(upbeat music) >> From Santa Clara, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering the Churchills, 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back here Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Chuchill's, it's the 9th annual award celebration put on by the Churchill club and the theme is all about leadership this year. We're really excited to have a very special guest John W. Thompson, chairman of Microsoft, a partner at Lightspeed Ventures, he's been around a long time. He's known and talks to a lot of leaders. So john, great to have you on. >> Nice to be here, thank you very much for having me. >> So leadership is such an interesting topic right? You go everything from, um, West point and trying to train young men to be leaders in a military situation to a start up that starts as some small company that had some interesting idea that grows to a huge corporate thing that's changing the world. Ya know, what are some of your thoughts as Silicon Valley is going through some hiccups right now and when you look, >> [John W. Thompson] We are? >> Just a couple little ones. >> I did recognize any of those. >> Well maybe not looking at the stock market. I don't know when that thing is coming back down. But you know when you think about leaders, what are somethings people maybe don't think about and really more interestingly how should people grow or what do you look for in a board member when you're talking to some CEO of a hot rising company? >> Well I think leadership is is as much about your personality and the business that use chose to go run is anything else. And the skills and experiences that someone might need to run a, pick a business, a business the size of Microsoft are fundamentally different than what you might need to run Rubrik, which is a company whose board I serve on. But that being said, leadership has some core principles that are critical independent of the size of the company or organization you're on. First of which is, integrity, second of which is focus, third of which is follow through and execution. There is lots of things that fundamental do and do well. And those who don't do well, don't become or stay leaders very long, that's for sure. >> It's interesting to look at Microsoft cause, ya know, three big personalities. Obviously Bill got it started as a young kid, I mean he was literally a kid in college. Um, then you had Steve Ballmer come in, completely different personalities and ya know, interesting for Bill to be willing to give up their reigns and then ya know, some tough times at Microsoft little bit stagnant and then Satya came in and just has supercharged and really driven a huge transformation in a giant big company. What are some of the attributes when you look at those three as leaders and you've worked with them, that make them so successful? >> Well, I think each of them brought something fundamentally different to the table when they were in the leadership role. In the case of Bill, he clearly was a visionary. He defined a point of view about the technology industry. That had he not done that, we wouldn't be where we are in the world today. And so, Bills role was unique. In the case of Steve, the company had hit a significant bump in the road all around the anti-trust activity. And candidly, it's my impression that Bill really didn't want to be involved in that, so he turned to Steve and says tag you're it. And Steve had a very fundamental view about execution. He was very much focus on execute, execute, execute. And if you look at the way the company preformed, its revenue grew from roughly ten, fifteen billion to almost eighty billion dollars during his term as CEO. However, the stock did not perform very well. So people weren't very happy with that. Ironically enough Satya come in, Satya had run the search business, had run the cloud business, had even run the enterprise software business. So he had a very fundamental view about of what he thought the company needed to do. And there were two issues, issues number one was strategy around cloud. And on the day of his announcement, he announced mobile first, cloud first are the strategies of Microsoft. And then he quickly, quickly made it clear that the number two issue, for the company, was about its culture. And while I am unbelievably fascinated by how much progress we've made on the product front, I'm even more encouraged by what has happened on the, candidly, on the cultural front. >> Right. So on the cultural front that is, are you a harder thing to impact especially on a large global company with hundreds of thousands of employees distributed all over the world, so what are the secrets that change culture like that? >> Its fundamental, it's about openness and honesty and candor. Um, one of the things that happens here in the valley, often for some companies is when they do their quarterly or monthly employee all hands meetings, guess what? They screen and filter all of the questions. Well, we don't do that at Microsoft office. Satya does not do that. He wants to be open and honest and candid with his employees with what's going on. My gosh! That's what real leaders do. And so I think what he has done is nothing that is unique, it's just consistent. He has been very very consistent and predictable in his execution of what openness, listening rather than talking, all