, which is only raised a little bit of money and it's actually performing just as well, if not better than a name, like a Netskope. OneTrust doing absolutely incredible right now. BeyondTrust. We've seen the issues with Okta, right. So those are two names that play in that space that obviously are probably getting some looks about what's going on right now. Wiz, we've all heard about right? So raised a ton of money. It's doing well on net sentiment, but the mindshare isn't as well as you'd want, which is why you're going to see a little bit of that red versus a name like Aqua, which is doing container and application security. And hasn't raised as much money, but is really neck and neck with a name like Wiz. So that is why on a relative basis, you'll see that more green. As we all know, information security is never going away. But as we'll get to later in the program, Dave, I'm not sure in this current market environment, if people are as willing to do POCs and switch away from their security provider, right. There's a little bit of tepidness out there, a little trepidation. So right now we're seeing overall a slight pause, a slight cooling in overall evaluations on the security side versus historical levels a year ago. >> Now let's stay on here for a second. So a couple things I want to point out. So it's interesting. Now Snyk has raised over, I think $800 million but you can see them, they're high on the vertical and the horizontal, but now compare that to Lacework. It's hard to see, but they're kind of buried in the middle there. That's the biggest dot in this whole thing. I think I'm interpreting this correctly. They've raised over a billion dollars. It's a Mike Speiser company. He was the founding investor in Snowflake. So people watch that very closely, but that's an example of where they're not punching above their weight. They recently had a layoff and they got to fine tune things, but I'm still confident they they're going to do well. 'Cause they're approaching security as a data problem, which is probably people having trouble getting their arms around that. And then again, I see Arctic Wolf. They're not red, they're not green, but they've raised fair amount of money, but it's showing up to the right and decent level there. And a couple of the other ones that you mentioned, Netskope. Yeah, they've raised a lot of money, but they're actually performing where you want. What you don't want is where Lacework is, right. They've got some work to do to really take advantage of the money that they raised last November and prior to that. >> Yeah, if you're seeing that more neutral color, like you're calling out with an Arctic Wolf, like that means relative to their peers, this is where they should be. It's when you're seeing that red on a Lacework where we all know, wow, you raised a ton of money and your mindshare isn't where it should be. Your net sentiment is not where it should be comparatively. And then you see these great standouts, like Salt Security and SecurityScorecard and Abnormal. You know they haven't raised that much money yet, but their net sentiment's higher and their mindshare's doing well. So those basically in a nutshell, if you're a PE or a VC and you see a small green circle, then you're doing well, then it means you made a good investment. >> Some of these guys, I don't know, but you see these small green circles. Those are the ones you want to start digging into and maybe help them catch a wave. Okay, let's get into the data discussion. And again, three areas, database slash data warehousing, big data analytics and ML AI. First, we're going to look at the database sector. So Alex, thank you for bringing that up. Alright, take us through this, Erik. Actually, let me just say Postgres SQL. I got to ask you about this. It shows some funding, but that actually could be a mix of EDB, the company that commercializes Postgres and Postgres the open source database, which is a transaction system and kind of an open source Oracle. You see MariaDB is a database, but open source database. But the companies they've raised over $200 million and they filed an S-4. So Erik looks like this might be a little bit of mashup of companies and open source products. Help us understand this. >> Yeah, it's tough when you start dealing with the open source side and I'll be honest with you, there is a little bit of a mashup here. There are certain names here that are a hundred percent for profit companies. And then there are others that are obviously open source based like Redis is open source, but Redis Labs is the one trying to monetize the support around it. So you're a hundred percent accurate on this slide. I think one of the things here that's important to note though, is just how important open source is to data. If you're going to be going to any of these areas, it's going to be open source based to begin with. And Neo4j is one I want to call out here. It's not one everyone's familiar with, but it's basically geographical charting database, which is a name that we're seeing on a net sentiment side actually really, really high. When you think about it's the third overall net sentiment for a niche database play. It's not as big on the mindshare 'cause it's use cases aren't as often, but third biggest play on net sentiment. I found really interesting on this slide. >> And again, so MariaDB, as I said, they filed an S-4 I think $50 million in revenue, that might even be ARR. So they're not huge, but they're getting there. And by the way, MariaDB, if you don't know, was the company that was formed the day that Oracle bought Sun in which they got MySQL and MariaDB has done a really good job of replacing a lot of MySQL instances. Oracle has responded with MySQL HeatWave, which was kind of the Oracle version of MySQL. So there's some interesting battles going on there. If you think about the LAMP stack, the M in the LAMP stack was MySQL. And so now it's all MariaDB replacing that MySQL for a large part. And then you see again, the red, you know, you got to have some concerns about there. Aerospike's been around for a long time. SingleStore changed their name a couple years ago, last year. Yellowbrick Data, Fire Bolt was kind of going after Snowflake for a while, but yeah, you want to get out of that red zone. So they got some work to do. >> And Dave, real quick for the people that aren't aware, I just want to let them know that we can cut this data with the public company data as well. So we can cross over this with that because some of these names are competing with the larger public company names as well. So we can go ahead and cross reference like a MariaDB with a Mongo, for instance, or of something of that nature. So it's not in this slide, but at another point we can certainly explain on a relative basis how these private names are doing compared to the other ones as well. >> All right, let's take a quick look at analytics. Alex, bring that up if you would. Go ahead, Erik. >> Yeah, I mean, essentially here, I can't see it on my screen, my apologies. I just kind of went to blank on that. So gimme one second to catch up. >> So I could set it up while you're doing that. You got Grafana up and to the right. I mean, this is huge right. >> Got it thank you. I lost my screen there for a second. Yep. Again, open source name Grafana, absolutely up and to the right. But as we know, Grafana Labs is actually picking up a lot of speed based on Grafana, of course. And I think we might actually hear some noise from them coming this year. The names that are actually a little bit more disappointing than I want to call out are names like ThoughtSpot. It's been around forever. Their mindshare of course is second best here but based on the amount of time they've been around and the amount of money they've raised, it's not actually outperforming the way it should be. We're seeing Moogsoft obviously make some waves. That's very high net sentiment for that company. It's, you know, what, third, fourth position overall in this entire area, Another name like Fivetran, Matillion is doing well. Fivetran, even though it's got a high net sentiment, again, it's raised so much money that we would've expected a little bit more at this point. I know you know this space extremely well, but basically what we're looking at here and to the bottom left, you're going to see some names with a lot of red, large circles that really just aren't performing that well. InfluxData, however, second highest net sentiment. And it's really pretty early on in this stage and the feedback we're getting on this name is the use cases are great, the efficacy's great. And I think it's one to watch out for. >> InfluxData, time series database. The other interesting things I just noticed here, you got Tamer on here, which is that little small green. Those are the ones we were saying before, look for those guys. They might be some of the interesting companies out there and then observe Jeremy Burton's company. They do observability on top of Snowflake, not green, but kind of in that gray. So that's kind of cool. Monte Carlo is another one, they're sort of slightly green. They are doing some really interesting things in data and data mesh. So yeah, okay. So I can spend all day on this stuff, Erik, phenomenal data. I got to get back and really dig in. Let's end with machine learning and AI. Now this chart it's similar in its dimensions, of course, except for the money raised. We're not showing that size of the bubble, but AI is so hot. We wanted to cover that here, Erik, explain this please. Why TensorFlow is highlighted and walk us through this chart. >> Yeah, it's funny yet again, right? Another open source name, TensorFlow being up there. And I just want to explain, we do break out machine learning, AI is its own sector. A lot of this of course really is intertwined with the data side, but it is on its own area. And one of the things I think that's most important here to break out is Databricks. We started to cover Databricks in machine learning, AI. That company has grown into much, much more than that. So I do want to state to you Dave, and also the audience out there that moving forward, we're going to be moving Databricks out of only the MA/AI into other sectors. So we can kind of value them against their peers a little bit better. But in this instance, you could just see how dominant they are in this area. And one thing that's not here, but I do want to point out is that we have the ability to break this down by industry vertical, organization size. And when I break this down into Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000, both Databricks and Tensorflow are even better than you see here. So it's quite interesting to see that the names that are succeeding are also succeeding with the largest organizations in the world. And as we know, large organizations means large budgets. So this is one area that I just thought was really interesting to point out that as we break it down, the data by vertical, these two names still are the outstanding players. >> I just also want to call it H2O.ai. They're getting a lot of buzz in the marketplace and I'm seeing them a lot more. Anaconda, another one. Dataiku consistently popping up. DataRobot is also interesting because all the kerfuffle that's going on there. The Cube guy, Cube alum, Chris Lynch stepped down as executive chairman. All this stuff came out about how the executives were taking money off the table and didn't allow the employees to participate in that money raising deal. So that's pissed a lot of people off. And so they're now going through some kind of uncomfortable things, which is unfortunate because DataRobot, I noticed, we haven't covered them that much in "Breaking Analysis", but I've noticed them oftentimes, Erik, in the surveys doing really well. So you would think that company has a lot of potential. But yeah, it's an important space that we're going to continue to watch. Let me ask you Erik, can you contextualize this from a time series standpoint? I mean, how is this changed over time? >> Yeah, again, not show here, but in the data. I'm sorry, go ahead. >> No, I'm sorry. What I meant, I should have interjected. In other words, you would think in a downturn that these emerging companies would be less interesting to buyers 'cause they're more risky. What have you seen? >> Yeah, and it was interesting before we went live, you and I were having this conversation about "Is the downturn stopping people from evaluating these private companies or not," right. In a larger sense, that's really what we're doing here. How are these private companies doing when it comes down to the actual practitioners? The people with the budget, the people with the decision making. And so what I did is, we have historical data as you know, I went back to the Emerging Technology Survey we did in November of 21, right at the crest right before the market started to really fall and everything kind of started to fall apart there. And what I noticed is on the security side, very much so, we're seeing less evaluations than we were in November 21. So I broke it down. On cloud security, net sentiment went from 21% to 16% from November '21. That's a pretty big drop. And again, that sentiment is our one aggregate metric for overall positivity, meaning utilization and actual evaluation of the name. Again in database, we saw it drop a little bit from 19% to 13%. However, in analytics we actually saw it stay steady. So it's pretty interesting that yes, cloud security and security in general is always going to be important. But right now we're seeing less overall net sentiment in that space. But within analytics, we're seeing steady with growing mindshare. And also to your point earlier in machine learning, AI, we're seeing steady net sentiment and mindshare has grown a whopping 25% to 30%. So despite the downturn, we're seeing more awareness of these companies in analytics and machine learning and a steady, actual utilization of them. I can't say the same in security and database. They're actually shrinking a little bit since the end of last year. >> You know it's interesting, we were on a round table, Erik does these round tables with CISOs and CIOs, and I remember one time you had asked the question, "How do you think about some of these emerging tech companies?" And one of the executives said, "I always include somebody in the bottom left of the Gartner Magic Quadrant in my RFPs. I think he said, "That's how I found," I don't know, it was Zscaler or something like that years before anybody ever knew of them "Because they're going to help me get to the next level." So it's interesting to see Erik in these sectors, how they're holding up in many cases. >> Yeah. It's a very important part for the actual IT practitioners themselves. There's always contracts coming up and you always have to worry about your next round of negotiations. And that's one of the roles these guys play. You have to do a POC when contracts come up, but it's also their job to stay on top of the new technology. You can't fall behind. Like everyone's a software company. Now everyone's a tech company, no matter what you're doing. So these guys have to stay in on top of it. And that's what this ETS can do. You can go in here and look and say, "All right, I'm going to evaluate their technology," and it could be twofold. It might be that you're ready to upgrade your technology and they're actually pushing the envelope or it simply might be I'm using them as a negotiation ploy. So when I go back to the big guy who I have full intentions of writing that contract to, at least I have some negotiation leverage. >> Erik, we got to leave it there. I could spend all day. I'm going to definitely dig into this on my own time. Thank you for introducing this, really appreciate your time today. >> I always enjoy it, Dave and I hope everyone out there has a great holiday weekend. Enjoy the rest of the summer. And, you know, I love to talk data. So anytime you want, just point the camera on me and I'll start talking data. >> You got it. I also want to thank the team at ETR, not only Erik, but Darren Bramen who's a data scientist, really helped prepare this data, the entire team over at ETR. I cannot tell you how much additional data there is. We are just scratching the surface in this "Breaking Analysis". So great job guys. I want to thank Alex Myerson. Who's on production and he manages the podcast. Ken Shifman as well, who's just coming back from VMware Explore. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE. Does some great editing for us. Thank you. All of you guys. Remember these episodes, they're all available as podcast, wherever you listen. All you got to do is just search "Breaking Analysis" podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or you can email me to get in touch david.vellante@siliconangle.com. You can DM me at dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts and please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Bradley and The Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. Be well. And we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis". (upbeat music)

>>Hello, everybody. Welcome to Von 2022, the live version. Yes, we're finally back live. Last time we did Von was 2019 live. Of course we did two subsequent years, uh, virtual. My name is Dave Valante and we've got two days of wall to wall coverage of VEON. As usual Veeam has brought together a number of customers, but it's really doing something different this year. Like many, uh, companies that you see, they have a big hybrid event. It's close to 40,000 people online and that's sort of driving the actual program where the content is actually different for the, the, the virtual viewers versus the onsite onsite. There's the, the V I P event going on, they got the keynotes. VM is a company who's a ancy occurred during the, the VMware rise. They brought in a new way of doing data protection. They didn't use agents. They, they protected at the hypervisor level. >>That changed the way that people did things. They're now doing it again in cloud, in SAS, in containers and ransomware. And so we're gonna dig into that. My cohost is Dave Nicholson this week, and we've got a special guest Zs Carava who is the principal at ZK research. He's an extraordinary analyst Zs. Great to see you, David. Thanks for coming out. Absolutely good to see you Beon. Great to be here. Yeah, we've done. Von act, live things have changed so dramatically. Uh, I mean the focus ransomware, it's now a whole new Tam, uh, the adjacency to security data protection. It's just a Zs. It's a whole new ballgame, isn't it? >>Well, it is. And, and in fact, um, during the keynote, they, they mentioned that they've, they're now tied at number one in, for, you know, back of a recovery, which is, I think it's safe to say Veeam. Does that really well? >>I think from a that's tied with Dell. Yes. Right. They didn't, I don't think they met Dell as >>Keto. And, uh, but I, you know, they've been rising Dell, EMC's been falling. And so I think >>It's somebody said 10 points that Dell lost and sharing the I data. >>It's not a big surprise. I mean, they haven't really invested a whole lot, >>I think anyway, >>Anyways, but I think from a Veeam perspective, the question is now that they've kind of hit that number one spot or close to it, what do they do next? This company, they mentioned, I was talking the CTO yesterday. You mentioned they're holding X bite of customer data. That is a lot of data. Right. And so they, they do back recovery really well. They do it arguably better than anybody. And so how do they take that data and then move into other adjacent markets to go create, not just a back recovery company, but a true data management platform company that has relevancy in cyber and analytics and artificial intelligence and data warehousing. Right? All those other areas I think are, are really open territory for this company right now. >>You know, Dave, you were a CTO at, at EMC when you, when you saw a lot of the acquisitions that the company made, uh, you, you know, they really never had a singular focus on data protection. They had a big data protection business, but that's the differentiator with Veeam. That's all it does. And you see that shine through from a, from a CTO's perspective. How do you see this market changing, evolving? And what's your sense as to how Vema is doing here? >>I think a lot of it's being driven by kind of, uh, unfortunately evil genius, uh, out in the market space. Yeah. I know we're gonna be hearing a lot about ransomware, uh, a lot about some concepts that we didn't really talk about outside of maybe the defense industry, air gaping, logical air gaping, um, Zs, you mentioned, you know, this, this, this question of what do you do when you have so many petabytes of data under management exabytes now exabytes, I'm sorry. Yeah, I see there I'm I'm already falling behind. One thing you could do is you could encrypt it all and then ask for Bitcoin in exchange for access to that data. >>Yes. That is what happens a >>Lot of them. So we're, we're getting, we're getting so much of the evil genius stuff headed our way. You start, you start thinking in those ways, but yet to, to your point, uh, dedicated backup products, don't address the scale and scope and variety of threats, not just from operational, uh, uh, you know, mishaps, uh, but now from so many bad actors coming in from the outside, it it's a whole new world. >>See us as analysts. We get inundated with ransomware solutions. Everybody's talking about it across the spectrum. The thing that interested me about what's happening here at VEON is they're, they're sort of trotting out this study that they do Veeam does some serious research, you know, thousands of customers that got hit by ransomware that they dug into. And then a, a larger study of all companies, many of whom didn't realize or said they hadn't been hit by ransomware, but they're really trying to inject thought leadership into the equation. You saw some of that in the analyst session this morning, it's now public. Uh, so we could talk about it. What were your thoughts on that data? >>Yeah, that was, uh, really fascinating data cuz it shows the ransomware industry, the response to it is largely reactive, right? We wait to get breach. We wait to, to uh, to get held at ransom I suppose. And then we, a lot of companies paid out. In fact, I thought there's one hospital in Florida, they're buying lots and lots of Bitcoin simply to pay out ransomware attacks. They didn't even really argue with them. They just pay it out. And I think Veeam's trying to change that mentality a little bit. You know, if you have the right strategy in place to be more preventative, you can do that. You can protect your data and then restore it right when you want to. So you don't have to be in that big bucket of companies that frankly pay and actually don't get their data back. Right. >>And like a third, I think roughly >>It's shocking amount of companies that get hit by that. And for a lot of companies, that's the end of their business. >>You know, a lot of the recovery process is manual is again a technologist. You understand that that's not the ideal way to go. In fact, it's probably a, a way to fail. >>Well, recovery's always the problem when I was in corporate, it used to joke that we were the best at backup, terrible at recovery. Well, you know, that's not atypical. >>My Fred Fred Moore, who was the vice president of strategy at a company called storage tech storage technology, corpor of storage tech. He had a great, uh, saying, he said, backup is one thing. Recovery is everything. And he started, he said that 30 years ago, but, but orchestration and automating that orchestration is, is really vital. We saw in the study, a lot of organizations are using scripts and scripts are fragile here they break. Right? >>Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. Um, unfortunately the idea of the red run book on the shelf is still with us. Uh, uh, you know, scripting does not equal automation necessarily in every case, there's still gonna be a lot of manual steps in the process. Um, but you know, what I hope we get to talk about during the next couple of days is, you know, some of the factors that go into this, we've got day zero exploits that have already been uncovered that are stockpiled, uh, and tucked away. And it's inevitable that they're gonna hit. Yeah. So whether it's a manual recovery process or some level of automation, um, if you don't have something that is air gapped and cut off from the rest of the world in a physical or logical way, you can't guarantee >>That the, the problem with manual processes and scripting is even if you can set it up today, the environment changes so fast, right? With shadow it and business units buying their own services and users storing things and you know, wherever, um, you, you can't keep up with scripts in manual. Automation must be the way and I've been, and I don't care what part of it. You work in, whether it's this area in networking, communications, whatever automation must be the way I think prior to the pandemic, I saw a lot of resistance from it pros in the area of mission. Since the pandemic, I've seen a lot of warming up to it because I think it pros, I just realized they can't do their job without it. So, so you >>Don't, you don't think that edge devices, uh, lend themselves to manual >>Recovery, no process. In fact, I think that's one of the things they didn't talk about. What's that is, is edge. Edge is gonna be huge. More, every retailer, I talk to oil and gas, company's been using it for a long time. I've, you know, manufacturing organizations are looking at edge as a way to put more data in more places to improve experiences. Cuz you're moving the data closer, but we're creating a world where the fragmentation of data, you think it's bad now just wait a couple of years until the edge is a little more, you know, uh, to life here. And I think you ain't see nothing yet. This is this world of data. Everywhere is truly becoming that. And the thing with edge is there's no one definition, edge, you got IOT edge cellular edge, campus edge, right? Um, you know, you look at hotels, they have their own edge. I talked to major league baseball, right? They have every, stadium's got its own edge server in it. So we're moving into a world. We're putting more data in more places it's more fragmented than ever. And we need better ways of managing Of securing that data. But then also being able to recover for when >>Things happen. I was having that Danny Allen, he used the term that we coined called super cloud. He used that in the analyst meeting today. And, and that's a metaphor for this new layer of cloud. That's developing to your point, whether it's on-prem in a hybrid across clouds, not just running on the cloud, but actually abstracting away the complexity of the underlying primitives and APIs. And then eventually to your point, going out to the edge, I don't know if anyone who has an aggressive edge strategy Veeam to its credit, you know, has gone well beyond just virtualization and gone to bare metal into cloud. They were the containers. There was first at SAS. They acquired Caston who was a partner of theirs and they tried to acquire them earlier, but there was some government things and you know, that whole thing that got cleaned up and now they've, they own Caston. And I think the edge is next. I mean, it's gotta be, there's gonna be so much data at the edge. I guess the question is where is it today? How much of that is actually persisted? How much goes back to the cloud? I don't think people really have a good answer for that yet. >>No. In fact, a lot of edge services will be very ephemeral in nature. So it's not like with cloud where we'll take data and we'll store it there forever with the edge, we're gonna take data, we'll store it there for the time, point in time we need it. But I think one of the interesting things about Veeam is because they're decoupled from the airline hardware, they can run virtual machines and containers, porting Veeam to whatever platform you have next actually isn't all that difficult. Right? And so then if you need to be able to go back to a certain point in time, they can do that instantly. It's, it's a fascinating way to do backup. Are >>You you' point about it? I mean, you remember the signs up and down, you know, near the EMC facility, right outside of Southborough no hardware agenda that that was Jeremy Burton when he was running Verto of course they've got a little hardware agenda. So, but Veeam doesn't Veeam is, you know, they they're friendly with all the hardware players of pure play software, couple other stats on them. So they're a billion dollar company. They've now started to talk about their ARR growth. They grew, uh, 27% last year in, in, in annual recurring revenue, uh, 25%, uh, in the most recent quarter. And so they're in, in the vast majority of their business is subscription. I think they said, uh, 73% is now subscription based. So they really trans transitioned that business. The other thing about vem is they they've come up with a licensing model that's very friendly. >>Um, and they sort of removed that friction early on in the process. I remember talking to TIR about this. He said, we are gonna incent our partners and make it transparent to them, whether it's, you know, that when we shift from, you know, the, the, the, the crack of, of perpetual license to a subscription model, we're gonna make that transparent to partners. We'll take care of that. Essentially. They funded that transition. So that's worked very well. So they do stand out, I think from some of the larger companies at these big portfolios, although the big portfolio companies, you know, they get board level contacts and they can elbow their ways in your thoughts on that sort of selling dynamic. >>So navigating that transition to a subscription model is always fraught with danger. Everybody wants you to be there, but they want you to be there now. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, they don't like the transition that happens over 1824 months to get there. Um, >>As a private company, they're somewhat shielded from what they would've been if they were appli. Sure, >>Exactly. But, but that, but that bodes well from a, from a, a Veeam perspective. Um, the other interesting thing is that they sit where customers sit today in the real world, a hybrid world, not everything is in the cloud or a single cloud, uh, still a lot of on-prem things to take care of. And, >>And there will be for >>A long time exactly. Back to this idea. Yeah. There's a very long tail on that. So it's, it's, it's well enough to have a niche product that addresses a certain segment of the market, but to be able to go in and say all data everywhere, it doesn't matter where it lives. We have you covered. Um, that's a powerful message. And we were talking earlier. I think they, they stand a really good shot at taking market share, you know, on an ongoing basis. >>Yeah. The interesting thing about this market, Dave is they're, you know, although, you know, they're tied to number one with Dell now, they're, it's 12%, right? This reminds me of the security industry five, six years ago, where it's so fragmented. There's so many vendors, no one really stood out right. Then what happened in security? It's a little company called Palo Alto networks came around, they created a platform story. They moved into adjacent markets like SDWAN, they did a lot of smart acquisitions and they took off. I think vem is at that similar point where they've now, you know, that 12% number they've got some capital. Now they could go do some acquisitions that they want do. There's lots of adjacent markets as they talk about this company could be the Palo Alto of the data management market, if you know, and based on good execution. But there's certainly the opportunities there with all the data that they're holding. >>That's a really interesting point. I wanna stay that in a second. So there's obviously, there's, there's backup, there's recovery, there's data protection, there's ransomware protection, there's SAS data protection. And now all of a sudden you're seeing even a company like Rubrik is kind of repositioning as a security play. Yeah. Which I'm not sure that's the right move for a company that's really been focused on, on backup to really dive into that fragmented market. But it's clearly an adjacency and we heard Anan the new CEO today in the analyst segment, you know, we asked him, what's your kinda legacy gonna look like? And he said, I want to, I want to, defragment this market he's looking at. Yeah. He wants 25 to 45% of the market, which I think is really ambitious. I love that goal now to your point, agree, he, he sure. But that doubles yeah. >>From today or more, and he gets there to your point, possibly through acquisitions, they've made some really interesting tuck-ins with Castin. They certainly bought an AWS, uh, cloud play years ago. But my, my so, uh, Veeam was purchased by, uh, private equity inside capital inside capital in January of 2020, just before COVID for 5 billion. And at the time, then COVID hit right after you were like uhoh. And then of course the market took off so great acquisition by insight. But I think an IPO is in their future and that's, uh, Zs when they can start picking up some of these adjacent markets through every day. >>And I think one of the challenges for them is now that the Holden XAB bited data, they need to be able to tell customers things they, the customer doesn't know. Right. And that's where a lot of the work they're doing in artificial intelligence machine learning comes into play. Right. And, and nobody does that better than AWS, right? AWS is always looking at your data and telling you things you don't know, which makes you buy more. And so I think from a Veeam perspective, they need to now take all this, this huge asset they have and, and find a way to monetize it. And that's by revealing these key insights to customers that the customers don't even know they have. And >>They've got that monitor monitoring layer. Um, it's if you called it, Danny, didn't like to use the term, but he called it an AI. It's really machine learning that monitors. And then I think makes recommendations. I want to dig into that a little bit with it. >>Well, you can see the platform story starting to build here. Right. And >>Here's a really good point. Yeah. Because they really have been historically a point product company. This notion of super cloud is really a platform play. >>Right. And if you look in the software industry, look across any, any segment of the software industry, those companies that were niche that became big became platforms, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle. Right. And, and they find a way to allow others to build on their platform. You know, companies, they think like a Citrix, they never did that. Yeah. And they kind of taped, you know, petered out at a certain level of growth and had to, you know, change. They're still changing their business model, in fact. But I think that's Veeam's at that inflection point, right. They either build a platform story, enable others to do more on their platform or they stagnate >>HP software is another good example. They never were able to get that platform. And we're not able bunch of spoke with it, a non used to work there. Why is it so important Dave, to have a platform over a product? >>Well, cynical, Dave says, uh, you have a platform because it attracts investment and it makes you look cooler than maybe you really are. Um, but, uh, but really for longevity, you have, you, you, you have to be a platform. So what's >>The difference. How do you know when you have platform versus it? APIs? Is it, yeah. Brett, is it ecosystem? >>Some of it is. Some of it is semantics. Look at when, when I'm worried about my critical assets, my data, um, I think of a platform, a portfolio of point solutions for backing up edge data stuff. That's in the cloud stuff that exists in SAS. I see that holistically. And I think guys, you're doing enough. This is good. Don't, don't dilute your efforts. Just keep focusing on making sure that you can back up my data wherever it lives and we'll both win together. So whenever I hear a platform, I get a little bit, a little bit sketchy, >>Well platform, beats products, doesn't >>It? Yeah. To me, it's a last word. You said ecosystem. Yes. When you think of the big platform players, everybody B in the customer, uh, experience space builds to build for Salesforce. First, if you're a small security vendor, you build for Palo Alto first, right? Right. If you're in the database, you build for Oracle first and when you're that de facto platform, you create an ecosystem around you that you no longer have to fund and build yourself. It just becomes self-fulfilling. And that drives a level of stickiness that can't be replicated through product. >>Well, look at the ecosystem that, that these guys are forming. I mean, it's clear. Yeah. So are they becoming in your view >>Of platform? I think they are becoming a platform and I think that's one of the reasons they brought on and in, I think he's got some good experience doing that. You could argue that ring kind of became that. Right. The, when, you know, when he was ring central. >>Yeah. >>Yeah. And, uh, so I think some, some of his experiences and then moving into adjacencies, I think is really the reason they brought him in to lead this company to the next level. >>Excellent guys, thanks so much for setting up VEON 20, 22, 2 days of coverage on the cube. We're here at the area. It's a, it's a great venue. I >>Love the area. >>Yeah. It's nice. It's a nice intimate spot. A lot of customers here. Of course, there's gonna be a big Veeam party. They're famous for their parties, but, uh, we'll, we'll be here to cover it and, uh, keep it right there. We'll be back with the next segment. You're watching the cube VEON 20, 22 from Las Vegas.

