>> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome once again to Action Item. (funky electronic music) Every week, Wikibon gathers together the research team to discuss seminal issues that are facing the IT industry. And this week is no different. In the next couple of weeks, somewhere near 100,000 people are gonna be heading to Las Vegas for the Amazon, or AWS re:Invent show from all over the world. And this week, what we wanna do is we wanna provide a preview of what we think folks are gonna be talking about. And I'm joined here in our lovely Palo Alto studio, theCUBE studio, by Rob Hof, who is the editor-in-chief of SiliconANGLE. David Floyer, who's in analyst at Wikibon. George Gilbert, who's an analyst Wikibon. And John Furrier, who's a CUBE host and co-CEO. On the phone we have Neil Raden, an analyst at Wikibon, and also Dave Vellante, who's co-CEO with John Furrier, an analyst at Wikibon as well. So guys, let's jump right into it. David Floyer, I wanna hit you first. AWS has done a masterful job of making the whole concept of infrastructure as a service real. Nobody should downplay how hard that was and how amazing their success has been. But they're moving beyond infrastructure as a service. What do we expect for how far up Amazon is likely to go up the stack this year at re:Invent? >> Well, I can say what I'm hoping for. I agree with your premise that they have to go beyond IAS. The overall market for cloud is much bigger than just IAS, with SaaS and other clouds as well, both on-premise and off-premise. So I would start with what enterprise CIOs are wanting, and they are wanting to see a multi-cloud strategy, both on-premise and multiple clouds. SaaS clouds, other clouds. So I'm looking for AWS to provide additional services to make that easier. in particular, services, I thought of private clouds for enterprises. I'm looking for distributed capabilities, particularly in the storage area so they can link different clouds together. I want to see edge data management capabilities. I'd love to see that because the edge itself, especially the low-latency stuff, the real-time stuff, that needs specialist services, and I'd like to see them integrate that much better than just Snowball. I want to see more details about AI I'd love to see what they're doing in that. There's tremendous potential for AI in operational and to improve security, to improve availability, recovery. That is an area where I think they could be a leader of the IT industry. >> So let me stop you there, and George I wanna turn to you. So AWS in AI how do we anticipate that's gonna play out at re:Invent this year? >> I can see three things in decreasing order of likelihood. The first one is, they have to do a better job of tooling, both for, sort of, developers who want to dabble in, well get their arms around AI, but who aren't real data scientists. And then also hardcore tools for data scientists that have been well served by, recently, Microsoft and IBM, among others. So this is this Iron Man Initiative that we've heard about. For the hardcore tools, something from Domino Data Labs that looks like they're gonna partner with them. It's like a data-science workbench, so for the collaborative data preparation, modeling, deployment. That whole life cycle. And then for the developer-ready tooling, I expect to see they'll be working with a company called DataRobot, which has a really nifty tool where you put in a whole bunch of training data, and it trains, could be a couple dozen models that it thinks that might fit, and it'll show you the best fits. It'll show you the features in the models that are most impactful. In other words, it provides a lot of transparency. >> So it's kind of like models for models. >> Yes, and it provides transparency. Now that's the highest likelihood. And we have names on who we think the likely suspects are. The next step down, I would put applying machine learning to application performance management and IT operations. >> So that's the whole AI for ITOM that David Floyer just mentioned. >> Yeah. >> Now, presumably, this is gonna have to extend beyond just AI for Amazon or AWS-related ITOM. Our expectation's that we're gonna see a greater distribution of, or Amazon take more of a leadership in establishing a framework that cuts across multi-cloud. Have I got that right, David Floyer? >> Absolutely. A massive opportunity for them to provide the basics on their own platform. That's obviously the starting point. They'll have the best instrumentation for all of the components they have there. But they will need to integrate that in with their own databases, with other people's databases. The more that they can link all the units together and get real instrumentation from an application point of view of the whole of the infrastructure, the more value AI can contribute. >> John Foyer, the whole concept of the last few years of AWS is that all roads eventually end up at AWS. However, there's been a real challenge associated with getting this migration momentum to really start to mature. Now we saw some interesting moves that they made with VMware over the last couple of years, and it's been quite successful. And some would argue it might even have given another round of life to VMware. Are there some things we expect to see AWS do this time that are gonna reenergize the ecosystem to start bringing more customers higher up the stack to AWS? >> Yeah, but I think I look at it, quickly, as VMware was a groundbreaking even for both companies, VMware and AWS. We talked about that at that research event we had with them. The issue that is happening is that AWS has had a run in the marketplace. They've been the leader in cloud. Every year, it's been a slew of announcements. This year's no different. They're gonna have more and more announcements. In fact, they had to release some announcements early, before the show, because they have, again, more and more announcements. So they have the under-the-hood stuff going on that David Floyer and George were pointing out. So the classic build strategy is to continue to be competitive by having more services layered on top of each other, upgrading those services. That's a competitive strategy frame that's under the hood. On the business side, you're seeing more competition this year than ever before. Amazon now is highly contested, certainly in the marketplace with competitors. Okay, you're seeing FUD, the uncertainty and doubt from other people, how they're bundling. But it's clear. The cloud visibility is clear to customers. The numbers are coming in, multiple years of financial performance. But now the ecosystem plays, really, the interesting one. I think the VMware