of the things that good leaders are able to do. >> Right, its funny the one word you haven't said since we have been sitting here, you keep saying execution of focus, which I love focus execute and delight the customer. You haven't said strategy one single time. you said vision, but not strategy. Its interesting because I think a lot of people don't put enough emphasis on, its just work, you just got to execute. >> Its one thing to have a strategy, but if you can't execute the strategy, of what value is it? So I have always had a view in my roles as leader that it's about focus and executing. Yes, you have to come up with a vision and yes you have to create ideas that employees, and partners, and customers can become excited about. But ultimately it's about execution day in and day out. 368 days of the years, not 365. >> Alright, final question I know you've got a busy night. As you look as some leaders that you look up to, maybe not of this generation that you've been working with, but maybe of a past generation, who are some of the folks that you look to for your inspiration on the leadership side? >> Well, I would have to say the first one was the former vice chairman of IBM, who I was the chief of staff to many many many years ago. His name was Paul Rizzo. Paul was probably one of the most influential people in the company during that period of time, but you'd never know it. He had a level of humility about himself. He had a level of openness and candor in his interaction with employees at all levels up and down the line. And a company of IBM's size back in those days, it was two, three hundred thousand people big. And so he would be the first leader that comes to my mind as someone who was impactful on me. Another one would have been, a guy who created Akamai. He's on the board of Oracle and he's an awesome awesome friend of mine. He was the guy that ran the America's and gave me my first really really big job. And the fact that he was willing to give a guy like me a job like that, was a pretty important move. George Conrades is his name by the way. And so those two people were very very influential as leaders. As I would look at them and try to determine whether or not can I, can I pattern myself after that? Or are there things that they do and say and execute that I should consider as I think about my evolving leadership. >> Right so important to have people that you can look up to, learn from, and to take care of ya and help you along the way. >> [John W. Thompson] I agree >> John, thanks for spending some time it's always great to sit down with you >> Nice to see you as well. >> And continue success. We'll hopefully see you next time not to long from now. >> Lets hope not. >> Alright, he's John W. Thompson and I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching the Cube, were at the Churchill's in Santa Clara California. Thanks for watching we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the Cube covering E M C. World 2015. Brought to you by E. M. C Brocade and D. C. >> You're watching E m C World Live here on the Q. Looking Angles Flagship program. We go out to the event they start the season noise. I'm John Kerry of my coast Dude. Minutemen. Our next guest is a cube. Alumni have been on a cute many times before and back again. 2011 John Thompson is the CEO of Virtual Instruments and also the chairman of a company called Microsoft. Um, welcome back to the cubes. Nice to be about Great to see you in the A M World week didn't interview on Virtual Instruments with CEO, and we were really riffing on this whole idea of data instrumentation. And we it was really free Internet of things. So give us the update. What's going on with virtue Instruments here? I see Microsoft has a conference going on ignite. Even though you're chairman. The board. You're also the CEO of Virgin Instruments and you're gonna do some business here. What's going on? What business are you doing? Well, this is an important conference for virtual instruments. DMC is one of our strongest go to market partners, and candidly, many of their customers are virtual instruments customers. And so it's an opportunity for me to be here to spend time with our partners and our customers in one venue. Our business is doing quite well. We just had a very, very strong March quarter, which is always a little bit of a down quarter for most tech companies. But we were up 27 28% year over year for the calendar. Q. One so we feel pretty good about that. This is the most important quarter of the year, though, which is always the case in Texas. So we're hoping that we can knock the ball out of the park again this quarter. We launched our virtual wisdom for platform in the spring of last year, and it is gaining tremendous traction, certainly in the U. S. And around the globe. It is all about health utilization in performance of the infrastructure, and we've defined a model where you can look at an application inside that infrastructure, monitor its performance and its availability, and that idea is so critical in a world where everything will someday live in the cloud and will you will want to assure a level of performance and, quite frankly, a level of responsiveness to customers as they come on says it's a reset to share the folks out. This is not a new concept for you guys. We talked about this years ago. It's not