>> Announcer: TheCUBE presents Dell Technologies World brought to you by Dell. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, day one, Dell Technologies World live from Las Vegas at the Venetian. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante and John Furrier. Guys let's talk, first of all, first time back in person since Dell Tech World 2019. Lots going on, lots of news today. I'm going to start with you, Dave, since you're closest to me. What are some of the things that have impressed you at this first in-person event in three years? >> Well, the first thing I want to say is, so John and I, we started theCUBE in 2010, John, right? In Boston, EMC World. Now of course, Dell owns EMC, so wow. It's good to be back here. Dell's built this beautiful set. I'd say the number one thing that's surprised me was how many people were here. Airport was packed, cab lines, the line at the Palazzo, the hotel, to get in was, you know, probably an hour long. And there's, I thought there'd be maybe 5,000 people here. I would say it's closer to eight. So the hall was packed today and everybody was pumped. Michael Dell was so happy to be up on stage. He talked, I dunno if you guys saw his keynote. He basically talked, obviously how great it is to be back, but he talked about their mission, building technologies that enable that better human condition. There was a big, you know, chewy words, right? And then they got into, you know, all the cool stuff they're doing so we can get into it. But they had CVS up on stage, they had USAA on stage. A big theme was trust. Which of course, if you're Dell, you know, you want people to trust you. I guess the other thing is this is the first live event they've had since the VMware spin. >> Right. >> So in 2019 they owned VMware. VMware's no longer a part of the income statement. Dell had a ton of debt back then. Now Dell's balance sheet looks actually better than VMware's because they restructured everything. And so it's a world without VMware where now with VMware their gross margins were in the 30-plus percent range. Now they're down to 20%. So we're now asking what's next for Dell? And they stood up on stage, we can talk about it some more, but a lot of multi-cloud, a lot of cyber resilience, obviously big themes around APEX, you know, hybrid work, John. So, well let's get into that. >> What are some of the key things that you heard today? >> Well, first of all, the customers on stage are always great. Dell's Technologies, 10 years for theCUBE and their history. I saw something back here, 25 years with celebrating precision, the history of Michael Dell's journey and the current Dell Technologies with EMC folded in and a little bit of VMware DNA still in there even though they're separated out. Just has a loyal set of customers. And you roam the hallways here, you see a lot of people know Dell, love Dell. Michael Dell himself was proud to talk before the event about he's number one, Dave, in PC market share. That's been his goal to beat HP for years. (laughing) And so he's got that done. But they're transforming their business cause they have to, the data center is now cloud. Cloud is now the distributed computing. Dell has all the piece parts today. We've covered this three years ago. Now it's turned into multi-cloud, which is multi-vendor, as a service is how the consumers consume, innovate with data, that's kind of the raw material. Future of work, and obviously the partners that they have. So I think Dell is going to continue to maintain the news of being the great in the front lines as a data-center-slash-enterprise, now cloud, Edge player. So, you know, I'm impressed with their constant reinvention of the company and the news hits all the cards: Snowflake partnership, cutting edge company in the cloud, partnership with Snowflake, APEX, their product that's innovating at the Edge, this new kind of product that's going to bring it together. Unifying, all those themes, Dave, are all hitting the marks. >> Chuck Whitten up on stage, obviously he was the multicloud, you know, conversation. And I think the vision that they they're laying out and Jeff Clarke talked about it as well, is a term that John and I coined. We can't remember who coined it, John or me, "supercloud." >> Yeah. (laughing) >> And they're talking about building an abstraction layer, building on top of the clouds, connecting on-prem to the clouds, across clouds, out to the Edge, hiding the underlying complexity, Dell managing all that. That's their vision. It's aspirational today but that really is supercloud. And it's more than multi-cloud. >> You coined the term supercloud. >> Did I? >> We riffed together. I called it sub-cloud. >> Oh, that's right. And then I said, no, it's got to float over. Super! Superman flies. (John laughs) Right, that's right. >> Sub-cloud, not really a good name. Nobody wants to be sub of anything. >> I think my kid gave it to me, John, actually. (laughing) >> Well if we do know that Michael Dell watches theCUBE, he's been on theCUBE many times. He watches theCUBE, clearly he's paying attention! >> Yeah, well I hope so. I mean, we write a lot about this and we talk to a lot of customers and talk to a lot of people. But let's talk about the announcements if we can. So... The APEX cyber recovery service, you know, ransomware recovery. They're now also running that on AWS and Azure. So that's big. We heard Presidio, they was super thrilled about that. So they're... The thing I'd say about that is, you know, Dell used to be really defensive about cloud. Now I think they're leaning in. They're saying, "Hey we're not going to spend, you know, Charles Fitzgerald, the snarky guy, does some good work on CAPEX. I mean, you look at how much the cloud guys are spending on CAPEX a year, $30, $40 billion. >> They can't compete. >> On cloud CAPEX. Dell doesn't want compete. >> John: You can't compete. >> Build on top of that, so that's a gift. So that's cool. You mentioned the Snowflake announcement. I thought that was big. What that is... It's very interesting, so Frank Slootman has always said, "We're not doing a half-way house, we're in the cloud." Okay, so square that circle for me. Now Snowflake's coming on-prem. Well, yeah, what they're doing is allowing customers to keep data in a Dell object store, ECS or other object stores. But use Snowflake. So non-native Snowflake data on-prem. So that expands Snowflake cloud. What it also does is give Dell a little sizzle, a little better partner and there's a path to cloud migration if that's where the customers want to go. >> Well, I mean, I would say that that's a dangerous game because we've seen that movie before, VMware and AWS. >> Yeah but that we've talked about this. Don't you think that was the right move for VMware? >> At the time, but if you don't nurture the relationship AWS will take all those customers, ultimately, from VMware. >> But that product's still doing very well. We'll see with NetApp is another one. NetApp on AWS. I forget what they call it, but yeah, file and AWS. So that was, go ahead. >> I was just going to say, what's the impact of Snowflake? Why do you think Snowflake chose Dell? >> Because Dell's a $101 billion company and they have a huge distribution channel and a lot of common customers. >> They own storage on the premise. >> Yep. And so Snowflake's looking for, you know, storage options on which they can, you know, bring data into their cloud. Snowflake wants the data to go from on-prem into the cloud. There's no question about that. >> And I would add another thing, is that Snowflake can't do what Dell Technologies does on-premises with storage and Dell can't do what Snowflake's doing. So I think it's a mutual short-term and medium-term benefit to say, "Hey you want to run on Snowflake? You need some services there? Great, but come back and use Dell." So that to me, I think that's a win-win for Snowflake. Just the dangerous game is, whoever can develop the higher-level services in the cloud will ultimately be the winner. >> But I think the thing I would say there is, as I said, Snowflake would love for the migration to occur, but they realize it's not always going to happen. And so why not partner with a company like Dell, you know, start that pipeline. And for Dell, hey, you know, why fight fashion, as Jeremy Burton would say. The other thing was Project Alpine, which is file, block and object across cloud. That's again setting up this supercloud. And then APEX. I mean, APEX is the discussion. We had a one-on-one session, a bunch of analysts with Jeff Woodrow who runs ISG. We were supposed to be talking about ISG, all we talked about is APEX. Then we had another session with APEX and all we talked about, of course, is APEX. So, they're still figuring that out, I would say, at this point. They don't quite have product market fit and I think they'd admit that, but they're working hard on scaling engineering, trying to figure out the channel model, the compensation. You know, taking their time even, but moving fast if you know what I mean. >> I mean, Dave, I think the big trend that's jumping out of me here is that, something that we've been covering, the headless cloud, meaning if you can do as a service, which is one of Dell's major points today, that to me, everyone is a PaaS layer. I think everyone that's building digital transformation apps has to be their own SaaS. So they either do that with somebody, a man in service, which fits beautifully into that trend, or do it own. Now e-commerce has this nailed down. Shopify or build your own on top of the cloud. So headless retail's a hot trend. You're going to start to see that come into the enterprise where the enterprise can have their cake and eat it too and take advantage of managed services where they don't have expertise. So those two things right there I think is going to drive a lot of growth for Dell. >> So essentially Lisa, what Dell is doing is saying, "Okay, the timing's good with the VMware spin." They say, "Now we're going to build our own cloud as a service, APEX." And they're starting with infrastructure as a service, you know, storage as a service. Obviously cyber recovery is a service. So you're going to get compute and storage and data protection. Eventually they'll move into other areas. And it's really important for them to do that to have their own cloud, but they've got to build up the ecosystem. Snowflake is a small example. My view, they need hundreds and hundreds of Snowflakes to fill the gaps, you know, move up the stack in middleware and database and DevOps. I mean, they should be partnering with HashiCorp. They should be partnering with all these companies that do DevOps stuff. They should be... I'd like to see them, frankly, partner with competitors to their data protection group. Why, you know, sounds crazy, but if you're going to build a cloud, look at AWS. They partner with everybody, right? And so that's what a true cloud experience looks like. You've got this huge menu. And so I think Dell's going to have to try to differentiate from HP. HPE was first, right, and they're all in. Dell's saying we're going to let the customers tell us where to go. And so they, I think one differentiation is their ecosystem, their ability to build that ecosystem. Yeah, but HP's got a good distribution channel too. Just not as big as Dell's. >> They all got the assets in it, but they're transforming. So I think at the end of the day, as Dell and even HPE transforms, they got to solve the customer problems and reduce the complexity. So again, the managed services piece with APEX is huge. I think having the building blocks for multi hybrid cloud at the Edge, just, you can't go wrong with that. If the customers can deploy it and consume it. >> What were some of the messages that you heard from, you mentioned CVS on stage, USAA on stage. Dell's always been very, very customer-focused. They've got some great brands. What did you hear from that customer's voice that shows you they're going in the right direction? >> Well first of all, the customers are longstanding customers of Dell Technologies, so that's one recognition of the ongoing partnerships. But they're also messaged up with Dell's messaging, right? They're telling the Dell story. And what I heard from the Dell story was moving fast and reducing complexity is their number one goal. They see the cloud option has to be there. Cloud native, Edge came up a little bit and the role of data. So I think all the new application development today that's relevant has a data as code kind of concept. Data engineering is the hottest skillset on the planet right now. And data engineering is not data science. So you start to see top-level CSOs and CIOs saying the new modern applications have to have data embedded in. It's just too hard. It's too hard to find that engineering team. So I heard the customer saying, we love the direction, we love the managed services. And by the way, we want to have that supply chain and cyber risk reduced. So yeah, big endorsement for Dell. >> You know, the biggest transformation in Dell, the two biggest transformations. One was the financials. You know, the income statement is totaled at a $101 billion company, growing at 17% a year. That's actually quite remarkable. But the flip side of that, the other big transformation was the customer. And with the acquisition of EMC but specifically VMware, it changed the whole conversation for Dell with customers. I think pre-2015, you wouldn't have had that type of narrative up on stage with customers. Cause it was, you know, compellant and it was equal logic and it was small businesses. Now you're talking about really deep strategic relationships that were enabled by that transformation. So my point is, to answer your question, it's going to be really interesting to see what happens post-VMware because when VMware came together with Dell, the industry didn't like it. The VMware ecosystem was like (growls) Dell. Okay, but customers loved it, right? And that's one of the things I heard on stage today. They didn't say, oh, well we love the VMware. But he mentioned VMware, the CTO from USAA. So Dell configured this commercial agreement with VMware, Michael Dell's the chairman of both companies. So that was part of the incentive. The other incentive is Dell is the number one distribution channel for VMware. So I think they now have that muscle memory in place where they've earned that trust. And I think that will continue on past the spin. It was actually quite brilliant the way they've orchestrated that. >> Yeah, Lisa, one more thing I want to add to that is that what I heard also was, you got the classic "here's how you be a leader in the modern era." It's a big leadership message. But then when you heard some of the notes, software-defined, multi-cloud with an emphasis on operations, Dave. So, okay, if you're a good leader, stay with Dell in operations. So you see strategy and operations kind of coming together around cloud. But big software defined multi-cloud data operational story. And I think those customers are kind of on that. You know, you got to maintain your operations. DevOps is operations, DevSecOps is operations. So big, like, don't get too greedy on the modern, shiny new toy, you know, in the cloud. >> Yeah, it's a safe bet, right? For infrastructure. I mean, HPE is a good bet too, but I mean Dell's got a way broader portfolio, bigger supply chain. It's got the end-to-end with the desktop, laptop, you know, the client side business, you know, a bigger services organization. And now the big challenge in my mind for Dell is okay, what's next? And I think they got to get into data management, obviously build up as a service, build up their cloud. They need software in their portfolio. I mean, you know, 20% gross margin company, it just, Wall Street's not as interested. You know, if they want to build more value, which they do, they've got to get more into software and I think you're going to see that. Again, I think you're going to see more M&A. I'd love to see more organic R&D instead of stock buybacks but I get why they have to do that. >> Well one of the things I'm looking at, Dave, in terms of what I think the future impact's going to be is the generational shift with the gen-Z and millennials running IT in the modern era. Not your old school rack-and-stack data center mentality. And then ultimately the scoreboard will determine, in my mind, the winner in their race is, where are the workloads running? Right? The workloads, and then also what's the application development scene look like? What do the apps look like? What are they building on? What's scaling them, what's running them? And the Edge is going to be a big part of that. So to me, operations, Edge, workloads and the development and then the workforce shift. >> And I do think Edge, I'm glad you brought up Edge. Edge is, you know, so fragmented but I think there's going to be a massive opportunity in Edge. There's going to be so much compute at the Edge. Dell talked about it, so much data. It's unclear to me right now how they go after that other than in pockets, like we heard from Gill. I believe they're going to do really well in retail. No question there. >> Yeah. >> But there's so much other industrial aisle IT- >> The telco space of towers, Edge. >> And Dell's, you know, Dell's server business, eh okay, it's got Intel and AMD inside, okay great. Their high margins come from storage, not from compute. Not the case with AWS. AWS had 35% operating margins last quarter. Oracle and Microsoft, that's the level that they're at. And I'd love to see Dell figure out a way to get paid more for their compute expertise. And that's going to take some R&D. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> Last question guys, as we wrap up our wrap of day one. Given everything that we've all been through the last couple of years, what is your overall summary of what Dell announced today? The vibe of the show? How well have they fared the last two years? >> Well, I mean, they had a remarkable last two years. In a large part thanks to the client business. I think today you're seeing, you know, them lift the veil on what's next. And I think their story is coherent. There's, again, financially, they're a much more sound company, much better balance sheet. Not the most attractive income statement from a margin standpoint and they got work to do there. But wow, as far as driving revenue, they know how to sell. >> Yeah, I mean to me, I think looking back to before the pandemic, when we were here on the stage last, we were talking end-to-end, Dell leadership. And I say the biggest thing is Dell's catching up fast, faster than I thought. And I think they got, they're skating to where the puck is going, Dave, and I'll tell you why. The end-to-end I thought wouldn't be a total flyer if the Edge got too dynamic, but the fact that the Edge is growing so fast, it's more complex, that's actually given Dell more time. So to me, what I see happening is Dell having that extra time to nail the Edge piece, cause if they get there, if they get there, then they'll have their core competency. And why do I say that? Cause hardware is back. Server god boxes are going to be back. You're going to see servers at the Edge. And look at the failure of Amazon's Outpost, okay? Amazon's Outpost was essentially hardware. That's Dell's business. So you talk about like compute as a cloud but they really didn't do well with deploying compute like Dell does with servers. EKS is kicking ass at the Edge. So serverless with hardware, I think, is going to be the killer solution at the Edge. A combination of cloud and Edge hardware. And the Edge looks more like a data center than the cloud looks like the data center, so- >> So you're saying hardware matters? >> HardwareMatters.com. >> I think that's what I heard. >> HardwareMatters.com, check out that site, coming soon. (all laughing) >> I think it matters more than ever, you know- >> Blockchain, silicon advances. >> I think reason hardware matters is cause it's barbelling. It's going from the box to the silicon and it's going, you know, upstream into software defined. >> Horizontally, scalability means good silicon at the Edge, under the cover, scaling all the stuff and machine learning and AI in the application. So we've said this on theCUBE now, what, five years now? >> Dave: Yeah, yep. >> Guys, we've got an action packed night tonight. Two days tomorrow and Wednesday. Michael Dell is on tomorrow. Chuck Whitten is on, Jeff Clarke, et cetera, et cetera. Caitlin Gordon is on Wednesday. >> All the heavy hitters are coming on. >> They're coming on, they're going to be... >> Dave: Allison Dew's coming on. >> Allison Dew's coming on. >> We're going to talk about the Matthew McConaughey interview, which was, I thought, fantastic. J.J. Davis is coming on. So we're going to have a great channel discussion, as well, with Cheryl Cook. >> That's right. >> A lot of the product people are coming on. We're going to be talking APEX, it's going to be good. With cyber recovery, the Storage Alchemist is coming on, John! (all laughing) >> Boy, I can't wait to see that one. >> Well stick around guys for our coverage all day tomorrow, Tuesday and Wednesday. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and John Furrier coming to you live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. This is Dell Technologies World 2022. We look forward to seeing you tomorrow and the next day. (bouncy, upbeat music)

More bottoms up and have more technical early adopters. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software and it starts with great technical founders with great products and great bottoms of emotions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background, super smart, but Myer of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is all companies there's no, I mean, consumer is enterprise now, everything is what was once a niche. No, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. <laugh> but remember, like right now there's also a tech and VC conference in Miami <laugh> and it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, >>Ts is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. >>Well, and, and I think all of us here that are, uh, may maybe students of history and have been involved in open source in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three >>Movement. The hype is definitely one web three. Yeah. >>But, >>But you know, >>For sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east of Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case now? And maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many measures over, uh, $500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30% a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast, well, >>Let's get, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant <laugh> but there's also the hype of like the web three, for instance, but you know, for, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Luman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, higher, a direct sales force and SAS kind of crushed that now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS is snowflake assassin or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, they own all my data and you know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of common across all successful startups and the overall adoption of technology. Um, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually like growth, right. They're one and the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving growth. >>You just pull the product >>Through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this, but maybe started with open source where users were contributors, you know, contributors were users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing. It's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the, and they're really the, the beneficiaries and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a gen Xer technically. So for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I have what been saying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit digital hippie revolution, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one other group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. You, we hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>During the mainframe days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home group. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on. Well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal it'll trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion yeah. Around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source, one example of that religion. Some people will say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? Yeah. It's so it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily caring >>About data. Data drives all decision making. Let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've been a VC for many years, but you also have the founder entrepreneurial mindset, but you can get empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of it's about believing in the person. So faking it till you make it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. >>Oh, AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur. Right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, so somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story, and I still think that that's important, right. It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. Yeah. But having said that you're right. The proof is in the pudding, right. At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it gonna it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in the new economy that we live in, really, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative of because their product begins exactly >>The volume you back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song is the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, like the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with. Right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the it's gotta speak to the, >>Speak to the user, but let me ask a question now that for the people watching, who are maybe entrepreneurial entre, preneurs, um, masterclass here in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine with you an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do, do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think something will become. Right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way. And we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be the, of more likely somebody is gonna align with your vision and, and wanna invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I, you gotta >>Show the >>Path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision. Uh, if you have the same vision, you can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle. The journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the latest trends because it's over before you can get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living, we'll say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. <laugh> so you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going in this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but some times it happens in six months. Sometimes it takes six years. Sometimes it takes 16 years. Uh, >>What's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Bel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There's three big trends that we invest in. And the they're the only things we do day in, day out one is the explosion and open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen, an alwa timeline >>Happening forever. >>But, uh, it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's, it's one big, massive wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now, a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally, it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is underinvested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a dessert do over, right? I mean, do we need you do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cybersecurity as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is run $150 billion. And it still is a fraction of what we're, >>What we're and national security even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital that's >>Right. You mean arguably, right? I mean, arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say, you gotta love your firm. Love. You're doing we're big supporters, your mission. Congratulations on your entrepreneurial venture. And, uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cuban. Uh, absolutely not. Certainly EU maybe even north Americans in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for helping me on the show. >>Guess be VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California. After this short break, stay with us. Everyone. Welcome to the cue here. Live in San Francisco. K warn you for AWS summit 2022 we're live we're back with events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube. Got a great guest here, Justin Kobe owner, and CEO of innovative solutions. Their booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us the story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. >>Yeah. <laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to mid-size businesses that are moving to the cloud, or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control security, compliance, all the good stuff that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is, but now we have offices down in Austin, Texas, up in Toronto, uh, Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago. And it's been a great ride. >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by a of us. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization, but obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? >>Yeah. It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small mids to size business. They're all trying to understand how to leverage technology better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech is really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're of like, listen, we gotta move to the cloud or we move some things to the cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then so, uh, progressively working through a modernization strategy is always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to mid-size businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. And they want to get set up. But the, the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is not it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem. And you guys solve >>In the SMB space. The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and our hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with, to technology staff that has traditional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether that's, we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to yeah. Feel like, listen, at the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's on primer in the cloud, I just want know that I'm doing that way. That helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. Good. >>How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I think there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start down your journey in one way and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's a, gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning, the projects that early, not worrying about it, you got it mean most people don't abandon stuff cuz they're like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. >>And they get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. >>Yeah. Frog and boiling water, as we used to say, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean, this, this is a dynamic. That's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you guys come in. I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talked to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did Andy jazzy announcer Adam? You know, the 5,000 announcement or whatever. They did huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just processes. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are >>Values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to midsize business leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a 10 a company in the process of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning they know that we have their back and we're the safety net. So when a customer is saying, right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand and dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going in alone. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say your high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attacks. If you have a partner that's offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products, uh, that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own. It, it would cost 'em a four, >>The training alone would be insane. A risk factor. I mean the cost. Yes, absolutely opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018. When, uh, when we, he made the decision to go all in on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious, it wasn't requirement. It still isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front >>Desk and she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I >>Love it. It's >>Amazing. >>But I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get >>The right people with. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point out SMBs and businesses in general, small and large it staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the buildout, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner, SMB, do I get to ROI? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cyber security issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one in the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Like critical issues. >>This is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about this, >>That's, that's what, at least a million in loading, if not three or more Just to get that app going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side. No. And they remind AI and ML. >>That's right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It it's incredibly difficult. And the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll do all that exactly. In the it department. >>Exactly. >>So like, can we just call up, uh, you know, our old vendor that's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like it, >>But that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I was a business owner starting a business today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. It's something that we talk about every, with every one of our small to mid-size >>Businesses. So just, I want get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative yeah. Award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, I was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduced other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. Yeah. I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months than I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at RT long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2000 and I was like, Hey, I'm growing the value of this business. And who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years? What do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner. But if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that were gonna also buy the business with me. >>And they were the owners, no outside capital, >>None zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons. They all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like, if we're own, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015 and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an earn out process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the BI cuz they cared very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting all going all in on the cloud was important for us. And we haven't looked back. >>And at that time, the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly the, uh, and those kinds of big enterprises. The GA I don't wanna say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to midsize business to migrate completely to the cloud is as infrastructure was considered, that just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing where the, a lot of our small to midsize business customers, they wanted to leverage cloud based backup, or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration. The, the Microsoft suite to the cloud. And a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on AWS at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plugin for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating into the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customer is not to be cash strapped and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so they can modernize. So >>Like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers and being empathetic to where they are in their journey. >>And that's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable win that's right. Seeing the value and ING down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate >>It. Thank you very much for having me. >>Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We're back with more great coverage for two days after this short break >>Live on the floor in San Francisco for Aus summit. I'm John for host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the actual back in person we're at AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube. Bring all the action. Also virtual. We have a hybrid cube, check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. >>So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to be back through events. It's >>Amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to, to in what two, three >>Years. That's awesome. We'll be at the, uh, a AWS summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and the big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything devs sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Benet, he's got cloud native. So the, the game is pretty much laid out. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's >>Right. Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions. The at our around, especially the edge public cloud for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give >>An example, >>Uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech data and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running or FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering Aw since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam slaps in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't wanna say trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listens to the customer. They work backwards from the customer. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does >>Computing. >>It >>Does. That's not centralized in the public cloud now they got regions. So what is the issue with the edge what's driving? The behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got five GM having. So it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data in is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always use the riff on the cube, uh, cause it's basically Amazon in a box, pushed in the data center, running native, all this stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of becoming standard. You're starting to see some standard. Deepak syncs group is doing some amazing work with opensource Raul's team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my datas center, do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outpost. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone now happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment. And it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. Right? So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. That's right. Innovative. Does that get the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in these new areas that you're helping out are they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is that they don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on what's making them money as a business. They wanna focus on their applications. They wanna focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and a AWS. You take the infrastructure, you take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. Uh, we help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. So >>Basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it >>Works? Right. And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy fin in the Caribbean, we're gonna talk about hurricanes. And we're gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that, that requirement. It makes total sense. We're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's a, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech. And in, in the islands there a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming. Uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a, uh, technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure, because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on >>It's interesting. I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, project going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart contract, we use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead and it's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain just for like smart contracts, for instance, or certain transactions. And they go to Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service. Well, what happened to decentralized? >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance issue. Yeah. And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through, uh, a use case of a customer Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my a, I also want all the benefit of the cloud. So I want the modern, and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer. >>Yeah. Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up, they don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with a regular commercially available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Inside of that manufacturing plant, we can do pre-procesing on things coming out of the robotics, depending on what we're manufacturing. Right. And then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard >>For data, data lake, or whatever, >>To the data lake. Yeah. Data lake house, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but a lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just time manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going to the data that saves that cost yeah. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data unless you have to. Um, but those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever, the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? There's a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe, maybe this decision can wait. Right. And then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot tube doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture on the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about customers are starting to talk about throwing away data. Uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And well, >>I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session this, but the one pattern we're seeing come of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retrain their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes co as we call it in our last showcase, we did a whole whole an event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw away. It's not just business benefits. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. There >>Are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are running petabyte level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a, kind of a, um, fun, I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, Aus cloud, and skydiving instructor. How does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? >>Yeah. Uh, I, >>You jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump >>Out kind of. So I was, you jumped out. I was teaching Scott eing, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a Scott I instructor. Uh, I was teaching Scott eing and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and how his customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, I started in the first day there, we had a, and, uh, EC two had just come out <laugh> um, and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that, and through being in on premises, migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services to premises. >>So it's such a great story. You know, I was gonna, you know, you know, the, the, the, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early days was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, uh, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and I, maybe it does still feel like that to some people, right. Yeah. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting stuff like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You guys, the right equipment, you gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Matthew, thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here, lot in San Francisco for AWS summit, I'm John for your host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look at this calendar for all the cube, actually@thecube.net. We'll right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube, a summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John furry host of the cube. We'll be at the, a us summit in New York city this summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco getting all coverage, what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dos car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor and a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you, Pam. Cool. How are you? Good. >>How are you? >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah so give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? First >>Of all, thank you for having me. We're back to be business with you never while after. Great to see you. Um, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. Um, we have raised close to a hundred million there. Uh, the investors are people like nor west Menlo, true ventures, coast, lo ventures, Ram Shera, and all those people, all known guys that Antibe chime Paul Mayard web. So a whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley vs are involved. >>And has it gone? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISR is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and ServiceNow to take it to the next stage? Well, >>I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, and Dave Valenti as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh>, >>You know, >>You >>Get, the comment is fun to talk to you though. >>You get the commentary, you, your, your finger on the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud out scale. You predicted that we talked about in the cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing Docker just raised a hundred million on our $2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from an enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control, plane emerging, AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded observability there's 10 million observability companies. Data is the key. This is what's your angle on this. What's your take. Yeah, >>No, look, I think I'll give you the view that I see, right? I, from my side, obviously data is very clear. So the things that room system of record that you and me talked about, the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud native, it'll be called AI. NA NA is a new buzzword and using the AI for customer service, it operations. You talk about observability. I call it AI ops, applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and AI service desk. What needs to be helped desk with ServiceNow BMC <inaudible> you see a new ALA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflows, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with AI workflows. So you'll see AI going >>Off is RPA a company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI S one will be at their event this summer? Um, or is it a product company? I mean, I mean, RPA is almost, should be embedded in everything. >>It's a feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company also, but that automation should be a, in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NA and AI NATO it'll become automation. NA yeah. And that's your thinking. >>It's almost interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kind having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle and it was software was action. Now you have all kinds of workflows abstractions everywhere. Right? So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed or they integrated. I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So don't about the databases become all polyglot databases. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area, like, as you were talking about, it should be part of ServiceNow. It should be part of ISRA, like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see MuleSoft and Salesforce buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies could cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also will have an automation as a layer <inaudible> inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind us, you got the expo hall. You got, um, we're back to vents, but you got, you know, am Clume Ove, uh, Dynatrace data dog, innovative all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right. Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Deibel later today. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen, we know all the, the VCs. What does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation. Cloud's bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's. Yes. Basically. Data's everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders, how Amazon created the startups 15 years back, everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be is people don't just build on Amazon. They're gonna build it on top of snowflake. Companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake. Right? So I see my old boss flagman try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer. Right? So I think that's the next level of <inaudible> trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis of a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your Mo is what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in, in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last reinvent, coined the term super cloud, right? He's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage, and guys, Charles Fitzgerald out there who we like was kind of shitting on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get it. Like, yeah, I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> cause he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Now. They say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist. And, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. It >>Is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer. Remember the middle layer pass will be snowflake so I can build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer if I really need to size build it on force.com Salesforce. Yeah. Right. So I think that's where you'll see. So >>Basically the, if you're an entrepreneur, the, the north star in terms of the, the outcome is be a super cloud. >>It is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. Yeah. >>Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales, the snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think they had Redshift. Amazon has got Redshift. Um, but Snowflake's a big customer in the, they're probably paying AWS, I think big bills too. So >>Joe on very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-optation will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with, uh, snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouses or data layer. So I think depending on the application use case, you have to use each of the above. I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that it comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, you know, foreclose, your, you that's right with some sort of internal hack. Uh, but I think, I think the general question that I have is that I, I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point, when does the rising tide stop and do the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth? So >>I think it's growth. You call it cloud scale, you invented the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's as long as there more movement from on, uh, OnPrem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations. It helpless, even the customer service service now and, uh, ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go >>Made. I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers are practitioners, not suppliers to the more market, feel free to text me or DMing. The next question's really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products, cuz you know, the big enterprises now and you know, small, medium, large and large enterprise are all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean I'm seeing some stuff, but why don't get your thoughts on that? What, >>No, it is. If I growing by or 2007 or eight, when I used to talk to you back then and Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or 1% today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a CIO or line of business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. >>Yeah. And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I reference the URL cause it's like, there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solutions that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there. Um, and goes back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure is code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share >>Yourself a lot of first is I see the AIOP solutions in the future should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app Dyna, right? Dynatrace, all this solution. We will go future towards predict to proactive solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service desk. Customers are give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can them, but I gotta train them, modify them, tweak them, make them >>Better, >>Make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to big data days back in 2009, you know, >>Look at, look how much data Rick has grown. >>It is. They doubled the >>Key cloud air kinda went private. So good stuff, man. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking at that growing customers and my customers are some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk McAfee, uh, grand to so all the top customers, um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on predict is one area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service. >>Great stuff, man. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of Aish summit 2022. And we're gonna be at Aus summit in San, uh, in New York in the summer. So look for that on this calendar, of course go to eight of us, startups.com. I mentioned that it's decipher all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This the cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back, little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit in new York's coming in the summer. We'll be there too with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the groove psych to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're can see a lot of virtual cube outta hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economists with bill group. He's the founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank >>You. Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe is shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at mark, Andrew's been doing a lot of shit posting lately. All a billionaires are shit hosting, but they don't know how to do it. Like they're not >>Doing it right? So there's something opportunity there. It's like here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a midsize island, do begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. >>This shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on this side I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what is shit posting? >>It's more or less talking about the world of enter prize technology, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream. But it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a jackass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, coupons coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you see the growth of cloud native Amazon's of all the Adams, especially new CEO. Andy's move on to be the chief of all Amazon. Just so I'm the cover of was it time met magazine? Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything. These folks do. They're they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble imagining the logistics. It takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. And it's, it's sprawling immense that dominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. >>Well, there's a lot of force for good conversations. Seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to port eight of us is trying to portray themselves as you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. <laugh> either way, sounds like more exciting. Like I better >>Have a replacement ready <laugh> I, in case something goes wrong on the track, highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in east sports with other people in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and videographic card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. >>Oh, it's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going on in your world. I know you have a lot of great success. We've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter, check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's the blowback, any blowback late? Has there been uptick? What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's high. I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They must not have heard me it. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do >>That. We should do that. Actually. I think you're people would call in, oh, >>I, I think >>I guarantee we had that right now. People would call in and say, Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised about anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the >>Customer. You know, I always joke with Dave Alane about how John Fort's always at, uh, um, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0, 0 5, or we can't call, we >>Have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And then there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented SU sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish. That's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their >>Producting. So they're going in different directions. When they named Amazon Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonused on number of words, they can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, session manager is a great one. I love the service ridiculous name. They have a systems manager, parameter store, which is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage your parameter store does not. It's fun. >>What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination >>Of gots. You got EMR, you got EC two, you got S3 SQS. Well, RedShift's not an acronym you >>Gets is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation, they >>Shook up bean stock or is that still around? Oh, >>They never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, well, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it, but while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it. John three <laugh>. Okay. Simple BV still haunts our dreams. >>I, I actually got an email on, I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C twos were being deprecated and I got an email I'm I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me? Just like, give me something else. All right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you, is that like, okay. So as Amazon better in some areas where do they need more work in your opinion? Because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database Snowflake's got out database service. So Redshift, snowflake data breach is out there. So you got this co-op petition. Yes. How's that going? And what do you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with, and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want. And they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multicloud. Cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word multicloud. Um, a lot of people though saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word. Like multicloud sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multicloud? >>Multiple single >>Cloudant loves that term. Yeah. >>You know, you're building in multiple single points of failure, do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about my multi-cloud either as the industry leader, let's talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective. It doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of forms. Some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on, but my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. >>Yeah, course. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question cause I know you we've been, you know, fellow journeyman and the, and the cloud journey going to all the events and then the pandemic hit. We now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna gonna end. Certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations. Community's gonna emerge. You've got a pretty big community growing and it's growing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing or just big changes you've seen with the pandemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece, come in, you're commentating, you're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck build group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, funny, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who can pony up two grand and a week in Las Vegas and get to Las Vegas from wherever they happen to be by moving virtually suddenly it, it embraces the reality that talent is evenly. Distributed. Opportunity is not. And that means that suddenly these things are accessible to a wide swath of audience and potential customer base and the rest that hadn't been invited to the table previously, it's imperative that we not lose that. It's nice to go out and talk to people and have people come up and try and smell my hair from time to time, I smelled delightful. Let me assure you. But it was, but it's also nice to be. >>I have a product for you if you want, you know? Oh, >>Oh excellent. I look forward to it. What is it? Pudding? Why not? <laugh> >>What else have you seen? So when accessibility for talent. Yes. Which by the way is totally home run. What weird things have happened that you've seen? Um, that's >>Uh, it's, it's weird, but it's good that an awful lot of people giving presentation have learned to tighten their message and get to the damn point because most people are not gonna get up from a front row seat in a conference hall, midway through your Aing talk and go somewhere else. But they will change a browser tab and you won't get them back. You've gotta be on point. You've gotta be compelling if it's going to be a virtual discussion. Yeah. >>And you turn off your iMessage too. >>Oh yes. It's always fun in the, in the meetings when you're ho to someone and their colleague is messaging them about, should we tell 'em about this? And I'm sitting there reading it and it's >>This guy is really weird. Like, >>Yes I am and I bring it into the conversation and then everyone's uncomfortable. It goes, wow. Why >>Not? I love when my wife yells at me over I message. When I'm on a business call, like, do you wanna take that about no, I'm good. >>No, no. It's better off. I don't the only entire sure. It's >>Fine. My kids text. Yeah, it's fine. Again, that's another weird thing. And, and then group behavior is weird. Now people are looking at, um, communities differently. Yes. Very much so, because if you're fatigued on content, people are looking for the personal aspect. You're starting to see much more of like yeah. Another virtual event. They gotta get better. One and two who's there. >>Yeah. >>The person >>That's a big part of it too is the human stories are what are being more and more interesting. Don't get up here and tell me about your product and how brilliant you are and how you built it. That's great. If I'm you, or if I wanna work with you or I want to compete with you or I want to put on my engineering hat and build it myself. Cause why would I buy anything? That's more than $8. But instead, tell me about the problem. Tell me about the painful spot that you specialize in. Yeah. Tell me a story there. >>I, I think >>That gets a glimpse in a hook and makes >>More, more, I think you nailed it. Scaling storytelling. Yes. And access to better people because they don't have to be there in person. I just did a thing. I never, we never would've done the queue. We did. Uh, Amazon stepped up in sponsors. Thank you, Amazon for sponsoring international women's day, we did 30 interviews, APAC. We did five regions and I interviewed this, these women in Asia, Pacific eight, PJ, they call for in this world. And they're amazing. I never would've done those interviews cuz I never, would've seen 'em at an event. I never would've been in pan or Singapore, uh, to access them. And now they're in the index, they're in the network. They're collaborating on LinkedIn. So a threads are developing around connections that I've never seen before. Yes. Around the content. >>Absolutely >>Content value plus and >>Effecting. And that is the next big revelation of this industry is going to realize you have different companies. And, and I Amazon's case different service teams all competing with each other, but you have the container group and you have the database group and you have the message cuing group. But customers don't really want to build things from spare parts. They want a solution to a problem. I want to build an app that does Twitter for pets or whatever it is I'm trying to do. I don't wanna basically have to pick and choose and fill my shopping cart with all these different things. I want something that's gonna basically give me what I'm trying to get as close to turnkey as possible. Moving up the stack. That is the future. And just how it gets here is gonna be >>Well we're here at Corey Quinn, the master of the master of content here in the a ecosystem. Of course we we've been following up from the beginning. His great guy, check out his blog, his site, his newsletter screaming podcast. Corey, final question for, uh, what are you here doing? What's on your agenda this week in San Francisco and give a plug for the duck build group. What are you guys doing? I know you're hiring some people what's on the table for the company. What's your focus this week and put a plug in for the group. >>I'm here as a customer and basically getting outta my cage cuz I do live here. It's nice to actually get out and talk to folks who are doing interesting things at the duck bill group. We solved one problem. We fixed the horrifying AWS bill, both from engineering and architecture, advising as well as negotiating AWS contracts because it turns out those things are big and complicated. And of course my side media projects last week in aws.com, we are, it it's more or less a content operation where I in my continual and ongoing love affair with the sound of my own voice. >><laugh> and you're good. It's good content it's on, on point fun, Starky and relevant. So thanks for coming to the cube and sharing with us. Appreciate it. No >>Thank you button. >>You. Okay. This the cube covers here in San Francisco, California, the cube is back going to events. These are the summits, Amazon web services summits. They happen all over the world. We'll be in New York and obviously we're here in San Francisco this week. I'm John fur. Keep, keep it right here. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Okay. Welcome back everyone. This's the cubes covers here in San Francisco, California, we're live on the show floor of AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube and remember AWS summit in New York city coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. And of course reinvent the end of the year for all the cube coverage on cloud computing and AWS two great guests here from the APN global APN Sege chef Jenko and Jeff Grimes partner lead Jeff and Sege is doing partnerships global APN >>AWS global startup program. Yeah. >>Okay. Say that again. >>AWS. We'll start >>Program. That's the official name. >>I love >>It too long, too long for me. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, >>Of course. >>Appreciate it. Tell us about what's going on with you guys. What's the, how was you guys organized? You guys we're obviously we're in San Francisco bay area, Silicon valley, zillions of startups here, New York. It's got another one we're gonna be at tons of startups. A lot of 'em getting funded, big growth and cloud big growth and data secure hot in all sectors. >>Absolutely. >>So maybe, maybe we could just start with the global startup program. Um, it's essentially a white glove service that we provide to startups that are built on AWS. And the intention there is to help identify use cases that are being built on top of AWS. And for these startups, we want to pro vibe white glove support in co building products together. Right. Um, co-marketing and co-selling essentially, um, you know, the use cases that our customers need solved, um, that either they don't want to build themselves or are perhaps more innovative. Um, so the, a AWS global startup program provides white glove support. Dedicat at headcount for each one of those pillars. Um, and within our program, we've also provided incentives, programs go to market activities like the AWS startup showcase that we've built for these startups. >>Yeah. By the way, AWS startup, AWS startups.com is the URL, check it out. Okay. So partnerships are key. Jeff, what's your role? >>Yeah. So I'm responsible for leading the overall effort for the AWS global startup program. Um, so I've got a team of partner managers that are located throughout the us, uh, managing a few hundred startup ISVs right now. <laugh> >>Yeah, you got a >>Lot. We've got a lot. >>There's a lot. I gotta, I gotta ask a tough question. Okay. I'm I'm a startup founder. I got a team. I just got my series a we're grown. I'm trying to hire people. I'm super busy. What's in it for me. Yeah. What do you guys bring to the table? I love the white glove service, but translate that what's in it for what do I get out of it? What's >>A story. Good question. I focus, I think. Yeah, because we get, we get to see a lot of partners building their businesses on AWS. So, you know, from our perspective, helping these partners focus on what, what do we truly need to build by working backwards from customer feedback, right? How do we effectively go to market? Because we've seen startups do various things, um, through trial and error, um, and also just messaging, right? Because oftentimes partners or rather startups, um, try to boil the ocean with many different use cases. So we really help them, um, sort of laser focus on what are you really good at and how can we bring that to the customer as quickly as possible? >>Yeah. I mean, it's truly about helping that founder accelerate the growth of their company, right. And there's a lot that you can do with AWS, but focus is truly the key word there because they're gonna be able to find their little piece of real estate and absolutely deliver incredible outcomes for our customers. And then they can start their growth curve there. >>What are some of the coolest things you've seen with the APN that you can share publicly? I know you got a lot going on there, a lot of confidentiality. Um, but you know, we're here a lot of great partners on the floor here. I'm glad we're back at events. Uh, a lot of stuff going on digitally with virtual stuff and, and hybrid. What are some of the cool things you guys have seen in the APN that you can point to? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can point to few, you can take them. So, um, I think what's been fun over the years for me personally, I came from a startup brand sales at an early stage startup and, and I went through the whole thing. So I have a deep appreciation for what these guys are going through. And what's been interesting to see for me is taking some of these early stage guys, watching them progress, go public, get acquired and see that big day mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, and being able to point to very specific items that we help them to get to that point. Uh, and it's just a really fun journey to watch. >>Yeah. I, and part of the reason why I really, um, love working at the AWS, uh, global startup program is working with passionate founders. Um, I just met with a founder today that it's gonna, he's gonna build a very big business one day, um, and watching them grow through these stages and supporting that growth. Um, I like to think of our program as a catalyst for enterprise is sort of scale. Yeah. Um, and through that we provide visibility, credibility and growth opportunities. >>Yeah. A lot, a lot of partners too. What I found talking to staff founders is when they have that milestone, they work so hard for it. Whether it's a B round C round Republic or get bought. Yeah. Um, then they take a deep breath and they look back at wow, what a journey it's been. So it's kind of emotional for sure. But still it's a grind. Right? You gotta, I mean, when you get funding, it's still day one. You don't stop. It's no celebrate, you got a big round or valuation. You still gotta execute >>And look it's hypercompetitive and it's brutally difficult. And our job is to try to make that a little less difficult and navigate those waters. Right. Where ever everyone's going after similar things. >>Yeah. And I think as a group element too, I observe that startups that I, I meet through the APN has been interesting because they feel part of AWS. Yeah, totally. As a group of community, as a vibe there. Um, I know they're hustling, they're trying to make things happen. But at the same time, Amazon throws a huge halo effect. I mean, that's a huge factor. I mean, you guys are the number one cloud in the business, the growth in every sector is booming. Yeah. And if you're a startup, you don't have that luxury yet. And look at companies like snowflake that built on top of AWS. I mean, people are winning by building on AWS. >>Yeah. And our, our, our program really validates their technology first. So we have, what's all the foundation's technical review that we put all of our startups through before we go to market. So that when enterprise customers are looking at startup technology, they know that it's already been vetted. And, um, to take that a step further and help these partners differentiate, we use programs like the competency programs, the DevOps competencies, the security competency, which continues to help, um, provide sort of a platform for these startups, help them differentiate. And also there's go to market benefits that are associated with that. >>Okay. So let me ask the, the question that's probably on everyone's mind, who's watching, certainly I asked this a lot. There's a lot of companies startups out there who makes the cut, is there a criteria cut? It's not like it's sports team or anything, but like sure. Like there's activate program, which is like, there's hundreds of thousands of startups out there. Not everyone is at the APN. Right? Correct. So ISVs again, that's a whole nother, that's a more mature partner that might have, you know, huge market cap or growth. How, how do you guys focus? How do you guys focus? I mean, you got a good question, you know, thousand flowers blooming all the time. Is there a new way you guys are looking at it? I know there's been some talk about restructure or, or new focus. What's the focus. >>Yeah. It's definitely not an easy task by any means. Um, but you know, I recently took over this role and we're really trying to establish focus areas, right. So obviously a lot of the ISVs that we look after are infrastructure ISVs. That's what we do. Uh, and so we have very specific pods that look after different type of partners. So we've got a security pod, we've got a DevOps pod, we've got core infrastructure, et cetera. And really, we're trying to find these ISVs that can solve, uh, really interesting AWS customer. >>You guys have a deliberate, uh, focus on these pillars. So what infrastructure, >>Security, DevOps, and data and analytics, and then line of business >>Line, business line business, like web >>Marketing, business apps, >>Owner type thing. Exactly. >>Yeah, exactly. >>So solutions there. Yeah. More solutions and the other ones are like hardcore. So infrastructure as well, like storage back up ransomware kind of stuff, or, >>Uh, storage, networking. >>Okay. Yeah. The classic >>Database, et cetera. Right. >>And so there's teams on each pillar. >>Yep. So I think what's, what's fascinating for the startups that we cover is that they've got, they truly have support from a build market sell perspective, right. So you've got someone who's technical to really help them get the technology, figured out someone to help them get the marketing message dialed and spread, and then someone to actually do the co-sell, uh, day to day activities to help them get in front of customers. >>Probably the number one request that we always ask for Amazon is can wish that sock report, oh, download it on the console, which we use all the time. <laugh> exactly. But security's a big deal. I mean, you know, ask the res are evolving, that role of DevOps is taking on dev SecOps. Um, I, I can see a lot of customers having that need for a relationship to move things faster. Do you guys provide like escalation or is that a part of a service or that not part of, uh, uh, >>Yeah, >>So the partner development manager can be an escalation for absolutely. Think of that. 'em as an extension of your business inside of AWS. >>Great. And you guys, how is that partner managers, uh, measure >>On those three pillars? Right. Got it. Are we billing, building valuable use cases? So product development go to market, so go to market activities, think blog, posts, webinars, case studies, so on and so forth. And then co-sell not only are we helping these partners win their current opportunities that they are sourcing, but can we also help them source net new deals? Yeah. Right. That's very, >>I mean, top asked from the partners is get me in front of customers. Right. Um, not an easy task, but that's a huge goal of ours to help them grow their top line. >>Right. Yeah. In fact, we had some interviews here on the cube earlier talking about that dynamic of how enterprise customers are buying. And it's interesting, a lot more POCs. I have one partner here that you guys work with, um, on observability, they got a huge POC with capital one mm-hmm <affirmative> and the enterprises are engaging the star ups and bringing them in. So the combination of open source software enterprises are leaning into that hard and bringing young growing startups in mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yep. So I could see that as a huge service that you guys can bring people in. >>Right. And they're bringing massively differentiated technology to the table. The challenge is they just might not have the brand recognition. The, at the big guys have mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so that's, our job is how do you get that great tech in front of the right situations? >>Okay. So my next question is about the show here, and then we'll talk globally. So here in San Francisco sure. You know, Silicon valley bay area, San Francisco bay area, a lot of startups, a lot of VCs, a lot of action. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so probably a big market for you guys. Yeah. So what's exciting here in SF. And then outside of SF, you guys have a global pro, have you see any trends that are geography based or is it sure areas more mature? There's certain regions that are better. I mean, I just interviewed a company here. That's doing, uh, a AWS edge really well in these cases. It's interesting that these, the partners are filling a lot of holes and gaps in the opportunities with a AWS. So what's exciting here. And then what's the global perspective. >>Yeah, totally. So obviously see a ton of partners from the bay area that we support. Um, but we're seeing a lot of really interesting technology come out of AMEA specifically. Yeah. Uh, and making a lot of noise here in the United States, which is great. Um, and so, you know, we definitely have that global presence and, and starting to see super differentiated technology come out of those regions. >>Yeah. Especially Tel Aviv. Yeah. >>Amy and real quick before you get into surge. It's interesting. The VC market in, in Europe is hot. They've got a lot of unicorns coming in. We've seen a lot of companies coming in. They're kind of rattling their own, you know, cage right now. Hey, look at us. Let's see if they crash, you know, but we don't see that happening. I mean, people have been predicting a crash now in, in the startup ecosystem for least a year. It's not crashing. In fact, funding's up. >>Yeah. The pandemic was hard on a lot of startups for sure. Yeah. Um, but what we've seen is many of these startups, they, as quickly as they can grow, they can also pivot as, as, as well. Um, and so I've actually seen many of our startups grow through the demo because their use cases are helping customers either save money, become more operationally efficient and provide value to leadership teams that need more visibility into their infrastructure during a pandemic. >>It's an interesting point. I talked to Andy jazzy and Adam Celski both say the same thing during the pandemic. Necessity's the mother of all invention. Yep. And startups can move fast. So with that, you guys are there to assist if I'm a startup and I gotta pivot cuz remember iterate and pivot, iterate and pivot. So you get your economics, that's the playbook of the ventures and the models. >>Exactly. How >>Do you guys help me do that? Give me an example of what me through. Pretend me, I'm a start up. Hey, I'm on the cloud. Oh my God. Pandemic. They need video conferencing. Hey cube. Yeah. What do I need? Search? What, what do >>I do? That's a good question. First thing is just listen. Yeah. I think what we have to do is a really good job of listening to the partner. Um, what are their needs? What is their problem statement? Where do they want to go at the end of the day? Um, and oftentimes because we've worked with, so how many successful startups that have come out of our program, we have, um, either through intuition or a playbook determined what is gonna be the best path forward and how do we get these partners to stop focusing on things that will eventually, um, just be a waste of time. Yeah. And, or not provide, or, you know, bring any fruit to the table, which, you know, essentially revenue. >>Well, we love startups here in the cube because one, um, they have good stories, they're oil and cutting edge, always pushing the envelope and they're kind of disrupting someone else. Yeah. And so they, they have an opinion. They don't mind sharing on camera. So love talking to startups. We love working with you guys on our startups. Showcases startups.com. Check out AWS startups.com and she got the showcase. So is, uh, final word. I'll give you guys the last word. What's the bottom line bumper sticker for AP globe. The global APN program summarize the opportunity for startups, what you guys bring to the table and we'll close it out. Totally. We'll start >>With you. Yeah. I think the AWS global startup programs here to help companies truly accelerate their business full stop. Right. And that's what we're here for. Love it. >>It's a good way to, it's a good way to put it. Dato yeah. >>All right. Thanks for coming out. Thanks John. Great to see you love working with you guys. Hey, startups need help. And the growing and huge market opportunities, the shift cloud scale data engineering, security infrastructure, all the markets are exploding in growth because of the digital transformation of realities here, open source and cloud. I'll making it happen here in the cube in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, your host. Thanks for >>Watching Cisco, John. >>Hello and welcome back to the Cube's live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, two days of coverage, AWS summit, 2022 in New York city coming up this summer will be there as well. Events are back. The cube is back of course, with the cube virtual cube hybrid, the cube.net. Check it out a lot of content this year more than ever a lot more cloud data cloud native, modern applic is all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, Cub alumni, uh, CEO of observe Inc in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data observability, Jeremy. Great to see you. Thanks. >>Coming on. Always great to come and talk to you on the queue, man. It's been been a few years, so, >>Um, well you, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, uh, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability Smith hot area, but also you've been a senior executive president of Dell EMC. Um, 11 years ago you had a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. Um, yeah. And it's here, you predicted it 11 years ago. Um, look around it's cloud meets big data. >>Yeah. I mean the, the cloud thing I think, you know, was, was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for, for sort of catching that bus early, um, you know, we, we were on the, the, the bus early and, and I think it was only inevitable. Like, you know, if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you, you could find out things you could never possibly imagine. >>So you're close to a lot of companies that we've been covering deeply snowflake, obviously you involved, uh, at the board level, the other found, you know, the people there, uh, cloud, you know, Amazon, you know, what's going on here? Yeah. You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, uh, chief of observ, Inc, which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data engineering, large scale integrations, um, data as code integrating into applications. I mean, it's a whole nother world developing, like you see with snowflake, it means snowflakes is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's your, what's this wave we're on what's how would you describe the wave? >>Well, a couple of things, I mean, people are, I think right in more software than, than ever before are why? Because they've realized that if, if you don't take your business online and offer a service, then you become largely irrelevant. And so you you've got a whole set of new applications. I think, I think more applications now than any point. Um, not, not just ever, but the mid nineties, I always looked at as the golden age of application development. Now, back then people were building for windows. Well, well now they're building for things like AWS is now the platform. Um, so you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data. And the, you know, there's sort of the transactions, you know, what you bought today are something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry, all the exhaust fumes. And I think people really are realizing that their differentiation is not so much their application. It's their understanding of the data. Can, can I understand who my best customers are, what I sell today. If people came to my website and didn't buy, then why not? Where did they drop off all of that? They wanna analyze. And, and the answers are all in the data. The question is, can you understand it >>In our last startup showcase, we featured data as code one of the insights that we got out of that, and I wanna get your opinion on our reaction to is, is that data used to be put into a data lake and turns into a data swamp or throw into the data warehouse. And then we'll do some queries, maybe a report once in a while. And so data, once it was done, unless it was real time, even real time was not good anymore after real time. That was the old way. Now you're seeing more and more, uh, effort to say, let's go look at the data, cuz now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once mm-hmm <affirmative> they're iterating. Yeah. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting. Yeah, that's a Silicon valley story. That's like how startups work, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have another, this data concept that's now yeah. Part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole, this whole new cycle of >>Yeah. >>Data being reused and repurposed and figured out and yeah, >>Yeah. I'm a big fan of, um, years ago. Uh, uh, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee at the MIT C cell labs I spent time with and he, he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look I'm I'm. He said I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you have enough data, you can answer any question. And, and this is going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and, and certainly, you know, research is on the forefront. But I think, you know, starting to see that mindset of the, the sort of MIT research be mainstream, you know, in enterprises, they they're realizing that. Yeah, it is about the data. You know, if I can better understand my data better than my competitor, then I've got an advantage. And so the question is is, is how, what, what technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to, to allow me to do that. >>So let's talk about observing you the CEO of, okay. Given you've seen the ways before you're in the front lines of observability, which again is in the center of all this action what's going on with the company. Give a quick minute to explain, observe for the folks who don't know what you guys do. What's the company doing? What's the funding status, what's the product status and what's the customer status. Yeah. >>So, um, we realized, you know, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago that, um, look, the way people are building applications is different. They they're way more functional. They change every day. Uh, but in some respects they're a lot more complicated. They're distributed. They, you know, microservices architectures and when something goes wrong, um, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not gonna fly because you had SA so much change going into production on a daily basis. It was hard to tell like where the problem was. And so we thought, okay, it's about time. Somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and all the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot and make sense of the problems that they're seeing. So, I mean, that's observability, it's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was a guy called, uh, Rudolph like, like everything in tech, you know, it's, it's a reinvention of something from years gone by. >>Um, there's a guy called, um, Rudy Coleman in 1960s coiner term and, and, and the term was being able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for, uh, the best part of four years now. Um, it took us three years just to build the product. I think, I think what people don't appreciate these days often is the barrier to entry in a lot of these markets is quite high. You, you need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. Um, so yeah, this last year we, we, we did our first year selling, uh, we've got about 40 customers now. Um, we just we've got great investors for the hill ventures. Uh, I mean, Mike SP who was, you know, the, the guy who was the, really, the first guy in it snowflake and the, the initial investor were fortunate enough to, to have Mike and our board. And, um, you know, part of the observed story is closely knit with snowflake all of that time with your data, you know, we, we store in there. >>So I want to get, uh, yeah. Pivot to that. Mike SP snowflake, Jeremy Burton, the cube kind of, kind of same thinking this idea of a super cloud or what snowflake became. Yeah. Snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of snowflake. Yeah. So that's become an entrepreneurial story that we think that to go big in the cloud, you can have a cloud on a cloud, uh, like as Jerry, Jerry Chan and Greylock calls it, castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you, you're doing some stuff with snowflake. So as a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a snowflake or an AWS, because again, you gotta go where the data is. You need all the data. >>Yeah. So >>What's your take on that? I mean, >>Having enough gray hair now, um, you know, again, in tech, I think if you wanna predict the future, look at the past. And, uh, you know, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a, a smaller company called Oracle and an Oracle was the database company. And, uh, their, their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms, one, one windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operating system was the platform. And, and then that was the, you know, ecosystem that you would compete on top of. And then there were companies like SAP that built applications on top of Oracle. So then wind the clock forward 25 years gray hairs. <laugh> the platform, isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, you know, Google cloud. I gotta probably look around if I say that in. Yeah, >>It's okay. Columbia, but hyperscale. Yeah. CapX built out >>That is the new platform. And then snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generated data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. And I think they they've done an amazing job are doing for the, I'd say, say the, the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world, you know, way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and, and of course my ambition would be, look, if, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of snowflake, uh, as, as they were on top of Oracle, then, then we'd probably be quite happy, >>Happy. So you're building on top of snowflake, >>We're building on top of snowflake a hundred percent. And, um, you know, I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that that's a risk. You're >>Still on the board. >>Yeah. I'm still on the board. Yeah. That's a risk I'm prepared to take. I am more on snowing. >>It sounds well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board, then you'll know what's going on. Okay. No, yeah. Serious one. But the, this is a real dynamic. It is. It's not a one off its >>Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS is in order of magnitude, more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so I've believe the opportunity for folks like snowflake and, and folks like observe it. It's an order of magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old world. >>Yeah. And I think this is really, I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you gotta be on a platform. Yeah. >>It's quite easy >>Or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how seats were at that table left >>Well value migrates up over time. So, you know, when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, you know, rack space and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure, a service platform as a service. My, my old, uh, um, employee EMC, we had pivotal, you know, pivotal was a platform as a service. Don't hear so much about it these days, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to, to like extract, uh, a real business, you gotta move up, you gotta add value, you gotta build databases, then you gotta build applications. So >>It's interesting. Moving from the data center of the cloud was a dream for starters within if the provision, the CapEx. Yeah. Now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on, on top of that, you got snowflake. Now you got on top of that. >>The assumption is almost that compute and storage is free. I know it's not quite free. Yeah. It's almost free, but you can, you know, as an application vendor, you think, well, what can I do if I assume compute and storage is free, that's the mindset you've gotta get >>Into. And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm gonna get a series us multiple of value in what I'm paying. Yeah. Most people don't even blanket their Avis pills unless they're like massively huge. Yeah. Then it's a repatriation question or whatever discount question, but for most startups or any growing company, the Amazon bill should be a small factor. >>Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, um, ask me, uh, like, look you build in on snowflake. Um, you, you know, you, you, you're gonna be, you're gonna be paying their money. How, how, how, how does that work with your business model? If you're paying their money, you know, do, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. I, we could build a database as well and observe, but then I've got half the development team working on something that will never be as good as snowflake. And so we made the call early on that. No, no, we, we want a eight above the database. Yeah. Right. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and, and the same is true of something like Amazon, like, like snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >>Yeah. And what's interesting is that Dave <inaudible> and I have been pointing this out and he's obviously a more on snowflake. I've been looking at data bricks, um, and the same dynamics happening, the proof is the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, if you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and data bricks it's exploding. Right. I mean, the shows are selling out the floor. Space's book. That's the old days at VMware. Yeah. The old days at AWS. >>Well, and for snowflake and, and any platform from VI, it's a beautiful thing because, you know, we build on snowflake and we pay them money. They don't have to sell to us. Right. And we do a lot of the support. And so the, the economics work out really, really well. If you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of >>Ecosystems. Yeah. And then also you get, you get a, um, a trajectory of, uh, economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of snowflake integrations, right. New product, you're scaling a step function with them. >>Yeah. I mean, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. Right. When I, when I, when I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had, we had one petabyte customer. And, and so at observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so been able to rely on a platform that can manage that is inve >>You know, well, Jeremy great conversation. Thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. Uh, we got a couple minutes left, um, put a plug in for observe. What do you guys know? You got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your, your, your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You getting in traction. >>Yeah. Yeah. Scales >>Around the corner. Sounds like, are you, is that where you are scale? >>We've got a big that that's when coming up in two or three weeks, we've got, we've got new funding, um, which is always great. Um, the product is, uh, really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, you know, which is at which point can you just start hiring salespeople? And the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. Um, we've got about 40 SaaS companies that run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, uh, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting, um, enterprise type customers. We're, we're, you know, F five networks we're POC in right now with capital one, we got some interest in news around capital one coming up. I, I can't share too much, but it's gonna be exciting. And, and like I said, so hill continue to, to, >>I think capital one's a big snowflake customer as well. Right. >>They were early in one of the things that attracted me to capital one was they were very, very good with snowflake early on. And, and they put snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. And, and today that, that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts, >>Capital, one, very innovative cloud, obviously Atos customer, and very innovative, certainly in the CISO and CIO, um, on another point on where you're at. So you're, Prescale meaning you're about to scale, >>Right? >>So you got POCs, what's that trajectory look like? Can you see around the corner? What's, what's going on? What's on, around the corner. That you're, that you're gonna hit this straight and narrow and, and gas it fast. >>Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the key thing for us is we gotta get the product. Right. Um, the nice thing about having a guy like Mike Pfizer on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage. His questions that the board are always about, like is the product, right? Is the product right? Is the product right? Have you got the product right? And cuz we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and, and the revenue will take care of itself. Yeah. So right now all the attention is on the product. Um, the, this year, the exciting thing is we we're, we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that by in the day you could do with the new relics and AppDynamics, the last generation of, of APM tools, you're gonna be able to do that within observe. And we've already got the logs and the metrics capability in there. So for us this year is a big one, cuz we sort of complete the trifecta, you know, the, the >>Logs, what's the secret sauce observe. What if you had the, put it into a, a, a sentence what's the secret sauce? >>I, I, I think, you know, an amazing founding engineering team, uh, number one, I mean, at the end of the day, you have to build an amazing product and you have to solve a problem in a different way. And we've got great long term investors and, and the biggest thing our investors give is it actually, it's not just money. It gives us time to get the product, right. Because if we get the product right, then we can get the growth. >>Got it. Final question. While I got you here, you've been on the enterprise business for a long time. What's the buyer landscape out there. You got people doing POCs on capital one scale. So we know that goes on. What's the appetite at the buyer side for startups and what are their requirements that you're seeing? Uh, obviously we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their, this restructure. So, so a lot of happening in cloud, what's the criteria. How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >>Yeah. I mean, enterprises, they know they've gotta spend money transforming the business. I mean, this was, I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but, um, what, what we were saying five years ago is happening. Um, everybody needs to figure out a way to take their business to this digital world. Everybody has to do it. So the nice thing from a startup standpoint is they know at times they need to risk or, or take a bet on new technology in order to, to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that a have money, uh, B it prepared to take risks and it's, it's a race against time to you'll get their, their offerings in this, a new digital footprint. >>Final, final question. What's the state of AWS. Where do you see them going next? Obviously they're continuing to be successful. How does cloud 3.0, or they always say it's day one, but it's more like day 10, but what's next for Aw. Where do they go from here? Obviously they're doing well. They're getting bigger and bigger. Yeah, >>Better. It's an amazing story. I mean, you know, we're, we're on AWS as well. And so I, I think if they keep nurturing the builders and the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They, they have an early leads. And if you look at where, you know, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the, in the late nineties, it was, they stopped, uh, really caring about developers in the folks who were building on top of their ecosystem. In fact, they started buying up their ecosystem and competing with people in their ecosystem. And I see with AWS, they, they have an amazing headstart and if they did more, you know, if they do more than that, that's, what's gonna keep this juggernaut rolling for many years to come. >>Yeah. They got the Silicon and got the stack. They're developing Jeremy Burton inside the cube, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called observing in the middle of all the action on the board of snowflake as well. Um, great startup. Thanks for coming on the cube. Always a pleasure. Okay. Live from San Francisco. It's to cube. I'm John for your host. Stay with us more coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. >>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here live in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cubes cube coverage of AWS summit 2022 here in San Francisco. We're all the developers are the bay air at Silicon valley. And of course, AWS summit in New York city is coming up in the summer. We'll be there as well. SF and NYC cube coverage. Look for us. Of course, reinforcing Boston and re Mars with the whole robotics, AI. They all coming together. Lots of coverage stay with us today. We've got a great guest from Bel VC. John founding partner, entrepreneurial venture is a venture firm. Your next act, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Good to see you, man. I feel like it's been forever since we've been able to do something in person. Well, >>I'm glad you're here because we run into each other all the time. We've known each other for over decade. Um, >>It's been at least 10 years, >>At least 10 years more. And we don't wanna actually go back as bring back the old school web 1.0 days. But anyway, we're in web three now. So we'll get to that in a second. We, >>We are, it's a little bit of a throwback to the path though, in my opinion, >>It's all the same. It's all distributed computing and software. We ran each other in cube con. You're investing in a lot of tech startup founders. Okay. This next level, next gen entrepreneurs have a new makeup and it's software. It's hardcore tech in some cases, not hardcore tech, but using software to take an old something old and make it better new, faster. So tell us about Bel what's the firm. I know you're the founder, uh, which is cool. What's going on. Explain >>What you, I mean, you remember I'm a recovering entrepreneur, right? So of course I, I, >>No, you're never recovering. You're always entrepreneur >>Always, but we are also always recovering. So I, um, started my first company when I was 24. If you remember, before there was Facebook and friends, there was instant messaging. People were using that product at work every day, they were creating a security vulnerability between their network and the outside world. So I plugged that hole and built an instant messaging firewall. It was my first company. The company was called IM logic and we were required by Symantec. Uh, then spent 12 years investing in the next generation of software companies, uh, early investor in open source companies and cloud companies and spent a really wonderful years, uh, at a firm called NEA. So I, I feel like my whole life I've been either starting enterprise software companies or helping founders start enterprise software companies. And I'll tell you, there's never been a better time than right now to start an enterprise software company. >>So, uh, the passion for starting a new firm was really a recognition that founders today that are starting an enterprise software company, they, they tend to be, as you said, a more technical founder, right? Usually it's a software engineer or a builder mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, they are building that are serving a slightly different market than what we've traditionally seen in enterprise software. Right? I think traditionally we've seen it buyers or CIOs that have agendas and strategies, which, you know, purchase software that is traditionally bought and sold tops down. But you know, today I think the most successful enterprise software companies are the ones that are built more bottoms up and have more technical early adopters. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software. And it starts with great technical founders with great products and great bottoms of motions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background. You're super smart admire of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is, is all companies there's no, I mean, consumer is enterprise now. Everything is what was once a niche, not, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. But remember, like right now, there's also a giant tech in VC conference in Miami <laugh> and it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, well, >>MFTs is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. >>Well, and, and I think all of us here that are of may, maybe students of his stream have been involved in open source in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three >>Movement. The hype is definitely web >>Three. Yeah. But, >>But you know, >>For sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east to Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case and maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many measures over, uh, $500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30 a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast >>Let's getting, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant <laugh> but there's also the hype of like the web three, for instance, but you know, for, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Lutman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, hire a direct sales force and sass kind of crushed that now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS? Is snowflake a SAS or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, and they own all my data. And you know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of commonalities across all six of startups and the overall adoption of technology. Uh, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually user like growth, right. They're one in the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving. >>You just pull the product >>Through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this movement may be started with open source where users were contributors, you know, contributors were users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing and it's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the users. And they're really the, the offic and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a gen Xer technically. So for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I've, I've been saying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit a digital hippie Revolut, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one of group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. We hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>During the mainframe days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home brew club. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on like, well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source. One example of that religion. Some people say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? It's, it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily. I mean, >>The data drives all decision making. Let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've been a VC for many years, but you also have the founder entrepreneurial mindset, but you can empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of is about believing in the first. So faking it till you make it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. Oh, >>AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur, right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story. And I still think that that's important, right. It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. Yeah. But having said that you're right. The proof is in the pudding, right. At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it's gonna, it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in this new economy, that're, we live in really, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative because their product begin for exactly >>The volume you back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song is the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, like the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with for right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the it's gotta speak to the, >>Exactly. Speak to the user. But let me ask a question now that for the people watching, who are maybe entrepreneurial entre entrepreneurs, um, masterclass here is in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur to come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine. Whether you're an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think will become, right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way, and we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be, the more likely somebody is gonna to align with your vision and, and want to invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I, you gotta show the path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision. Uh, if you have the same vision, you can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle of the journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the, the latest trends because it's over before you even get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living will say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. So you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but sometimes it happens ins six months. Sometimes it takes six years. Sometimes it takes 16 years. Uh, >>What's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Tebel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There there's three big trends that we invest in. And then the, the only things we do day in day out one is the explosion at open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen an alwa timeline happening forever, but it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's its one big mass of wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is underinvested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a do over, right? I mean, do we need a do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cyber security as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole like economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is around 150 billion and it still is a fraction of what >>We're, what we're and even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital >>That's right. You mean arguably, right. Arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say you gotta love your firm. Love who you're doing. We're big supporters of your mission. Congrat is on your entrepreneurial venture. And uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cuban. Uh, >>Absolutely >>Not. Certainly EU maybe even north America's in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for helping me on the show. >>Des bell VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California, after the short break, stay with us. Hey everyone. Welcome to the cue here. Live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022 we're live we're back with events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, 80% summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube. Got a great guest here. Justin Colby, owner and CEO of innovative solutions they booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us the story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. Yeah. >><laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to midsize businesses that are moving to the cloud or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control, cost, security, compliance, all the good stuff, uh, that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is. But now we have offices down in Austin, Texas up in Toronto, uh, Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago. And it's been a great ride. >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by AWS. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization and obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? Yeah. >>It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small to mid-size business. I'll try and understand how to leverage technology better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech is really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're like, listen, we gotta move to the out or we move some things to the cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then, uh, progressively working through a modernization strategy is always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to midsize businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. They want to get set up. But the, the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is. And it's not, it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem you guys solve >>The SMB space. The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and are hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with technology staff that has additional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether that's, we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to, yeah, they're like, listen, the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's OnPrem or in the cloud. I just want to know that I'm doing that in a way that helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. Good. >>How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I think there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start the, on your journey in one way, and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's a, gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning, the projects that early and not worrying about it, you got it. I mean, most people don't abandon stuff cuz they're like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. >>And they get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. Yeah. >>Frog and boiling water as we used to say so, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean this, this is a dynamic that's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you guys come in. I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talk to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did Andy jazzy announcer Adam, you know, five, a thousand announcement or whatever they did with huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just product. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are >>The values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to mid-size business, leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a tech company in the pro of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning know that we have their back and we're the safety net. So when a customer is saying, all right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going on loan. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say you're high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attack. If you have a partner that's offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own, it would cost 'em a fortune. If >>It's training alone would be insane. A risk factor not mean the cost. Yes, absolutely. Opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. Yeah. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018, when, uh, when we made the decision to go all on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious decision. It wasn't requirement isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front desk >>And she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I >>Love it. It's amazing. So I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get the right >>People involved. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point about SMBs and BIS is in general, small and large. It staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the build out, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner or SMB, do I get the why? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cyber security issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one in the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Like critical issues. This >>Is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about this, that's, >>That's what, at least a million in bloating, if not three or more Just to get that going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side now. Yeah. No. And nevermind AI and ML. That's >>Right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It's incredibly difficult. And the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll do all that exactly. In the it department. >>Exactly. >>Like, can we just call up, uh, you know, our old vendor that's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like >>It, >>But that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I were a business owner starting a business today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. And it's something that we tell, talk about every, with every one of our small to mid-size >>Businesses. So just, I wanna get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative yeah. Award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, I was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduce other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. And I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months that I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at RT long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2010 and I was like, Hey, on the value of this business and who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years, what do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner, but if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that were gonna also buy into the business with me. >>And they were the owners, no outside capital, none >>Zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons, they all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like if we're owners, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015, and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an early now process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the business, cuz they cared very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting going all in on the cloud was important for us and we haven't looked back. >>And at that time the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly. And those kinds of big enterprises, the GA I don't wanna say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to mid-size business, to migrate completely to the cloud as, as infrastructure was considered. That just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing where a lot of our small to mid-size as customers, they wanted to leverage cloud-based backup or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration, the Microsoft suite to the cloud. And a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on AWS at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is it the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plug in for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking to migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating to the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customers not to be cash strap and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so that they can modernize. >>So like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers and being empathetic to where they are in their journey. >>And that's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable wind. That's right. Seeing the value and Ling down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much for having me. >>Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We're back with more great coverage for two days after this short break, >>Live on the floor and see San Francisco for a AWS summit. I'm John ferry, host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the action we're back in person. We're at a AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back. Events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube. Bring all the action. Also virtual. We have a hybrid cube. Check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad to be >>Here. So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to have to be back through events. >>It's amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to and what two, three years. >>It's awesome. We'll be at the UHS summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and a big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything dev sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the game is pretty much laid out mm-hmm <affirmative> and the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's right. >>Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around, especially the edge public cloud for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give an example, uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, it's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering a, since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam's in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't wanna say trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listen to the customers. They work backwards from the customer. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does computing. It >>Does. That's not centralized in the public cloud now they got regions. So what is the issue at the edge what's driving the behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see that the data at the edge, you got 5g having. So it's pretty obvious, but there's a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation where today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always used to riff on the cube cause it's basically Amazon and a box pushed in the data center, running native, all the stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of becoming standard. You're starting to see some standard Deepak syncs. Group's doing some amazing work with open source Rauls team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW, he was giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my data center, do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outposts. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere or in your VMware environment. And it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. Right? So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. That's right. Innovative as that you get the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in, in these new areas that you're helping out are, they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is it. They don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on, what's making them money as a business. They want on their applications. They want to focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS, you take the infrastructure. You take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. Uh, we help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping of these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. So >>Basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it works? Right. >>And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy FinTech in the Caribbean, we talk about hurricanes and we're gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where you now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that, that required. It makes total sense. We're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech. And in, in the islands there a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what's your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming a, uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a, uh, technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure, because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on it's >>Interesting. I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, projects going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart concept. We use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead and it's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain, just for this like smart contracts for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service, but what happened to decentralized. >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance issue. Yeah. And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through, uh, a use case of a customer, um, Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud. Um, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my ad. And I also want all the benefit of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer. Yeah. >>Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment inside that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with, uh, regular commercial available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Uh, inside of that manufacturing plant, uh, we can do pre-procesing on things coming out of the, uh, the robotics that depending on what we're manufacturing, right. Uh, and then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard for >>Data, data lake, or whatever, to >>The data lake. Yeah. Data lake house, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but a lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just in time, manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going to the data that saves that cost yep. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data, unless you have to, um, those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever, the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? This is a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud out? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe maybe decision can wait. Right? Yeah. Uh, and then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot too, doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture on the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are. And, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about customers are starting to talk about throwing away data, uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And >>Well, I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this, but the one pattern was income of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retrain their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes code, as we call it our lab showcase, we did a whole, whole, that event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw away. It's not just business benefits. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. There >>Are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are run petabyte level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, uh, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to the AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a kind of a, um, fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, a cloud and skydiving instructor. <laugh> how does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? Yeah. >>Uh, you >>Jumped out a plane and got a job. You, you got a customer to jump out >>Kind of. So I was jump, I was teaching Scott eing, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a Scott I instructor. Yeah. Uh, I was teaching Scott eing and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and, and how his cus customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, uh, I was living in a tent in the woods teaching scout. I think I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, uh, I started in the first day there, uh, we had a, a discussion, uh, EC two, just come out <laugh> um, and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that and through being an on premises migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services to >>It's. So it's such a great story, you know, I was gonna, you know, you know, the, the, the, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early day was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, um, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and I, maybe it does still feel like that to some people. Right. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days, AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's pretty much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting edge stuff, like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You guys, the right equipment, you gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Matthew, thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here live and San Francisco for summit. I'm John Forry host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. look@thiscalendarforallthecubeactionatthecube.net. We'll be right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube a be summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John fury host to the cube. We'll be at the eight of his summit in New York city. This summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco, getting all the coverage what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dudes, car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor and a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you, sir. Chris. Cool. How are, are you >>Good? How are you? >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah. So give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? First >>Of all, thank you for having me back to be business with you. Never great to see you. Um, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. Um, we have raised close to a hundred million there. Uh, the investors are people like Norwes Menlo, Tru ventures, coast, lo ventures, Ram Sheam and all those people, all well known guys. The Andy Beckel chime, Paul Mo uh, main web. So a whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley VCs are involved >>And has it come? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISR is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk, uh, the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and ServiceNow to take it to the next stage? >>Well, I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, Dave Valenti as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a GE, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh> >>You know who you >>Get to call this fun to talk. You though, >>You got the commentary, you, your, your finger on the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud scale. You predicted that we talked about on cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing DACA just raised a hundred million on a 2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from an enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control, plane emerging, AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded, observability there's 10 million observability companies. Data is the key. What's your angle on this? What's your take. Yeah, >>No, look, I think I'll give you the view that I see right from my side. Obviously data is very clear. So the things that remember system of recorded you and me talked about the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud NA it'll be called AI, NA AI native is a new buzzword and using the AI customer service it operations. You talk about observability. I call it, AIOps applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and service desk. What needs to be helped us with ServiceNow BMC G you see a new ELA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflow, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with a AI workflows. So you'll see AI going >>Off is RPA a company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI pass? One will be at their event this summer? Um, is it a product company? I mean, I mean, RPA is almost, should be embedded in everything. It's >>A feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company, or, but that automation should be embedded in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NA and AI NATO it'll become automation. NA yeah. And that's your thinking. >>It's almost interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kinda having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it. It was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle, and it was software abstraction. Now you have all, all kinds of workflows, abstractions everywhere. So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed or they integrated. I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So don't about the databases become called poly databases. Yeah. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area like you were talking about. It should be part of service. Now it should be part of ISRA, like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see MuleSoft and Salesforce buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies, cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also have an automation as a layer <inaudible> inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind us, you've got the expo hall. We got, um, we're back to vents, but you got, you know, AMD, Clum, Ove, uh, Dynatrace data, dog, innovative, all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right. Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Bel later today. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen. We know all the, the VCs. What does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation, clouds bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's code. Yes. Basically data is everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders of Amazon created the startups 15 years back. Everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be is people don't just build on Amazon. They're going to build it on top of snowflake. Companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake. Right? So I see my old boss flagman try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer. Right? So I think that's in the of, <inaudible> trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your moat is, what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last reinvent, coined the term super cloud, right? He's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage. And guys like Charles Fitzgeral out there, who we like was kind of shit on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get it. Like, yeah. I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> if he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Yes. Now they say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist. And, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. >>It is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer. Remember the middle layer pass will be snowflake. So can build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer. If I really need to size, I'll build it on four.com Salesforce. So I think that's where you'll see. So >>Basically if you're an entrepreneur, the north star in terms of the outcome is be a super cloud. >>It is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. >>Yeah. Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales? The snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think got Redshift. Amazon has got red, um, but Snowflake's a big customer. They're probably paying AWS think big bills too. >>So John, very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-option will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with, uh, snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouse as a data layer. So I think depending on the application use case, you have to use each of the above. I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, You know, foreclose your value that's right. But some sort of internal hack, but I think, I think the general question that I have is that I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point. When does the rising tide stop >>And >>Do the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth cycle? I >>Think it's growth. You call it cloud scale. You invented the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's, as long as there are more movement from on, uh, OnPrem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations. It helpless, even the customer service service now and, uh, ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go made. >>I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers or practitioners, not suppliers to the market, feel free to, to XME or DMing. Next question's really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products. Cause you know, the big enterprises now and, you know, small, medium, large, and large enterprise are all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or a growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean I'm seeing some stuff, but why don't we get your thoughts on that? What, no, it is. >>If I remember going back to our 2007 or eight, it, when I used to talk to you back then when Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or 1% today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a CIO line business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can double in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. >>Yeah. And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I reference the URL cause it's like, there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solutions that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting left for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there, um, and gives back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure as code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share >>Yourself? No, I have a lot of thoughts that plus I see AIOP solutions in the future should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app Dyna, right? Dynatrace, all this solution will go future towards to proactive solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service that customers are give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can come the best algorithm, but I gotta train them, modify them, tweak them, make them better, make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to our big data days back in 2009, you know, >>Look at, look how much data bricks has grown. >>It is uh, double, the key >>Cloud kinda went private, so good stuff. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking at that growing customers and my customers are some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk, Mac of fee, uh, grandchildren, all the top customers. Um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on predict S one area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service, >>Great stuff, man. Doing great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of 80 summit, 2022. And we're gonna be at 80 summit in San, uh, in New York and the summer. So look for that on this calendar, of course go to eight of us, startups.com. I mentioned that it's a site for all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This to cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back a little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit new York's coming in the summer. We'll be there too with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the groove, psyched to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're gonna see a lot of virtual cube, a lot of hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economists with duck, bill groove, he founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe as shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at Mark's been doing a lot of shit posting lately, all a billionaires are shit posting, but they don't know how to do it. Like they're not >>Doing it right. Something opportunity there. It's like, here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a mid-size island to begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. This >>Shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on the other side, I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what is shit posting? >>It's more or less talking about the world of enterprise tech, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream. But it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a jackass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, coupons coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you can see the growth of cloud native Amazons, all, all the Adams let see new CEO, Andy move on to be the chief of all. Amazon just saw him. The cover of was it time magazine. Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything these folks do. They they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble imagining the logistics. It takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. It's, it's sprawling, immense that dominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. Well, >>There's a lot of force for good conversations, seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to port and he was trying to portray themselves as you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now it same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. Either way, sounds like more exciting >>Replacement ready <laugh> in case something goes wrong. I, the track highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in e-sports with other, in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and video graphics card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. >>Oh, it's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going in your world. I know you have a lot of great success. We've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter. Check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's back any blow back late there been uptick. What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's high. I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They must not have heard me it. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do that. >>We should do that. Actually. I think sure would call in. Oh, I, >>I think >>Chief, we had that right now. People would call in and say, Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the customer. >>You know, I always joke with Dave ante about how John Fort's always at, uh, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0 5, or we can't, >>We have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish. That's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their >>Producting, they're going in different directions. When they named Amazon Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonused on a number of words. They can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, session manager is a great one. I love the service, ridiculous name. They have systems manager, parameter store, which is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage your parameter store does not. It's >>Fun. What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination of you >>Got Ks. You got EMR, you got EC two. You got S three SQS. Well, Redshift the on an acronym, you >>Gots is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation. >>They still up bean stalk. Or is that still around? Oh, >>They never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, wow, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it. But while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it. John three <laugh>. >>Okay. >>Simple BV still haunts our dreams. >>I, I actually got an email. I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C two S were being deprecated and I got an email I'm like, I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me just like, give me something else. Right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you is that like, okay. So as Amazon gets better in some areas, where do they need more work in your opinion? Because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database, Snowflake's got a database service. So Redshift, snowflake database is, so you got this co-op petition. Yes. How's that going? And what are you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with Amazon and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want and they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multi-cloud cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word. Multi-cloud um, a lot of people are saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word, like multi sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multi-cloud >>Multiple single points? >>Dave loves that term. Yeah. >>Yeah. You're building in multiple single points of failure. Do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about multi-cloud either as the industry leader, talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective, it doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of forms. Some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on context. But my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing, because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. Yeah. >>Cool. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question, cause I know you, we you've been, you know, fellow journeymen and the, and the cloud journey going to all the events and then the pandemic hit where now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna gonna end. Certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations. Community's gonna emerge. You got a pretty big community growing and it's throwing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing, or just big chain angels. You've seen with the pandemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece, come in, you're commentating. You're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck bill group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, fun, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who can pony up two grand and a week in Las Vegas and get to Las Vegas from wherever they happen to be by moving virtually suddenly it, it embraces the reality that talent is even distributed. Opportunity is not. And that means that suddenly these things are accessible to a wide swath of audience and potential customer base and the rest that hadn't been invited to the table previously, it's imperative that we not lose that. It's nice to go out and talk to people and have people come up and try and smell my hair from time to time, I smell delightful. Let make assure you, but it was, but it's also nice to be. >>I have a product for you if you want, you know. >>Oh, excellent. I look forward to it. What is it putting? Why not? <laugh> >>What else have you seen? So when accessibility for talent, which by the way is totally home run. What weird things have happened that you've seen? Um, that's >>Uh, it's, it's weird, but it's good that an awful lot of people giving presentations have learned to tighten their message and get to the damn point because most people are not gonna get up from a front row seat in a conference hall, midway through your Aing talk and go somewhere else. But they will change a browser tab and you won't get them back. You've gotta be on point. You've gotta be compelling if it's going to be a virtual discussion. >>Yeah. And also turn off your IMEs too. >>Oh yes. It's always fun in the, in the meetings when you're talking to someone and their co is messaging them about, should we tell 'em about this? And I'm sitting there reading it and it's >>This guy is really weird. Like, >>Yes I am and I bring it into the conversation and then everyone's uncomfortable. It goes, wow. >>Why not? I love when my wife yells at me over I message. When I'm on a business call, like, do you wanna take that about no, I'm good. >>No, no. It's better off. I don't. No, the only encourager it's fine. >>My kids. Excellent. Yeah. That's fun again. That's another weird thing. And, and then group behavior is weird. Now people are looking at, um, communities differently. Yes. Very much so, because if you're fatigued on content, people are looking for the personal aspect. You're starting to see much more of like yeah. Another virtual event. They gotta get better. One and two who's there. >>Yeah. >>The person >>That's a big part of it too is the human stories are what are being more and more interesting. Don't get up here and tell me about your product and how brilliant you are and how you built it. That's great. If I'm you, or if I wanna work with you or I want to compete with you, or I wanna put on my engineering hat and build it myself. Cause why would I buy anything? That's more than $8. But instead, tell me about the problem. Tell me about the painful spot that you specialize in. Tell me a story there. >>I, I >>Think that gets a glimpse in a hook and >>Makes more, more, I think you nailed it. Scaling storytelling. Yes. And access to better people because they don't have to be there in person. I just did it thing. I never, we never would've done the queue. We did. Uh, Amazon stepped up in sponsors. Thank you, Amazon for sponsoring international women's day, we did 30 interviews, APAC. We did five regions and I interviewed this, these women in Asia, Pacific eight, PJ, they called for in this world. And they're amazing. I never would've done those interviews cuz I never, would've seen 'em at an event. I never would've been in Japan or Singapore to access them. And now they're in the index. They're in the network. They're collaborating on LinkedIn. So a threads are developing around connections that I've never seen before. Yes. Around the content, >>Absolutely >>Content value plus >>The networking. And that is the next big revelation of this industry is going to realize you have different companies. And in Amazon's case, different service teams, all, all competing with each other, but you have the container group and you have the database group and you have the message cuing group. But customers don't really want to build things from spare parts. They want a solution to a problem. I want to build an app that does Twitter for pets or whatever it is I'm trying to do. I don't wanna basically have to pick and choose and fill my shopping cart with all these different things. I want something that's gonna give me what I'm trying to get as close to turnkey as possible. Moving up the stack. That is the future. And just how it gets here is gonna be >>Well we're here with Corey Quinn, the master of the master of content here in the a ecosystem. Of course we we've been following up in the beginnings. Great guy. Check out his blog, his site, his newsletter screaming podcast. Cory, final question for you. Uh, what do you hear doing what's on your agenda this week in San Francisco and give a plug for the duck build group. What are you guys doing? I know you're hiring some people what's on the table for the company. What's your focus this week and put a plug in for the group. >>I'm here as a customer and basically getting outta my cage cuz I do live here. It's nice to actually get out and talk to folks who are doing interesting things at the duck build group. We solve one problem. We fixed the horrifying AWS bill, both from engineering and architecture, advising as well as negotiating AWS contracts because it turns out those things are big and complicated. And of course my side media projects last week in aws.com, we are, it it's more or less a content operation where I indulge my continual and ongoing law of affair with the sound of my own voice. >><laugh> and you good. It's good content. It's on, on point fun, Starky and relevant. So thanks for coming to the cube and sharing with us. Appreciate it. No, thank you. Fun. You. Okay. This the cube covers here in San Francisco, California, the cube is back at to events. These are the summits, Amazon web services summits. They happen all over the world. We'll be in New York and obviously we're here in San Francisco this week. I'm John furry. Keep, keep it right here. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Okay. Welcome back everyone. This's the cubes covers here in San Francisco, California, we're live on the show floor of AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube and remember AWS summit in New York city coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. And of course reinvent the end of the year for all the cube coverage on cloud computing and AWS. The two great guests here from the APN global APN se Jenko and Jeff Grimes partner leader, Jeff and se is doing partnerships global APN >>AWS global startup program. Yeah. >>Okay. Say that again. >>AWS global startup program. >>That's the official name. >>I love >>It too long, too long for me. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, of course. Appreciate it. Tell us about what's going on with you guys. What's the, how was you guys organized? You guys we're obviously were in San Francisco bay area, Silicon valley, zillions of startups here, New York. It's got another one we're gonna be at tons of startups. Lot of 'em getting funded, big growth and cloud big growth and data security, hot and sectors. >>Absolutely. >>So maybe, maybe we could just start with the global startup program. Um, it's essentially a white glove service that we provide to startups that are built on AWS. And the intention there is to help identify use cases that are being built on top of AWS. And for these startups, we want to provide white glove support in co building products together. Right. Um, co-marketing and co-selling essentially, um, you know, the use cases that our customers need solved, um, that either they don't want to build themselves or are perhaps more innovative. Um, so the, a AWS global startup program provides white glove support, dedicated headcount for each one of those pillars. Um, and within our program, we've also provided incentives, programs go to market activities like the AWS startup showcase that we've built for these startups. >>Yeah. By the way, start AWS startups.com is the URL, check it out. Okay. So partnerships are key. Jeff, what's your role? >>Yeah. So I'm responsible for leading the overall F for, for the AWS global startup program. Um, so I've got a team of partner managers that are located throughout the us, uh, managing a few hundred startup ISVs right now. <laugh> >>Yeah, I got >>A lot. We've got a lot. >>There's a lot. I gotta, I gotta ask the tough question. Okay. I'm I'm a startup founder. I got a team. I just got my series a we're grown. I'm trying to hire people. I'm super busy. What's in it for me. Yeah. What do you guys bring to the table? I love the white glove service, but translate that what's in it. What do I get out of it? What's >>A good story. Good question. I focus, I think. Yeah, because we get, we get to see a lot of partners building their businesses on AWS. So, you know, from our perspective, helping these partners focus on what, what do we truly need to build by working backwards from customer feedback, right? How do we effectively go to market? Because we've seen startups do various things, um, through trial and error, um, and also just messaging, right? Because oftentimes partners or rather startups, um, try to boil the ocean with many different use cases. So we really help them, um, sort of laser focus on what are you really good at and how can we bring that to the customer as quickly as possible? >>Yeah. I mean, it's truly about helping that founder accelerate the growth of their company. Yeah. Right. And there's a lot that you can do with AWS, but focus is truly the key word there because they're gonna be able to find their little piece of real estate and absolutely deliver incredible outcomes for our customers. And then they can start their growth curve there. >>What are some of the coolest things you've seen with the APN that you can share publicly? I know you got a lot going on there, a lot of confidentiality. Um, but you know, we're here lot of great partners on the floor here. I'm glad we're back at events. Uh, a lot of stuff going on digitally with virtual stuff and, and hybrid. What are some of the cool things you guys have seen in the APN that you can point to? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can point to few, you can take them. Sure. So, um, I think what's been fun over the years for me personally, I came from a startup, ran sales at an early stage startup and, and I went through the whole thing. So I have a deep appreciation for what these guys are going through. And what's been interesting to see for me is taking some of these early stage guys, watching them progress, go public, get acquired, and see that big day mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, and being able to point to very specific items that we help them to get to that point. Uh, and it's just a really fun journey to watch. >>Yeah. I, and part of the reason why I really, um, love working at the AWS, uh, global startup program is working with passionate founders. Um, I just met with a founder today that it's gonna, he's gonna build a very big business one day, um, and watching them grow through these stages and supporting that growth. Um, I like to think of our program as a catalyst for enterprise sort of scale. Yeah. Um, and through that we provide visibility, credibility and growth opportunities. >>Yeah. A lot, a lot of partners too. What I found talking to staff founders is when they have that milestone, they work so hard for it. Whether it's a B round C round Republic or get bought. Yeah. Um, then they take a deep breath and they look back at wow, what a journey it's been. So it's kind of emotional for sure. Yeah. Still it's a grind. Right? You gotta, I mean, when you get funding, it's still day one. You don't stop. It's no celebrate, you got a big round or valuation. You still gotta execute >>And look it's hypercompetitive and it's brutally difficult. And our job is to try to make that a little less difficult and navigate those waters right. Where everyone's going after similar things. >>Yeah. I think as a group element too, I observe that startups that I, I meet through the APN has been interesting because they feel part of AWS. Yeah, totally. As a group of community, as a vibe there. Um, I know they're hustling, they're trying to make things happen. But at the same time, Amazon throws a huge halo effect. I mean, that's a huge factor. I mean, yeah. You guys are the number one cloud in the business, the growth in every sector is booming. Yeah. And if you're a startup, you don't have that luxury yet. And look at companies like snowflake, they're built on top of AWS. Yeah. I mean, people are winning by building on AWS. >>Yeah. And our, our, our program really validates their technology first. So we have, what's called a foundation's technical review that we put all of our startups through before we go to market. So that when enterprise customers are looking at startup technology, they know that it's already been vetted. And, um, to take that a step further and help these partners differentiate, we use programs like the competency programs, the DevOps compet, the, the security competency, which continues to help, um, provide sort of a platform for these startups, help them differentiate. And also there's go to market benefits that are associated with that. >>Okay. So let me ask the, the question that's probably on everyone's mind, who's watching. Certainly I asked this a lot. There's a lot of companies startups out there who makes the, is there a criteria? Oh God, it's not like his sports team or anything, but like sure. Like there's activate program, which is like, there's hundreds of thousands of startups out there. Not everyone is at the APN. Right? Correct. So ISVs again, that's a whole nother, that's a more mature partner that might have, you know, huge market cap or growth. How do you guys focus? How do you guys focus? I mean, you got a good question, you know, a thousand flowers blooming all the time. Is there a new way you guys are looking at it? I know there's been some talk about restructure or, or new focus. What's the focus. >>Yeah. It's definitely not an easy task by any means. Um, but you know, I recently took over this role and we're really trying to establish focus areas, right. So obviously a lot of the fees that we look after our infrastructure ISVs, that's what we do. Uh, and so we have very specific pods that look after different type of partners. So we've got a security pod, we've got a DevOps pod, we've got core infrastructure, et cetera. And really we're trying to find these ISVs that can solve, uh, really interesting AWS customer challenges. >>So you guys have a deliberate, uh, focus on these pillars. So what infrastructure, >>Security, DevOps, and data and analytics, and then line of business >>Line of business line, like web marketing >>Solutions, business apps, >>Business, this owner type thing. Exactly. >>Yeah, exactly. >>So solutions there. Yeah. More solutions and the other ones are like hardcore. So infrastructure as well, like storage, backup, ransomware of stuff, or, >>Uh, storage, networking. >>Okay. Yeah. The classic >>Database, et cetera. Right. >>And so there's teams on each pillar. >>Yep. So I think what's, what's fascinating for the startup that we cover is that they've got, they truly have support from a build market sell perspective. Right. So you've got someone who's technical to really help them get the technology, figured out someone to help them get the marketing message dialed and spread, and then someone to actually do the co-sell, uh, day to day activities to help them get in front of customers. >>Probably the number one request that we always ask for Amazon is can we waste that sock report? Oh, download it, the console, which we use all the time. Exactly. But security's a big deal. I mean, you know, SREs are evolving, that role of DevOps is taking on dev SecOps. Um, I, I could see a lot of customers having that need for a relationship to move things faster. Do you guys provide like escalation or is that a part of a service or not, not part of a, uh, >>Yeah, >>So the partner development manager can be an escalation point. Absolutely. Think of them as an extension of your business inside of AWS. >>Great. And you guys how's that partner managers, uh, measure >>On those three pillars. Right. Got it. Are we billing, building valuable use cases? So product development go to market, so go to market activities, think blog, posts, webinars, case studies, so on and so forth. And then co-sell not only are we helping these partners win their current opportunities that they are sourcing, but can we also help them source net new deals? Yeah. Right. That's >>Very important. I mean, top asked from the partners is get me in front of customers. Right. Um, not an easy task, but that's a huge goal of ours to help them grow their top >>Line. Right. Yeah. In fact, we had some interviews here on the cube earlier talking about that dynamic of how enterprise customers are buying. And it's interesting, a lot more POCs. I have one partner here that you guys work with, um, on observability, they got a huge POC with capital one mm-hmm <affirmative> and the enterprises are engaging the startups and bringing them in. So the combination of open source software enterprises are leaning into that hard and bringing young growing startups in mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yep. So I could see that as a huge service that you guys can bring people in. >>Right. And they're bringing massively differentiated technology to the table. Mm-hmm <affirmative> the challenge is they just might not have the brand recognition that the big guys have. And so that it's our job is how do you get that great tech in front of the right situations? >>Okay. So my next question is about the show here, and then we'll talk globally. So here in San Francisco sure. You know, Silicon valley bay area, San Francisco bay area, a lot of startups, a lot of VCs, a lot of action. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so probably a big market for you guys. Yeah. So what's exciting here in SF and then outside SF, you guys have a global program, you see any trends that are geography based or is it sure areas more mature? There's certain regions that are better. I mean, I just interviewed a company here that's doing, uh, AWS edge really well in these cases. It's interesting that these, the partners are filling a lot of holes and gaps in the opportunities with AWS. So what's exciting here. And then what's the global perspective. >>Yeah, totally. So obviously a ton of partners, I, from the bay area that we support. Um, but we're seeing a lot of really interesting technology coming out of AMEA specifically. Yeah. Uh, and making a lot of noise here in the United States, which is great. Um, and so, you know, we definitely have that global presence and, and starting to see super differentiated technology come out of those regions. >>Yeah. Especially Tel Aviv. Yeah. >>Amy real quick, before you get in the surge. It's interesting. The VC market in, in Europe is hot. Yeah. They've got a lot of unicorns coming in. We've seen a lot of companies coming in. They're kind of rattling their own, you know, cage right now. Hey, look at us. We'll see if they crash, you know, but we don't see that happening. I mean, people have been projecting a crash now in, in the startup ecosystem for at least a year. It's not crashing. In fact, funding's up. >>Yeah. The pandemic was hard on a lot of startups for sure. Yeah. Um, but what we've seen is many of these startups, they, as quickly as they can grow, they can also pivot as, as, as well. Um, and so I've actually seen many of our startups grow through the pandemic because their use cases are helping customers either save money, become more operationally efficient and provide value to leadership teams that need more visibility into their infrastructure during a pandemic. >>It's an interesting point. I talked to Andy jazzy and Adam Leski both say the same thing during the pandemic necessity, the mother of all invention. Yep. And startups can move fast. So with that, you guys are there to assist if I'm a startup and I gotta pivot cuz remember iterate and pivot, iterate and pivot. So you get your economics, that's the playbook of the ventures and the models. >>Exactly. How >>Do you guys help me do that? Give me an example of walk me through, pretend me I'm a startup. Hey, I am on the cloud. Oh my God. Pandemic. They need video conferencing. Hey cube. Yeah. What do I need? Surge? What, what do I do? >>That's a good question. First thing is just listen. Yeah. I think what we have to do is a really good job of listening to the partner. Um, what are their needs? What is their problem statement and where do they want to go at the end of the day? Um, and oftentimes because we've worked with so many successful startups, they have come out of our program. We have, um, either through intuition or a playbook, determined what is gonna be the best path forward and how do we get these partners to stop focusing on things that will eventually, um, just be a waste of time yeah. And, or not provide, or, you know, bring any fruit to the table, which, you know, essentially revenue. >>Well, we love star rights here in the cube because one, um, they have good stories. They're oil and cutting edge, always pushing the envelope and they're kind of disrupting someone else. Yeah. And so they have an opinion. They don't mind sharing on camera. So love talking to startups. We love working with you guys on our startup showcases startups.com. Check out AWS startups.com and you got the showcases, uh, final. We I'll give you guys the last word. What's the bottom line bumper sticker for AP the global APN program. Summarize the opportunity for startups, what you guys bring to the table and we'll close it out. Totally start >>With you. Yeah. I think the AWS global startup program's here to help companies truly accelerate their business full stop. Right. And that's what we're here for. I love it. >>It's a good way to, it's a good way to put it Dito. >>Yeah. All right, sir. Thanks for coming on. Thanks John. Great to see you love working with you guys. Hey, startups need help. And the growing and huge market opportunities, the shift cloud scale data engineering, security infrastructure, all the markets are exploding in growth because of the digital transformation of the realities here. Open source and cloud all making it happen here in the cube in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, your host. Thanks for watching >>John. >>Hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, two days of coverage, AWS summit, 2022 in New York city. Coming up this summer, we'll be there as well at events are back. The cube is back of course, with the cube virtual cube hybrid, the cube.net, check it out a lot of content this year, more than ever, a lot more cloud data cloud native, modern applic is all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, Cub alumni, uh, CEO of observe Inc in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data observability Jeremy. Great to see you. Thanks >>Always great to come and talk to you on the queue, man. It's been been a few years, so, >>Um, well you, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, uh, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability hot area, but also you've been a senior executive president of Dell, uh, EMC, uh, 11 years ago you had a, a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. Um, yeah. And it's here. You predicted it 11 years ago. Um, look around it's cloud meets big data. >>Yeah. I mean the, the cloud thing I think, you know, was, was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for, for, for sort of catching that bus out, um, you know, we, we were on the, the, the bus early and, and I think it was only inevitable. Like, you know, if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you, you could find out things you could never possibly imagine. >>So you're close to a lot of companies that we've been covering deeply. Snowflake obviously are involved, uh, the board level, you know, the founders, you know, the people there cloud, you know, Amazon, you know, what's going on here? Yeah. You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, uh, chief of observ, Inc, which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data engineering, large scale integrations, um, data as code integrating into applic. I mean, it's a whole nother world developing, like you see with snowflake, it means snowflake is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's your, what's this wave we're on what's how would you describe the wave? >>Well, a couple of things, I mean, people are, I think riding more software than, than ever fall. Why? Because they've realized that if, if you don't take your business online and offer a service, then you become largely irrelevant. And so you you've got a whole set of new applications. I think, I think more applications now than any point. Um, not, not just ever, but the mid nineties, I always looked at as the golden age of application development. Now back then people were building for windows. Well, well now they're building for things like AWS is now the platform. Um, so you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data and the, you know, the sort of the transactions, you know, what you bought today or something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry data, all the exhaust fumes. And I think people really are realizing that their differentiation is not so much their application. It's their understanding of the data. Can, can I understand who my best customers are, what I sell today. If people came to my website and didn't buy, then I not, where did they drop off all of that they wanna analyze. And, and the answers are all in the data. The question is, can you understand it >>In our last startup showcase, we featured data as code. One of the insights that we got out of that I wanna get your opinion on our reaction to is, is that data used to be put into a data lake and turns into a data swamp or throw into the data warehouse. And then we'll do some query, maybe a report once in a while. And so data, once it was done, unless it was real time, even real time was not good anymore after real time. That was the old way. Now you're seeing more and more, uh, effort to say, let's go look at the data cuz now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once mm-hmm <affirmative> they're iterating. Yeah. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting. Yeah, that's a Silicon valley story. That's like how startups work, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have another, this data concept that's now yeah. Part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole, this whole new cycle of >>Yeah. >>Data being reused and repurposed and figured out and >>Yeah, yeah. I'm a big fan of, um, years ago. Uh, uh, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee at the MIT C cell labs I spent time with and he, he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look I'm I'm. He said I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you, of enough data, you can answer any question. And, and this is going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and, and certainly, you know, research is on the forefront. But I, I think, you know, starting to see that mindset of the, the sort of MIT research be mainstream, you know, in enterprises, they they're realizing that yeah, it is about the data. You know, if I can better understand my data better than my competitor than I've got an advantage. And so the question is is, is how, what, what technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to, to allow me to do that. So >>Let's talk about observing you the CEO of, okay. Given you've seen the wave before you're in the front lines of observability, which again is in the center of all this action what's going on with the company. Give a quick minute to explain, observe for the folks who don't know what you guys do. What's the company doing? What's the funding status, what's the product status and what's the customer status. Yeah. >>So, um, we realized, you know, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago that, um, look, the way people are building applications is different. They they're way more functional. They change every day. Uh, but in some respects they're a lot more complicated. They're distributed. They, you know, microservices architectures and when something goes wrong, um, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not gonna fly because you had SA so much change going into production on a daily basis. It was hard to tell like where the problem was. And so we thought, okay, it's about time. Somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and all the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot and make sense of the problems that they're seeing. So, I mean, that's observability, it's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was a guy called, uh, Rudolph like, like everything in tech, you know, it's, it's a reinvention of, of something from years gone by. >>But, um, there's a guy called, um, Rudy Coleman in 1960s, kinder term. And, and, and the term was been able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for, uh, the best part of the all years now. Um, it took us three years just to build the product. I think, I think what people don't appreciate these days often is the barrier to entry in a lot of these markets is quite high. You, you need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. Um, so yeah, this last year we, we, we did our first year selling, uh, we've got about 40 customers now. <affirmative> um, we just we've got great investors for the hill ventures. Uh, I mean, Mike SP who was, you know, the, the guy who was the, really, the first guy in it snowflake and the, the initial investor were fortunate enough to, to have Mike on our board. And, um, you know, part of the observed story yeah. Is closely knit with snowflake because all of that time data know we, we still are in there. >>So I want to get, uh, >>Yeah. >>Pivot to that. Mike Pfizer, snowflake, Jeremy Burton, the cube kind of, kind of same thinking this idea of a super cloud or what snowflake became snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of snowflake. Yeah. So that's become an entrepreneurial story that we think that to go big in the cloud, you can have a cloud on a cloud, uh, like as Jerry, Jerry Chan and Greylock calls it castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you're doing some stuff with snowflake. So a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a snowflake or an AWS, because again, you gotta go where the data is. You need all the data. >>Yeah. So >>What's your take on that? >>I mean, having enough gray hair now, um, you know, again, in tech, I think if you wanna predict the future, look at the past. And, uh, you know, to many years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a, a smaller company called Oracle and an Oracle was the database company. And, uh, their, their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms, one, one windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operator and system was the platform. And, and then that was the, you know, ecosystem that you would compete on top of. And then there were companies like SAP that built applications on top of Oracle. So then wind the clock forward 25 years gray hairs. <laugh> the platform, isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, you know, Google cloud. I gotta probably look around if I say that in. Yeah. It's >>Okay. But hyperscale, yeah. CapX built out >>That is the new platform. And then snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generator data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. And I think they they've done an amazing job doing for the, I'd say, say the, the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world, you know, way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and, and of course my ambition would be, look, if, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of snow snowflake, uh, as, as they were on top of Oracle, then, then we'd probably be quite happy. >>So you're building on top of snowflake. >>We're building on top of snowflake a hundred percent. And, um, you know, I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that that's a risk. You >>Still on the board. >>Yeah. I'm still on the board. Yeah. That that's a risk I'm prepared to take <laugh> I am long on snowflake you, >>Well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board, then you'll know what's going on. Okay. No know just doing, but the, this is a real dynamic. It is. It's not a one off it's. >>Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS is an order of magnitude more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so I believe the opportunity for folks like snowflake and folks like observe it's an order of magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old >>World. Yeah. And I think this is really, I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you gotta be on a platform. Yeah. >>It's quite >>Easy or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how many seats are at that table left. >>Well, value migrates up over time. So, you know, when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, you know, Rackspace and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure, a service platform as a service, my, my old, uh, um, employee EMC, we had pivotal, you know, pivotal was a platform as a service. You don't hear so much about it, these, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to, to like extract, uh, a real business, you gotta move up, you gotta add value, you gotta build databases, then you gotta build applications. So >>It's interesting. Moving from the data center of the cloud was a dream for starters. Cause then if the provision, the CapEx, now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on top of that, you got snowflake you on top of that, the >>Assumption is almost that compute and storage is free. I know it's not quite free. Yeah. It's >>Almost free, >>But, but you can, you know, as an application vendor, you think, well, what can I do if I assume compute and storage is free, that's the mindset you've gotta get into. >>And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm gonna get a serious, multiple of value in what I'm paying. Yeah. Most people don't even blanket their Avis pills unless they're like massively huge. Yeah. Then it's a repatriation question or whatever discount question, but for most startups or any growing company, the Amazon bill should be a small factor. >>Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, um, ask me like, look, you're building on snowflake. Um, you, you know, you are, you are, you're gonna be, you're gonna be paying their money. How, how, how, how does that work with your business model? If you're paying them money, you know, do, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. I, we could build a database as well in observe, but then I've got half the development team working on in that will never be as good as snowflake. And so we made the call early on that. No, no, we, we wanna innovate above the database. Yeah. Right. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and, and the same is true of something like Amazon, like, like snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >>Yeah. And what's interesting is that Dave <inaudible> and I have been pointing this out and he's actually more on snowflake. I I've been looking at data bricks, um, and the same dynamics happening, the proof is the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, if you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and data bricks it's exploding. Right. I mean, the shows are selling out the floor. Space's book. That's the old days at VMware. Yeah. The old days at AWS >>One and for snowflake and, and any platform provider, it's a beautiful thing. You know, we build on snowflake and we pay them money. They don't have to sell to us. Right. And we do a lot of the support. And so the, the economics work out really, really well. If you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of ecosystems. >>Yeah. And then also you get, you get a, um, a trajectory of, uh, economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of snowflake integrations, right. New products. You're scaling that function with the, >>Yeah. I mean, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. Right. When I, when I, when I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had, we had one petabyte customer. And, and so at observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so been able to rely on a platform that can manage that is invaluable, >>You know, but Jeremy Greek conversation, thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. Uh, we got a couple minutes left. Um, put a plug in for observe. What do you guys, I know you got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your, your, your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You getting traction. Yeah. >>Yeah. >>Scales around the corner. Sounds like, are you, is that where you are scale? >>Got, we've got a big announcement coming up in two or weeks. We've got, we've got new funding, um, which is always great. Um, the product is, uh, really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, you know, which is at which point can you just start hiring salespeople? And the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. Um, we've got about 40 SaaS companies run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, uh, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting, um, enterprise type customers. We're, we're, you know, F five networks we're POC in right now with capital one, we got some interest in news around capital one coming up. I, I can't share too much, uh, but it's gonna be exciting. And, and like I saids hill continued to, to, to stick, >>I think capital one's a big snowflake customer as well. Right. They, >>They were early in one of the things that attracted me to capital one was they were very, very good with snowflake early on. And, and they put snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. Yeah. And, and today that, that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts. >>So capital one, very innovative cloud, obviously AIOS customer and very innovative, certainly in the CISO and CIO, um, on another point on where you're at. So you're, Prescale meaning you're about to scale, right? So you got POCs, what's that trick GE look like, can you see around the corner? What's, what's going on? What's on, around the corner. That you're, that you're gonna hit the straight and narrow and, and gas it >>Fast. Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the key thing for us is we gotta get the product. Right. Um, the nice thing about having a guy like Mike Pfizer on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage is questions that the board are always about, like, is the product, right? Is the product right? Is the product right? If you got the product right. And cuz we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and, and the revenue will take care of itself. Yeah. So right now all the attention is on the product. Um, the, this year, the exciting thing is we were, we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that back in the day you could do with the new lakes and, and AppDynamics, the last generation of, of APM tools, you're gonna be able to do that within observe. And we've already got the logs and the metrics capability in there. So for us, this year's a big one, cuz we sort of complete the trifecta, you know, the, the logs, >>What's the secret sauce observe. What if you had the, put it into a, a sentence what's the secret sauce? I, >>I, I think, you know, an amazing founding engineering team, uh, number one, I mean, at the end of the day, you have to build an amazing product and you have to solve a problem in a different way. And we've got great long term investors. And, and the biggest thing our investors give is actually it's not just money. It gives us time to get the product, right. Because if we get the product right, then we can get the growth. >>Got it. Final question. Why I got you here? You've been on the enterprise business for a long time. What's the buyer landscape out there. You got people doing POCs on capital one scale. So we know that goes on. What's the appetite at the buyer side for startups and what are their requirements that you're seeing? Uh, obviously we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their business restructure. So a lot happening in cloud. What's the criteria. How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >>Yeah. I mean, enterprises, they know they've gotta spend money transforming the business. I mean, this was, I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but, um, what, what we were saying five years ago is happening. Um, everybody needs to figure out out a way to take their, this to this digital world. Everybody has to do it. So the nice thing from a startup standpoint is they know at times they need to risk or, or take a bet on new technology in order to, to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that a have money, uh, B prepared to take risks and it's, it's a race against time to, you know, get their, their offerings in this. So a new digital footprint, >>Final, final question. What's the state of AWS. Where do you see them going next? Obviously they're continuing to be successful. How does cloud 3.0, or they always say it's day one, but it's more like day 10. Uh, but what's next for Aw. Where do they go from here? Obviously they're doing well. They're getting bigger and bigger. >>Yeah. They're, they're, it's an amazing story. I mean, you know, we we're, we're on AWS as well. And so I, I think if they keep nurturing the builders in the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They, they have an early leads. And if you look at where, you know, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the, in the late it was, they stopped, uh, really caring about developers and the folks who were building on top of their ecosystem. In fact, they started buying up their ecosystem and competing with people in their ecosystem. And I see with AWS, they, they have an amazing head start and if they did more, you know, if they do more than that, that's, what's gonna keep the jut rolling for many years to come. Yeah, >>They got the silicone and they got the staff act, developing Jeremy Burton inside the cube, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called observing in the middle of all the action on the board of snowflake as well. Um, great start. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Always a pleasure. >>Okay. Live from San Francisco to cube. I'm John for your host. Stay with us more coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. >>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here live in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cubes cube coverage of AWS summit 2022 here in San Francisco. We're all the developers of the bay area at Silicon valley. And of course, AWS summit in New York city is coming up in the summer. We'll be there as well. SF and NYC cube coverage. Look for us. Of course, reinforcing Boston and re Mars with the whole robotics AI thing, all coming together. Lots of coverage stay with us today. We've got a great guest from Deibel VC. John Skoda, founding partner, entrepreneurial venture is a venture firm. Your next act, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Good to see you, Matt. I feel like it's been forever since we've been able to do something in person. Well, >>I'm glad you're here because we run into each other all the time. We've known each other for over a decade. Um, >><affirmative>, it's been at least 10 years now, >>At least 10 years more. And we don't wanna actually go back as frees back, uh, the old school web 1.0 days. But anyway, we're in web three now. So we'll get to that in >>Second. We, we are, it's a little bit of a throwback to the path though, in my opinion, >><laugh>, it's all the same. It's all distributed computing and software. We ran each other in cube con you're investing in a lot of tech startup founders. Okay. This next level, next gen entrepreneurs have a new makeup and it's software. It's hardcore tech in some cases, not hardcore tech, but using software is take old something old and make it better, new, faster. <laugh>. So tell us about Deibel what's the firm. I know you're the founder, uh, which is cool. What's going on. Explain >>What you're doing. I mean, you remember I'm a recovering entrepreneur, right? So of course I, I, I, >>No, you're never recovering. You're always entrepreneur >>Always, but we are also always recovering. So I, um, started my first company when I was 24. If you remember, before there was Facebook and friends, there was instant messaging. People were using that product at work every day, they were creating a security vulnerability between their network and the outside world. So I plugged that hole and built an instant messaging firewall. It was my first company. The company was called, I am logic and we were required by Symantec. Uh, then spent 12 years investing in the next generation of our companies, uh, early investor in open source companies and cloud companies and spent a really wonderful 12 years, uh, at a firm called NEA. So I, I feel like my whole life I've been either starting enterprise software companies or helping founders start enterprise software companies. And I'll tell you, there's never been a better time than right now to start enter price software company. >>So, uh, the passion for starting a new firm was really a recognition that founders today that are starting in an enterprise software company, they, they tend to be, as you said, a more technical founder, right? Usually it's a software engineer or a builder mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, they are building products that are serving a slightly different market than what we've traditionally seen in enterprise software. Right? I think traditionally we've seen it buyers or CIOs that have agendas and strategies, which, you know, purchased software that has traditionally bought and sold tops down. But, you know, today I think the most successful enterprise software companies are the ones that are built more bottoms up and have more technical early opts. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software. And it starts with great technical founders with great products and great and emotions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background, super smart admire of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is all companies. The is no, I mean, consumer is enterprise. Now everything is what was once a niche. No, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. But remember, like right now, there's also a giant tech in VC conference in Miami <laugh> it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, >>Ts is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. Well, and, >>And I think all of us here that are, uh, maybe students of history and have been involved in, open in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three movement. >>The hype is definitely that three. >>Yeah. But, but >>You know, for >>Sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east to Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case now? And maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many men over, uh, 500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30% a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast, >>Let's getting, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant, but it's also the hype of like the web three, for instance. But you know, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Luman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, higher direct sales force and SAS kind of crushed the, at now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS? Is snowflake a SAS or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, they own all my data. You know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of commonalities across all successful startups and the overall adoption of technology. Uh, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually user like growth, right. They're one in the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving. You >>Just pull the >>Product through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this movement maybe started with open source where users were, are contributors, you know, contributors, we're users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing and it's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the users. And they're really the, the beneficiaries and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a GenXer technically, so for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I've, I've been staying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit a digital hippie revolution, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one other group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. We hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>It's the main for days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home brew club. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on. Well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source, one example of that religion. Some people will say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? It's, it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily. I mean >>The decision making, let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've made a VC for many years, but you also have the founder, uh, entrepreneurial mindset, but you can get empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of is about believing in the person. So fing, so you make, it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. Oh, >>AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur, right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story. You, I still think that that's important, right? It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. But having said that you're right, the proof is in the pudding, right? At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in this new economy that we live in, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative because their products exactly >>The volume back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song was the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with. Right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the, you know, it's gotta speak to >>The, speak to the user, but let me ask a question now that the people watching who are maybe entrepreneurial entrepreneur, um, masterclass here is in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur to come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine. Whether you're an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage, engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think something will become. Right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way, and we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be, the more likely somebody is gonna align with your vision and, and want to invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I >>Show >>The path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision, uh, have the same vision. You can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle of the journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the latest trends because it's over before you can get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living will say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. So you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but sometimes it happens in six months. Sometimes it takes six years is sometimes like 16 years. >>Uh, what's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Desel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There, there's three big trends that we invest in. And they're the, they're the only things we do day in, day out. One is the explosion and open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen and on what timeline happening >>Forever. >>But it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's, it's one big, massive wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now, a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a, a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally, it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is under invested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a dessert do over, right? I mean, do we need a do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cyber security as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is around 150 billion. And it still is a fraction of what we're, what >>We're and security even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital >>That's right. You mean arguably, right? I mean, arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say, you gotta love your firm. Love. You're doing we're big supporters of your mission. Congratulations on your entrepreneurial venture. And, uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cub gone. Uh, >>Absolutely. >>Certainly EU maybe even north America's in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for having me on >>The show. Guess bell VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California. After the short break, stay with us. Everyone. Welcome to the queue here. Live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022 we're live we're back with the events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, 80% summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube got a great guest here. Justin Coby owner and CEO of innovative solutions. Their booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us a story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. >>Yeah. <laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to midsize businesses that are moving into the cloud or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control, cost, security, compliance, all the good stuff, uh, that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is, but now we have offices down in Austin, Texas up in Toronto, uh, key Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago and it's been a great ride. It >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by AWS. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization and obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? >>Yeah. It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small to midsize business. They're trying to understand how to leverage technology. It better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech ISNT really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're like, listen, we gotta move to the cloud or we move some things to cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then, uh, progressively working through a modernization strateg, always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to midsize businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. They want get set up. But then the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is. And it's not, it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem you guys solve >>In the SMB space? The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and are hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with technology staff that has traditional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to, yeah, they're like, listen, the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's OnPrem or in the cloud. I just want to know that I'm doing that in a way that helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. >>Good. How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I, there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start down your journey in one way and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning the projects that early and not worrying about it, you got it. I mean, most people don't abandon cause like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. And >>They get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. Yeah. >>Frog and boiling water as we used to say. So, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean, this is a dynamic that's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you, I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talked to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did am jazzy announce or Adam, you know, the 5,000 announcement or whatever. They do huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just processes. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are, >>What's the values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to midsize business leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a tech company in the process of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your, or it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning they know that we have their back Andre or the safety net. So when a customer is saying, all right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going in alone. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say you're high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attack. If you have a partner, that's all offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products, uh, that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own. It, it would cost 'em a fortune. If >>Training alone would be insane, a factor and the cost. Yes, absolutely. Opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. Yeah. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018, when, uh, when we made the decision to go all in on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious decision. It wasn't requirement and still isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front desk >>And she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I love it. It's amazing. >>But I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get >>The right people involved. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point about SMBs and businesses in general, small en large, it staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the build out, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner or SMB, do I get the ROI? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cybersecurity issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one and the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Critical issues. This >>Is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about. So that's, >>That's what, at least a million in bloating, if not three or more Just to get that going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side though. Yeah. No. And nevermind AI and ML. That's >>Right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It it's incredibly difficult. And, and the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll >>Do all that >>Exactly. In it department. >>Exactly. >>Like, can we just call up, uh, you know, <laugh> our old vendor. That's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like it, but that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I was a business owner, starting a business to today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. And it's something that we talk about every, with every one of our small to midsize business. >>So just, I want to get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduce other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. And I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months that I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at R I T long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2010 and I was like, Hey, I'm growing the value of this business. And who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years? What do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner, but if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that we're gonna also buy the business with >>Me. And they were the owners, no outside capital, >>None zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons. They all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like if we're owners, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015, and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an earn out process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the business, cuz they care very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting all going all in on the cloud was important for us and we haven't looked back. >>And at that time, the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly the, uh, and those kinds of big enterprises. The game don't, won't say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to midsize business, to migrate completely to the cloud as, as infrastructure was considered. That just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing were a lot of our small to midsize business customers, they wanted to leverage cloud based backup, or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration. The, the Microsoft suite to the cloud and a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on eight at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plug in for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking to migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating to the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customers not to be cash strapped and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so that they can modernize. >>So like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers, empathetic to where they are in their journey. And >>That's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable wind. That's right. Seeing the value and doubling down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate it. Thank >>You very much for having >>Me. Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching with back with more great coverage for two days after this short break >>Live on the floor in San Francisco for 80 west summit, I'm John ferry, host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the action we're back in person. We're at AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube, bringing all the action. Also virtual, we have a hybrid cube, check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticketing off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad >>To be here. So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to have to be back through events. >>It's amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to and what two, three years. >>It's awesome. We'll be at the, uh, New York as well. A lot of developers and a big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything dev sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the, the game is pretty much laid out. Mm. And the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's right. >>Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around, especially the edge public cloud out for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give >>An example, >>Uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech data and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering Aw since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and then became the CEO. Now Adam Slosky is in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to, I don't wanna say, trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listen to customers. They work backwards from the customers. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does >>Computing. It >>Does. >>That's not central lies in the public cloud. Now they got regions. So what is the issue with the edge what's driving? The behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got five GM having. So it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the <affirmative> what's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over fit 15 AWS edge services, and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always used to riff on the cube, uh, cuz it's basically Amazon in a box, pushed in the data center, uh, running native, all the stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of become standard. You're starting to see some standard Deepak sings group is doing some amazing work with open source Rauls team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see low the zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my data center, do I wanna manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outpost. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment and it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. Innovative does that. You have the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in, in these new areas that you're helping out are they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their available ability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is it. They don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on, what's making them money as a business. They wanna focus on their applications. They want focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS, you take the infrastructure. You take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. We help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company, we have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. >>So basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it works? Right. >>And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy FinTech in the Caribbean, we're gonna talk about hurricanes and gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where now have data, you have applications that are tapping into that, that requirement. It makes total sense. We're seeing across the board. So it's not like it's, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech in, in the islands. There are a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what's your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto underly parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming. Uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a tech technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on it's >>Interesting. And I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, projects going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart contract, we use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead. It's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain, just for this like smart contracts for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service, but what happened to decent centralized. >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance. >>Yeah. >>And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through a, a use case of a customer, um, Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud. Um, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my a and I also want all the benefits of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the good this of the cloud. What's the answer. Yeah. >>Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment inside that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with, uh, regular commercially available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Uh, inside of that manufacturing plant, uh, we can do pre-processing on things coming out of the, uh, the robotics that depending on what we're manufacturing, right. Uh, and then we can take the, those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard >>For data lake or whatever, >>To the data lake. Yeah. Data Lakehouse, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but I'll lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just in time, manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going of the data that saves that cost yep. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data unless you have to. Um, but those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you, what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacture, industrial, whatever the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? There's a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe, maybe this decision can wait. Yeah. Uh, and then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot tube doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture in the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are. And, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about out. Customers are starting to talk about throwing away data, uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And well, >>I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this, but the one pattern we're seeing of the past year is that throwing away data's bad, even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retraining their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes code, as we call it in our last showcase, we did a whole whole event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw it away. It's not just business better. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. >>There are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are running pay Toby level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, uh, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move Aytes of data to the AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a kind of a, um, fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background, OnPrem architect, Aus cloud, and skydiving instructor. <laugh> how does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? Yeah. >>Uh, you >>Jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump out >>Kind of. So I was, you jumped out. I was teaching having, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a sky. I instructor, uh, I was teaching skydiving and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and, and how his customers are working. And he can't find an enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, uh, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, uh, I started and the first day there, uh, we had a, a discussion, uh, EC two had just come out <laugh> and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that, and through being in on premises, migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services tore >>It's. So it's such a great story, you know, was gonna, you know, you know, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early days was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, uh, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and maybe it does still feel like that to some people. Right. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting edge stuff, like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You got the right equipment. You gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Yeah. Thanks for coming. You really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here live in San Francisco for eight of us summit. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look up this calendar for all the cube, actually@thecube.net. We'll right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube a be summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John fury host of the cube. We'll be at the eighties summit in New York city this summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco, getting all the coverage what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dos car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor in a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you. Cool. How are you? Good. >>How hello you. >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah. So give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? >>First of all, thank you for having me. We're back to be business with you, never after to see you. Uh, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. We have raised close to a hundred million there. The investors are people like Norwes Menlo ventures, coastal ventures, Ram Shera, and all those people, all well known guys. And Beckel chime Paul me Mayard web. So whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley VCs are involved >>And has it gone? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISRA is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk, uh, the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and service now to take you to the next stage? Well, >>I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, Dave LAN as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh> >>You know, who does >>You, >>You >>Get the call fund to talk to you though. You >>Get the commentary, your, your finger in the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud scale. You predicted that we talked about in the cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing Docker just raised a hundred million on a $2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control plan? Emerging AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded, observability there's 10 billion observability companies. Data is the key. This is what's your end on this. What's your take. >>Yeah, look, I think I'll give you the few that I see right from my side. Obviously data is very clear. So the things that rumor system of recorded you and me talked about the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud native, it'll be called AI. NA AI enable is a new buzzword and using the AI for customer service. It, you talk about observability. I call it, AIOps applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and AI services. What used to be desk with ServiceNow BMC GLA you see a new ALA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflows, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with AI workflows. So you, you see AI going >>Off is RPA. A company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI S one will be at their event this summer? Um, is it a product company? I mean, or I mean, RPA is, should be embedded in everything. It's a >>Feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company also, but that automation should be embedded in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NATO and AI. They it'll become automation data. Yeah. And that's your, thinking's >>Interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kinda having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle, and it was software abstraction. Now you have all kinds of workflows, abstractions everywhere. So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed. Are they integrated? I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So remember the databases became called polyglot databases. Yeah. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area like you, you were talking about, it should be part of service. Now it should be part of ISRA. Like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see it MuleSoft and sales buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies, cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also have an automation as a layer embedded inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind, as you got the XPO hall got, um, we're back to vis, but you got, you know, AMD, Clum, Dynatrace data, dog, innovative, all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right? Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Deibel later. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen, we know all the, the VCs, what does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation. Cloud's bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's code. Yes. Basically. Data's everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders of Amazon created the startups 15 years back. Everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be people don't just build on Amazon. They're going to build it on top of snow. Flake companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake, right? So I see my old boss playing ment, try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer, right? So I think that's the next level of companies trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your moat is, what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last re invent, coined the term super cloud, right? It's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You're starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage. And guys like Charles Fitzgeral out there, who we like was kind of hitting on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get him. Like, yeah, I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> cause he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Yes. Now they say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist and, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. >>It is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer room. The middle layer pass will be snowflake. So I cannot build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer if I really need to size, I'll build it on force.com Salesforce. Yeah. Right. So I think that's where you'll >>See. So basically the, the, if you're an entrepreneur, the, the north star in terms of the, the outcome is be a super cloud. It >>Is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. Yeah. >>Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales, the snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think got Redshift. Amazon has got Redshift. Um, but snowflake big customer. The they're probably paying AWS big, >>I >>Think big bills too. >>So John, very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-option will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with the snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouse as a data layer. So I think depending on the use case you have to use each of the above, I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, you know, foreclose your value. That's right. With some sort of internal hack, but I've think, I think the general question that I have is that I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point, when does the rising tide stop and the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth cycle? I >>Think it's growth. You call it closed skill you the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's as long as there more movement from on, uh, on-prem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations, it helpless. Even the customer service service. Now the ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go made. >>I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers are practitioners, not suppliers to the market. Feel free to text me or DMing. Next question is really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products. Cause you know, the big enterprises now and you know, small, medium, large, and large enterprise, they're all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean seeing some stuff, but why don't we get your thoughts on that? What it >>Is you, if I remember going back to our 2007 or eight, when I used to talk to you back then when Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or one person today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a C I will line our business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can double in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. Yeah. >>And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I, I reference the URL causes like there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solution that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting left for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there. Um, and goes back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure as code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share? >>I, a lot of thoughts that Fu I see the AI op solutions in the futures should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app dynamic, right? Dynatrace, all this solution will go future towards predict to pro so solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service that customers give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can give the best algorithm, but I gotta train them, modify them, make them better, make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to big data days back in 2009, you know that >>Look at, look how much data bricks has grown. >>It is doubled. The key cloud >>Air kinda went private, so good stuff. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking year that growing customers and my customers, or some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk, McAfee, uh, grand <inaudible>. So all the top customers, um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on, predict ours. One area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service, >>Great stuff, man. Doing great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of a us summit 2022. And we're gonna be at Aus summit in San, uh, in New York in the summer. So look for that on the calendar, of course, go to a us startups.com. That's a site for all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This the cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back, little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit in new York's coming in the summer. We'll be two with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the Groove's psych to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're gonna see a lot of virtual cube outta hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economist with duck bill groove, he's the founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe is shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at mark, Andrew's been doing a lot of shit posting lately. All a billionaires are shit posting, but they don't know how to do it. They're >>Doing it right. There's something opportunity there. It's like, here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a mid-size island to begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. >>This shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on this side I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what, what is shitposting >>It's more or less talking about the world of enterprise technology, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream, but it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a Jack ass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, Cuban coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you see the growth of cloud native Amazon's evolving Atos, especially new CEO. Andy move on to be the chief of all. Amazon just saw him the cover of was it time magazine. Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything. These folks do. They're they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble. Imagine the logistics, it takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. And it's, it's sprawling immense, the nominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. >>Well, there's a lot of force for good conversations. Seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to a, is trying to portray themselves, you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now it's same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car, our driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. Either way, it sounds like more exciting. Like they >>Better have a replacement ready in case something goes wrong on the track, highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula, the one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in e-sports with other people in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and video graphics card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. Oh, >>It's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting it into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going on in your world. I know you have a lot of great SA we've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter. Check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's the blowback, any blowback late leads there been tick? What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's hi, I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They not have heard me. It. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do that. >>We should do that. Actually. I think sure would call in. Oh, I, I >>Think >>I guarantee if we had that right now, people would call in and Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the customer. >>You know, I always joke with Dave Avante about how John Fort's always at, uh, um, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0, 0 5, or we can't, we >>Have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And then there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish, but that's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their product >>They're going in different directions. When they named Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonus on number of words, they can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, a session manager is a great one. I love the service ridiculous name. They have a systems manager, parameter store with is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage through parameter store does not. It's fun. >>What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination of you >>Got Ks. You got EMR, you got EC two. You got S three SQS. Well, RedShift's not an acronym. You got >>Gas is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation, >>They still got bean stock or is that still >>Around? Oh, they never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, wow, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it. But while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it, John. >>Okay. >>Simple BV still haunts our >>Dreams. I, I actually got an email on, I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C twos were being deprecated and I got an email I'm like, I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me just like, gimme something else. Right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you is that like, okay, so as Amazon gets better in some areas where do they need more work? And you, your opinion, because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database Snowflake's got out database service. So, you know, Redshift, snowflake database is out there. So you've got this optician. Yes. How's that going? And what are you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with Amazon and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want. And they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multi-cloud cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word. Multi-cloud um, a lot of people are saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word. Like multicloud sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multicloud? >>Multiple single >>Loves that term. Yeah. >>You're building in multiple single points of failure. Do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the, the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about multi-cloud either as the industry leader, let's talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective. It doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on context. But my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. >>Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question cause I know you we've been, you know, fellow journey mean in the, in the cloud journey, going to all the events and then the pandemic hit where now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna end, certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations community's gonna emerge. You've got a pretty big community growing and it's growing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing, or just big changes you've seen with the pan endemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece come in, you're commentating, you're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck bill group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, funny, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who >>Can pony. >>Hello and welcome back to the live cube coverage here in San Francisco, California, the cube live coverage. Two days, day two of a summit, 2022 Aish summit, New York city coming up in summer. We'll be there as well. Events are back. I'm the host, John fur, the Cub got great guest here. Johnny Dallas with Ze. Um, here is on the queue. We're gonna talk about his background. Uh, little trivia here. He was the youngest engineer ever worked at Amazon at the age. 17 had to get escorted into reinvent in Vegas cause he was underage <laugh> with security, all good stories. Now the CEO of company called Z know DevOps kind of focus, managed service, a lot of cool stuff, Johnny, welcome to the cube. >>Thanks John. Great. >>So tell a story. You were the youngest engineer at AWS. >>I was, yes. So I used to work at a company called Bebo. I got started very young. I started working when I was about 14, um, kind of as a software engineer. And when I, uh, it was about 16. I graduated out of high school early, um, working at this company Bebo, still running all of the DevOps at that company. Um, I went to reinvent in about 2018 to give a talk about some of the DevOps software I wrote at that company. Um, but you know, as many of those things were probably familiar with reinvent happens in a casino and I was 16. So was not able to actually go into the, a casino on my own. Um, so I'd have <inaudible> security as well as casino security escort me in to give my talk. >>Did Andy jazzy, was he aware of >>This? Um, you know, that's a great question. I don't know. <laugh> >>I'll ask him great story. So obviously you started a young age. I mean, it's so cool to see you jump right in. I mean, I mean you never grew up with the old school that I used to grew up in and loading package software, loading it onto the server, deploying it, plugging the cables in, I mean you just rocking and rolling with DevOps as you look back now what's the big generational shift because now you got the Z generation coming in, millennials on the workforce. It's changing like no one's putting and software on servers. Yeah, >>No. I mean the tools keep getting better, right? We, we keep creating more abstractions that make it easier and easier. When I, when I started doing DevOps, I could go straight into E two APIs. I had APIs from the get go and you know, my background was, I was a software engineer. I never went through like the CIS admin stack. I, I never had to, like you said, rack servers, myself. I was immediately able to scale. I was managing, I think 2,500 concurrent servers across every Ables region through software. It was a fundamental shift. >>Did you know what an SRE was at that time? >>Uh, >>You were kind of an SRE on >>Yeah, I was basically our first SRE, um, was familiar with the, with the phrasing, but really thought of myself as a software engineer who knows cloud APIs, not a SRE. All >>Right. So let's talk about what's what's going on now as you look at the landscape today, what's the coolest thing that's going on in your mind in cloud? >>Yeah, I think the, I think the coolest thing is, you know, we're seeing the next layer of those abstraction tools exist and that's what we're doing with Z is we've basically gone and we've, we're building an app platform that deploys onto your cloud. So if you're familiar with something like Carku, um, where you just click a GitHub repo, uh, we actually make it that easy. You click a GI hub repo and it will deploy on ALS using a AWS tools. So, >>Right. So this is Z. This is the company. Yes. How old's the company about >>A year and a half old now. >>All right. So explain what it does. >>Yeah. So we make it really easy for any software engineer to deploy on a AWS. It's not SREs. These are the actual application engineers doing the business logic. They don't really want to think about Yamo. They don't really want to configure everything super deeply. They want to say, run this API on S in the best way possible. We've encoded all the best practices into software and we set it up for you. Yeah. >>So I think the problem you're solving is that there's a lot of want be DevOps engineers. And then they realize, oh shit, I don't wanna do this. Yeah. And some people want to do it. They loved under the hood. Right. People love to have infrastructure, but the average developer needs to actually be as agile on scale. So that seems to be the problem you solve. Right? >>Yeah. We, we, we give way more productivity to each individual engineer, you know? >>All right. So let me ask you a question. So let me just say, I'm a developer. Cool. I build this new app. It's a streaming app or whatever. I'm making it up cube here, but let's just say I deploy it. I need your service. But what happens about when my customers say, Hey, what's your SLA? The CDN went down from this it's flaky. Does Amazon have, so how do you handle all that SLA reporting that Amazon provides? Cuz they do a good job with sock reports all through the console. But as you start getting into DevOps <affirmative> and sell your app, mm-hmm <affirmative> you have customer issues. How do you, how do you view that? Yeah, >>Well, I, I think you make a great point of AWS has all this stuff already. AWS has SLAs. AWS has contract. Aw has a lot of the tools that are expected. Um, so we don't have to reinvent the wheel here. What we do is we help people get to those SLAs more easily. So Hey, this is AWS SLA as a default. Um, Hey, we'll fix you your services. This is what you can expect here. Um, but we can really leverage S's reliability of you. Don't have to trust us. You have to trust ALS and trust that the setup is good there. >>Do you handle all the recovery or mitigation between, uh, identification say downtime for instance? Oh, the server's not 99% downtime. Uh, went down for an hour, say something's going on? And is there a service dashboard? How does it get what's the remedy? Do you have a, how does all that work? >>Yeah, so we have some built in remediation. You know, we, we basically say we're gonna do as much as we can to keep your endpoint up 24 7 mm-hmm <affirmative>. If it's something in our control, we'll do it. If it's a disc failure, that's on us. If you push bad code, we won't put out that new version until it's working. Um, so we do a lot to make sure that your endpoint stay is up, um, and then alert you if there's a problem that we can't fix. So cool. Hey S has some downtime, this thing's going on. You need to do this action. Um, we'll let you know. >>All right. So what do you do for fun? >>Yeah, so, uh, for, for fun, um, a lot of side projects. <laugh> uh, >>What's your side hustle right now. You got going on >>The, uh, it's >>A lot of tools playing tools, serverless. >>Yeah, painless. A lot of serverless stuff. Um, I think there's a lot of really cool WAM stuff as well. Going on right now. Um, I love tools is, is the truest answer is I love building something that I can give to somebody else. And they're suddenly twice as productive because of it. Um, >>It's a good feeling, isn't it? >>Oh yeah. There's >>Nothing like tools were platforms. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know, the expression, too many tools in the tool. She becomes, you know, tools for all. And then ultimately tools become platforms. What's your view on that? Because if a good tool works and starts to get traction, you need to either add more tools or start building a platform platform versus tool. What's your, what's your view on a reaction to that kind of concept debate? >>Yeah, it's a good question. Uh, we we've basically started as like a, a platform. First of we've really focused on these, uh, developers who don't wanna get deep into the DevOps. And so we've done all of the pieces of the stacks. We do C I C D management. Uh, we do container orchestration, we do monitoring. Um, and now we're, spliting those up into individual tools so they can be used. Awesome in conjunction more. >>All right. So what are some of the use cases that you see for your service? It's DevOps basically nano service DevOps. So people who want a DevOps team, do clients have a DevOps person and then one person, two people what's the requirements to run >>Z. Yeah. So we we've got teams, um, from no DevOps is kind of when they start and then we've had teams grow up to about, uh, five, 10 men DevOps teams. Um, so, you know, as is more infrastructure people come in because we're in your cloud, you're able to go in and configure it on top you're we can't block you. Uh, you wanna use some new AWS service. You're welcome to use that alongside the stack that we deploy >>For you. How many customers do you have now? >>So we've got about 40 companies that are using us for all of their infrastructure, um, kind of across the board, um, as well as >>What's the pricing model. >>Uh, so our pricing model is we, we charge basically similar to an engineering salary. So we charge a monthly rate. We have plans at 300 bucks a month, a thousand bucks a month, and then enterprise plan for >>The requirement scale. Yeah. So back into the people cost, you must have her discounts, not a fully loaded thing, is it? >>Yeah, there's a discounts kind of asking >>Then you pass the Amazon bill. >>Yeah. So our customers actually pay for the Amazon bill themselves. So >>Have their own >>Account. There's no margin on top. You're linking your, a analyst account in, um, got it. Which is huge because we can, we are now able to help our customers get better deals with Amazon. Um, got it. We're incentivized on their team to drive your costs down. >>And what's your unit main unit of economics software scale. >>Yeah. Um, yeah, so we, we think of things as projects. How many services do you have to deploy as that scales up? Um, awesome. >>All right. You're 20 years old now you not even can't even drink legally. <laugh> what are you gonna do when you're 30? We're gonna be there. >>Well, we're, uh, we're making it better, better, >>Better the old guy on the queue here. <laugh> >>I think, uh, I think we're seeing a big shift of, um, you know, we've got these major clouds. ALS is obviously the biggest cloud and it's constantly coming out with new services, but we're starting to see other clouds have built many of the common services. So Kubernetes is a great example. It exists across all the clouds and we're starting to see new platforms come up on top that allow you to leverage tools for multiple times. At the same time. Many of our customers actually have AWS as their primary cloud and they'll have secondary clouds or they'll pull features from other clouds into AWS, um, through our software. I think that's, I'm very excited by that. And I, uh, expect to be working on that when I'm 30. <laugh> awesome. >>Well, you gonna have a good future. I gotta ask you this question cuz uh, you know, I always, I was a computer science undergrad in the, in the, and um, computer science back then was hardcore, mostly systems OS stuff, uh, database compiler. Um, now there's so much compi, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> how do you look at the high school college curriculum experience slash folks who are nerding out on computer science? It's not one or two things. You've got a lot of, lot of things. I mean, look at Python, data engineering and emerging as a huge skill. What's it, what's it like for college kids now and high school kids? What, what do you think they should be doing if you had to give advice to your 16 year old self back a few years ago now in college? Um, I mean Python's not a great language, but it's super effective for coding and the datas were really relevant, but it's, you've got other language opportunities you've got tools to build. So you got a whole culture of young builders out there. What should, what should people gravitate to in your opinion and stay away from or >>Stay away from? That's a good question. I, I think that first of all, you're very right of the, the amount of developers is increasing so quickly. Um, and so we see more specialization. That's why we also see, you know, these SREs that are different than typical application engineering. You know, you get more specialization in job roles. Um, I think if, what I'd say to my 16 year old self is do projects, um, the, I learned most of my, what I've learned just on the job or online trying things, playing with different technologies, actually getting stuff out into the world, um, way more useful than what you'll learn in kind of a college classroom. I think classroom's great to, uh, get a basis, but you need to go out and experiment actually try things. >>You know? I think that's great advice. In fact, I would just say from my experience of doing all the hard stuff and cloud is so great for just saying, okay, I'm done, I'm banning the project. Move on. Yeah. Cause you know, it's not gonna work in the old days. You have to build this data center. I bought all this, you know, people hang on to the old, you know, project and try to force it out there. Now you >>Can launch a project now, >>Instant gratification, it ain't working <laugh> or this is shut it down and then move on to something new. >>Yeah, exactly. Instantly you should be able to do that much more quickly. Right. So >>You're saying get those projects and don't be afraid to shut it down. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that? Do you agree with that? >>Yeah. I think it's ex experiment. Uh, you're probably not gonna hit it rich on the first one. It's probably not gonna be that idea is the genius idea. So don't be afraid to get rid of things and just try over and over again. It's it's number of reps >>That'll win. I was commenting online. Elon Musk was gonna buy Twitter, that whole Twitter thing. And someone said, Hey, you know, what's the, I go look at the product group at Twitter's been so messed up because they actually did get it right on the first time. And we can just a great product. They could never change it because people would freak out and the utility of Twitter. I mean, they gotta add some things, the added button and we all know what they need to add, but the product, it was just like this internal dysfunction, the product team, what are we gonna work on? Don't change the product so that you kind of have there's opportunities out there where you might get the lucky strike right outta the gate. Yeah. Right. You don't know. >>It's almost a curse too. It's you're not gonna hit curse Twitter. You're not gonna hit a rich the second time too. So yeah. >><laugh> Johnny Dallas. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Give a plug for your company. Um, take a minute to explain what you're working on. What you're look looking for. You hiring funding. Customers. Just give a plug, uh, last minute and kind the last word. >>Yeah. So, um, John Dallas from Ze, if you, uh, need any help with your DevOps, if you're a early startup, you don't have DevOps team, um, or you're trying to deploy across clouds, check us out z.com. Um, we are actively hiring. So if you are a software engineer excited about tools and cloud, or you're interested in helping getting this message out there, hit me up. Um, find us on z.co. >>Yeah. LinkedIn Twitter handle GitHub handle. >>Yeah. I'm the only Johnny on a LinkedIn and GitHub and underscore Johnny Dallas underscore on Twitter. All right. Um, >>Johnny Dallas, the youngest engineer working at Amazon, um, now 20 we're on great new project here in the cube. Builders are all young. They're growing into the business. They got cloud at their, at their back it's tailwind. I wish I was 20. Again, this is a I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. Thanks. >>Welcome >>Back to the cubes. Live coverage of a AWS summit in San Francisco, California events are back, uh, ADAS summit in New York cities. This summer, the cube will be there as well. Check us out there lot. I'm glad we have events back. It's great to have everyone here. I'm John furry host of the cube. Dr. Matt wood is with me cube alumni now VP of business analytics division of AWS. Matt. Great to see you. Thank >>You, John. Great to be here. >>Appreciate it. I always call you Dr. Matt wood, because Andy jazzy always says Dr. Matt, we >>Would introduce you on the he's the one and only the one and >>Only Dr. Matt wood >>In joke. I love it. >>Andy style. And I think you had walkup music too on, you know, >>Too. Yes. We all have our own personalized walk. >>So talk about your new role. I not new role, but you're running up, um, analytics, business or AWS. What does that consist of right now? >>Sure. So I work, I've got what I consider to be the one of the best jobs in the world. Uh, I get to work with our customers and, uh, the teams at AWS, uh, to build the analytics services that millions of our customers use to, um, uh, slice dice, pivot, uh, better understand their day data, um, look at how they can use that data for, um, reporting, looking backwards and also look at how they can use that data looking forward. So predictive analytics and machine learning. So whether it is, you know, slicing and dicing in the lower level of, uh Hado and the big data engines, or whether you're doing ETR with glue or whether you're visualizing the data in quick side or building models in SageMaker. I got my, uh, fingers in a lot of pies. >>You know, one of the benefits of, uh, having cube coverage with AWS since 2013 is watching the progression. You were on the cube that first year we were at reinvent 2013 and look at how machine learning just exploded onto the scene. You were involved in that from day one is still day one, as you guys say mm-hmm <affirmative>, what's the big thing now. I mean, look at, look at just what happened. Machine learning comes in and then a slew of services come in and got SageMaker became a hot seller, right outta the gate. Mm-hmm <affirmative> the database stuff was kicking butt. So all this is now booming. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that was the real generational changeover for <inaudible> what's the perspective. What's your perspective on, yeah, >>I think how that's evolved. No, I think it's a really good point. I, I totally agree. I think for machine machine learning, um, there was sort of a Renaissance in machine learning and the application of machine learning machine learning as a technology has been around for 50 years, let's say, but, uh, to do machine learning, right? You need like a lot of data, the data needs to be high quality. You need a lot of compute to be able to train those models and you have to be able to evaluate what those mean as you apply them to real world problems. And so the cloud really removed a lot of the constraints. Finally, customers had all of the data that they needed. We gave them services to be able to label that data in a high quality way. There's all the compute. You need to be able to train the models <laugh> and so where you go. >>And so the cloud really enabled this Renaissance with machine learning, and we're seeing honestly, a similar Renaissance with, uh, with data, uh, and analytics. You know, if you look back, you know, five, 10 years, um, analytics was something you did in batch, like your data warehouse ran a analysis to do, uh, reconciliation at the end of the month. And then was it? Yeah. And so that's when you needed it, but today, if your Redshift cluster isn't available, uh, Uber drivers don't turn up door dash deliveries, don't get made. It's analytics is now central to virtually every business and it is central to every virtually every business is digital transformation. Yeah. And be able to take that data from a variety of sources here, or to query it with high performance mm-hmm <affirmative> to be able to actually then start to augment that data with real information, which usually comes from technical experts and domain experts to form, you know, wisdom and information from raw data. That's kind of, uh, what most organizations are trying to do when they kind of go through this analytics journey. It's >>Interesting, you know, Dave LAN and I always talk on the cube, but out, you know, the future and, and you look back, the things we were talking about six years ago are actually happening now. Yeah. And it's not a, a, a, you know, hyped up statement to say digital transformation. It actually's happening now. And there's also times where we bang our fist on the table, say, I really think this is so important. And Dave says, John, you're gonna die on that hill <laugh>. >>And >>So I I'm excited that this year, for the first time I didn't die on that hill. I've been saying data you're right. Data as code is the next infrastructure as code mm-hmm <affirmative>. And Dave's like, what do you mean by that? We're talking about like how data gets and it's happening. So we just had an event on our 80 bus startups.com site mm-hmm <affirmative>, um, a showcase with startups and the theme was data as code and interesting new trends emerging really clearly the role of a data engineer, right? Like an SRE, what an SRE did for cloud. You have a new data engineering role because of the developer on, uh, onboarding is massively increasing exponentially, new developers, data science, scientists are growing mm-hmm <affirmative> and the, but the pipelining and managing and engineering as a system. Yeah. Almost like an operating system >>And as a discipline. >>So what's your reaction to that about this data engineer data as code, because if you have horizontally scalable data, you've gotta be open that's hard. <laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative> and you gotta silo the data that needs to be siloed for compliance and reasons. So that's got a very policy around that. So what's your reaction to data as code and data engineering and >>Phenomenon? Yeah, I think it's, it's a really good point. I think, you know, like with any, with any technology, uh, project inside an organization, you know, success with analytics or machine learning is it's kind of 50% technology and then 50% cultural. And, uh, you have often domain experts. Those are, could be physicians or drug experts, or they could be financial experts or whoever they might be got deep domain expertise. And then you've got technical implementation teams and it's kind of a natural often repulsive force. I don't mean that rudely, but they, they just, they don't talk the same language. And so the more complex the domain and the more complex the technology, the stronger that repulsive force, and it can become very difficult for, um, domain experts to work closely with the technical experts, to be able to actually get business decisions made. And so what data engineering does and data engineering is in some cases team, or it can be a role that you play. >>Uh, it's really allowing those two disciplines to speak the same language it provides. You can think of it as plumbing, but I think of it as like a bridge, it's a bridge between like the technical implementation and the domain experts. And that requires like a very disparate range of skills. You've gotta understand about statistics. You've gotta understand about the implementation. You've gotta understand about the, it, you've gotta understand and understand about the domain. And if you could pull all of that together, that data engineering discipline can be incredibly transformative for an organization, cuz it builds the bridge between those two >>Groups. You know, I was advising some, uh, young computer science students at the sophomore junior level, uh, just a couple weeks ago. And I told 'em, I would ask someone at Amazon, this questions I'll ask you since you're, you've been in the middle of of it for years, they were asking me and I was trying to mentor them on. What, how do you become a data engineer from a practical standpoint, uh, courseware projects to work on how to think, um, not just coding Python cause everyone's coding in Python mm-hmm <affirmative> but what else can they do? So I was trying to help them and I didn't really know the answer myself. I was just trying to like kind of help figure it out with them. So what is the answer in your opinion or the thoughts around advice to young students who want to be data engineers? Cuz data scientists is pretty clear in what that is. Yeah. You use tools, you make visualizations, you manage data, you get answers and insights and apply that to the business. That's an application mm-hmm <affirmative>, that's not the, you know, sta standing up a stack or managing the infrastructure. What, so what does that coding look like? What would your advice be to >>Yeah, I think >>Folks getting into a data engineering role. >>Yeah. I think if you, if you believe this, what I said earlier about like 50% technology, 50% culture, like the, the number one technology to learn as a data engineer is the tools in the cloud, which allow you to aggregate data from virtually any source into something which is incrementally more valuable for the organization. That's really what data engineering is all about. It's about taking from multiple sources. Some people call them silos, but silos indicates that the, the storage is kind of fungible or UND differentiated. That that's really not the case. Success requires you to really purpose built well crafted high performance, low cost engines for all of your data. So understanding those tools and understanding how to use 'em, that's probably the most important technical piece. Um, and yeah, Python and programming and statistics goes along with that, I think. And then the most important cultural part, I think is it's just curiosity. >>Like you want to be able to, as a data engineer, you want to have a natural curiosity that drives you to seek the truth inside an organization, seek the truth of a particular problem and to be able to engage, cuz you're probably, you're gonna have some choice as you go through your career about which domain you end up in, like maybe you're really passionate about healthcare. Maybe you're really just passionate about your transportation or media, whatever it might be. And you can allow that to drive a certain amount of curiosity, but within those roles, like the domains are so broad, you kind of gotta allow your curiosity to develop and lead, to ask the right questions and engage in the right way with your teams. So because you can have all the technical skills in the world, but if you're not able to help the team's truths seek through that curiosity, you simply won't be successful. >>We just had a guest on 20 year old, um, engineer, founder, Johnny Dallas, who was 16 when he worked at Amazon youngest engineer at >>Johnny Dallas is a great name by the that's fantastic. It's his real name? >>It sounds like a football player. Rockstar. I should call Johnny. I have Johnny Johnny cube. Uh it's me. Um, so, but he's young and, and he, he was saying, you know, his advice was just do projects. >>Yeah. That's get hands on. >>Yeah. And I was saying, Hey, I came from the old days though, you get to stand stuff up and you hugged onto the assets. Cause you didn't wanna kill the cause you spent all this money and, and he's like, yeah, with cloud, you can shut it down. If you do a project that's not working and you get bad data, no one's adopting it or you don't want like it anymore. You shut it down. Just something >>Else. Totally >>Instantly abandoned it. Move onto something new. >>Yeah. With progression. Totally. And it, the, the blast radius of, um, decisions is just way reduced, gone. Like we talk a lot about like trying to, you know, in the old world trying to find the resources and get the funding. And it's like, right. I wanna try out this kind of random idea that could be a big deal for the organization. I need 50 million in a new data center. Like you're not gonna get anywhere. You, >>You do a proposal working backwards, document >>Kinds, all that, that sort of stuff got hoops. So, so all of that is gone, but we sometimes forget that a big part of that is just the, the prototyping and the experimentation and the limited blast radius in terms of cost. And honestly, the most important thing is time just being able to jump in there, get fingers on keyboards, just try this stuff out. And that's why at AWS, we have part of the reason we have so many services because we want, when you get into AWS, we want the whole toolbox to be available to every developer. And so, as your ideas developed, you may want to jump from, you know, data that you have, that's already in a database to doing realtime data. Yeah. And then you can just, you have the tools there. And when you want to get into real time data, you don't just have kineses, but you have real time analytics and you can run SQL again, that data is like the, the capabilities and the breadth, like really matter when it comes to prototyping and, and >>That's culture too. That's the culture piece, because what was once a dysfunctional behavior, I'm gonna go off the reservation and try something behind my boss's back or cause now as a side hustle or fun project. Yeah. So for fun, you can just code something. Yeah, >>Totally. I remember my first Haddo project, I found almost literally a decommissioned set of servers in the data center that no one was using. They were super old. They're about to be literally turned off. And I managed to convince the team to leave them on for me for like another month. And I installed her DUP on them and like, got them going. It's like, that just seems crazy to me now that I, I had to go and convince anybody not to turn these service off, but what >>It was like for that, when you came up with elastic map produce, because you said this is too hard, we gotta make it >>Easier. Basically. Yes. <laugh> I was installing Haddo version, you know, beta nor 0.9 or whatever it was. It's like, this is really hard. This is really hard. >>We simpler. All right. Good stuff. I love the, the walk down memory lane and also your advice. Great stuff. I think culture's huge. I think. And that's why I like Adam's keynote to reinvent Adam. Lesky talk about path minds and trail blazers because that's a blast radius impact. Mm-hmm <affirmative> when you can actually have innovation organically just come from anywhere. Yeah, that's totally cool. Totally. Let's get into the products. Serverless has been hot mm-hmm <affirmative> uh, we hear a lot about EKS is hot. Uh, containers are booming. Kubernetes is getting adopted. There's still a lot of work to do there. Lambda cloud native developers are booming, serverless Lambda. How does that impact the analytics piece? Can you share the hot, um, products around how that translates? Sure, absolutely. Yeah, the SageMaker >>Yeah, I think it's a, if you look at kind of the evolution and what customers are asking for, they're not, you know, they don't just want low cost. They don't just want this broad set of services. They don't just want, you know, those services to have deep capabilities. They want those services to have as lower operating cost over time as possible. So we kind of really got it down. We got built a lot of muscle, lot of services about getting up and running and experimenting and prototyping and turning things off and turn turning them on and turning them off. And like, that's all great. But actually the, you really only most projects start something once and then stop something once. And maybe there's an hour in between, or maybe there's a year, but the real expense in terms of time and, and complexity is sometimes in that running cost. Yeah. And so, um, we've heard very loudly and clearly from customers that they want, that, that running cost is just undifferentiated to them and they wanna spend more time on their work and in analytics that is, you know, slicing the data, pivoting the data, combining the data, labeling the data, training their models, uh, you know, running inference against their models, uh, and less time doing the operational pieces. >>So is that why the servers focus is there? >>Yeah, absolutely. It, it dramatically reduces the skill required to run these, uh, workloads of any scale. And it dramatically reduces the UND differentiated, heavy lifting, cuz you get to focus more of the time that you would've spent on the operation on the actual work that you wanna get done. And so if you look at something just like Redshift serverless that we launched a reinvent, you know, there's a kind of a, we have a lot of customers that want to run like a, uh, the cluster and they want to get into the, the weeds where there is benefit. We have a lot of customers that say, you know, I there's no benefit for me though. I just wanna do the analytics. So you run the operational piece, you're the experts we've run. You know, we run 60 million instant startups every single day. Like we do this a lot. Exactly. We understand the operation. I >>Want the answers come on. So >>Just give the answers or just let, give me the notebook or just give the inference prediction. So today for example, we announced, um, you know, serverless inference. So now once you've trained your machine learning model, just, uh, run a few, uh, lines of code or you just click a few buttons and then yeah, you got an inference endpoint that you do not have to manage. And whether you're doing one query against that endpoint, you know, per hour or you're doing, you know, 10 million, but we'll just scale it on the back end. You >>Know, I know we got not a lot of time left, but I want, wanna get your reaction to this. One of the things about the data lakes, not being data swamps has been from what I've been reporting and hearing from customers is that they want to retrain their machine learning algorithm. They want, they need that data. They need the, the, the realtime data and they need the time series data, even though the time has passed, they gotta store in the data lake mm-hmm <affirmative>. So now the data lakes main function is being reusing the data to actually retrain. Yeah, >>That's >>Right. It worked properly. So a lot of, lot of postmortems turn into actually business improvements to make the machine learning smarter, faster. You see that same way. Do you see it the same way? Yeah, >>I think it's, I think it's really interesting. No, I think it's really interesting because you know, we talk it's, it's convenient to kind of think of analytics as a very clear progression from like point a point B, but really it's, you are navigating terrain for which you do not have a map and you need a lot of help to navigate that terrain. Yeah. And so, you know, being, having these services in place, not having to run the operations of those services, being able to have those services be secure and well governed, and we added PII detection today, you know, something you can do automatically, uh, to be able to use their, uh, any unstructured data run queries against that unstructured data. So today we added, you know, um, text extract queries. So you can just say, well, uh, you can scan a badge for example, and say, well, what's the name on this badge? And you don't have to identify where it is. We'll do all of that work for you. So there's a often a, it's more like a branch than it is just a, a normal, uh, a to B path, a linear path. Uh, and that includes loops backwards. And sometimes you gotta get the results and use those to make improvements further upstream. And sometimes you've gotta use those. And when you're downstream, you'll be like, ah, I remember that. And you come back and bring it all together. So awesome. It's um, it's, uh, uh, it's a wonderful >>Work for sure. Dr. Matt wood here in the queue. Got just take the last word and give the update. Why you're here. What's the big news happening that you're announcing here at summit in San Francisco, California, and update on the, the business analytics >>Group? Yeah, I think, you know, one of the, we did a lot of announcements in the keynote, uh, encouraged everyone to take a look at that. Uh, this morning was Swami. Uh, one of the ones I'm most excited about, uh, is the opportunity to be able to take, uh, dashboards, visualizations. We're all used to using these things. We see them in our business intelligence tools, uh, all over the place. However, what we've heard from customers is like, yes, I want those analytics. I want their visualization. I want it to be up to date, but you know, I don't actually want to have to go my tools where I'm actually doing my work to another separate tool to be able to look at that information. And so today we announced, uh, one click public embedding for quick side dashboards. So today you can literally, as easily as embedding a YouTube video, you can take a dashboard that you've built inside, quick site cut and paste the HTML, paste it into your application and that's it. That's all you have to do. It takes seconds and >>It gets updated in real time. >>Updated in real time, it's interactive. You can do everything that you would normally do. You can brand it like this is there's no power by quick site button or anything like that. You can change the colors, make it fit in perfectly with your, with your applications. So that's sitting incredibly powerful way of being able to take a, uh, an analytics capability that today sits inside its own little fiefdom and put it just everywhere. It's, uh, very transformative. >>Awesome. And the, the business is going well. You got the serverless and your tailwind for you there. Good stuff, Dr. Matt with thank you. Coming on the cube >>Anytime. Thank >>You. Okay. This is the cubes cover of eight summit, 2022 in San Francisco, California. I'm John host cube. Stay with us with more coverage of day two after this short break.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Every CEO is figuring out the right balance for new hybrid business models. Now, regardless of the chosen approach, which is going to vary, technology executives, they understand they have to accelerate their digital and build resilience as well as optionality into their platforms. Now, this is driving a dramatic shift in IT investments. And at the macro level, we expect total spending to increase at as much as 8% or even more in 2021, compared to last year's contraction. Investments in cybersecurity, cloud collaboration that are enabling hybrid work as well as data, including analytics, AI, and automation are at the top of the spending priorities for CXOs. Hello everyone. And welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we're pleased to welcome back Erik Bradley, who is the chief engagement strategist at our partner, ETR. Now in this segment, we're going to share some of the latest findings from ETR's surveys and provide our commentary on what it means for the markets, for sellers, and for buyers. Erik, great to see you, my friend. Welcome back to Breaking Analysis. >> Thank you for having me, always enjoy it. We've got some fresh data to talk about on this beautiful summer Friday, so I'm ready to go. >> All right. I'm excited too. Okay, last year we saw a contraction in IT spending by at least 5%. And now we're seeing a snapback to, as I said, at least 8% growth relative to last year. You got to go back to 2007 just before the financial crisis to see this type of top line growth. The shift to hybrid work, it's exposed us to new insidious security threats. And we're going to discuss that in a lot more detail. Cloud migration of course picked up dramatically last year, and based on the recent earnings results of the big cloud players, for now we got two quarters of data, that trend continues as organizations are accelerating their digital platform build-outs, and this is bringing a lot of complexity and a greater need for so-called observability solutions, which Erik is going to talk about extensively later on in this segment. Data, we think is entering a new era of de-centralization. We see organizations not only focused on analytics and insights, but actually creating data products. Leading technology organizations like JP Morgan, they're heavily leaning into this trend toward packaging and monetizing data products. And finally, as part of the digital transformation trend, we see no slow down in spending momentum for AI and automation, generally in RPA specifically. Erik, anything you want to add to that top level narrative? >> Yeah, there's a lot to take on the macro takeaways. The first thing I want to state is that that 8, 8.5% number that started off at just 3 to 4% beginning of the year. So as the year has continued, we are just seeing this trend in budgets continue to accelerate, and we don't have any reason to believe that's going to stop. So I think we're going to just keep moving on heading into 2021. And we're going to see a banner year of spend this year and probably next as well. >> All right, now we're going to bring up a chart that shows kind of that progression here of spending momentum. So Erik, I'm going to let you comment on this chart that tracks those projections over time. >> Erik: Yeah. Great. So thank you very much for pulling this up. As you can see in the beginning part of the year, when we asked people, "What do you plan to spend throughout 2021?" They were saying it would be about a 4% increase. Which we were happy with because as you said last year, it was all negative. That continues to accelerate and is only hyper accelerating now as we head into the back half of the year. In addition, after we do this data, I always host a panel of IT end users to kind of get their feedback on what we collected, to a man, every one of them expects continued increase throughout next year. There are some concerns and uncertainty about what we're seeing right now with COVID, but even with that, they're planning their budgets now for 2022 and they're planning for even further increases going forward. >> Dave: Great, thank you. So we circled that 8%. That's really kind of where we thought it was going to land. And so we're happy with that number, but let's take a look at where the action is by technology sector. This chart that we're showing you here, it tracks spending priorities back to last September. When I believe that was the point, Erik, that cyber became the top priority in the survey, ahead of cloud collaboration, analytics, and data, and the other sectors that you see there. Now, Erik, we should explain. These areas, they're the top seven, and they outrank all the other sectors. ETR tracks many, many other sectors, but please weigh in here and share your thoughts on this data. >> Erik: Yeah. Security, security, security. It hasn't changed. It had really hasn't. The hybrid work. The fact that you're behind the firewall one day and then you're outside working from home the next, switching in and out of networks. This is just a field day for bad actors. And we have no choice right now, but to continue to spend, because as you're going to talk about in a minute, hybrid's here to stay. So we have to figure out a way to secure behind the firewall on-prem. We also have to secure our employees and our assets that are not in the office. So it is a main priority. One of the things that point out on this chart, I had a couple of ITN users talk to me about customer experience and automation really need to move from the right part of that chart to the left. So they're seeing more in what you were talking about in RPA and automation, starting to creep up heading into next year. As cloud migration matures, as you know, cybersecurity spending has been ramping up. People are going to see a little bit more on the analytics and a little bit more on the automation side going forward. >> Dave: Great. Now, this next data view- well, first of all, one of the great things about the ETR dataset is that you can ask key questions and get a time series. And I will tell you again, I go back to last March, ETR hit it. They were the first on the work from home trend. And so if you were on that trend, you were able to anticipate it. And a lot of investors I think took advantage of that. Now, but we've shown this before, but there's new data points that we want to introduce. So the data tracks how CIOs and IT buyers have responded to the pandemic since last March. Still 70% of the organizations have employees working remotely, but 39% now have employees fully returning to the office and Erik, the rest of the metrics all point toward positives for IT spending, although accelerating IT deployments there at the right peaked last year, as people realized they had to invest in the future. Your thoughts? >> Erik: Yeah, this is the slide for optimism, without a doubt. Of the entire macro survey we did, this is the most optimistic slide. It's great for overall business. It's great for business travel. This is well beyond just IT. Hiring is up. I've had some people tell me that they possibly can't hire enough people right now. They had to furlough employees, they had to stop projects, and they want to re accelerate those now. But talent is very hard to find. Another point to you about your automation and RPA, another underlying trend for there. The one thing I did want to talk about here is the hybrid workplace, but I believe there's another slide on it. So just to recap on this extremely optimistic, we're seeing a lot of hiring. We're seeing increased spending, and I do believe that that's going to continue. >> Yeah I'm glad you brought that up because a session that you and I did a while ago, we pointed out, it was earlier this year, that the skill shortage is one potential risk to our positive scenario. We'll keep an eye on that, but so I want to show another set of data that we've showed previously, but ETR again, has added some new questions in here. So note here that 60% of employees still work remotely with 33% in a hybrid model currently, and the CIO's expect that to land on about 42% hybrid workforce with around 30% working remotely, which is around, it's been consistent by the way on your surveys, but that's about double the historic norm, Eric. >> Erik: Yeah, and even further to your point Dave, recently I did a panel asking people to give me some feedback on this. And three of those four experts basically said to me, if we had greed run this survey right now, that even more people would be saying remote. That they believe that that number, that's saying they're expecting that number of people to be back in office, is actually too optimistic. They're actually saying that maybe if we had- cause as a survey launched about six, seven weeks ago before this little blip on the radar, before the little COVID hiccup we're seeing now, and they're telling me that they believe if we reran this now that it would be even more remote work, even more hybrid and less returned to the office. So that's just an update I wanted to offer on this slide. >> Dave: Yeah. Thank you for that. I mean, we're still in this kind of day to day, week to week, month to month mode, but I want to do a little double click on this. We're not going to share this data, but there was so much ETR data. We got to be selective. But if you double click on the hybrid models, you'll see that 50% of organizations plan to have time roughly equally split between onsite and remote with again around 30 or 31% mostly remote, with onsite space available if they need it. And Erik, very few don't plan to have some type of hybrid model, at least. >> Yeah, I think it was less than 10% that said it was going to be exclusively onsite. And again, that was a more optimistic scenario six, seven weeks ago than we're seeing right now throughout the country. So I agree with you, hybrid is here to stay. There really is no doubt about it. from everyone I speak to when, you know, I basically make a living talking to IT end users. Hybrid is here to stay. They're planning for it. And that's really the drive behind the spending because you have to support both. You have to give people the option. You have to, from an IT perspective, you also have to support both, right? So if somebody is in office, I need the support staff to be in office. Plus I need them to be able to remote in and fix something from home. So they're spending on both fronts right now. >> Okay. Let's get into some of the vendor performance data. And I want to start with the cloud hyperscalers. It's something that we followed pretty closely. I got some Wiki bond data, that we just had earnings released. So here's data that shows the Q2 revenue shares on the left-hand side in the pie and the growth rates for the big four cloud players on the right hand side. It goes back to Q1 2019. Now the first thing I want to say is these players generated just under $39 billion in the quarter with AWS capturing 50% of that number. I said 39, it was 29 billion, sorry, with AWS capturing 50% of that in the quarter. As you're still tracking around a third in Alibaba and GCP in the, you know, eight or 9% range. But what's most interesting to me, Erik, is that AWS, which generated almost 15 billion in the quarter, was the only player to grow its revenue, both sequentially and year over year. And Erik, I think the street is missing the real story here on Amazon. Amazon announced earnings on Thursday night. The company had a 2% miss on the top line revenues and a meaningful 22% beat on earnings per share. So the retail side of the business missed its revenue targets, so that's why everybody's freaked out. But AWS, the cloud side, saw a 4% revenue beat. So the stock was off more than 70% after hours and into Friday. Now to me, a mix shift toward AWS, that's great news for investors. Now, tepid guidance is a negative, but the shift to a more profitable cloud business is a huge positive. >> Yeah, there's a lot that goes into stock price, right? I remember I was a director of research back in the day. One of my analysts said to me, "Am I crazy for putting a $1,000 target on Amazon?" And I laughed and I said, "No, you're crazy if you don't make it $2,000." (both chuckling) So, you know, at that time it was basically the mix shift towards AWS. You're a thousand percent right. I think the tough year over year comps had something to do with that reaction. That, you know, it's just getting really hard. What's that? The law of large numbers, right? It's really hard to grow at that percentage rate when you're getting this big. But from our data perspective, we're seeing no slowdown in AWS, in cloud, none whatsoever. The only slowdown we're seeing in cloud is GCP. But to, you know, to focus on AWS, extremely strong across the board and not only just in cloud, but in all their data products as well, data and analytics. >> Yeah and I think that the AWS, don't forget folks, that funds Amazon's TAM expansion into so many different places. Okay. As we said at the top, the world of digital and hybrid work, and multi-cloud, it's more complicated than it used to be. And that means if you need to resolve issues, which everybody does, like poor application performance, et cetera, what's happening at the user level, you have to have a better way to sort of see what's going on. And that's what the emergence of the observability space is all about. So Erik, let me set this up and you have a lot of comments here because you've recently had some, and you always have had a lot of round table discussions with CXOs on this topic. So this chart plots net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis, and market share or pervasiveness in the dataset on the horizontal axis. And we inserted a table that shows the data points in detail. Now that red dotted line is just sort of Dave Vellante's subjective mark in the sand for elevated spending levels. And there are three other points here. One is Splunk as well off is two-year peak, as highlighted in the red, but Signal FX, which Splunk acquired, has made a big move northward this last quarter. As has Datadog. So Erik, what can you share with us on this hot, but increasingly crowded space? >> Yeah. I could talk about the space for a long time. As you know, I've gotten some flack over the last year and a half about, you know, kind of pointing out this trend, this negative trend in Splunk. So I do want to be the first one to say that this data set is rebounding. Splunk has been horrific in our data for going back almost two years now, straight downward trend. This is the first time we're seeing any increase, any positivity there. So I do want to be fair and state that because I've been accused of being a little too negative on Splunk in the past. But I would basically say for observability right now, it's a rising tide lifts all boats, if I can use a New England phrase. The data across the board in analytics for these observability players is up, is accelerating. None more so than Datadog. And it's exactly your point, David. The complexity, the increased cloud migration is a perfect setup for Datadog, which is a cloud native. It focuses on microservices. It focuses on cloud observability. Old Splunk was just application monitoring. Don't get me wrong, they're changing, but they were on-prem application monitoring, first and foremost. Datadog came out as cloud native. They, you know, do microservices. This is just a perfect setup for them. And not only is Datadog leading the observability, it's leading the entire analytics sector, all of it. Not just the observability niche. So without a doubt, that is the strongest that we're seeing. It's leading Dynatrace new Relic. The only one that really isn't rebounding is Cisco App Dynamics. That's getting the dreaded legacy word really attached to it. But this space is really on fire, elastic as well, really doing well in this space. New Relic has shown a little bit of improvement as well. And what I heard when I asked my panelists about this, is that because of the maturity of cloud migration, that this observability has to grow. Spending on this has to happen. So they all say the chart looks right. And it's really just about the digital transformation maturity. So that's largely what they think is happening here. And they don't really see it getting, you know, changing anytime soon. >> Yeah, and I would add, and you see that it's getting crowded. You saw a service now acquired LightStep, and they want to get into the game. You mentioned, you know, last deck of the elk stack is, you know, the open source alternative, but then we see a company who's raised a fair amount of money, startup, chaos search, coming in, going after kind of the complexity of the elk stack. You've got honeycomb, which has got a really innovative approach, Jeremy Burton's company observes. So you have venture capital coming in. So we'll see if those guys could be disruptive enough or are they, you know, candidates to get acquired? We'll see how that all- you know that well. The M and A space. You think this space is ripe for M and A? >> I think it's ripe for consolidation, M and A. Something has to shake out. There's no doubt. I do believe that all of these can be standalone. So we shall see what's happened to, you mentioned the Splunk acquisition of Signal FX, just a house cleaning point. That was really nice acceleration by Signal FX, but it was only 20 citations. We'd looked into this a little bit deeper. Our data scientists did. It appears as if the majority of people are just signaling spunk and not FX separately. So moving forward for our data set, we're going to combine those two, so we don't have those anomalies going forward. But that type of acquisition does show what we should expect to see more of in this group going forward. >> Well that's I want to mention. That's one of the challenges that any data company has, and you guys do a great job of it. You're constantly having to reevaluate. There's so much M and A going on in the industry. You've got to pick the right spots in terms of when to consolidate. There's some big, you know, Dell and EMC, for example. You know, you've beautifully worked through that transition. You're seeing, you know, open shift and red hat with IBM. You just got to be flexible. And that's where it's valuable to be able to have a pipeline to guys like Erik, to sort of squint through that. So thank you for that clarification. >> Thank you too, because having a resource like you with industry knowledge really helps us navigate some of those as well for everyone out there. So that's a lot to do with you do Dave, >> Thank you. It's going to be interesting to watch Splunk. Doug Merritt's made some, you know, management changes, not the least of which is bringing in Teresa Carlson to run go to market. So if you know, I'd be interested if they are hitting, bouncing off the bottom and rising up again. They have a great customer base. Okay. Let's look at some of the same dimensions. Go ahead. You got a comment? >> A few of ETR's clients looked at our data and then put a billion dollar investment into it too. So obviously I agree. (Dave laughing) Splunk is looking like it's set for a rebound, and it's definitely something to watch, I agree. >> Not to rat hole in this, but I got to say. When I look back, cause theCUBE gives us kind of early visibility. So companies with momentum and you talk to the customers that all these shows that we go to. I will tell you that three companies stood out last decade. It was Splunk. It was Service Now and Tableau. And you could tell just from just discussions with their customers, the enthusiasm in that customer base. And so that's a real asset, and that helps them build them a moat. So we'll see. All right, let's take a look at the same dimensions now for cyber. This is cybersecurity net score in the vertical, and market share in the horizontal. And I filtered by in greater than a hundred shared in because just gets so crowded. Erik, the only things I would point out here is CrowdStrike and Zscaler continue to shine, CyberArk also showing momentum over that 40% line. Very impressively, Palo Alto networks, which has a big presence in the market. They've bounced back. We predicted that a while back. Your round table suggested people like working with Palo Alto. They're a gold standard. You know, we had reported earlier on that divergence with four to net in terms of valuation and some of the challenges they had in cloud, clearly, you know, back with the momentum. And of course, Microsoft in the upper, right. It's just, they're literally off the charts and obviously a major player here, but your thoughts on cyber? >> Erik: Yeah. Going back to the backdrop. Security, security, security. It has been the number one priority going back to last September. No one sees it changing. It has to happen. The threat vectors are actually expanding and we have no choice but to spend here. So it is not surprising to see. You did name our three favorite names. So as you know, we look at the dataset, we see which ones have the most positive inflections, and we put outlooks on those. And you did mention Zscaler, Okta and CrowdStrike, by far the three standouts that we're seeing. I just recently did a huge panel on Okta talking about their acquisition of Auth Zero. They're pushed into Sale Point space, trying to move just from single sign on and MFA to going to really privileged account management. There is some hurdles there. Really Okta's ability to do this on-prem is something that a little bit of the IT end users are concerned about. But what we're seeing right now, both Okta and Auth Zero are two of the main adopted names in security. They look incredibly well set up. Zscaler as well. With the ZTNA push more towards zero trust, Zscaler came out so hot in their IPO. And everyone was wondering if it was going to trail off just like Snowflake. It's not trailing off. This thing just keeps going up into the right, up into the right. The data supports a lot of tremendous growth for the three names that you just mentioned. >> Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad you brought up Auth Zero. We had reported on that earlier. I just feel like that was a great acquisition. You had Okta doing the belly to belly enterprise, you know, selling. And the one thing that they really lacked was that developer momentum. And that's what Auth Zero brings. Just a smart move by Todd McKinnon and company. And I mean, so this, you know, I want to, I want to pull up another chart show a quick snapshot of some of the players in the survey who show momentum and have you comment on this. We haven't mentioned Snowflake so far, but they remain again with like this gold standard of net score, they've consistently had those high marks with regard to spending velocity. But here's some other data. Erik, how should we interpret this? >> Erik: Yeah, just to harp on Snowflake for a second. Right, I mean the rich get richer. They came out- IPO was so hyped, so it was hard for us as a research company to say, "Oh, you know, well, you know, we agree." But we did. The data is incredible. You can't beat the management team. You can't beat what they're doing. They've got so much cash. I can't wait to see what they do with it. And meanwhile, you would expect something that debuted with that high of a net score, that high of spending velocity to trail off. It would be natural. It's not Dave, it's still accelerating. It's gone even higher. It's at all time highs. And we just don't see it stopping anytime soon. It's a really interesting space right now. Maybe another name to look at on here that I think is pretty interesting, kind of a play on return to business is Kupa. It's a great project expense management tool that got hit really hard. Listen, traveling stopped, business expense stopped, and I did a panel on it. And a lot of our guys basically said, "Yeah, it was the first thing I cut." But we're seeing a huge rebound in spending there in that space. So that's a name that I think might be worth being called out on a positive side. Negative, If you look down to the bottom right of that chart, unfortunately we're seeing some issues in RingCentral and Zoom. Anything that's sort of playing in this next, you know, video conferencing, IP telephony space, they seem to be having really decelerating spending. Also now with Zoom's acquisition of five nine. I'm not really sure how RingCentral's going to compete on that. But yeah, that's one where we debuted for the first time with a negative outlook on that name. And looking and asking to some of the people in our community, a lot of them say externally, you still need IP telepany, but internally you don't. Because the You Cast communication systems are getting so sophisticated, that if I have Teams, if I have Slack, I don't need phones anymore. (chuckling) That you and I can just do a Slack call. We can do a Teams call. And many of them are saying I'm truly ripping out my IP Telepany internally as soon as possible because we just don't need it. So this whole collaboration, productivity space is here to stay. And it's got wide ranging implications to some of these more legacy type of tools. >> You know, one of the other things I'd call out on this chart is Accenture. You and I had a session earlier this year, and we had predicted that that skill shortage was going to lead to an uptick in traditional services. We've certainly seen that. I mean, IBM beat its quarter on the strength of services largely. And seeing Accenture on that is I think confirmation. >> Yeah that was our New Year prediction show, right Dave? When we made top 10 predictions? >> That's right. That was part of our predictions show. Exactly, good memory. >> The data is really showing that continue. People want the projects, they need to do the projects, but hiring is very difficult. So obviously the number one beneficiary there are going to be the Accentures of the world. >> All right. So let's do a quick wrap. I'm going to make a few comments and then have you bring us home, Erik. So we laid out our scenario for the tech spending rebound. We definitely believe last year tracked downward, along with GDP contraction. It was interesting. Gardner doesn't believe, at least factions of Gardner don't believe there's a correlation between GDP and tech spending. But, you know, I personally think there generally is some kind of relatively proportional pattern there. And I think we saw contraction last year. People are concerned about inflation. Of course, that adds some uncertainty. And as well, as you mentioned around the Delta variant. But I feel as though that the boards of directors and CEOs, they've mandated that tech execs have to build out digital platforms for the future. They're data centric. They're highly automated, to your earlier points. They're intelligent with AI infused, and that's going to take investment. I feel like the tech community has said, "Look, we know what to do here. We're dealing with hybrid work. We can't just stop doing what we're doing. Let's move forward." You know, and as you say, we're flying again and so forth. You know, getting hybrid right is a major priority that directly impacts strategies. Technology strategies, particularly around security, cloud, the productivity of remote workers with collaboration. And as we've said many times, we are entering a new era of data that's going to focus on decentralized data, building data products, and Erik let's keep an eye on this observability space. Lot of interest there, and buyers have a number of choices. You know, do they go with a specialist, as we saw recently, we've seen in the past, or did they go with the generalist like Service Now with the acquisition of LightStep? You know, it's going to be interesting. A lot of people are going to get into this space, start bundling into larger platforms. And so as you said, there's probably not enough room for all the players. We're going to see some consolidation there. But anyway, let me give you the final word here. >> Yeah, no, I completely agree with all of it. And I think your earlier points are spot on, that analytics and automation are certainly going to be moving more and more to that left of that chart we had of priorities. I think as we continue that survey heading into 2022, we'll have some fresh data for you again in a few months, that's going to start looking at 2022 priorities and overall spend. And the one other area that I keep hearing about over and over and over again is customer experience. There's a transition from good old CRM to CXM. Right now, everything is digital. It is not going away. So you need an omni-channel support to not only track your customer experience, but improve it. Make sure there's a two way communication. And it's a really interesting space. Salesforce is going to migrate into it. We've got Qualtrics out there. You've got Medallia. You've got FreshWorks, you've got Sprinkler. You got some names out there. And everyone I keep talking to on the IT end user side keeps bringing up customer experience. So let's keep an eye on that as well. >> That's a great point. And again, it brings me back to Service Now. We wrote a piece last week that's sort of, Service Now and Salesforce are on a collision course. We've said that for many, many years. And you've got this platform of platforms. They're just kind of sucking in different functions saying, "Hey, we're friends with everybody." But as you know Erik, software companies, they want to own it all. (both chuckling) All right. Hey Erik, thank you so much. I want to thank you for coming back on. It's always a pleasure to have you on Breaking Analysis. Great to see you. >> Love the partnership. Love the collaboration. Let's go enjoy this summer Friday. >> All right. Let's do. Okay, remember everybody, these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis Podcast, click subscribe to the series. Check out ETR's website at etr.plus. They've just launched a new website. They've got a whole new pricing model. It's great to see that innovation going on. Now remember we also publish a full report every week on WikiBond.com and SiliconAngle.com. You can always email me, appreciate the back channel comments, the metadata insights. David.Vellante@SiliconAngle.com. DM me on Twitter @DVellante or comment on the LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Bradley and theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, a good rest of summer, be well. And we'll see you next time. (inspiring music)

(bright music) >> Welcome back to the CUBE presents the AWS Startup Showcase The Next Big Thing in cloud startups with AI security and life science tracks, 15 hottest growing startups are presented. And we had a great opening keynote with luminaries in the industry. And now our closing keynote is to get a deeper dive on cracking the code in the enterprise, how startups are changing the game and helping companies change. And they're also changing the game of open source. We have a great guest, Katie Drucker, Head of Business Development, Madrona Venture Group. Katie, thank you for coming on the CUBE for this special closing keynote. >> Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. >> So one of the topics we talked about with Soma from Madrona on the opening keynote, as well as Ali from Databricks is how startups are seeing success faster. So that's the theme of the Cloud speed, agility, but the game has changed in the enterprise. And I want to really discuss with you how growth changes and growth strategy specifically. They talk, go to market. We hear things like good sales to enterprise sales, organic, freemium, there's all kinds of different approaches, but at the end of the day, the most successful companies, the ones that might not be known that just come out of nowhere. So the economics are changing and the buyers are thinking differently. So let's explore that topic. So take us through your view 'cause you have a lot of experience. But first talk about your role at Madrona, what you do. >> Absolutely all great points. So my role at Madrona, I think I have personally one of the more enviable jobs and that my job is to... I get the privilege of working with all of these fantastic entrepreneurs in our portfolio and doing whatever we can as a firm to harness resources, knowledge, expertise, connections, to accelerate their growth. So my role in setting up business development is taking a look at all of those tools in the tool chest and partnering with the portfolio to make it so. And in our portfolio, we have a wide range of companies, some rely on enterprise sales, some have other go to markets. Some are direct to consumer, a wide range. >> Talk about the growth strategies that you see evolving because what's clear with the pandemic. And as we come out of it is that there are growth plays happening that don't look a little bit differently, more obvious now because of the Cloud scale, we're seeing companies like Databricks, like Snowflake, like other companies that have been built on the cloud or standalone. What are some of the new growth techniques, or I don't want to say growth hacking, that is a pejorative term, but like just a way for companies to quickly describe their value to an enterprise buyer who's moving away from the old RFP days of vendor selection. The game has changed. So take us through how you see secret key and unlocking that new equation of how to present value to an enterprise and how you see enterprises evaluating startups. >> Yes, absolutely. Well, and that's got a question, that's got a few components nestled in what I think are some bigger trends going on. AWS of course brought us the Cloud first. I think now the Cloud is more and more a utility. And so it's incumbent upon thinking about how an enterprise 'cause using the Cloud is going to go up the value stack and partner with its cloud provider and other service providers. I think also with that agility of operations, you have thinning, if you will, the systems of record and a lot of new entrance into this space that are saying things like, how can we harness AIML and other emerging trends to provide more value directly around work streams that were historically locked into those systems of record? And then I think you also have some price plans that are far more flexible around usage based as opposed to just flat subscription or even these big clunky annual or multi-year RFP type stuff. So all of those trends are really designed in ways that favor the emerging startup. And I think if done well, and in partnership with those underlying cloud providers, there can be some amazing benefits that the enterprise realizes an opportunity for those startups to grow. And I think that's what you're seeing. I think there's also this emergence of a buyer that's different than the CIO or the site the CISO. You have things with low code, no code. You've got other buyers in the organization, other line of business executives that are coming to the table, making software purchase decisions. And then you also have empowered developers that are these citizen builders and developer buyers and personas that really matter. So lots of inroads in places for a startup to reach in the enterprise to make a connection and to bring value. That's a great insight. I want to ask that just if you don't mind follow up on that, you mentioned personas. And what we're seeing is the shift happens. There's new roles that are emerging and new things that are being reconfigured or refactored if you will, whether it's human resources or AI, and you mentioned ML playing a role in automation. These are big parts of the new value proposition. How should companies posture to the customer? Because I don't want to say pivot 'cause that means it's not working but mostly extending our iterating around their positioning because as new things have not yet been realized, it might not be operationalized in a company or maybe new things need to be operationalized, it's a new solution for that. Positioning the value is super important and a lot of companies often struggle with that, but also if they get it right, that's the key. What's your feeling on startups in their positioning? So people will dismiss it like, "Oh, that's marketing." But maybe that's important. What's your thoughts on the great positioning question? >> I've been in this industry a long time. And I think there are some things that are just tried and true, and it is not unique to tech, which is, look, you have to tell a story and you have to reach the customer and you have to speak to the customer's need. And what that means is, AWS is a great example. They're famous for the whole concept of working back from the customer and thinking about what that customer's need is. I think any startup that is looking to partner or work alongside of AWS really has to embody that very, very customer centric way of thinking about things, even though, as we just talked about those personas are changing who that customer really is in the enterprise. And then speaking to that value proposition and meeting that customer and creating a dialogue with them that really helps to understand not only what their pain points are, but how you were offering solves those pain points. And sometimes the customer doesn't realize that that is their pain point and that's part of the education and part of the way in which you engage that dialogue. That doesn't change a lot, just generation to generation. I think the modality of how we have that dialogue, the methods in which we choose to convey that change, but that basic discussion is what makes us human. >> What's your... Great, great, great insight. I want to ask you on the value proposition question again, the question I often get, and it's hard to answer is am I competing on value or am I competing on commodity? And depending on where you're in the stack, there could be different things like, for example, land is getting faster, smaller, cheaper, as an example on Amazon. That's driving down to low cost high value, but it shifts up the stack. You start to see in companies this changing the criteria for how to evaluate. So an enterprise might be struggling. And I often hear enterprises say, "I don't know how to pick who I need. I buy tools, I don't buy many platforms." So they're constantly trying to look for that answer key, if you will, what's your thoughts on the changing requirements of an enterprise? And how to do vendor selection. >> Yeah, so obviously I don't think there's a single magic bullet. I always liked just philosophically to think about, I think it's always easier and frankly more exciting as a buyer to want to buy stuff that's going to help me make more revenue and build and grow as opposed to do things that save me money. And just in a binary way, I like to think which side of the fence are you sitting on as a product offering? And the best ways that you can articulate that, what opportunities are you unlocking for your customer? The problems that you're solving, what kind of growth and what impact is that going to lead to, even if you're one or two removed from that? And again, that's not a new concept. And I think that the companies that have that squarely in mind when they think about their go-to market strategy, when they think about the dialogue they're having, when they think about the problems that they're solving, find a much faster path. And I think that also speaks to why we're seeing so many explosion in the line of business, SAS apps that are out there. Again, that thinning of the systems of record, really thinking about what are the scenarios and work streams that we can have happened that are going to help with that revenue growth and unlocking those opportunities. >> What's the common startup challenge that you see when they're trying to do business development? Usually they build the product first, product led value, you hear that a lot. And then they go, "Okay, we're ready to sell, hire a sales guy." That seems to be shifting away because of the go to markets are changing. What are some of the challenges that startups have? What are some that you're seeing? >> Well, and I think the point that you're making about the changes are really almost a result of the trends that we're talking about. The sales organization itself is becoming... These work streams are becoming instrumented. Data is being collected, insights are being derived off of those things. So you see companies like Clary or Highspot or two examples or tutorial that are in our portfolio that are looking at that action and making the art of sales and marketing far more sophisticated overall, which then leads to the different growth hacking and the different insights that are driven. I think the common mistakes that I see across the board, especially with earlier stage startups, look you got to find product market fit. I think that's always... You start with a thesis or a belief and a passion that you're building something that you think the market needs. And it's a lot of dialogue you have to have to make sure that you do find that. I think once you find that another common problem that I see is leading with an explanation of technology. And again, not focusing on the buyer or the... Sorry, the buyer about solving a problem and focusing on that problem as opposed to focusing on how cool your technology is. Those are basic and really, really simple. And then I think setting a set of expectations, especially as it comes to business development and partnering with companies like AWS. The researching that you need to adequately meet the demand that can be turned on. And then I'm sure you heard about from Databricks, from an organization like AWS, you have to be pragmatic. >> Yeah, Databricks gone from zero a software sales a few years ago to over a billion. Now it looks like a Snowflake which came out of nowhere and they had a great product, but built on Amazon, they became the data cloud on top of Amazon. And now they're growing just whole new business models and new business development techniques. Katie, thank you for sharing your insight here. The CUBE's closing keynote. Thanks for coming on. >> Appreciate it, thank you. >> Okay, Katie Drucker, Head of Business Development at Madrona Venture Group. Premier VC in the Seattle area and beyond they're doing a lot of cloud action. And of course they know AWS very well and investing in the ecosystem. So great, great stuff there. Next up is Peter Wagner partner at Wing.VX. Love this URL first of all 'cause of the VC domain extension. But Peter is a long time venture capitalist. I've been following his career. He goes back to the old networking days, back when the internet was being connected during the OSI days, when the TCP IP open systems interconnect was really happening and created so much. Well, Peter, great to see you on the CUBE here and congratulations with success at Wing VC. >> Yeah, thanks, John. It's great to be here. I really appreciate you having me. >> Reason why I wanted to have you come on. First of all, you had a great track record in investing over many decades. You've seen many waves of innovation, startups. You've seen all the stories. You've seen the movie a few times, as I say. But now more than ever, enterprise wise it's probably the hottest I've ever seen. And you've got a confluence of many things on the stack. You were also an early seed investor in Snowflake, well-regarded as a huge success. So you've got your eye on some of these awesome deals. Got a great partner over there has got a network experience as well. What is the big aha moment here for the industry? Because it's not your classic enterprise startups anymore. They have multiple things going on and some of the winners are not even known. They come out of nowhere and they connect to enterprise and get the lucrative positions and can create a moat and value. Like out of nowhere, it's not the old way of like going to the airport and doing an RFP and going through the stringent requirements, and then you're in, you get to win the lucrative contract and you're in. Not anymore, that seems to have changed. What's your take on this 'cause people are trying to crack the code here and sometimes you don't have to be well-known. >> Yeah, well, thank goodness the game has changed 'cause that old thing was (indistinct) So I for one don't miss it. There was some modernization movement in the enterprise and the modern enterprise is built on data powered by AI infrastructure. That's an agile workplace. All three of those things are really transformational. There's big investments being made by enterprises, a lot of receptivity and openness to technology to enable all those agendas, and that translates to good prospects for startups. So I think as far as my career goes, I've never seen a more positive or fertile ground for startups in terms of penetrating enterprise, it doesn't mean it's easy to do, but you have a receptive audience on the other side and that hasn't necessarily always been the case. >> Yeah, I got to ask you, I know that you're a big sailor and your family and Franks Lubens also has a boat and sailing metaphor is always good to have 'cause you got to have a race that's being run and they have tactics. And this game that we're in now, you see the successes, there's investment thesises, and then there's also actually bets. And I want to get your thoughts on this because a lot of enterprises are trying to figure out how to evaluate startups and starts also can make the wrong bet. They could sail to the wrong continent and be in the wrong spot. So how do you pick the winners and how should enterprises understand how to pick winners too? >> Yeah, well, one of the real important things right now that enterprise is facing startups are learning how to do and so learning how to leverage product led growth dynamics in selling to the enterprise. And so product led growth has certainly always been important consumer facing companies. And then there's a few enterprise facing companies, early ones that cracked the code, as you said. And some of these examples are so old, if you think about, like the ones that people will want to talk about them and talk about Classy and want to talk about Twilio and these were of course are iconic companies that showed the way for others. But even before that, folks like Solar Winds, they'd go to market model, clearly product red, bottom stuff. Back then we didn't even have those words to talk about it. And then some of the examples are so enormous if think about them like the one right in front of your face, like AWS. (laughing) Pretty good PLG, (indistinct) but it targeted builders, it targeted developers and flipped over the way you think about enterprise infrastructure, as a result some how every company, even if they're harnessing relatively conventional sales and marketing motion, and you think about product led growth as a way to kick that motion off. And so it's not really an either word even more We might think OPLJ, that means there's no sales keep one company not true, but here's a way to set the table so that you can very efficiently use your sales and marketing resources, only have the most attractive targets and ones that are really (indistinct) >> I love the product led growth. I got to ask you because in the networking days, I remember the term inevitability was used being nested in a solution that they're just going to Cisco off router and a firewall is one you can unplug and replace with another vendor. Cisco you'd have to go through no switching costs were huge. So when you get it to the Cloud, how do you see the competitiveness? Because we were riffing on this with Ali, from Databricks where the lock-in might be value. The more value provider is the lock-in. Is their nestedness? Is their intimate ability as a competitive advantage for some of these starts? How do you look at that? Because startups, they're using open source. They want to have a land position in an enterprise, but how do they create that sustainable competitive advantage going forward? Because again, this is what you do. You bet on ones that you can see that could establish a model whatever we want to call it, but a competitive advantage and ongoing nested position. >> Sometimes it has to do with data, John, and so you mentioned Snowflake a couple of times here, a big part of Snowflake's strategy is what they now call the data cloud. And one of the reasons you go there is not to just be able to process data, to actually get access to it, exchange with the partners. And then that of course is a great reason for the customers to come to the Snowflake platform. And so the more data it gets more customers, it gets more data, the whole thing start spinning in the right direction. That's a really big example, but all of these startups that are using ML in a fundamental way, applying it in a novel way, the data modes are really important. So getting to the right data sources and training on it, and then putting it to work so that you can see that in this process better and doing this earlier on that scale. That's a big part of success. Another company that I work with is a good example that I call (indistinct) which works in sales technology space, really crushing it in terms of building better sales organizations both at performance level, in terms of the intelligence level, and just overall revenue attainment using ML, and using novel data sources, like the previously lost data or phone calls or Zoom calls as you already know. So I think the data advantages are really big. And smart startups are thinking through it early. >> It's interest-- >> And they're planning by the way, not to ramble on too much, but they're betting that PLG strategy. So their land option is designed not just to be an interesting way to gain usage, but it's also a way to gain access to data that then enables the expand in a component. >> That is a huge call-out point there, I was going to ask another question, but I think that is the key I see. It's a new go to market in a way. product led with that kind of approach gets you a beachhead and you get a little position, you get some data that is a cloud model, it means variable, whatever you want to call it variable value proposition, value proof, or whatever, getting that data and reiterating it. So it brings up the whole philosophical question of okay, product led growth, I love that with product led growth of data, I get that. Remember the old platform versus a tool? That's the way buyers used to think. How has that changed? 