move is gonna be a tell sign for other companies that haven't won that top-three position. >> Example? >> I will say SAP. >> Oh really? You think SAP is gonna have a major play this year where we might see some more stuff about AWS and SAP? >> I'm hearing rumblings that SAP is gonna be expanding their relationship. I don't have the facts yet on the ground, but from what I'm sensing, this is consistent with what they've been doing. We've seen them at Google cloud platform. We talked to them specifically about how they're dealing with cloud. And their strategy is clear. They wanna be on Azure, Google, and Amazon. They wanna provide that database functionality and their client base in from HANA, and roll that in. So it's clear that SAP wants to be multi-cloud. >> Well we've seen Oracle over the past couple of years, or our research has suggested, I would say, that there's been kind of two broad strategies. The application-oriented strategy that goes down to IAAS aggressively. That'd be Oracle and Microsoft. And then the IAAS strategy that's trying to move up through an ecosystem play, which is more AWS. David Floyer and I have been writing a lot of that research. So it sounds like AWS is really gonna start doubling down in an ecosystem and making strategic bets on software providers who can bring those large enterprise install bases with them. >> Yeah, and the thing that you pointed out is migration. That's a huge issue. Now you can get technical, and say, what does that mean? But Andy Jassy has been clear, and the whole Amazon Web Services Team has been clear from day one. They're customer centric. They listen to the customers. So if they're doing more migration this year, and we'll see, I think they will be, I think that's a good tell sign and good prediction. That means the customers want to use Amazon more. And VMware was the same way. Their customers were saying, hey, we're ops guys, we want to have a cloud strategy. And it was such a great move for VMware. I think that's gonna lift the fog, if you will, pun intended, between what cloud computing is and other alternatives. And I think companies are gonna be clear that I can party with Amazon Web Services and still run my business in a way that's gonna help customers. I think that's the number one thing that I'm looking for is, what is the customers looking for in multi-cloud? Or if it's server-less or other things. >> Well, or yeah I agree. Lemme run this by you guys. It sounds as though multi-cloud increasingly is going to be associated with an application set. So, for example, it's very difficult to migrate a database manager from one place to another, as a snowflake. The cost to the customer is extremely high. The cost to the migration team is extremely high, lotta risk. But if you can get an application provider to step up and start migrating elements of the database interface, then you dramatically reduce the overall cost of what that migration might look like. Have I got that right, David Floyer? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's what AWS, what I'm expecting them to focus on is more integration with more SaaS vendors, making it a better place-- >> Paul: Or just software vendors. >> Or software vendors. Well, SaaS vendors in particular, but software vendors in particular-- >> Well SAP's not a SaaS player, right? Well, they are a little bit, but most of their installations are still SAP on Oracle and moving them over, then my ass is gonna require a significant amount of SAP help. >> And one of the things I would love to see them have is a proper tier-one database as a service. That's something that's hugely missing at the moment, and using HANA, for example, on SAP, it's a tier-one database in a particular area, but that would be a good move and help a lot of enterprises to move stuff into AWS. >> Is that gonna be sufficient, though, given how dominant Oracle is in that-- >> No, they need something general purpose which can compete with Oracle or come to some agreement with Oracle. Who knows what's gonna happen in the future? >> Yeah, I don't know. >> Yeah we're all kinda ignoring here. It will be interesting to see. But at the end of the day, look, Oracle has an incentive also to render more of what it has, as a service at some level. And it's gonna be very difficult to say, we're gonna render this as a service to a customer, but Amazon can't play. Or AWS can't play. That's gonna be a real challenge for them. >> The Oracle thing is interesting and I bring this up because Oracle has been struggling as a company with cloud native messaging. In other words, they're putting out, they have a lot of open source, we know what they have for tooling. But they own IT. I mean if you dug up Oracle, they got the database as David pointed out, tier one. But they know the IT guys, they've been doing business in IT for years as a legacy vendor. Now they're transforming, and they are trying hard to be the cloud native path, and they're not making it. They're not getting the credit, and I don't know if that's a cultural issue with Oracle. But Amazon has that positioning from a developer cloud DNA. Now winning real enterprise deals. So the question that I'm looking for is, can Amazon continue to knock down these enterprise deals in lieu of these incumbent or legacy players in IT. So if IT continues to transform more towards cloud native, docker containers, or containers in Kubernetes, these kinds of micro services, I would give the advantage to Amazon over Oracle even though that Oracle has the database because ultimately the developers are driving the behavior. >> Oh again I don't think any of us would disagree with that. >> Yeah so the trouble though is the cost of migrating the applications and the data. That is huge. The systems of record are there for a reason. So there are two fundamental strategies for Oracle. If they can get their developers to add the AI, add the systems of intelligence. Make them systems of intelligence, then they can win in that strategy. Or the alternative is that they move it to AWS and do that movement in AWS. That's a much more risky strategy. >> Right but I think our kind of concluding point here is that ultimately if AWS can get big application players to participate and assist and invest in and move customers along with some of these big application migrations, it's good for AWS. And to your point John, it's probably good for the customers too. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah I don't think it's mutually exclusive as David makes a point about migrating for Oracle. I don't see a lot of migration coming off of Oracle. I look at overall database growth is the issue. Right so Oracle will have that position, but it's kind of like when we argued about the internet growth back in 1997. Just internet users growing was so great that rising tide flows. So I believe that the database growth is going to happen so fast that Amazon is not necessarily targeting Oracle's market share, they're going after the overall database market, which might be a smaller tier two kind of configuration or new architectures that are developing. So I think it's interesting dynamic and Oracle certainly could play there and lock in the database, but-- >> Here's what I would say, I would say that they're going after the new workload world, and a lot of that new workload is gonna involve database as it always has. Not like there's anything that the notion that we have solved or that database is 90% penetrated for the applications that are gonna be dominant matter in 2025 is ridiculous. There's a lot of new database that's gonna be sold. I think you're absolutely right. Rob Hof what's the general scuttlebutt that you're hearing. You know you as editor of SiliconANGLE, editor-in-chief of SiliconANGLE. What is the journalist world buzzing about for re:Invent this year? >> Well I guess you know my questions is because of the challenges that we're facing like we just talked about with migrating, the difficulty in migrating some of these applications. We also see very fast growing rivals like Google. Still small, but growing fast. And then there's China. That's a big one where is there a natural limit there that they're gonna have? So you put these things together, and I guess we see Amazon Web Services still growing at 42% a year or whatever it's great. But is it gonna start to go down because of all these challenges? >> 'Cause some of the constraints may start to assert themselves. >> Rob: Exactly, exactly. >> So-- >> Rob: That's what I'm looking at. >> Kind of the journalism world is kinda saying, are there some speed bumps up ahead for AWS? >> Exactly, and we saw one just a couple, well just this week with China for example. They sold off $300 million worth of data centers, equipment and such to their partner in China Beijing Sinnet. And they say this is a way to comply with Chinese law. Now we're going to start expanding, but expanding while you're selling off $300 million worth of equipment, you know, it begs a question. So I'm curious how they're going to get past that. >> That does raise an interesting question, and I think I might go back to some of the AI on ITOM, AI on IT operations management. Is that do you need control of the physical assets in China to nonetheless sell great service. >> Rob: And that's a big question. >> For accessing assets in China. >> Rob: Right. >> And my guess is that if they're successful with AI for ITOM and some of these other initiatives we're talking about. It in fact may be very possible for them to offer a great service in China, but not actually own the physical assets. And that's, it's an interesting question for some of the Chinese law issues. Dave Vellante, anything you want to jump in on, and add to the conversation? For example, if we look at some of the ecosystem and some of the new technologies, and some of the new investments being made around new technologies. What are some of your thoughts about some of the new stuff that we might hear about at AWS this year? >> Dave: Well so, a couple things. Just a comment on some of the things you guys were saying about Oracle and migration. To me it comes down to three things, growth, which is clearly there, you've talked about 40% plus growth. Momentum, you know the flywheel effect that Amazon has been talking about for years. And something that really hasn't been discussed as much which is economics, and this is something that we've talked about a lot and Amazon is bringing a software like marginal economics model to infrastructure services. And as it potentially slows down its growth, it needs to find new areas, and it will expand its tan by gobbling up parts of the ecosystem. So, you know there's so much white space, but partners got to be careful about where they're adding value because ultimately Amazon is gonna target those much in the same way, in my view anyway that Microsoft and Intel have in the past. And so I think you've got to tread very carefully there, and watch where Amazon is going. And they're going into the big areas of AI, trying to do more stuff with the Edge. And anywhere there's automation they are going to grab that piece of value in the value chain. >> So one of the things that we've been, we've talked about two main things. We've talked about a lot of investments, lot of expectations about AI and how AI is gonna show up in a variety of different ways at re:Invent. And we've talked about how they're likely to make some of these migration initiatives even that much more tangible than they have been. So by putting some real operational clarity as to how they intend to bring enterprises into AWS. We haven't talked about IoT. Dave just mentioned it. What's happening with the Edge, how is the Edge going to work? Now historically what we've seen is we've seen a lot of promises that the Edge was all going to end up in the cloud from a data standpoint, and that's where everything was gonna be processed. We started seeing the first indications that that's not necessarily how AWS is gonna move last year with Snowball and server-less computing, and some of those initiatives. We have anticipated a real honest to goodness true private cloud, AWS stack with a partnership. Hasn't happened yet. David Floyer what are we looking for this year? Are we gonna see that this year or are we gonna see more kind of circumnavigating the issue and doing the best that they can? >> Yeah, well my prediction last year was that they would come out with some sort of data service that you could install on your on-premise machine as a starting point for this communication across a multi cloud environment. I'm still expecting that, whether it happens this year or early next year. I think they have to. The pressure from enterprises, and they are a customer driven organization. The pressure from enterprises is going to mandate that they have some sort of solution on-premise. It's a requirement in many countries, especially in Europe. They're gonna have to do that I think without doubt. So they can do it in multiple ways, they can do it as they've done with the US government by putting in particular data centers, whole data centers within the US government. Or they can do it with small services, or they can have a, take the Microsoft approach of having an AWS service on site as well. I think with pressure from Microsoft, the pressure from Europe in particular