like you woke up one boys. Hey, things is trendy. This data center in fermentation takes us quickly back. Where did it come from? Was an itch to scratch. What original product as you have and how does that morph into today's crazy, data driven world, where dash boring riel time is actually competitive advantage and now table stakes? Well, if you were to go back to the genesis of virtual instruments, we started as a small technology investment inside a larger company called Venice are that was trying to solve the inevitable performance problem in the fibre channel world. And as the market crashed in 7 4008 the team at Venice or had to decide, how are we gonna clean up our portfolio? And the result waas. They sold off the assets? Were we, in fact, created virtual instruments. So a small group of investors, led by Jim Davidson from Silver Lake and Michael Marks from Riverwood, helped to fund the original investment and virtual instruments. We've been at it now for about seven years. We have clearly evolved the product quite a bit since then, and we've captured a number of very, very strong venture capital investment so long away as we made the choice. That said, we need the shift from being a fiber channel company to be in an infrastructure performance management company because the inevitable movement to the cloud will drive an opportunity for us. Yeah, and you're a senior executive private equity. I mean, this is pretty much a big bet. There's a lot of money involved with private equity. So it wasn't like you're, like, throw in the Silicon Valley startup together. It was really like, Okay, there's big money behind it. Well, you guys, did you see it turning out this way? What? What was learning that have been magnified from that trajectory? Well, I think in the early days we thought the path was a little different than what we've actually followed. We thought the path waas that the fibre channel World was so big and it needed better visibility. This would in fact give the world better visibility in the fibre channel space. What we have observed, however, is that the entire infrastructure has become Maur and more opaque, and therefore you need to not just drive visibility in the storage layer, but across the entire converge staff. And so the platform that we have evolved is all about supporting this converged platform not just fibre Channel, but filed a storage not just VM where, but all virtualized server environments. And we believe that's, ah, multibillion dollar market. And that's why we were able to attract both private equity initially and venture capital later as we built out of product. It's interesting. You see some of these ideas come a come around full circle. I'm curious. Just in industry trend. Your your opinion on Veritas, you know, being spun out. It's it's It's both sad for me personally, but I think it speaks to how difficult the cultural integration might have been between the two companies. While I really had a vision back in the old four or five days of security and backup coming together, I think It was a really, really difficult thing to make happen in the context of what has evolved at Samantha, so the fact that they've chosen to spend it out, it's perhaps a little disappointing for me personally, but not a surprise. So what is your vision of security today? My understanding, You advise, even sit on the board of ah Lumia company. We've way we've talked to the company really, what's happening in security. So if you think about how security has evolved once upon a time, it was about protecting the device candidly and a cloud based world. It's going to be more about protecting the workloads as they move around. And that's one of the elements of what a lumia does, in fact, provide. Furthermore, I have believed for a very, very long time that as time goes on, security will have to get closer and closer to that which is deemed to be most critical. In other words, you can't protect all of the data. You can't protect all of the instances that air on the Web, but you can identify those that are most critical and therefore need a level of protection beyond what the standard would be. And so my belief is that companies like a Loom EO and others that will evolve will get closer to the workload, and we'll get closer to the data that's most critical. And so data classification and things of that nature will become much, much more important than they have. You're an investor in aluminum. You on the board are okay, so you're on the board of director and investor. We covered their launch. Great company. The cracking is low slides, as as Alan Cohen would say, they phenomenal funding round gone from stealth two years and now the big $100,000,000 really funding round massive guerrilla marketing. Still going on at the air say, was kind of clever. The perimeter lists cloud is a factor. And what tech enabled? Do you see the key thing? Alan Cohen described it as 1000 foot shoulds soldiers protecting assets because there's no more perimeter that no front door any more. What is the technology driver for that? Well, the whole idea behind the loom Eo, is to have a what I would call a portable policy enforcement engine that can move as the workload moves around the cloud. So policy management, security policy management has been a very, very difficult task for most large enterprises. So if I