'Cause now almost, this conversation throws out the whole platform thing, but isn't like a platform. >> It looks like it's all. (laughs) you can if it is a platform, though to do that you can reveal that later, but you're looking for adoption, so if it's down stock product, you're looking for adoption by like developers or DevOps people or SOEs, and they're trying to solve a problem, and they want rapid gratification. So they don't want to have an architectural boomimg, placed in front of them. And if it's up stock product and application, then it's a user or the business or whatever that is, is adopting the application. And again, they're trying to solve a very specific problem. You need instant and immediate obvious time and value. And now you have a ticket to the dance and build on that and maybe a platform strategy can gradually take shape. But you know who's not in this conversation is the CIO, it's like, "I'm always the last to know." >> That's the CISO though. And they got him there on the firing lines. CISOs are buying tools like it's nobody's business. They need everything. They'll buy anything or you go meet with sand, they'll buy it. >> And you make it sound so easy. (laughing) We do a lot of security investment if only (indistinct) (laughing) >> I'm a little bit over the top, but CISOs are under a lot of pressure. I would talk to the CISO at Capital One and he was saying that he's on Amazon, now he's going to another cloud, not as a hedge, but he doesn't want to focus development teams. So he's making human resource decisions as well. Again, back to what IT used to be back in the old days where you made a vendor decision, you built around it. So again, clouds play that way. I see that happening. But the question is that I think you nailed this whole idea of cross hairs on the target persona, because you got to know who you are and then go to the market. So if you know you're a problem solving and the lower in the stack, do it and get a beachhead. That's a strategy, you can do that. You can't try to be the platform and then solve a problem at the same time. So you got to be careful. Is that what you were getting at? >> Well, I think you just understand what you're trying to achieve in that line of notion. And how those dynamics work and you just can't drag it out. And they could make it too difficult. Another company I work with is a very strategic cloud data platform. It's a (indistinct) on systems. We're not trying to foist that vision though (laughs) or not adopters today. We're solving some thorny problems with them in the short term, rapid time to value operational needs in scale. And then yeah, once they found success with (indistinct) there's would be an opportunity to be increasing the platform, and an obstacle for those customers. But we're not talking about that. >> Well, Peter, I appreciate you taking the time and coming out of a board meeting, I know that you're super busy and I really appreciate you making time for us. I know you've got an impressive partner in (indistinct) who's a former Sequoia, but Redback Networks part of that company over the years, you guys are doing extremely well, even a unique investment thesis. I'd like you to put the plug in for the firm. I think you guys have a good approach. I like what you guys are doing. You're humble, you don't brag a lot, but you make a lot of great investments. So could you take them in to explain what your investment thesis is and then how that relates to how an enterprise is making their investment thesis? >> Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, the concept that I described earlier that the modern enterprise movement as a workplace built on data powered by AI. That's what we're trying to work with founders to enable. And also we're investing in companies that build the products and services that enable that modern enterprise to exist. And we do it from very early stages, but with a longterm outlook. So we'll be leading series and series, rounds of investment but staying deeply involved, both operationally financially throughout the whole life cycle of the company. And then we've done that a bunch of times, our goal is always the big independent public company and they don't always make it but enough for them to have it all be worthwhile. An interesting special case of this, and by the way, I think it intersects with some of startup showcase here is in the life sciences. And I know you were highlighting a lot of healthcare websites and deals, and that's a vertical where to disrupt tremendous impact of data both new data availability and new ways to put it to use. I know several of my partners are very focused on that. They call it bio-X data. It's a transformation all on its own. >> That's awesome. And I think that the reason why we're focusing on these verticals is if you have a cloud horizontal scale view and vertically specialized with machine learning, every vertical is impacted by data. It's so interesting that I think, first start, I was probably best time to be a cloud startup right now. I really am bullish on it. So I appreciate you taking the time Peter to come in again from your board meeting, popping out. Thanks for-- (indistinct) Go back in and approve those stock options for all the employees. Yeah, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> All right, thank you John, it's a pleasure. >> Okay, Peter Wagner, Premier VC, very humble Wing.VC is a great firm. Really respect them. They do a lot of great investing investments, Snowflake, and we have Dave Vellante back who knows a lot about Snowflake's been covering like a blanket and Sarbjeet Johal. Cloud Influencer friend of the CUBE. Cloud commentator and cloud experience built clouds, runs clouds now invests. So V. Dave, thanks for coming back on. You heard Peter Wagner at Wing VC. These guys have their roots in networking, which networking back in the day was, V. Dave. You remember the internet Cisco days, remember Cisco, Wellfleet routers. I think Peter invested in Arrow Point, remember Arrow Point, that was about in the 495 belt where you were. >> Lynch's company. >> That was Chris Lynch's company. I think, was he a sales guy there? (indistinct) >> That was his first big hit I think. >> All right, well guys, let's wrap this up. We've got a great program here. Sarbjeet, thank you for coming on. >> No worries. Glad to be here todays. >> Hey, Sarbjeet. >> First of all, really appreciate the Twitter activity lately on the commentary, the observability piece on Jeremy Burton's launch, Dave was phenomenal, but Peter was talking about this dynamic and I think ties this cracking the code thing together, which is there's a product led strategy that feels like a platform, but it's also a tool. In other words, it's not mutually exclusive, the old methods thrown out the window. Land in an account, know what problem you're solving. If you're below the stack, nail it, get data and go from there. If you're a process improvement up the stack, you have to much more of a platform longer-term sale, more business oriented, different motions, different mechanics. What do you think about that? What's your reaction? >> Yeah, I was thinking about this when I was listening to some of the startups pitching, if you will, or talking about what they bring to the table in this cloud scale or cloud era, if you will. And there are tools, there are applications and then they're big monolithic platforms, if you will. And then they're part of the ecosystem. So I think the companies need to know where they play. A startup cannot be platform from the get-go I believe. Now many aspire to be, but they have to start with tooling. I believe in, especially in B2B side of things, and then go into the applications, one way is to go into the application area, if you will, like a very precise use cases for certain verticals and stuff like that. And other parties that are going into the platform, which is like horizontal play, if you will, in technology. So I think they have to understand their age, like how old they are, how new they are, how small they are, because when their size matter when you are procuring as a big business, procuring your technology vendors size matters and the economic viability matters and their proximity to other windows matter as well. So I think we'll jump into that in other discussions later, but I think that's key, as you said. >> I would agree with that. I would phrase it in my mind, somewhat differently from Sarbjeet which is you have product led growth, and that's your early phase and you get product market fit, you get product led growth, and then you expand and there are many, many examples of this, and that's when you... As part of your team expansion strategy, you're going to get into the platform discussion. There's so many examples of that. You take a look at Ali Ghodsi today with what's happening at Databricks, Snowflake is another good example. They've started with product led growth. And then now they're like, "Okay, we've got to expand the team." Okta is another example that just acquired zero. That's about building out the platform, versus more of a point product. And there's just many, many examples of that, but you cannot to your point, very hard to start with a platform. Arm did it, but that was like a one in a million chance. >> It's just harder, especially if it's new and it's not operationalized yet. So one of the things Dave that we've observed the Cloud is some of the best known successes where nobody's not known at all, database we've been covering from the beginning 'cause we were close to that movement when they came out of Berkeley. But they still were misunderstood and they just started generating revenue in only last year. So again, only a few years ago, zero software revenue, now they're approaching a billion dollars. So it's not easy to make these vendor selections anymore. And if you're new and you don't have someone to operate it or your there's no department and the departments changing, that's another problem. These are all like enterprisey problems. What's your thoughts on that, Dave? >> Well, I think there's a big discussion right now when you've been talking all day about how should enterprise think about startups and think about most of these startups they're software companies and software is very capital efficient business. At the same time, these companies are raising hundreds of millions, sometimes over a billion dollars before they go to IPO. Why is that? A lot of it's going to promotion. I look at it as... And there's a big discussion going on but well, maybe sales can be more efficient and more direct and so forth. I really think it comes down to the golden rule. Two things really mattered in the early days in the startup it's sales and engineering. And writers should probably say engineering and sales and start with engineering. And then you got to figure out your go to market. Everything else is peripheral to those two and you don't get those two things right, you struggle. And I think that's what some of these successful startups are proving. >> Sarbjeet, what's your take on that point? >> Could you repeat the point again? Sorry, I lost-- >> As cloud scale comes in this whole idea of competing, the roles are changing. So look at IOT, look at the Edge, for instance, you got all kinds of new use cases that no one actually knows is a problem to solve. It's just pure opportunity. So there's no one's operational I could have a product, but it don't know we can buy it yet. It's a problem. >> Yeah, I think the solutions have to be point solutions and the startups need to focus on the practitioners, number one, not the big buyers, not the IT, if you will, but the line of business, even within that sphere, like just focus on the practitioners who are going to use that technology. I talked to, I think it wasn't Fiddler, no, it was CoreLogics. I think that story was great today earlier in how they kind of struggle in the beginning, they were trying to do a big bang approach as a startup, but then they almost stumbled. And then they found their mojo, if you will. They went to Don the market, actually, that's a very classic theory of disruption, like what we study from Harvard School of Business that you go down the market, go to the non-consumers, because if you're trying to compete head to head with big guys. Because most of the big guys have lot of feature and functionality, especially at the platform level. And if you're trying to innovate in that space, you have to go to the practitioners and solve their core problems and then learn and expand kind of thing. So I think you have to focus on practitioners a lot more than the traditional oracle buyers. >> Sarbjeet, we had a great thread last night in Twitter, on observability that you started. And there's a couple of examples there. Chaos searches and relatively small company right now, they just raised them though. And they're part of this star showcase. And they could've said, "Hey, we're going to go after Splunk." But they chose not to. They said, "Okay, let's kind of disrupt the elk stack and simplify that." Another example is a company observed, you've mentioned Jeremy Burton's company, John. They're focused really on SAS companies. They're not going after initially these complicated enterprise deals because they got to get it right or else they'll get churn, and churn is that silent killer of software companies. >> The interesting other company that was on the showcase was Tetra Science. I don't know if you noticed that one in the life science track, and again, Peter Wagner pointed out the life science. That's an under recognized in the press vertical that's exploding. Certainly during the pandemic you saw it, Tetra science is an R&D cloud, Dave, R&D data cloud. So pharmaceuticals, they need to do their research. So the pandemic has brought to life, this now notion of tapping into data resources, not just data lakes, but like real deal. >> Yeah, you and Natalie and I were talking about that this morning and that's one of the opportunities for R&D and you have all these different data sources and yeah, it's not just about the data lake. It's about the ecosystem that you're building around them. And I see, it's really interesting to juxtapose what Databricks is doing and what Snowflake is doing. They've got different strategies, but they play a part there. You can see how ecosystems can build that system. It's not one company is going to solve all these problems. It's going to really have to be connections across these various companies. And that's what the Cloud enables and ecosystems have all this data flowing that can really drive new insights. >> And I want to call your attention to a tweet Sarbjeet you wrote about Splunk's earnings and they're data companies as well. They got Teresa Carlson there now AWS as the president, working with Doug, that should change the game a little bit more. But there was a thread of the neath there. Andy Thry says to replies to Dave you or Sarbjeet, you, if you're on AWS, they're a fine solution. The world doesn't just revolve around AWS, smiley face. Well, a lot of it does actually. So (laughing) nice point, Andy. But he brings up this thing and Ali brought it up too, Hybrid now is a new operating system for what now Edge does. So we got Mobile World Congress happening this month in person. This whole Telco 5G brings up a whole nother piece of the Cloud puzzle. Jeff Barr pointed out in his keynote, Dave. Guys, I want to get your reaction. The Edge now is... I'm calling it the super Edge because it's not just Edge as we know it before. You're going to have these pops, these points of presence that are going to have wavelength as your spectrum or whatever they have. I think that's the solution for Azure. So you're going to have all this new cloud power for low latency applications. Self-driving delivery VR, AR, gaming, Telemetry data from Teslas, you name it, it's happening. This is huge, what's your thoughts? Sarbjeet, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I think Edge is like bound to happen. And for many reasons, the volume of data is increasing. Our use cases are also expanding if you will, with the democratization of computer analysis. Specialization of computer, actually Dave wrote extensively about how Intel and other chip players are gearing up for that future if you will. Most of the inference in the AI world will happen in the field close to the workloads if you will, that can be mobility, the self-driving car that can be AR, VR. It can be healthcare. It can be gaming, you name it. Those are the few use cases, which are in the forefront and what alarm or use cases will come into the play I believe. I've said this many times, Edge, I think it will be dominated by the hyperscalers, mainly because they're building their Metro data centers now. And with a very low latency in the Metro areas where the population is, we're serving the people still, not the machines yet, or the empty areas where there is no population. So wherever the population is, all these big players are putting their data centers there. And I think they will dominate the Edge. And I know some Edge lovers. (indistinct) >> Edge huggers. >> Edge huggers, yeah. They don't like the hyperscalers story, but I think that's the way were' going. Why would we go backwards? >> I think you're right, first of all, I agree with the hyperscale dying you look at the top three clouds right now. They're all in the Edge, Hardcore it's a huge competitive battleground, Dave. And I think the missing piece, that's going to be uncovered at Mobile Congress. Maybe they'll miss it this year, but it's the developer traction, whoever wins the developer market or wins the loyalty, winning over the market or having adoption. The applications will drive the Edge. >> And I would add the fourth cloud is Alibaba. Alibaba is actually bigger than Google and they're crushing it as well. But I would say this, first of all, it's popular to say, "Oh not everything's going to move into the Cloud, John, Dave, Sarbjeet." But the fact is that AWS they're trend setter. They are crushing it in terms of features. And you'd look at what they're doing in the plumbing with Annapurna. Everybody's following suit. So you can't just ignore that, number one. Second thing is what is the Edge? Well, the edge is... Where's the logical place to process the data? That's what the Edge is. And I think to your point, both Sarbjeet and John, the Edge is going to be won by developers. It's going to be one by programmability and it's going to be low cost and really super efficient. And most of the data is going to stay at the Edge. And so who is in the best position to actually create that? Is it going to be somebody who was taking an x86 box and throw it over the fence and give it a fancy name with the Edge in it and saying, "Here's our Edge box." No, that's not what's going to win the Edge. And so I think first of all it's huge, it's wide open. And I think where's the innovation coming from? I agree with you it's the hyperscalers. >> I think the developers as John said, developers are the kingmakers. They build the solutions. And in that context, I always talk about the skills gravity, a lot of people are educated in certain technologies and they will keep using those technologies. Their proximity to that technology is huge and they don't want to learn something new. So as humans we just tend to go what we know how to use it. So from that front, I usually talk with consumption economics of cloud and Edge. It has to focus on the practitioners. And in this case, practitioners are developers because you're just cooking up those solutions right now. We're not serving that in huge quantity right now, but-- >> Well, let's unpack that Sarbjeet, let's unpack that 'cause I think you're right on the money on that. The consumption of the tech and also the consumption of the application, the end use and end user. And I think the reason why hyperscalers will continue to dominate besides the fact that they have all the resource and they're going to bring that to the Edge, is that the developers are going to be driving the applications at the Edge. So if you're low latency Edge, that's going to open up new applications, not just the obvious ones I did mention, gaming, VR, AR, metaverse and other things that are obvious. There's going to be non-obvious things that are going to be huge that are going to come out from the developers. But the Cloud native aspect of the hyperscalers, to me is where the scales are tipping, let me explain. IT was built to build a supply resource to the businesses who were writing business applications. Mostly driven by IBM in the mainframe in the old days, Dave, and then IT became IT. Telcos have been OT closed, "This is our thing, that's it." Now they have to open up. And the Cloud native technologies is the fastest way to value. And I think that paths, Sarbjeet is going to be defined by this new developer and this new super Edge concept. So I think it's going to be wide open. I don't know what to say. I can't guess, but it's going to be creative. >> Let me ask you a question. You said years ago, data's new development kit, does low code and no code to Sarbjeet's point, change the equation? In other words, putting data in the hands of those OT professionals, those practitioners who have the context. Does low-code and no-code enable, more of those protocols? I know it's a bromide, but the citizen developer, and what impact does that have? And who's in the best position? >> Well, I think that anything that reduces friction to getting stuff out there that can be automated, will increase the value. And then the question is, that's not even a debate. That's just fact that's going to be like rent, massive rise. Then the issue comes down to who has the best asset? The software asset that's eating the world or the tower and the physical infrastructure. So if the physical infrastructure aka the Telcos, can't generate value fast enough, in my opinion, the private equity will come in and take it over, and then refactor that business model to take advantage of the over the top software model. That to me is the big stare down competition between the Telco world and this new cloud native, whichever one yields in valley is going to blink first, if you say. And I think the Cloud native wins this one hands down because the assets are valuable, but only if they enable the new model. If the old model tries to hang on to the old hog, the old model as the Edge hugger, as Sarbjeet says, they'll just going to slowly milk that cow dry. So it's like, it's over. So to me, they have to move. And I think this Mobile World Congress day, we will see, we will be looking for that. >> Yeah, I think that in the Mobile World Congress context, I think Telcos should partner with the hyperscalers very closely like everybody else has. And they have to cave in. (laughs) I usually say that to them, like the people came in IBM tried to fight and they cave in. Other second tier vendors tried to fight the big cloud vendors like top three or four. And then they cave in. okay, we will serve our stuff through your cloud. And that's where all the buyers are congregating. They're going to buy stuff along with the skills gravity, the feature proximity. I've got another term I'll turn a coin. It matters a lot when you're doing one thing and you want to do another thing when you're doing all this transactional stuff and regular stuff, and now you want to do data science, where do you go? You go next to it, wherever you have been. Your skills are in that same bucket. And then also you don't have to write a new contract with a new vendor, you just go there. So in order to serve, this is a lesson for startups as well. You need to prepare yourself for being in the Cloud marketplaces. You cannot go alone independently to fight. >> Cloud marketplace is going to replace procurement, for sure, we know that. And this brings up the point, Dave, we talked about years ago, remember on the CUBE. We said, there's going to be Tier two clouds. I used that word in quotes cause nothing... What does it even mean Tier two. And we were talking about like Amazon, versus Microsoft and Google. We set at the time and Alibaba but they're in China, put that aside for a second, but the big three. They're going to win it all. And they're all going to be successful to a relative terms, but whoever can enable that second tier. And it ended up happening, Snowflake is that example. As is Databricks as is others. So Google and Microsoft as fast as they can replicate the success of AWS by enabling someone to build their business on their cloud in a way that allows the customer to refactor their business will win. They will win most of the lion's share my opinion. So I think that applies to the Edge as well. So whoever can come in and say... Whichever cloud says, "I'm going to enable the next Snowflake, the next enterprise solution." I think takes it. >> Well, I think that it comes back... Every conversation coming back to the data. And if you think about the prevailing way in which we treated data with the exceptions of the two data driven companies in their quotes is as we've shoved all the data into some single repository and tried to come up with a single version of the truth and it's adjudicated by a centralized team, with hyper specialized roles. And then guess what? The line of business, there's no context for the business in that data architecture or data Corpus, if you will. And then the time it takes to go from idea for a data product or data service commoditization is way too long. And that's changing. And the winners are going to be the ones who are able to exploit this notion of leaving data where it is, the point about data gravity or courting a new term. I liked that, I think you said skills gravity. And then enabling the business lines to have access to their own data teams. That's exactly what Ali Ghodsi, he was saying this morning. And really having the ability to create their own data products without having to go bow down to an ivory tower. That is an emerging model. All right, well guys, I really appreciate the wrap up here, Dave and Sarbjeet. I'd love to get your final thoughts. I'll just start by saying that one of the highlights for me was the luminary guests size of 15 great companies, the luminary guests we had from our community on our keynotes today, but Ali Ghodsi said, "Don't listen to what everyone's saying in the press." That was his position. He says, "You got to figure out where the puck's going." He didn't say that, but I'm saying, I'm paraphrasing what he said. And I love how he brought up Sky Cloud. I call it Sky net. That's an interesting philosophy. And then he also brought up that machine learning auto ML has got to be table stakes. So I think to me, that's the highlight walk away. And the second one is this idea that the enterprises have to have a new way to procure and not just the consumption, but some vendor selection. I think it's going to be very interesting as value can be proved with data. So maybe the procurement process becomes, here's a beachhead, here's a little bit of data. Let me see what it can do. >> I would say... Again, I said it was this morning, that the big four have given... Last year they spent a hundred billion dollars more on CapEx. To me, that's a gift. In so many companies, especially focusing on trying to hang onto the legacy business. They're saying, "Well not everything's going to move to the Cloud." Whatever, the narrative should change to, "Hey, thank you for that gift. We're now going to build value on top of the Cloud." Ali Ghodsi laid that out, how Databricks is doing it. And it's clearly what Snowflake's new with the data cloud. It basically a layer that abstracts all that underlying complexity and add value on top. Eventually going out to the Edge. That's a value added model that's enabled by the hyperscalers. And that to me, if I have to evaluate where I'm going to place my bets as a CIO or IT practitioner, I'm going to look at who are the ones that are actually embracing that investment that's been made and adding value on top in a way that can drive my data-driven, my digital business or whatever buzzword you want to throw on. >> Yeah, I think we were talking about the startups in today's sessions. I think for startups, my advice is to be as close as you can be to hyperscalers and anybody who awards them, they will cave in at the end of the day, because that's where the whole span of gravity is. That's what the innovation gravity is, everybody's gravitating towards that. And I would say quite a few times in the last couple of years that the rate of innovation happening in a non-cloud companies, when I talk about non-cloud means are not public companies. I think it's like diminishing, if you will, as compared to in cloud, there's a lot of innovation. The Cloud companies are not paying by power people anymore. They have all sophisticated platforms and leverage those, and also leverage the marketplaces and leverage their buyers. And the key will be how you highlight yourself in that cloud market place if you will. It's like in a grocery store where your product is placed and you have to market around it, and you have to have a good story telling team in place as well after you do the product market fit. I think that's a key. I think just being close to the Cloud providers, that's the way to go for startups. >> Real, real quick. Each of you talk about what it takes to crack the code for the enterprise in the modern era now. Dave, we'll start with you. What's it take? (indistinct) >> You got to have it be solving a problem that is 10X better at one 10th a cost of anybody else, if you're a small company, that rule number one. Number two is you obviously got to get product market fit. You got to then figure out. And I think, and again, you're in your early phases, you have to be almost processed builders, figure out... Your KPIs should all be built around retention. How do I define customer success? How do I keep customers and how do I make them loyal so that I know that my cost of acquisition is going to be at least one-third or lower than my lifetime value of that customer? So you've got to nail that. And then once you nail that, you've got to codify that process in the next phase, which really probably gets into your platform discussion. And that's really where you can start to standardize and scale and figure out your go to market and the relationship between marketing spend and sales productivity. And then when you get that, then you got to move on to figure out your Mot. Your Mot might just be a brand. It might be some secret sauce, but more often than not though, it's going to be the relationship that you build. And I think you've got to think about those phases and in today's world, you got to move really fast. Sarbjeet, real quick. What's the secret to crack the code? >> I think the secret to crack the code is partnership and alliances. As a small company selling to the bigger enterprises, the vendors size will be one of the big objections. Even if they don't say it, it's on the back of their mind, "What if these guys disappear tomorrow what would we do if we pick this technology?" And another thing is like, if you're building on the left side, which is the developer side, not on the right side, which is the operations or production side, if you will, you have to understand the sales cycles are longer on the right side and left side is easier to get to, but that's why we see a lot more startups. And on the left side of your DevOps space, if you will, because it's easier to sell to practitioners and market to them and then show the value correctly. And also understand that on the left side, the developers are very know how hungry, on the right side people are very cost-conscious. So understanding the traits of these different personas, if you will buyers, it will, I think set you apart. And as Dave said, you have to solve a problem, focus on practitioners first, because you're small. You have to solve political problems very well. And then you can expand. >> Well, guys, I really appreciate the time. Dave, we're going to do more of these, Sarbjeet we're going to do more of these. We're going to add more community to it. We're going to add our community rooms next time. We're going to do these quarterly and try to do them as more frequently, we learned a lot and we still got a lot more to learn. There's a lot more contribution out in the community that we're going to tap into. Certainly the CUBE Club as we call it, Dave. We're going to build this actively around Cloud. This is another 20 years. The Edge brings us more life with Cloud, it's really exciting. And again, enterprise is no longer an enterprise, it's just the world now. So great companies here, the next Databricks, the next IPO. The next big thing is in this list, Dave. >> Hey, John, we'll see you in Barcelona. Looking forward to that. Sarbjeet, I know in a second half, we're going to run into each other. So (indistinct) thank you John. >> Trouble has started. Great talking to you guys today and have fun in Barcelona and keep us informed. >> Thanks for coming. I want to thank Natalie Erlich who's in Rome right now. She's probably well past her bedtime, but she kicked it off and emceeing and hosting with Dave and I for this AW startup showcase. This is batch two episode two day. What do we call this? It's like a release so that the next 15 startups are coming. So we'll figure it out. (laughs) Thanks for watching everyone. Thanks. (bright 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 recent survey data from etr shows that enterprise tech spending is tracking with projected u.s gdp growth at six to seven percent this year many markers continue to point the way to a strong recovery including hiring trends and the loosening of frozen it project budgets however skills shortages are blocking progress at some companies which bodes well for an increased reliance on external i.t services moreover while there's much to talk about well there's much talk about the rotation out of work from home plays and stocks such as video conferencing vdi and other remote worker tech we see organizations still trying to figure out the ideal balance between funding headquarter investments that have been neglected and getting hybrid work right in particular the talent gap combined with a digital mandate means companies face some tough decisions as to how to fund the future while serving existing customers and transforming culturally hello everyone and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we welcome back eric porter bradley of etr who will share fresh data perspectives and insights from the latest survey data eric great to see you welcome thank you very much dave always good to see you and happy to be on the show again okay we're going to share some macro data and then we're going to dig into some highlights from etr's most recent march covid survey and also the latest april data so eric the first chart that we want to show it shows cio and it buyer responses to expected i.t spend for each quarter of 2021 versus 2020. and you can see here a steady quarterly improvement eric what are the key takeaways from your perspective sure well first of all for everyone out there this particular survey had a record-setting number of uh participation we had uh 1 500 i.t decision makers participate and we had over half of the fortune 500 and over a fifth of the global 1000. so it was a really good survey this is the seventh iteration of the covet impact survey specifically and this is going to transition to an over large macro survey going forward so we could continue it and you're 100 right what we've been tracking here since uh march of last year was how is spending being impacted because of covid where is it shifting and what we're seeing now finally is that there is a real re-acceleration in spend i know we've been a little bit more cautious than some of the other peers out there that just early on slapped an eight or a nine percent number but what we're seeing is right now it's at a midpoint of over six uh about six point seven percent and that is accelerating so uh we are still hopeful that that will continue uh really that spending is going to be in the second half of the year as you can see on the left part of this chart that we're looking at uh it was about 1.7 versus 3 for q1 spending year over year so that is starting to accelerate through the back half you know i think it's prudent to be be cautious relative because normally you'd say okay tech is going to grow a couple of points higher than gdp but it's it's really so hard to predict this year okay the next chart is here that we want to show you is we ask respondents to indicate what strategies they're employing in the short term as a result of coronavirus and you can see a few things that i'll call out and then i'll ask eric to chime in first there's been no meaningful change of course no surprise in tactics like remote work and halting travel however we're seeing very positive trends in other areas trending downward like hiring freezes and freezing i.t deployments downward trend in layoffs and we also see an increase in the acceleration of new i.t deployments and in hiring eric what are your key takeaways well first of all i think it's important to point out here that uh we're also capturing that people believe remote work productivity is still increasing now the trajectory might be coming down a little bit but that is really key i think to the backdrop of what's happening here so people have a perception that productivity of remote work is better than hybrid work and that's from the i.t decision makers themselves um but what we're seeing here is that uh most importantly these organizations are citing plans to increase hiring and that's something that i think is really important to point out it's showing a real thawing and to your point in right in the beginning of the intro uh we are seeing deployments stabilize versus prior survey levels which means early on they had no plans to launch new tech deployments then they said nope we're going to start and now that's stalling and i think it's exactly right what you said is there's an i.t skills shortage so people want to continue to do i.t deployments because they have to support work from home and a hybrid back return to the office but they just don't have the skills to do so and i think that's really probably the most important takeaway from this chart um is that stalling and to really ask why it's stalling yeah so we're going to get into that for sure and and i think that's a really key point is that that that accelerating it deployments is some it looks like it's hit a wall in the survey and so but before before we get deep into the skills let's let's take a look at this next chart and we're asking people here how a return to the new normal if you will and back to offices is going to change spending with on-prem architectures and applications and so the first two bars they're cloud-friendly if you add them up at 63 percent of the respondents say that either they'll stay in the cloud for the most part or they're going to lower the on-prem spend when they go back to the office the next three bars are on-prem friendly if you add those up as 29 percent of the respondents say their on-prem spend is going to bounce back to pre-covert levels or actually increase and of course 12 percent of that number by the way say they they've never altered their on-prem spend so eric no surprise but this bodes well for cloud but but it it isn't it also a positive for on-prem this we've had this dual funding premise meaning cloud continues to grow but neglected data center spend also gets a boost what's your thoughts you know really it's interesting it's people are spending on all fronts you and i were talking in a prep it's like you know we're we're in battle and i've got naval i've got you know air i've got land uh i've got to spend on cloud and digital transformation but i also have to spend for on-prem uh the hybrid work is here and it needs to be supported so this spending is going to increase you know when you look at this chart you're going to see though that roughly 36 percent of all respondents say that their spending is going to remain mostly on cloud so this you know that is still the clear direction uh digital transformation is still happening covid accelerated it greatly um you know you and i as journalists and researchers already know this is where the puck is going uh but spend has always lagged a little bit behind because it just takes some time to get there you know inversely 27 said that their on-prem spending will decrease so when you look at those two i still think that the trend is the friend for cloud spending uh even though yes they do have to continue spending on hybrid some of it's been neglected there are refresh cycles coming up so overall it just points to more and more spending right now it really does seem to be a very strong backdrop for it growth so i want to talk a little bit about the etr taxonomy before we bring up the next chart we get a lot of questions about this and of course when you do a massive survey like you're doing you have to have consistency for time series so you have to really think through what that what the buckets look like if you will so this next chart takes a look at the etr taxonomy and it breaks it down into simple to understand terms so the green is the portion of spending on a vendor's tech within a category that is accelerating and the red is the portion that is decelerating so eric what are the key messages in this data well first of all dave thank you so much for pointing that out we used to do uh just what we call a next a net score it's a proprietary formula that we use to determine the overall velocity of spending some people found it confusing um our data scientists decided to break this sector breakdown into what you said which is really more of a mode analysis in that sector how many of the vendors are increasing versus decreasing so again i just appreciate you bringing that up and allowing us to explain the the the reasoning behind our analysis there but what we're seeing here uh goes back to something you and i did last year when we did our predictions and that was that it services and consulting was going to have a true rebound in 2021 and that's what this is showing right here so in this chart you're going to see that consulting and services are really continuing their recovery uh 2020 had a lot of declines and they have the biggest sector over year-over-year acceleration sector-wise the other thing to point out in this which we'll get to again later is that the inverse analysis is true for video conferencing uh we will get to that so i'm going to leave a little bit of ammunition behind for that one but what we're seeing here is it consulting services being the real favorable and video conferencing uh having a little bit more trouble great okay and then let's let's take a look at that services piece and this next chart really is a drill down into that space and emphasizes eric what you were just talking about and we saw this in ibm's earnings where still more than 60 percent of ibm's business comes from services and the company beat earnings you know in part due to services outperforming expectations i think it had a somewhat easier compare and some of this pen-up demand that we've been talking about bodes well for ibm and in other services companies it's not just ibm right eric no it's not but again i'm going to point out that you and i did point out ibm in our in our predictions one we did in late december so it is nice to see one of the reasons we don't have a more favorable rating on ibm at the moment is because they are in the the process of spinning out uh this large unit and so there's a little bit of you know corporate action there that keeps us off on the sideline but i would also want to point out here uh tata infosys and cognizant because they're seeing year-over-year acceleration in both it consulting and outsourced i t services so we break those down separately and those are the three names that are seeing acceleration in both of those so again a tata emphasis and cognizant are all looking pretty well positioned as well so we've been talking a little bit about this skill shortage and this is what's i think so hard for for forecasters um is that you know on the one hand there's a lot of pent up demand you know it's like scott gottlieb said it's like woodstock coming out of the covid uh but on the other hand if you have a talent gap you've got to rely on external services so there's a learning curve there's a ramp up it's an external company and so it takes time to put those together so so this data that we're going to show you next uh is is really important in my view and ties what we're saying we're saying at the top it asks respondents to comment on their staffing plans the light blue is we're increasing staff the gray is no change in the magenta or whatever whatever color that is that sort of purplish color anyway that color is is decreasing and the picture is very positive across the board full-time staff offshoring contract employees outsourced professional services all up trending upwards and this eric is more evidence of the services bounce back yeah it certainly is david and what happened is when we caught this trend we decided to go one level deeper and say all right we're seeing this but we need to know why and that's what we always try to do here data will tell you what's happening it doesn't always tell you why and that's one of the things that etr really tries to dig in with through the insights interviews panels and also going direct with these more custom survey questions uh so in this instance i think the real takeaway is that 30 of the respondents said that their outsourced and managed services are going to increase over the next three months that's really powerful that's a large portion of organizations in a very short time period so we're capturing that this acceleration is happening right now and it will be happening in real time and i don't see it slowing down you and i are speaking about we have to you know increase cloud spend we have to increase hybrid spend there are refresh cycles coming up and there's just a real skill shortage so this is a long-term setup that bodes very well for it services and consulting you know eric when i came out of college i somebody told me read read read read as much as you can and and so i would and they said read the wall street journal every day and i so i did it and i would read the tech magazines and back then it was all paper and what happens is you begin to connect the dots and so the reason i bring that up is because i've now been had taken a bath in the etr data for the better part of two years and i'm beginning to be able to connect the dots you know the data is not always predictive but many many times it is and so this next data gets into the fun stuff where we name names a lot of times people don't like it because the marketing people and organizations say well the data's wrong of course that's the first thing they do is attack the data but you and i know we've made some really great calls work from home for sure you're talking about the services bounce back uh we certainly saw the rise of crowdstrike octa zscaler well before people were talking about that same thing with video conferencing and so so anyway this is the fun stuff and it looks at positive versus negative sentiment on on companies so first how does etr derive this data and how should we interpret it and what are some of your takeaways [Music] sure first of all how we derive the data or systematic um survey responses that we do on a quarterly basis and we standardize those responses to allow for time series analysis so we can do trend analysis as well we do find that our data because it's talking about forward-looking spending intentions is really more predictive because we're talking about things that might be happening six months three months in the future not things that a lot of other competitors and research peers are looking at things that already happened uh they're looking in the past etr really likes to look into the future and our surveys are set up to do so so thank you for that question it's an enjoyable lead-in but to get to the fun stuff like you said uh what we do here is we put ratings on the data sets i do want to put the caveat out there that our spending intentions really only captures top-line revenue it is not indicative of profit margin or any other line items so this is only going to be viewed as what we are rating the data set itself not the company um you know that's not what we're in the game of doing so i think that's very important for the marketing and the vendors out there themselves when they when they take a look at this we're just talking about what we can control which is our data we're going to talk about a few of the names here on this highlighted vendors list one we're going to go back to that you and i spoke about i guess about six months ago or maybe even earlier which was the observability space um you and i were noticing that it was getting very crowded a lot of new entrants um there was a lot of acquisition from more of the legacy or standard entrance players in the space and that is continuing so i think in a minute we're going to move into that observability space but what we're seeing there is that it's becoming incredibly crowded and we're possibly seeing signs of them cannibalizing each other uh we're also going to move on a little bit into video conferencing where we're capturing some spend deceleration and then ultimately we're going to get into a little bit of a storage refresh cycle and talk about that but yeah these are the highlighted vendors for april um we usually do this once a quarter and they do change based on the data but they're not usually whipsawed around the data doesn't move that quickly yeah so you can see the some of the big names on the left-hand side some of the sas companies that have momentum obviously servicenow has been doing very very well we've talked a lot about snowflake octa crowdstrike z scalar in all very positive as well as you know several others i i guess i'd add some some things i mean i think if thinking about the next decade it's it's cloud which is not going to be like the same cloud as last decade a lot of machine learning and deep learning and ai and the cloud is extending to the edge in the data center data obviously very important data is decentralized and distributed so data architectures are changing a lot of opportunities to connect across clouds and actually create abstraction layers and then something that we've been covering a lot is processor performance is actually accelerating relative to moore's law it's probably instead of doubling every two years it's quadrupling every two years and so that is a huge factor especially as it relates to powering ai and ai inferencing at the edge this is a whole new territory custom silicon is is really becoming in vogue uh and so we're something that we're watching very very closely yeah i completely completely agree on that and i do think that the the next version of cloud will be very different another thing to point out on that too is you can't do anything that you're talking about without collecting the data and and organizations are extremely serious about that now it seems it doesn't matter what industry they're in every company is a data company and that also bodes well for the storage call we do believe that there is going to just be a huge increase in the need for storage um and yes hopefully that'll become portable across multi-cloud and hybrid as well now as eric said the the etr data's it's it's really focused on that top line spend so if you look at the uh on on the right side of that chart you saw you know netapp was kind of negative was very negative right but there's a company that's in in transformation now they've lowered expectations and they've recently beat expectations that's why the stock has been doing better but but at the macro from a spending standpoint it's still challenged so you have big footprint companies like netapp and oracle is another one oracle's stock is at an all-time high but the spending relative to sort of previous cycles or relative to you know like for instance snowflake much much smaller not as high growth but they're managing expectations they're managing their transition they're managing profitability zoom is another one zoom looking looking negative but you know zoom's got to use its market cap now to to transform and increase its tam uh and then splunk is another one we're going to talk about splunk is in transition it acquired signal fx it just brought on this week teresa carlson who was the head of aws public sector she's the president and head of sales so they've got a go to market challenge and they brought in teresa carlson to really solve that but but splunk has been trending downward we called that you know several quarters ago eric and so i want to bring up the data on splunk and this is splunk eric in analytics and it's not trending in the right direction the green is accelerating span the red is and the bars is decelerating spend the top blue line is spending velocity or net score and the yellow line is market share or pervasiveness in the data set your thoughts yeah first i want to go back is a great point dave about our data versus a disconnect from an equity analysis perspective i used to be an equity analyst that is not what we do here and you you may the main word you said is expectations right stocks will trade on how they do compared to the expectations that are set uh whether that's buy side expectations sell side expectations or management's guidance themselves we have no business in tracking any of that what we are talking about is top line acceleration or deceleration so uh that was a great point to make and i do think it's an important one for all of our listeners out there now uh to move to splunk yes i've been capturing a lot of negative commentary on splunk even before the data turned so this has been about a year-long uh you know our analysis and review on this name and i'm dating myself here but i know you and i are both rock and roll fans so i'm gonna point out a led zeppelin song and movie and say that the song remains the same for splunk we are just seeing uh you know recent spending intentions are taking yet another step down both from prior survey levels from year ago levels uh this we're looking at in the analytics sector and spending intentions are decelerating across every single customer group if we went to one of our other slide analysis um on the etr plus platform and you do by customer sub sample in analytics it's dropping in every single vertical it doesn't matter which one uh it's really not looking good unfortunately and you had mentioned this as an analytics and i do believe the next slide is an information security yeah let's bring that up and it's unfortunately it's not doing much better so this is specifically fortune 500 accounts and information security uh you know there's deep pockets in the fortune 500 but from what we're hearing in all the insights and interviews and panels that i personally moderate for etr people are upset they didn't like the the strong tactics that splunk has used on them in the past they didn't like the ingestion model pricing the inflexibility and when alternatives came along people are