is going to make this an essential requirement of their whole strategy. >> I remember a number of years going back a couple decades when Dell made big moves because to win the business of a very large manufacturer that had 50,000 work stations. Mainly engineers were turning over every year. To get that business Dell literally put a distribution point right next to that manufacturer. And we expect to see something similar here I would presume when we start talking about this. >> Yeah I mean I would make a comment on the IoT. First of all I agree with what David said, and I like his prediction, but I'm kind of taking a contrarian view on this, and I'm watching a few things at Amazon. Amazon always takes an approach of getting into new markets either with a big idea, and small teams to figure it out or building blocks, and they listen to the customer. So IoT is interesting because IoT's hard, it's important, it's really a fundamental important infrastructure, architecture that's not going away. I mean it has to be nailed down, it's obvious. Just like blockchain kinda is obvious when you talk about decentralization. So it'll be interesting to see what Amazon does on those two fronts. But what's interesting to note is Amazon always becomes their first customer. In their retail business, AWS was powering retail. With Whole Foods, and the stuff they're doing on the physical side, it'll be very interesting to see what their IoT strategy is from a technology standpoint with what they're doing internally. We get food delivered to our house from Amazon Fresh, and they got Whole Foods and all the retail. So it'll be interesting to see that. >> They're buying a lot of real estate. And I thought about this as well John. They're buying a lot of real estate, and how much processing can they put in there. And the only limit is that I don't think Whole Foods would qualify as particularly secure locations (laughing) when we start talking about this. But I think you're absolutely right. >> That only brings the question, how will they roll out IoT. Because he's like okay roll out an appliance that's more of an infrastructure thing. Is that their first move. So the question that I'm looking for is just kind of read the tea leaves and saying, what is really their doing. So they have the tech, and it's gonna be interesting to see, I mean it's more of a high level kind of business conversation, but IoT is a really big challenging area. I mean we're hearing that all over the place from CIOs like what's the architecture, what's the playbook? And it's different per company. So it's challenging. >> Although one of the reasons why it looks different per company is because it is so uncertain as to how it's gonna play out. There's not a lot of knowledge to fuse. My guess is that in 10 years we're gonna look back and see that there was a lot more commonality and patterns of work that were in IoT that many people expected. So I'll tell you one of the things that I saw last year that particularly impressed me at AWS re:Invent. Was the scale at which the network was being built out. And it raised for me an interesting question. If in fact one of the chief challenges of IoT. There are multiple challenges that every company faces with IoT. One is latency, one is intellectual property control, one is legal ramification like GDPR. Which is one of the reasons why the whole Europe play is gonna be so interesting 'cause GDPR is gonna have a major impact on a global basis, it's not just Europe. Bandwidth however is an area that is not necessarily given, it's partly a function of cost. So what happens if AWS blankets the world with network, and customers to get access to at least some degree of Edge no longer have to worry about a telco. What happens to the telco business at least from a data communication standpoint? Anybody wanna jump in on that one? >> Well yeah I mean I've actually talked to a couple folks like Ericson, and I think AT&T. And they're actually talking about taking their central offices and even the base stations, and sort of outfitting them as mini data centers. >> As pops. >> Yeah. But I think we've been hearing now for about 12 months that, oh maybe Edge is going to take over before we actually even finish getting to the cloud. And I think that's about as sort of ill-considered as the notion that PCs were gonna put mainframes out of business. And the reason I use that as an analogy, at one point IBM was going to put all their mainframe based databases and communication protocol on the PC. That was called OS2 extended edition. And it failed spectacularly because-- >> Peter: For a lot of reasons. >> But the idea is you have a separation of concerns. Presentation on one side in that case, and data management communications on the other. Here in this, in what we're doing here, we're definitely gonna have the low latency inferencing on the Edge and then the question is what data goes back up into the cloud for training and retraining and even simulation. And we've already got, having talked to Microsoft's Azure CTO this week, you know they see it the same way. They see the compute intensive modeling work, and even simulation work done in the cloud, and the sort of automated decisioning on the Edge. >> Alright so I'm gonna make one point and then I want to hit the Action Item around here. The one point I wanna make is I have a feeling that over, and I don't know if it's gonna happen at re:Invent this year but I have a feeling that over the course of the next six to nine months, there's going to be a major initiative on the part of Amazon to start bringing down the cost of data communications, and use their power to start hitting the telcos on a global basis. And what's going to be very very interesting is whether Amazon starts selling services to its network independent of its other cloud services. Because that could have global implications for who wins and who loses. >> Well that's a good point, I just wanna add color on that. Just anecdotally from my perspective you asked a question and I went, haven't talked to anyone. But knowing the telco business, I think they're gonna have that VMware moment. Because they've been struggling with over the top for so long. The rapid pace of innovation going on, that I don't think Amazon is gonna go after the telcos, I think it's just an evolutionary steamroller effect. >> It's an inevitability. >> It's an inevitability that the steamroller's coming. >> So users, don't sign longterm data communications deals right now. >> Why wouldn't you do a deal with Amazon if you're a telco, you get relevance, you have stability, lock in your cash flows, cut your deal, and stay alive. >> You know it's an