can define security policies for every server of where workloads can go to and from on that server and make sure that nothing violates that policy, hence I enforce it routinely. Oh, I can change. The dynamic of House security gets delivered in a cloud based world because no workload is gonna run in any single place on a cloud world. That workload is gonna move to where there is capacity to handle. I gotta ask you because we have a lot of people out there that follow tech business test tech athletes that you are. But also, you're a senior executive who has a lot of experience, and we could be presenting to Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School. I want to get your kind of business mind out to the audience. And that is, is that as an executive who's seen the big, big companies, the big battleships, the big aircraft carriers, from the IBM days to the M in a world of the nineties and the transformation of the Internet now in a complete shift, an inflection point with things like a Loom, Eo and Cloud and and Virtual instruments and the new Microsoft and the Silicon Angles and the crowd shots out there, What do you advise managers out there to operate from a management perspective. I mean, there's a classic business school numbers quarter on the challenges of going public, managing enormous dynamic technology change. So every theater is kind of exploding the technology theater, the business theater, the social theater as an executive. How would you advise someone as a CEO are rising growing startup how they should stitch themselves together? If you can draw in from previous experiences? Or is there a pattern recognition you can share? Well, it's It's never simply about the numbers, while the numbers air always important and the numbers will always be the underpinning of evaluation or whatever. In reality, it's about having a team that is able to rally around a leader with vision that says, Here's how we're gonna change the world. Here's how we're going to make an impact as this industry goes through, the natural inflection points that it always does. And if you look at what has occurred in this industry about every 8 to 10 years, something significant changes. And so a company that may have missed an opportunity six or eight years ago has another shot at it six or eight years later because of the inflection points that we go through. So it's important for the leader of a company toe. Believe that I can change the world based upon the industry that I'm a part of and have a compelling point of view about what changing the world means for that company and that team. And if you could get the team together around that idea, what about cloud and big data and mobile thes dynamics that you would? If someone just wants a roadmap for navigation or what decked me to go after, What would you say? What do you say? You know, get it all in the cloud or go poke at a duel are indeed new, agile management. Things were happening like, Well, I think it starts with what are the court confidence is that you have as a team or company, so you can't say g I'm gonna go and do cloud and oh, by the way, I have no confidence in the management infrastructure for large enterprises or I'm gonna go do mobile and I really have no experience in the mobile space whatsoever. So core competencies matter and leveraging the core strengths of the company matters now. Oftentimes, what companies will do its supplement their core strengths through M, and we'll go out and acquire something and bolted on the hard part of M and A, which is what we were referencing early around. Veritas is Can you integrate it? Can you really make it work after you bought it? Buying it is the easy part. Generating it and making it work is the really, really tough part. And arguably we didn't do is good a job as I would have liked with Samantha. And so basically you're saying is if you as an executive, you want to look at the winds of change for hand, get the sails up, if you will, to confuse the metaphor and get into that slipstream so you can actually drive and you can't. Being an amateur, you gotta actually have some competency. You have a leverage point. Look, one of the great things about this industry is it doesn't take some brilliant business leader to create a new idea. I mean, no one ever would have viewed Zucker Bird as a business leader or some of the young, really, really powerful CEO built phenomenal, phenomenal companies in this industry. But they had an idea, and they were able to create a team around that idea and go change the world. And that's what's so powerful about this industry that I've had the pleasure to be a part of for 40 some years. Yes. Speaking about CEOs that changed the industry, John Chambers announced that he's stepping aside from the CEO role this morning. So you know when you look back, you know John was one of the four horsemen of the Internet era and 20 years there. Chuck Robbins is coming in. He's been there since C. I think 97. What do you think of that move? And you know what's happening with Cisco in leadership for the big companies? Well, John's a really, really good friend, and I admire him for all of what he's done and Cisco and I wish him well as he makes this transition. Interestingly enough, the transition is to executive chairman, with the new CEO stepping in so What that says is that John