willing to look at the alternatives and that's what we're seeing in both analytics and big data and also for their sim in security yeah so i think again i i point to teresa carlson she's got a big job but she's very capable she's gonna she's gonna meet with a lot of customers she's a go to market pro she's gonna have to listen hard and i think you're gonna you're gonna see some changes there um okay so there's more sorry there's more bad news on splunk so bring this up is is is net score for splunk in elastic accounts uh this is for analytics so there's 106 elastic accounts that uh in the data set that also have splunk and it's trending downward for splunk that's why it's green for elastic and eric the important call out from etr here is how splunk's performance in elastic accounts compares with its performance overall the elk stack which obviously elastic is a big part of that is causing pain for splunk as is data dog and you mentioned the pricing issue uh is it is it just well is it pricing in your assessment or is it more fundamental you know it's multi-level based on the commentary we get from our itdms that take the survey so yes you did a great job with this analysis what we're looking at is uh the spending within shared accounts so if i have splunk already how am i spending i'm sorry if i have elastic already how is my spending on splunk and what you're seeing here is it's down to about a 12 net score whereas splunk overall has a 32 net score among all of its customers so what you're seeing there is there is definitely a drain that's happening where elastic is draining spend from splunk and usage from them uh the reason we used elastic here is because all observabilities the whole sector seems to be decelerating splunk is decelerating the most but elastic is the only one that's actually showing resiliency so that's why we decided to choose these two but you pointed out yes it's also datadog datadog is cloud native uh they're more devops oriented they tend to be viewed as having technological lead as compared to splunk so that's a really good point a dynatrace also is expanding their abilities and splunk has been making a lot of acquisitions to push their cloud services they are also changing their pricing model right they're they're trying to make things a little bit more flexible moving off ingestion um and moving towards uh you know consumption so they are trying and the new hires you know i'm not gonna bet against them because the one thing that splunk has going for them is their market share in our survey they're still very well entrenched so they do have a lot of accounts they have their foothold so if they can find a way to make these changes then they you know will be able to change themselves but the one thing i got to say across the whole sector is competition is increasing and it does appear based on commentary and data that they're starting to cannibalize themselves it really seems pretty hard to get away from that and you know there are startups in the observability space too that are going to be you know even more disruptive i think i think i want to key on the pricing for a moment and i've been pretty vocal about this i think the the old sas pricing model where essentially you essentially lock in for a year or two years or three years pay up front or maybe pay quarterly if you're lucky that's a one-way street and i think it's it's a flawed model i like what snowflake's doing i like what datadog's doing look at what stripe is doing look what twilio is doing these are cons you mentioned it because it's consumption based pricing and if you've got a great product put it out there and you know damn the torpedoes and i think that is a game changer i i look at for instance hpe with green lake i look at dell with apex they're trying to mimic that model you know they're there and apply it to to infrastructure it's much harder with infrastructure because you got to deploy physical infrastructure but but that is a model that i think is going to change and i think all of the traditional sas pricing is going to is going to come under disruption over the next you know better part of the decades but anyway uh let's move on we've we've been covering the the apm space uh pretty extensively application performance management and this chart lines up some of the big players here comparing net score or spending momentum from the april 20th survey the gray is is um is sorry the the the gray is the april 20th survey the blue is jan 21 and the yellow is april 21. and not only are elastic and data dog doing well relative to splunk eric but everything is down from last year so this space as you point out is undergoing a transformation yeah the pressures are real and it's you know it's sort of that perfect storm where it's not only the data that's telling us that but also the direct feedback we get from the community uh pretty much all the interviews i do i've done a few panels specifically on this topic for anyone who wants to you know dive a little bit deeper we've had some experts talk about this space and there really is no denying that there is a deceleration in spend and it's happening because that spend is getting spread out among different vendors people are using you know a data dog for certain aspects they're using elastic where they can because it's cheaper they're using splunk because they have to but because it's so expensive they're cutting some of the things that they're putting into splunk which is dangerous particularly on the security side if i have to decide what to put in and whatnot that's not really the right way to have security hygiene um so you know this space is just getting crowded there's disruptive vendors coming from the emerging space as well and what you're seeing here is the only bit of positivity is elastic on a survey over survey basis with a slight slight uptick everywhere else year over year and survey over survey it's showing declines it's just hard to ignore and then you've got dynatrace who based on the the interviews you do in the venn you're you know one on one or one on five you know the private interviews that i've been invited to dynatrace gets very high scores uh for their road map you've got new relic which has been struggling you know financially but they've got a purpose built they've got a really good product and a purpose-built database just for this apm space and then of course you've got cisco with appd which is a strong business for them and then as you mentioned you've got startups coming in you've got chaos search which ed walsh is now running you know leave the data in place in aws and really interesting model honeycomb it's going to be really disruptive jeremy burton's company observed so this space is it's becoming jump ball yeah there's a great line that came out of one of them and that was that the lines are blurring it used to be that you knew exactly that app dynamics what they were doing it was apm only or it was logging and monitoring only and a lot of what i'm hearing from the itdm experts is that the lines are blurring amongst all of these names they all have functionality that kind of crosses over each other and the other interesting thing is it used to be application versus infrastructure monitoring but as you know infrastructure is becoming code more and more and more and as infrastructure becomes code there's really no difference between application and infrastructure monitoring so we're seeing a convergence and a blurring of the lines in this space which really doesn't bode well and a great point about new relic their tech gets good remarks uh i just don't know if their enterprise level service and sales is up to snuff right now um as one of my experts said a cto of a very large public online hospitality company essentially said that he would be shocked that within 18 months if all of these players are still uh standalone that there needs to be some m a or convergence in this space okay now we're going to call out some of the data that that really has jumped out to etr in the latest survey and some of the names that are getting the most queries from etr clients which are many of which are investor clients so let's start by having a look at one of the most important and prominent work from home names zoom uh let's let's look at this eric is the ride over for zoom oh i've been saying it for a little bit of a time now actually i do believe it is um i will get into it but again pointing out great dave uh the reason we're presenting today splunk elastic and zoom are they are the most viewed on the etr plus platform uh trailing behind that only slightly is f5 i decided not to bring f5 to the table today because we don't have a rating on the data set um so then i went one deep one below that and it's pure so the reason we're presenting these to you today is that these are the ones that our clients and our community are most interested in which is hopefully going to gain interest to your viewers as well so to get to zoom um yeah i call zoom the pandec pandemic bull market baby uh this was really just one that had a meteoric ride you look back january in 2020 the stock was at 60 and 10 months later it was like like 580. that's in 10 months um that's cooled down a little bit uh into the mid 300s and i believe that cooling down should continue and the reason why is because we are seeing a huge deceleration in our spending intentions uh they're hitting all-time lows it's really just a very ugly data set um more importantly than the spending intentions for the first time we're seeing customer growth in our survey flattened in the past we could we knew that the the deceleration and spend was happening but meanwhile their new customer growth was accelerating so it was kind of hard to really make any call based on that this is the first time we're seeing flattening customer growth trajectory and that uh in tandem with just dominance from microsoft in every sector they're involved in i don't care if it's ip telephony productivity apps or the core video conferencing microsoft is just dominating so there's really just no way to ignore this anymore the data and the commentary state that zoom is facing some headwinds well plus you've pointed out to me that a lot of your private conversations with buyers says that hey we're we're using the freebie version of zoom you know we're not paying them and so in that combined with teams i mean it's it's uh it's i think you know look zoom has to figure it out they they've got to they've got to figure out how to use their elevated market cap to transform and expand their tan um but let's let's move on here's the data on pure storage and we've highlighted a number of times this company is showing elevated spending intentions um pure announces earnings in in may ibm uh just announced storage what uh it was way down actually so sort of still pure more positive but i'll comment on a moment but what does this data tell you eric yeah you know right now we started seeing this data last survey in january and that was the first time we really went positive on the data set itself and it's just really uh continuing so we're seeing the strongest year-over-year acceleration in the entire survey um which is a really good spot to be pure is also a leading position in among its sector peers and the other thing that was pretty interesting from the data set is among all storage players pure has the highest positive public cloud correlation so what we can do is we can see which respondents are accelerating their public cloud spend and then cross-reference that with their storage spend and pure is best positioned so as you and i both know uh you know digital transformation cloud spending is increasing you need to be aligned with that and among all storage uh sector peers uh pure is best positioned in all of those in spending intentions and uh adoptions and also public cloud correlation so yet again just another really strong data set and i have an anecdote about why this might be happening because when i saw the date i started asking in my interviews what's going on here and there was one particular person he was a director of cloud operations for a very large public tech company now they have hybrid um but their data center is in colo so they don't own and build their own physical building he pointed out that doran kovid his company wanted to increase storage but he couldn't get into his colo center due to covert restrictions they weren't allowed you had so 250 000 square feet right but you're only allowed to have six people in there so it's pretty hard to get to your rack and get work done he said he would buy storage but then the cola would say hey you got to get it out of here it's not even allowed to sit here we don't want it in our facility so he has all this pent up demand in tandem with pent up demand we have a refresh cycle the ssd you know depreciation uh you know cycle is ending uh you know ssds are moving on and we're starting to see uh new technology in that space nvme sorry for technology increasing in that space so we have pent up demand and we have new technology and that's really leading to a refresh cycle and this particular itdm that i spoke to and many of his peers think this has a long tailwind that uh storage could be a good sector for some time to come that's really interesting thank you for that that extra metadata and i want to do a little deeper dive on on storage so here's a look at storage in the the industry in context and some of the competitive i mean it's been a tough market for the reasons that we've highlighted cloud has been eating away that flash headroom it used to be you'd buy storage to get you know more spindles and more performance and you were sort of forced to buy more flash gave more headroom but it's interesting what you're saying about the depreciation cycle so that's good news so etr combines just for people's benefit here combines primary and secondary storage into a single category so you have companies like pure and netapp which are really pure play you know primary storage companies largely in the sector along with veeam cohesity and rubric which are kind of secondary data or data protection so my my quick thoughts here are that pure is elevated and remains what i call the one-eyed man in the land of the blind but that's positive tailwinds there so that's good news rubric is very elevated but down it's a big it's big competitor cohesity is way off its highs and i have to say to me veeam is like the steady eddy consistent player here they just really continue to do well in the data protection business and and the highs are steady the lows are steady dell is also notable they've been struggling in storage their isg business which comprises service and storage it's been soft during covid and and during even you know this new product rollout so it's notable with this new mid-range they have in particular the uptick in dell this survey because dell so large a small uptick can be very good for dell hpe has a big announcement next month in storage so that might improve based on a product cycle of course the nimble brand continues to do well ibm as i said just announced a very soft quarter you know down double digits again uh and there in a product cycle shift and netapp is that looks bad in the etr data from a spending momentum standpoint but their management team is transforming the company into a cloud play which eric is why it was interesting that pure has the greatest momentum in in cloud accounts so that is sort of striking to me i would have thought it would be netapp so that's something that we want to pay attention to but i do like a lot of what netapp is doing uh and other than pure they're the only big kind of pure play in primary storage so long winded uh uh intro there eric but anything you'd add no actually i appreciate it was long winded i i'm going to be honest with you storage is not my uh my best sector as far as a researcher and analyst goes uh but i actually think a lot of what you said is spot on um you know we do capture a lot of large organizations spend uh we don't capture much mid and small so i think when you're talking about these large large players like netapp and um you know not looking so good all i would state is that we are capturing really big organizations spending attention so these are names that should be doing better to be quite honest uh in those accounts and you know at least according to our data we're not seeing it and it's long-term depression as you can see uh you know netapp now has a negative spending velocity in this analysis so you know i can go dig around a little bit more but right now the names that i'm hearing are pure cohesity uh um i'm hearing a little bit about hitachi trying to reinvent themselves in the space but you know i'll take a wait-and-see approach on that one but uh pure and cohesity are the ones i'm hearing a lot from our community so storage is transforming to cloud as a service you're seeing things like apex and in green lake from dell and hpe and container storage little so not really a lot of people paying attention to it but pure about a company called portworx which really specializes in container storage and there's many startups there they're trying to really change the way david flynn has a startup in that space he's the guy who started fusion i o so a lot a lot of transformations happening here okay i know it's been a long segment we have to summarize and then let me go through a summary and then i'll give you the last word eric so tech spending appears to be tracking us gdp at six to seven percent this talent shortage could be a blocker to accelerating i.t deployments and that's kind of good news actually for for services companies digital transformation you know it's it remains a priority and that bodes well not only for services but automation uipath went public this week we we profiled that you know extensively that went public last wednesday um organizations they've i said at the top face some tough decisions on how to allocate resources you know running the business growing the business transforming the business and we're seeing a bifurcation of spending and some residual effects on vendors and that remains a theme that we're watching eric your final thoughts yeah i'm going to go back quickly to just the overall macro spending because there's one thing i think is interesting to point out and we're seeing a real acceleration among mid and small so it seems like early on in the covid recovery or kovitz spending it was the deep pockets that moved first right fortune 500 knew they had to support remote work they started spending first round that in the fortune 500 we're only seeing about five percent spent but when you get into mid and small organizations that's creeping up to eight nine so i just think it's important to point out that they're playing catch-up right now uh also would point out that this is heavily skewed to north america spending we're seeing laggards in emea they just don't seem to be spending as much they're in a very different place in their recovery and uh you know i do think that it's important to point that out um lastly i also want to mention i know you do such a great job on following a lot of the disruptive vendors that you just pointed out pure doing container storage we also have another bi-annual survey that we do called emerging technology and that's for the private names that's going to be launching in may for everyone out there who's interested in not only the disruptive vendors but also private equity players uh keep an eye out for that we do that twice a year and that's growing in its respondents as well and then lastly one comment because you mentioned the uipath ipo it was really hard for us to sit on the sidelines and not put some sort of rating on their data set but ultimately um the data was muted unfortunately and when you're seeing this kind of hype into an ipo like we saw with snowflake the data was resoundingly strong we had no choice but to listen to what the data said for snowflake despite the hype um we didn't see that for uipath and we wanted to and i'm not making a large call there but i do think it's interesting to juxtapose the two that when snowflake was heading to its ipo the data was resoundingly positive and for uipath we just didn't see that thank you for that and eric thanks for coming on today it's really a pleasure to have you and uh so really appreciate the the uh collaboration and look forward to doing more of these we enjoy the partnership greatly dave we're very very happy to have you in the etr family and looking forward to doing a lot lot more with you in the future ditto okay that's it for today remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen all you got to do is search breaking analysis podcast and please subscribe to the series check out etr's website it's etr dot plus we also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com at siliconangle.com you can email me david.velante at siliconangle.com you can dm me on twitter at dvalante or comment on our linkedin post i could see you in clubhouse this is dave vellante for eric porter bradley for the cube insights powered by etr have a great week stay safe be well and we'll see you next time

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, Bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Recent survey data from ETR shows that enterprise tech spending is tracking with projected US GDP growth at six to 7% this year. Many markers continue to point the way to a strong recovery, including hiring trends and the loosening of frozen IT Project budgets. However skills shortages are blocking progress at some companies which bodes well for an increased reliance on external IT services. Moreover, while there's much talk about the rotation out of work from home plays and stocks such as video conferencing, VDI, and other remote worker tech, we see organizations still trying to figure out the ideal balance between funding headquarter investments that have been neglected and getting hybrid work right. In particular, the talent gap combined with a digital mandate, means companies face some tough decisions as to how to fund the future while serving existing customers and transforming culturally. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE's Insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we welcome back Erik Porter Bradley of ETR who will share fresh data, perspectives and insights from the latest survey data. Erik, great to see you. Welcome. >> Thank you very much, Dave. Always good to see you and happy to be on the show again. >> Okay, we're going to share some macro data and then we're going to dig into some highlights from ETR's most recent March COVID survey and also the latest April data. So Erik, the first chart that we want to show, it shows CIO and IT buyer responses to expected IT spend for each quarter of 2021 versus 2020, and you can see here a steady quarterly improvement. Erik, what are the key takeaways, from your perspective? >> Sure, well, first of all, for everyone out there, this particular survey had a record-setting number of participation. We had a 1,500 IT decision makers participate and we had over half of the Fortune 500 and over a fifth of the Global 1000. So it was a really good survey. This is seventh iteration of the COVID Impact Survey specifically, and this is going to transition to an overlarge macro survey going forward so we can continue it. And you're 100% right, what we've been tracking here since March of last year was, how is spending being impacted because of COVID? Where is it shifting? And what we're seeing now finally is that there is a real re-acceleration in spend. I know we've been a little bit more cautious than some of the other peers out there that just early on slapped an eight or a 9% number, but what we're seeing is right now, it's at a midpoint of over six, about 6.7% and that is accelerating. So, we are still hopeful that that will continue, and really, that spending is going to be in the second half of the year. As you can see on the left part of this chart that we're looking at, it was about 1.7% versus 3% for Q1 spending year-over-year. So that is starting to accelerate through the back half. >> I think it's prudent to be cautious (indistinct) 'cause normally you'd say, okay, tech is going to grow a couple of points higher than GDP, but it's really so hard to predict this year. Okay, the next chart here that we want to show you is we asked respondents to indicate what strategies they're employing in the short term as a result of coronavirus and you can see a few things that I'll call out and then I'll ask Erik to chime in. First, there's been no meaningful change of course, no surprise in tactics like remote work and holding travel, however, we're seeing very positive trends in other areas trending downward, like hiring freezes and freezing IT deployments, a downward trend in layoffs, and we also see an increase in the acceleration of new IT deployments and in hiring. Erik, what are your key takeaways? >> Well, first of all, I think it's important to point out here that we're also capturing that people believe remote work productivity is still increasing. Now, the trajectory might be coming down a little bit, but that is really key, I think, to the backdrop of what's happening here. So people have a perception that productivity of remote work is better than hybrid work and that's from the IT decision makers themselves, but what we're seeing here is that, most importantly, these organizations are citing plans to increase hiring, and that's something that I think is really important to point out. It's showing a real following, and to your point right in the beginning of the intro, we are seeing deployments stabilize versus prior survey levels, which means early on, they had no plans to launch new tech deployments, then they said, "Nope, we're going to start." and now that stalling, and I think it's exactly right, what you said, is there's an IT skills shortage. So people want to continue to do IT deployments 'cause they have to support work from home and a hybrid back return to the office, but they just don't have the skills to do so, and I think that's really probably the most important takeaway from this chart, is that stalling and to really ask why it's stalling. >> Yeah, so we're going to get into that for sure, and I think that's a really key point, is that accelerating IT deployments, it looks like it's hit a wall in the survey, but before we get deep into the skills, let's take a look at this next chart, and we're asking people here how our return to the new normal, if you will, and back to offices is going to change spending with on-prem architectures and applications. And so the first two bars, they're Cloud-friendly, if you add them up, it's 63% of the respondents, say that either they'll stay in the Cloud for the most part, or they're going to lower their on-prem spend when they go back to the office. The next three bars are on-prem friendly. If you add those up it's 29% of the respondents say their on-prem spend is going to bounce back to pre-COVID levels or actually increase, and of course, 12% of that number, by the way, say they've never altered their on-prem spend. So Erik, no surprise, but this bodes well for Cloud, but isn't it also a positive for on-prem? We've had this dual funding premise, meaning Cloud continues to grow, but neglected data center spend also gets a boost. What's your thoughts? >> Really, it's interesting. It's people are spending on all fronts. You and I were talking in the prep, it's like we're in battle and I've got naval, I've got air, I've got land, I've got to spend on Cloud and digital transformation, but I also have to spend for on-prem. The hybrid work is here and it needs to be supported. So this is spending is going to increase. When you look at this chart, you're going to see though, that roughly 36% of all respondents say that their spending is going to remain mostly on Cloud. So that is still the clear direction, digital transformation is still happening, COVID accelerated it greatly, you and I, as journalists and researchers already know this is where the puck is going, but spend has always lagged a little bit behind 'cause it just takes some time to get there. Inversely, 27% said that their on-prem spending will decrease. So when you look at those two, I still think that the trend is the friend for Cloud spending, even though, yes, they do have to continue spending on hybrid, some of it's been neglected, there are refresh cycles coming up, so, overall it just points to more and more spending right now. It really does seem to be a very strong backdrop for IT growth. >> So I want to talk a little bit about the ETR taxonomy before we bring up the next chart. We get a lot of questions about this, and of course, when you do a massive survey like you're doing, you have to have consistency for time series, so you have to really think through what the buckets look like, if you will. So this next chart takes a look at the ETR taxonomy and it breaks it down into simple-to-understand terms. So the green is the portion of spending on a vendor's tech within a category that is accelerating, and the red is the portion that is decelerating. So Erik, what are the key messages in this data? >> Well, first of all, Dave, thank you so much for pointing that out. We used to do, just what we call a Net score. It's a proprietary formula that we use to determine the overall velocity of spending. Some people found it confusing. Our data scientists decided to break this sector, break down into what you said, which is really more of a mode analysis. In that sector, how many of the vendors are increasing versus decreasing? So again, I just appreciate you bringing that up and allowing us to explain the reasoning behind our analysis there. But what we're seeing here goes back to something you and I did last year when we did our predictions, and that was that IT services and consulting was going to have a true rebound in 2021, and that's what this is showing right here. So in this chart, you're going to see that consulting and services are really continuing their recovery, 2020 had a lot of the clients and they have the biggest sector year-over-year acceleration sector wise. The other thing to point out on this, which we'll get to again later, is that the inverse analysis is true for video conferencing. We will get to that, so I'm going to leave a little bit of ammunition behind for that one, but what we're seeing here is IT consulting services being the real favorable and video conferencing having a little bit more trouble. >> Great, okay, and then let's take a look at that services piece, and this next chart really is a drill down into that space and emphasizes, Erik, what you were just talking about. And we saw this in IBM's earnings, where still more than 60% of IBM's business comes from services and the company beat earnings, in part, due to services outperforming expectations, I think it had a somewhat easier compare and some of this pent-up demand that we've been talking about bodes well for IBM and other services companies, it's not just IBM, right, Erik? >> No, it's not, but again, I'm going to point out that you and I did point out IBM in our predictions when we did in late December, so, it is nice to see. One of the reasons we don't have a more favorable rating on IBM at the moment is because they are in the process of spinning out this large unit, and so there's a little bit of a corporate action there that keeps us off on the sideline. But I would also want to point out here, Tata, Infosys and Cognizant 'cause they're seeing year-over-year acceleration in both IT consulting and outsourced IT services. So we break those down separately and those are the three names that are seeing acceleration in both of those. So again, at the Tata, Infosys and Cognizant are all looking pretty well positioned as well. >> So we've been talking a little bit about this skills shortage, and this is what's, I think, so hard for forecasters, is that in the one hand, There's a lot of pent up demand, Scott Gottlieb said it's like Woodstock coming out of the COVID, but on the other hand, if you have a talent gap, you've got to rely on external services. So there's a learning curve, there's a ramp up, it's an external company, and so it takes time to put those together. So this data that we're going to show you next, is really important in my view and ties what we were saying at the top. It asks respondents to comment on their staffing plans. The light blue is "We're increasing staff", the gray is "No change" and the magenta or whatever, whatever color that is that sort of purplish color, anyway, that color is decreasing, and the picture is very positive across the board. Full-time staff, offshoring, contract employees, outsourced professional services, all up trending upwards, and this Erik is more evidence of the services bounce back. >> Yeah, it's certainly, yes, David, and what happened is when we caught this trend, we decided to go one level deeper and say, all right, we're seeing this, but we need to know why, and that's what we always try to do here. Data will tell you what's happening, it doesn't always tell you why, and that's one of the things that ETR really tries to dig in with through the insights, interviews panels, and also going direct with these more custom survey questions. So in this instance, I think the real takeaway is that 30% of the respondents said that their outsourced and managed services are going to increase over the next three months. That's really powerful, that's a large portion of organizations in a very short time period. So we're capturing that this acceleration is happening right now and it will be happening in real time, and I don't see it slowing down. You and I are speaking about we have to increase Cloud spend, we have to increase hybrid spend, there are refresh cycles coming up, and there's just a real skills shortage. So this is a long-term setup that bodes very well for IT services and consulting. >> You know, Erik, when I came out of college, somebody told me, "Read, read, read, read as much as you can." And then they said, "Read the Wall Street Journal every day." and so I did it, and I would read the tech magazines and back then it was all paper, and what happens is you begin to connect the dots. And so the reason I bring that up is because I've now taken a bath in the ETR data for the better part of two years and I'm beginning to be able to connect the dots. The data is not always predictive, but many, many times it is. And so this next data gets into the fun stuff where we name names. A lot of times people don't like it because they're either marketing people at organizations, say, "Well, data's wrong." because that's the first thing they do, is attack the data. But you and I know, we've made some really great calls, work from home, for sure, you're talking about the services bounce back. We certainly saw the rise of CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler, well before people were talking about that, same thing with video conferencing. And so, anyway, this is the fun stuff and it looks at positive versus negative sentiment on companies. So first, how does ETR derive this data and how should we interpret it, and what are some of your takeaways? >> Sure, first of all, how we derive the data, are systematic survey responses that we do on a quarterly basis, and we standardize those responses to allow for time series analysis so we can do trend analysis as well. We do find that our data, because it's talking about forward-looking spending intentions, is really more predictive because we're talking about things that might be happening six months, three months in the future, not things that a lot of other competitors and research peers are looking at things that already happened, they're looking in the past, ETR really likes to look into the future and our surveys are set up to do so. So thank you for that question, It's a enjoyable lead in, but to get to the fun stuff, like you said, what we do here is we put ratings on the datasets. I do want to put the caveat out there that our spending intentions really only captures top-line revenue. It is not indicative of profit margin or any other line items, so this is only to be viewed as what we are rating the data set itself, not the company, that's not what we're in the game of doing. So I think that's very important for the marketing and the vendors out there themselves when they take a look at this. We're just talking about what we can control, which is our data. We're going to talk about a few of the names here on this highlighted vendors list. One, we're going to go back to that you and I spoke about, I guess, about six months ago, or maybe even earlier, which was the observability space. You and I were noticing that it was getting very crowded, a lot of new entrants, there was a lot of acquisition from more of the legacy or standard players in the space, and that is continuing. So I think in a minute, we're going to move into that observability space, but what we're seeing there is that it's becoming incredibly crowded and we're possibly seeing signs of them cannibalizing each other. We're also going to move on a little bit into video conferencing, where we're capturing some spend deceleration, and then ultimately, we're going to get into a little bit of a storage refresh cycle and talk about that. But yeah, these are the highlighted vendors for April, we usually do this once a quarter and they do change based on the data, but they're not usually whipsawed around, the data doesn't move that quickly. >> Yeah, so you can see some of the big names in the left-hand side, some of the SAS companies that have momentum. Obviously, ServiceNow has been doing very, very well. We've talked a lot about Snowflake, Okta, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, all very positive, as well as several others. I guess I'd add some things. I mean, I think if thinking about the next decade, it's Cloud, which is not going to be like the same Cloud as the last decade, a lot of machine learning and deep learning and AI and the Cloud is extending to the edge and the data center. Data, obviously, very important, data is decentralized and distributed, so data architectures are changing. A lot of opportunities to connect across Clouds and actually create abstraction layers, and then something that we've been covering a lot is processor performance is actually accelerating relative to Moore's law. It's probably instead of doubling every two years, it's quadrupling every two years, and so that is a huge factor, especially as it relates to powering AI and AI inferencing at the edge. This is a whole new territory, custom Silicon is really becoming in vogue and so something that we're watching very, very closely. >> Yeah, I completely, agree on that and I do think that the next version of Cloud will be very different. Another thing to point out on that too, is you can't do anything that you're talking about without collecting the data and organizations are extremely serious about that now. It seems it doesn't matter what industry they're in, every company is a data company, and that also bodes well for the storage goal. We do believe that there is going to just be a huge increase in the need for storage, and yes, hopefully that'll become portable across multi-Cloud and hybrid as well. >> Now, as Erik said, the ETR data, it's really focused on that top-line spend. So if you look on the right side of that chart, you saw NetApp was kind of negative, was very negative, right? But it is a company that's in transformation now, they've lowered expectations and they've recently beat expectations, that's why the stock has been doing better, but at the macro, from a spending standpoint, it's still stout challenged. So you have big footprint companies like NetApp and Oracle is another one. Oracle's stock is at an all time high, but the spending relative to sort of previous cycles are relative to, like for instance, Snowflake, much, much smaller, not as high growth, but they're managing expectations, they're managing their transition, they're managing profitability. Zoom is another one, Zoom looking negative, but Zoom's got to use its market cap now to transform and increase its TAM. And then Splunk is another one we're going to talk about. Splunk is in transition, it acquired SignalFX, It just brought on this week, Teresa Carlson, who was the head of AWS Public Sector. She's the president and head of sales, so they've got a go-to-market challenge and they brought in Teresa Carlson to really solve that, but Splunk has been trending downward, we called that several quarters ago, Erik, and so I want to bring up the data on Splunk, and this is Splunk, Erik, in analytics, and it's not trending in the right direction. The green is accelerating spend, the red is in the bars is decelerating spend, the top blue line is spending velocity or Net score, and the yellow line is market share or pervasiveness in the dataset. Your thoughts. >> Yeah, first I want to go back. There's a great point, Dave, about our data versus a disconnect from an equity analysis perspective. I used to be an equity analyst, that is not what we do here. And the main word you said is expectations, right? Stocks will trade on how they do compare to the expectations that are set, whether that's buy-side expectations, sell-side expectations or management's guidance themselves. We have no business in tracking any of that, what we are talking about is the top-line acceleration or deceleration. So, that was a great point to make, and I do think it's an important one for all of our listeners out there. Now, to move to Splunk, yes, I've been capturing a lot of negative commentary on Splunk even before the data turns. So this has been a about a year-long, our analysis and review on this name and I'm dating myself here, but I know you and I are both rock and roll fans, so I'm going to point out a Led Zeppelin song and movie, and say that the song remains the same for Splunk. We are just seeing recent spending attentions are taking yet another step down, both from prior survey levels, from year ago levels. This, we're looking at in the analytics sector and spending intentions are decelerating across every single group, and we went to one of our other slide analysis on the ETR+ platform, and you do by customer sub-sample, in analytics, it's dropping in every single vertical. It doesn't matter which one. it's really not looking good, unfortunately, and you had mentioned this is an analytics and I do believe the next slide is an information security. >> Yeah, let's bring that up. >> And unfortunately it's not doing much better. So this is specifically Fortune 500 accounts and information security. There's deep pockets in the Fortune 500, but from what we're hearing in all the insights and interviews and panels that I personally moderate for ETR, people are upset, that they didn't like the strong tactics that Splunk has used on them in the past, they didn't like the ingestion model pricing, the inflexibility, and when alternatives came along, people are willing to look at the alternatives, and that's what we're seeing in both analytics and big data and also for their SIM and security. >> Yeah, so I think again, I pointed Teresa Carlson. She's got a big job, but she's very capable. She's going to meet with a lot of customers, she's a go-to-market pro, she's going to to have to listen hard, and I think you're going to see some changes there. Okay, so sorry, there's more bad news on Splunk. So (indistinct) bring this up is Net score for Splunk and Elastic accounts. This is for analytics, so there's 106 Elastic accounts in the dataset that also have Splunk and it's trending downward for Splunk, that's why it's green for Elastic. And Erik, the important call out from ETR here is how Splunk's performance in Elastic accounts compares with its performance overall. The ELK stack, which obviously Elastic is a big part of that, is causing pain for Splunk, as is Datadog, and you mentioned the pricing issue, well, is it pricing in your assessment or is it more fundamental? >> It's multi-level based on the commentary we get from our ITDMs teams that take the survey. So yes, you did a great job with this analysis. What we're looking at is the spending within shared accounts. So if I have Splunk already, how am I spending? I'm sorry if I have Elastic already, how am I spending on Splunk? And what you're seeing here is it's down to about a 12% Net score, whereas Splunk overall, has a 32% Net score among all of its customers. So what you're seeing there is there is definitely a drain that's happening where Elastic is draining spend from Splunk and usage from them. The reason we used Elastic here is because all observabilities, the whole sector seems to be decelerating. Splunk is decelerating the most, but Elastic is the only one that's actually showing resiliency, so that's why we decided to choose these two, but you pointed out, yes, it's also Datadog. Datadog is Cloud native. They're more dev ops-oriented. They tend to be viewed as having technological lead as compared to Splunk. So a really good point. Dynatrace also is expanding their abilities and Splunk has been making a lot of acquisitions to push their Cloud services, they are also changing their pricing model, right? They're trying to make things a little bit more flexible, moving off ingestion and moving towards consumption. So they are trying, and the new hires, I'm not going to bet against them because the one thing that Splunk has going for them is their market share in our survey, they're still very well entrenched. So they do have a lot of accounts, they have their foothold. So if they can find a way to make these changes, then they will be able to change themselves, but the one thing I got to say across the whole sector is competition is increasing, and it does appear based on commentary and data that they're starting to cannibalize themselves. It really seems pretty hard to get away from that, and you know there are startups in the observability space too that are going to be even more disruptive. >> I think I want to key on the pricing for a moment, and I've been pretty vocal about this. I think the old SAS pricing model where you essentially lock in for a year or two years or three years, pay up front, or maybe pay quarterly if you're lucky, that's a one-way street and I think it's a flawed model. I like what Snowflake's doing, I like what Datadog's doing, look at what Stripe is doing, look at what Twilio is doing, you mentioned it, it's consumption-based pricing, and if you've got a great product, put it out there and damn, the torpedoes, and I think that is a game changer. I look at, for instance, HPE with GreenLake, I look at Dell with Apex, they're trying to mimic that model and apply it to infrastructure, it's much harder with infrastructure 'cause you've got to deploy physical infrastructure, but that is a model that I think is going to change, and I think all of the traditional SAS pricing is going to come under disruption over the next better part of the decades, but anyway, let's move on. We've been covering the APM space pretty extensively, application performance management, and this chart lines up some of the big players here. Comparing Net score or spending momentum from the April 20th survey, the gray is, sorry, the gray is the April 20th survey, the blue is Jan 21 and the yellow is April 21, and not only are Elastic and Datadog doing well relative to Splunk, Erik, but everything is down from last year. So this space, as you point out, is undergoing a transformation. >> Yeah, the pressures are real and it's sort of that perfect storm where it's not only the data that's telling us that, but also the direct feedback we get from the community. Pretty much all the interviews I do, I've done a few panels specifically on this topic, for anyone who wants to dive a little bit deeper. We've had some experts talk about this space and there really is no denying that there is a deceleration in spend and it's happening because that spend is getting spread out among different vendors. People are using a Datadog for certain aspects, they are using Elastic where they can 'cause it's cheaper. They're using Splunk because they have to, but because it's so expensive, they're cutting some of the things that they're putting into Splunk, which is dangerous, particularly on the security side. If I have to decide what to put in and whatnot, that's not really the right way to have security hygiene. So this space is just getting crowded, there's disruptive vendors coming from the emerging space as well, and what you're seeing here is the only bit of positivity is Elastic on a survey-over-survey basis with a slight, slight uptick. Everywhere else, year-over-year and survey-over-survey, it's showing declines, it's just hard to ignore. >> And then you've got Dynatrace who, based on the interviews you do in the (indistinct), one-on-one, or one-on-five, the private interviews that I've been invited to, Dynatrace gets very high scores for their roadmap. You've got New Relic, which has been struggling financially, but they've got a really good product and a purpose-built database just for this APM space, and then of course, you've got Cisco with AppD, which is a strong business for them, and then as you mentioned, you've got startups coming in, you got ChaosSearch, which Ed Walsh is now running, leave the data in place in AWS and really interesting model, Honeycomb is getting really disruptive, Jeremy Burton's company, Observed. So this space is it's becoming jumped ball. >> Yeah, there's a great line that came out of one of them, and that was that the lines are blurring. It used to be that you knew exactly that AppDynamics, what they were doing, it was APM only, or it was logging and monitoring only, and a lot of what I'm hearing from the ITDM experts is that the lines are blurring amongst all of these names. They all have functionality that kind of crosses over each other. And the other interesting thing is it used to be application versus infrastructure monitoring, but as you know, infrastructure is becoming code more and more and more, and as infrastructure becomes code, there's really no difference between application and infrastructure monitoring. So we're seeing a convergence and a blurring of the lines in this space, which really doesn't bode well, and a great point about New Relic, their tech gets good remarks. I just don't know if their enterprise level service and sales is up to snuff right now. As one of my experts said, a CTO of a very large public online hospitality company essentially said that he would be shocked that within 18 months if all of these players are still standalone, that there needs to be some M and A or convergence in this space. >> Okay, now we're going to call out some of the data that really has jumped out to ETR in the latest survey, and some of the names that are getting the most queries from ETR clients, many of which are investor clients. So let's start by having a look at one of the most important and prominent work from home names, Zoom. Let's look at this. Erik is the ride over for Zoom? >> Ah, I've been saying it for a little bit of a time now actually. I do believe it is, and we'll get into it, but again, pointing out, great, Dave, the reason we're presenting today Splunk, Elastic and Zoom, they are the most viewed on the ETR+ platform. Trailing behind that only slightly is F5, I decided not to bring F5 to the table today 'cause we don't have a rating on the data set. So then I went one deep, one below that and it's pure. So the reason we're presenting these to you today is that these are the ones that our clients and our community are most interested in, which is hopefully going to gain interest to your viewers as well. So to get to Zoom, yeah, I call Zoom the pandemic bull market baby. This was really just one that had a meteoric ride. You look back, January in 2020, the stock was at $60 and 10 months later, it was like 580, that's in 10 months. That's cooled down a little bit into the mid-300s, and I believe that cooling down should continue, and the reason why is because we are seeing huge deceleration in our spending intentions. They're hitting all-time lows, it's really just a very ugly dataset. More importantly than the spending intentions, for the first time, we're seeing customer growth in our survey flatten. In the past, we knew that the deceleration of spend was happening, but meanwhile, their new customer growth was accelerating, so it was kind of hard to really make any call based on that. This is the first time we're seeing flattening customer growth trajectory, and that in tandem with just dominance from Microsoft in every sector they're involved in, I don't care if it's IP telephony, productivity apps or the core video conferencing, Microsoft is just dominating. So there's really just no way to ignore this anymore. The data and the commentary state that Zoom is facing some headwinds. >> Well, plus you've pointed out to me that a lot of your private conversations with buyers says that, "Hey, we're, we're using the freebie version of Zoom, and we're not paying them." And that combined with Teams, I mean, it's... I think, look, Zoom, they've got to figure out how to use their elevated market cap to transform and expand their TAM, but let's move on. Here's the data on Pure Storage and we've highlighted a number of times this company is showing elevated spending intentions. Pure announced it's earnings in May, IBM just announced storage, it was way down actually. So still, Pure, more positive, but I'll on that comment in a moment, but what does this data tell you, Erik? >> Yeah, right now we started seeing this data last survey in January, and that was the first time we really went positive on the data set itself, and it's just really continuing. So we're seeing the strongest year-over-year acceleration in the entire survey, which is a really good spot to be. Pure is also a leading position among its sector peers, and the other thing that was pretty interesting from the data set is among all storage players, Pure has the highest positive public Cloud correlation. So what we can do is we can see which respondents are accelerating their public Cloud spend and then cross-reference that with their storage spend and Pure is best positioned. So as you and I both know, digital transformation Cloud spending is increasing, you need to be aligned with that. And among all storage sector peers, Pure is best positioned in all of those, in spending intentions and adoptions and also public Cloud correlation. So yet again, to start another really strong dataset, and I have an anecdote about why this might be happening, because when I saw the data, I started asking in my interviews, what's going on here? And there was one particular person, he was a director of Cloud operations for a very large public tech company. Now, they have hybrid, but their data center is in colo, So they don't own and build their own physical building. He pointed out that during COVID, his company wanted to increase storage, but he couldn't get into his colo center due to COVID restrictions. They weren't allowed. You had 250,000 square feet, right, but you're only allowed to have six people in there. So it's pretty hard to get to your rack and get work done. He said he would buy storage, but then the colo would say, "Hey, you got to get it out of here. It's not even allowed to sit here. We don't want it in our facility." So he has all this pent up demand. In tandem with pent up demand, we have a refresh cycle. The SSD depreciation cycle is ending. SSDs are moving on and we're starting to see a new technology in that space, NVMe sorry, technology increasing in that space. So we have pent up demand and we have new technology and that's really leading to a refresh cycle, and this particular ITDM that I spoke to and many of his peers think this has a long tailwind that storage could be a good sector for some time to come. >> That's really interesting, thank you for that extra metadata. And I want to do a little deeper dive on storage. So here's a look at storage in the industry in context and some of the competitive. I mean, it's been a tough market for the reasons that we've highlighted, Cloud has been eating away that flash headroom. It used to be you'd buy storage to get more spindles and more performance and we're sort of forced to buy more, flash, gave more headroom, but it's interesting what you're saying about the depreciation cycle. So that's good news. So ETR combines, just for people's benefit here, combines primary and secondary storage into a single category. So you have companies like Pure and NetApp, which are really pure play primary storage companies, largely in the sector, along with Veeam, Cohesity and Rubrik, which are kind of secondary data or data protection. So my quick thoughts here that Pure is elevated and remains what I call the one-eyed man in the land of the blind, but that's positive tailwinds there, so that's good news. Rubrik is very elevated but down, it's big competitor, Cohesity is way off its highs, and I have to say to me, Veeam is like the Steady Eddy consistent player here. They just really continue to do well in the data protection business, and the highs are steady, the lows are steady. Dell is also notable, they've been struggling in storage. Their ISG business, which comprises servers and storage, it's been softer in COVID, and during even this new product rollout, so it's notable with this new mid range they have in particular, the uptick in Dell, this survey, because Dell is so large, a small uptick can be very good for Dell. HPE has a big announcement next month in storage, so that might improve based on a product cycle. Of course, the Nimble brand continues to do well, IBM, as I said, just announced a very soft quarter, down double digits again, and they're in a product cycle shift. And NetApp, it looks bad in the ETR data from a spending momentum standpoint, but their management team is transforming the company into a Cloud play, which Erik is why it was interesting that Pure has the greatest momentum in Cloud accounts, so that is sort of striking to me. I would have thought it would be NetApp, so that's something that we want to pay attention to, but I do like a lot of what NetApp is doing, and other than Pure, they're the only big kind of pure play in primary storage. So long-winded, intro there, Erik, but anything you'd add? >> No, actually I appreciate it as long-winded. I'm going to be honest with you, storage is not my best sector as far as a researcher and analyst goes, but I actually think that a lot of what you said is spot on. We do capture a lot of large organizations spend, we don't capture much mid and small, so I think when you're talking about these large, large players like NetApp not looking so good, all I would state is that we are capturing really big organization spending attention, so these are names that should be doing better to be quite honest, in those accounts, and at least according to our data, we're not seeing it in. It's longterm depression, as you can see, NetApp now has a negative spending velocity in this analysis. So, I can go dig around a little bit more, but right now the names that I'm hearing are Pure, Cohesity. I'm hearing a little bit about Hitachi trying to reinvent themselves in the space, but I'll take a wait-and-see approach on that one, but pure Cohesity are the ones I'm hearing a lot from our community. >> So storage is transforming to Cloud as a service. You've seen things like Apex in GreenLake from Dell and HPE and container storage. A little, so not really a lot of people paying attention to it, but Pure bought a company called Portworx which really specializes in container storage, and there's many startups there, they're trying to really change the way. David Flynn, has a startup in that space, he's the guy who started Fusion-io. So a lot of transformations happening here. Okay, I know it's been a long segment, we have to summarize, and let me go through a summary and then I'll give you the last word, Erik. So tech spending appears to be tracking US GDP at 6 to 7%. This talent shortage could be a blocker to accelerating IT deployments, so that's kind of good news actually for services companies. Digital transformation, it remains a priority, and that bodes, well, not only for services, but automation. UiPath went public this week, we profiled that extensively, that went public last Wednesday. Organizations that sit at the top face some tough decisions on how to allocate resources. They're running the business, growing the business, transforming the business, and we're seeing a bifurcation of spending and some residual effects on vendors, and that remains a theme that we're watching. Erik, your final thoughts. >> Yeah, I'm going to go back quickly to just the overall macro spending, 'cause there's one thing I think is interesting to point out and we're seeing a real acceleration among mid and small. So it seems like early on in the COVID recovery or COVID spending, it was the deep pockets that moved first, right? Fortune 500 knew they had to support remote work, they started spending first. Around that in the Fortune 500, we're only seeing about 5% spend, but when you get into mid and small organizations, that's creeping up to eight, nine. So I just think it's important to point out that they're playing catch up right now. I also would point out that this is heavily skewed to North America spending. We're seeing laggards in EMEA, they just don't seem to be spending as much. They're in a very different place in their recovery, and I do think that it's important to point that out. Lastly, I also want to mention, I know you do such a great job on following a lot of the disruptive vendors that you just pointed out, with Pure doing container storage, we also have another bi-annual survey that we do called Emerging Technology, and that's for the private names. That's going to be launching in May, for everyone out there who's interested in not only the disruptive vendors, but also private equity players. Keep an eye out for that. We do that twice a year and that's growing in its respondents as well. And then lastly, one comment, because you mentioned the UiPath IPO, it was really hard for us to sit on the sidelines and not put some sort of rating on their dataset, but ultimately, the data was muted, unfortunately, and when you're seeing this kind of hype into an IPO like we saw with Snowflake, the data was resoundingly strong. We had no choice, but to listen to what the data said for Snowflake, despite the hype. We didn't see that for UiPath and we wanted to, and I'm not making a large call there, but I do think it's interesting to juxtapose the two, that when snowflake was heading to its IPO, the data was resoundingly positive, and for UiPath, we just didn't see that. >> Thank you for that, and Erik, thanks for coming on today. It's really a pleasure to have you, and so really appreciate the collaboration and look forward to doing more of these. >> Yeah, we enjoy the partnership greatly, Dave. We're very happy to have you on the ETR family and looking forward to doing a lot, lot more with you in the future. >> Ditto. Okay, that's it for today. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you have to do is search "Breaking Analysis" podcast, and please subscribe to the series. Check out ETR website it's etr.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me, david.vellante@siliconangle.com, you can DM me on Twitter @dvellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. I could see you in Clubhouse. This is Dave Vellante for Erik Porter Bradley for the CUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time. (bright music)