interesting thought. Alright so let's hit the Action Item around here. So really quickly, as a preface for this, the way we wanna do this is guys, is that John Furrier is gonna have a couple hour one on one with Andy Jassy sometime in the next few days. And so if you were to, well tell us a little about that first John. >> Well every re:Invent we've been doing re:Invent for multiple years, I think it's our sixth year, we do all the events, and we cover it as the media partner as you know. And I'm gonna have a one on one sit down every year prior to re:Invent to get his view, exclusive interview, for two hours. Talk about the future. We broke the first Amazon story years ago on the building blocks, and how they overcame, and now they're winning. So it's a time for me to sit down and get his insight and continue to tell the story, and document the growth of this amazing success story. And so I'm gonna ask him specific questions and I wanted, love to know what he's thinking. >> Alright guys so I want each of you to pretend that you are, so representing your community, what would your community, what's the one question your community would like answered by Andy Jassy. George let's start with you. >> So my question would be, are you gonna take IT operations management, machine learn enable it, and then as part of offering a hybrid cloud solution, do you extend that capability on-prem, and maybe to even other vendor clouds. >> Peter: That's a good one, David Floyer. >> I've got two if I may. >> The more the merrier. >> I'll say them very quickly. The first one, John, is you've, the you being AWS, developed a great international network, with fantastic performance. How is AWS going to avoid conflicts with the EU, China, Japan, and particularly about their resistance about using any US based nodes. And from in-country telecommunication vendors. So that's my first, and the second is, again on AI, what's going to be the focus of AWS in applying the value of AI. Where are you gonna focus first and to give value to your customers? >> Rob Hof do you wanna ask a question? >> Yeah I'd like to, one thing I didn't raise in terms of the challenges is, Amazon overall is expanding so fast into all kinds of areas. Whole Foods we saw this. I'd ask Jassy, how do you contend with reality that a lot of these companies that you're now bumping up against as an overall company. Now don't necessarily want to depend on AWS for their critical infrastructure because they're competitors. How do you deal with that? >> Great question, David Vellante. >> David: Yeah my question is would be, as an ecosystem partner, what advice would you give? 'Cause I'm really nervous that as you grow and you use the mantra of, well we do what customers want, that you are gonna eat into my innovation. So what advice would you give to your ecosystem partners about places that they can play, and a framework that they should think about where they should invest and add value without the fear of you consuming their value proposition. >> So it's kind of the ecosystem analog to the customer question that Rob asked. So the one that I would have for you John is, the promise is all about scale, and they've talked a lot about how software at scale has to turn into hardware. What will Amazon be in five years? Are they gonna be a hardware player on a global basis? Following his China question, are they gonna be a software management player on a global basis and are not gonna worry as much about who owns the underlying hardware? Because that opens up a lot of questions about maybe there is going to be a true private cloud option an AWS will just try to run on everything, and really be the multi cloud administrator across the board. The Cisco as opposed to the IBM in the internet transformation. Alright so let me summarize very quickly. Thank you very much all of you guys once again for joining us in our Action Item. So this week we talked about AWS re:Invent. We've done this for a couple of years now. theCUBE has gone up and done 30, 35, 40 interviews. We're really expanding our presence at AWS re:Invent this year. So our expectation is that Amazon has been a major player in the industry for quite some time. They have spearheaded the whole concept of infrastructure as a service in a way that, in many respects nobody ever expected. And they've done it so well and so successfully that they are having an enormous impact way beyond just infrastructure in the market place today. Our expectation is that this year at AWS re:Invent, we're gonna hear a lot about three things. Here's what we're looking for. First, is AWS as a provider of advanced artificial intelligence technologies that then get rendered in services for application developers, but also for infrastructure managers. AI for ITOM being for example a very practical way of envisioning how AI gets instantiated within the enterprise. The second one is AWS has had a significant migration as a service initiative underway for quite some time. But as we've argued in Wikibon research, that's very nice, but the reality is nobody wants to bond the database manager. They don't want to promise that the database manager's gonna come over. It's interesting to conceive of AWS starting to work with application players as a way of facilitating the process of bringing database interfaces over to AWS more successfully as an onboarding roadmap for enterprises that want to move some of their enterprise applications into the AWS domain. And we mentioned one in particular, SAP, that has an interesting potential here. The final one is we don't expect to see the kind of comprehensive Edge answers at this year's re:Invent. Instead our expectation is that we're gonna continue to see AWS provide services and capabilities through server-less, through other partnerships that allow AWS to be, or the cloud to be able to extend out to the Edge without necessarily putting out that comprehensive software stack as an appliance being moved through some technology suppliers. But certainly green grass, certainly server-less, lambda, and other technologies are gonna continue to be important. If we finalize overall what we think, one of the biggest plays is, we are especially intrigued by Amazon's continuing build out of what appears to be one of the world's fastest, most comprehensive networks, and their commitment to continue to do that. We think this is gonna have implications far beyond just how AWS addresses the Edge to overall how the industry ends up getting organized. So with that, once again thank you very much for enjoying Action Item, and participating, and we'll talk next week as we review some of the things that we heard at AWS. And we look forward to those further conversations with you. So from Peter Burris, the Wikibon team, SiliconANGLE, thank you very much and this has been Action Item. (funky electronic music)

hi everybody we are live at AWS reinvents in Las Vegas I'm Jeff Kelly with Wikibon org you're watching the cube silicon angles premiere live broadcast we go out to the technology events and as John foyer likes to say extract the signal from the noise so being here at the AWS show we were talk we're going to talk to a lot of AWS customers here a lot about what they're doing in in this case around analytics data warehousing and data integration so for this segment I'm joined by two customers Daniel heacock senior business systems analyst with a tix and Adam Cain's who's a data architect with federated sample welcome guys thanks for joining us on the cube Thanks your first time so we'll promise we'll make this as painless as possible so so you guys have a couple things in common we were talking beforehand some of the workflows are similar you work your you're using Amazon Web Services redshift platform for data warehousing you're using attunity for some of the data integration to bring that in from your for your operational transactional databases and using a bi tool on top to kind of tease out some of the insights from that data but why don't we get started Daniel we'll start with you tell us a little bit about etix kind of what you guys do and then we'll just kind of get into the use cases and talk to use AWS and the tuner need some of the other technologies you use it sure yeah so the company I work for is etix we are a primary market ticketing company in the entertainment industry we provide a box office solutions to venues and venue owners all types of events casinos fairs festivals pretty much you name and we sell some tickets in that industry we we provide a software solution that enables those menu owners to engage their customers and sell tickets so could kind of a competitor to something like ticketmaster the behemoth in the industry and you're definitely so Ticketmaster would be the behemoth in the industry and we are we consider ourselves a smaller sexier version that more friendly to the customer customer friendly more agile absolutely so Adam tell us a little bit about better a sample sure federated sample is a technology company in the market research industry and we aim to do is add an exchange layer between buyers and sellers so we facilitate the transaction between when a buyer or a company like coke would say hey we need to do a survey we will negotiate pricing and route our respondents to their surveys try to make that a more seamless process so they don't have to go out and find your very respond right everything online and right right absolutely got it so so let's talk a little bit about let's start with AWS so obviously we're here to reinvent a big show 9,000 people here so you guys you know talk about agile talk about cloud enabling kind of innovation and I'm gonna start with you what kind of brought you to AWS are you using red shift and I think you mentioned you're all in the cloud right just give us your impressions of the show in AWS and what that's meant your business right shows been great so far as to we were originally on-premise entirely at data center out in California and it just didn't meet our rapid growth we're a smaller company startup so we couldn't handle the growth so we need something more elastic more agile so we ended up moving our entire infrastructure into amazon web services so then we found that we had a need to actually perform analytics on that data and that's when we started the transition to you know redshift and so the idea being you're moving data from your transactional system which is also on AWS into redshift so using attunity for that they're clapping solution talk a little bit about that and and you know how that is differentiate from some of the other integration methods you could have chosen right so we started with a more conventional integration method a homegrown solution to move our data from our production sequel server into redshift and it worked but it was not optimal didn't have all the bells and whistles and it was prone to bad management being like not many people could configure it know how to use it so then we saw cloud being from attunity and they offered a native solution using secret survey replication that could tie into our native sequel server and then push that data directly into cloud being at a very fast rate so moving that data from from the sequel server it is essentially a real-time replication so that yes that's moving that data into redshifts of the year analysts can actually write when they're doing there the reporting or doing some real ad hoc kind of queries they can be confident they've got the most up-to-date data from your secret service right actual system right yeah nearly real-time and just to put in perspective the reports that we were running on our other system we're taking you know 10 15 minutes to run in redshift we're running those same reports in minutes 1 12 minutes right and if you're running those reports so quickly you know the people sometimes forget when you're talking about you know real time or interactive queries and reporting it's somewhat only as good as the data timeliness that you've got that you by Dave the timeless of the data you've got in that database because right trying to make some real-time decisions you've got a lag of depending on the workload and your use case even 15 minutes to an hour back might really impact you're ready to make those decisions so Adam talk a little bit about your use case is it is a similar cloud cloud architecture are you moving from upside Daniel moving from on-premise to so you're actually working with an on-premise data center it's an Oracle database and so we've basically we we ran into two limitations one regarding to our current reporting infrastructure and then to kind of our business intelligence capabilities and so as an analyst I've been kind of tasked with creating internal feedback loops within our organization as far as delivering certain types of KPIs and metrics to you know inform our our different teams or operations teams our marketing teams so that has been one of the kind of BI lms that we've been able to achieve because of the replication and the redshift and then the the other is actually making our reporting more I guess comprehensive we're able to run now that we're using redshift we're able to run reports that we were previously not be able to do to run on our on-premise transactional database so really we just are kind of embracing the power of redshift and it's enabling us and a lot of different types of ways yeah i mean we're hearing a lot about red shift at the show it's the amazon says the fastest-growing service AWS has had from a revenue perspective and it's six seven year history so clearly there's a lot of power in that platform it removes a lot of the concerns around having to manage that infrastructure obviously but the performance you know that's that's something I think when people are have their own data centers their own databases tuning those for the type of performance you're looking for is can be a challenge is that one of the drivers to kind of your move to redshift oh for sure the performance i I'm trying to think of a good example of a metric to compare but it's basically enabled us to develop a product or to develop products that would not have been possible otherwise there were certain i guess the ability to crunch data like you said in a specific time frame is very important for reporting purposes and if you're not able to meet a certain time frame then certain type of report is just not going to be useful so it's opening the door for new types of products within our organization well let's dig into that a little bit the different data types we're talking about so you've got a tea tix you're talking about customer transactions your custom are you talking about profiles of different types of customers tell us about some of the data sources that you're moving from your transactional system which i think is an Oracle database to to red shift and then you know what are some of those types of analytic workloads what kind of insights are you looking for sure so you know we're in the business of selling tickets and so one of our you know main concerns or I guess you should say we're in the business of helping our customers sell tickets and so we're always trying to figure out ways to improve their marketing efforts and so marketing segmentation is one of the huge ones appending data from large data services in order to get customer demographic information is something as you know easy to do in red shift and so we're able to use that information transaction information customer information I guess better engage our fans and likewise Adam could you maybe walk us through kind of a use case maybe your types of data you're looking at right that you're moving into red ship with attunity and then you know what kind of analytics are you doing on top of that what kind of insights are you gathering right so are our date is a little bit different than then ticketing but what we ultimately capture is is a respondent answers to questions so we try to find the value in a particular set of answers so we can determine the quality of the supply that's sent from suppliers so if they say that a person meets a certain demographic that we can actually verify that that person reads that demographic and then we can actually help them improve their supply that they push down to that respondent to it everybody makes more money because the completion rates go up so overall just business and analysis on that type of information so that we can help our customers and help ourselves so I wonder if we could talk a little bit about kind of the BI layer on top as well I think you're both using jaspersoft but you know beyond that you know one of the topics we've been covering on the cube another and on Wikibon is this whole analytics for all movement and we've been hearing about self service business intelligence for 20-plus years from some of the more incumbent vendors like business objects and cognos that others but really I mean if you look at a typical enterprise business intelligence usage or adoption rate kind of stalls out by eighteen percent twenty percent talk about how you've seen this kind of industry evolve a little bit maybe talk about jaspersoft specifically but what are some of the things that you think have to happen or some of the types of tools that are needed to really make business intelligence more consumable for analysts and more business use people who are not necessarily trained in statistics aren't data scientists Adam we start yes so one of the things that we're doing is with our jaspersoft we're trying to figure out you know certain we have a pis and we have traditional you know client server applications which ones our customers want to use the most because we're trying to push everybody towards an API oriented so we're trying to put that data into redshift with Jasper soft and kind of flip that data and look at it year-to-date or over a period of time to see where all of our money's coming from where others are rather than getting driven from and our business users are now empowered with jaspersoft to do that themselves they don't rely on us to pull data from they could just tie right into jaspersoft grab the data they need for whatever period of time they want and look at it in a nice pretty chart as a similar experience you're having any text definitely and I think one of the things I should emphasize about our use of Jasper's off and basically really any bi tool you choose to use in the Amazon platform is just the ability to launch it almost immediately and be able to play with data within 5-10 minutes of trying to launch it yeah it's pretty amazing what how quickly things can come from just a thought into action so well that's a good point because I mean you think about not just bitten telligence but the whole datawarehousing world it was you know the traditional method is you you know the business user a business unit goes to IT they say here are some of the requirements of the metrics we want on these reports IT then gun it goes away and builds it comes back six months later 12 months later here you go here's the report and next thing you know the business doesn't remember what they asked for this isn't necessarily going to serve our needs anymore and you've just essentially it's not a particularly useful model and Amazon really helps you kind of shorten that time frame significantly it sounds like between what you can do with redshift and some of their other database products and whatever bi to used to use is that kind of how you see this evolving oh definitely and the options I guess the the kind of plug and play workflow is is pretty pretty amazing and it's a it's given us the flexibility in our organization to be able to say well we can use this tool for now and there's a there's a chance we may decide there's something different in the future that we want to use and plugin in its place we're confident that that product will be there whenever the you know whenever the need is there right well that's the other thing you can you can start to use a tool and if it doesn't meet your need you can stop using it move to another tool so I think that puts you know vendors like jaspersoft than others puts them on their toes they've got to continually innovate and make their product useful otherwise you know they know that you know there were AWS customers can simply press the button stop using it press another button stop start using another tool so I think it's good in that sense but kind of you know when you talk about cloud and especially around data you get questions around privacy about data ownership who owns the data if it's in amazon's cloud is your data but you know it's on there in their data centers how do you feel about that Adam is there any concerns around either privacy or data ownership when it comes to using the cloud I mean you guys are all in in the cloud so right yeah so we've isolated a lot of our data into virtual private clouds so with that segment of the network we feel much more comfortable putting our data in a public space because we do feel like it's secure enough for our type of data so that was one of the major concerns up front but you know after talking with Amazon and going through the whole process of migrating to we kind of feel way more comfortable with that if you expand on that a little so you've got a private instance essentially in amazon's rep right so we have a private subnet so it's a segmented piece of their network that's just for us okay so we're not you can't access this publicly only within our VPN client or within our infrastructure itself so we're segmented we're away from that everybody else interesting so they offer that kind of type of service when there's more privacy concern as a security concern definitely and of course a lot depends on the type of data i mean how sensitive that data is if it you know but personally identifiable data obviously is going to be more sensitive than if it's just a general market data that anyone could potentially access daniel is we'll talk about your concerns around that or did you have concerns definitely a more of a governance people process question than a technology question I think well I definitely a technology question to a certain extent I mean as a as a transaction based business we were obviously very concerned with security and our CTO is very adamant about that and so that was one of the first first issues that we address whenever we decided to go this route and I'm obviously AWS has has taken all the precautions we have a very similar set up to what Adam is describing as far as our security we are very much confident that it is a very robust solution so looking forward how do you see your use of both the cloud and kind of analytics evolving you know one of the things we've been covering a lot is the as use case to get more complex your kind of you've got to orchestrate more data flows you've got to move data for more places you mentioned you're using attunity to do some of that replication from your transactional database and some red shift you know what are some of the other potential data integration challenges you see fate you see yourselves facing as you kind of potentially get more complex deployments we've got more data maybe you start using more services on Amazon how do you look to tackle some of those eight integration challenges let me start that's a good question one of the things we're trying to do inside of you know our organization is I guess bring data from all the different sources that we have together we have you know we use Salesforce for our sales team we collect information from MailChimp from our digital marketing agency that that we'd like to tile that information together and so that's something we're working on attunity has been a great help there and they're you know they're their product development as far as their capabilities of bringing in information from other sources is growing so that's a you know we're confident that the demand is there and that the product will develop as we as we move forward well I mean it's interesting that we've got you know you two gentlemen up here one with a kind of a on premise to cloud deployment and one all in the cloud so I'm clearly tuning you can kind of gap both those right on premise and cloud roll but also work in the cloud environment Adam when we if you could talk a little bit about how you see this kind of evolving as you get more complex maybe bring in more systems are you looking to bring in more data sources maybe even third-party data sources outside data sources how are you how do you look at this evolve right President Lee we do have a Mongo database so we have other sources that we're doing now there's talks of even trying to stick that in dynamo DB which is a reg amazon offering and that ties directly into redshift so we could load that data directly into that using that key pair or however we want to use that type of data data Mart but one of the things that we're trying to work out right now is just distribution and you know being agile you know elasticity which I work those issues with our growing database so so our database grows rather large each month so working on scalability is our primary focus but other data sources so we look into other database technologies that we can leverage in addition to sequel server to help distribute that load you so we've got time just for one more question I wonder I always like to ask when we get customers and users on if you can give some advice to other practitioners for watching so I mean if you can give one piece of advice to somebody who might be in your position they're looking at maybe they've got an on-premise data warehouse or maybe they're just trying to figure out a way to to get make better use of their data I mean what would the we the one thing would it be a technology piece of advice maybe you know looked at something like red shift or and solutions like attunity but maybe it would be more of a you know cultural question around the use of data and I'm I instead of making data-driven decisions but with that kind of one piece of ice big I could put you on the spot okay I would say don't try to do it yourself when the experts have done it for I couldn't put it any more simpler than that very succinct but very powerful but for me my biggest takeaway would be just redshift I was kind of apprehensive to use it at first I was so used to other technologies but we can do so much with redshift now add you know half the cost so your good works pretty compelling all right fantastic well Adam pains Daniel heacock thank you so much for joining us on the cube appreciate it we'll be right back with 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