plans that have a little more involvement, perhaps in what goes on in the company. Then I do it. Microsoft. My title is not executive chairman of Microsoft. Thank goodness I wouldn't want it to. But it also speaks to the fact that John spend the CEO. It just goes since 1995 like that. So he has an enormous amount of knowledge and insight about the company industry, its customers, partners, culture, all of those culture. And so all of those things will be valuable and important to the new CEO. And I think him stepping into that role is trying to leverage that. Cenedella came in and made his voice heard really instantly. And Microsoft has been a great company to watch, you know, since Auntie's came on board, you know, just Cisco need to make some bold moves or are they pretty stable where they are is kind of the dominant? That's a better question for John and CEO. I think what is clear is that all all companies, at some point after find a way to redefine and Sasha's role at Microsoft. He has redefined Microsoft as a cloud first mobile first, and that's all about recognizing. Were acts are gonna run on what devices and what kind of service is. And that redefinition, I think, is important for any industry leader, regardless of how long you just brought us to the tagline of this show, M C World is redefined. So any comments, How's the emcee doing it? Redefining themselves, I think the emcees a terrific company. Joe's a longtime friend of mine. I mean, I know Joe forever on. It's been amazing to see how it's gone from being a storage company to this federation of companies that have capabilities that are so broad and so diverse. I hope they don't get pushed to do something that isn't in the best interest of customers, but maybe enamored by some investors. The angel of the activist pressure. Yeah, that's always and that that's unfortunate, but I think they have a nice balance now. They have a huge installed base and this competitive pressure so they gotta push that. But I have to. I have to ask, is that? You know, I was getting some tweets earlier about Microsoft, and I know you, you know, you're only chairman of the board executive chairman. But you were involved in a very historic where you were on the executive search committee for the CEO replacement for Steve Balmer, of which they chose sake. Nutella Cube alumni We interviewed at the XL Partners Innovation Summit in Stanford that that's about culture. That's about transitions, about inflection points. And Sister used to mention Cisco. Not similar situation. But Microsoft is the legend company. I think the computer industry like an apple. Microsoft was their big part of the computer revolution. Big seismic changing. You were right there. Just share some color on what that whole experience like for you personally. And if you can share any insights to the audience, I know it's a sense might be sensitive topic. But what's that like? And, you know, the outcomes. Looking good. As he says, he's doing great. What? What can you share? Well, I think it would be fair to say that it was a more consuming process than I ever thought it would be. I went from being a new board member of Microsoft in the spring of 2012 to be in the lead independent director in the fall of 2012 to leading the search starting in the summer of 2013. I mean, I never could have imagine my involvement there changing that dramatically, Nor would I have imagined that searching for a CEO of a company would consume 80% of my time when I was also running a company. So for a period of about six months, it's like athlete right there. I had two full time jobs where I was on the phone all day, every day, trying to get something done for the eye and on the phone all day, every day, trying to get something done for Microsoft as well. It was, I would also have to say and incredibly incredibly exhilarating experience. I talked to some phenomenal leaders from around the world way had hard, long look anywhere we wanted at any CEO or candidate that we wanted, and we settled on someone who was a Tech athlete. We believe that the company was at a really, really important inflection point where over the course of the next 12 to 24 months, we're gonna have to make some really, really important technology decisions that would set the course from Microsoft for many, many years to come. And so, while there was much speculation in the press about this person or that person, and what a great business leader, that person waas What we, as a board concluded, was that what our company needed at that moment in time was a true technology visionary who could drive the strategy of the company because it had assets. I mean, they had a whole search thing that they quote missed on paper. But they had, like you said, they could come back at it again with being the subtle art of assets. Here, Cloud was built out. Everything was kind of like in place for that tech athlete on. And I think soccer has done an amazing job. I'm quite proud of them. I'm happy toe say I have some small part in that, but I'm or happy for the way he has executed in the job. I mean, he steps into the job with a level of humility but confidence that is so important for the CEO of a company of that size, and to maintain that cultural DNA because you have one of most competitive companies on the planet. A question to the point where they had to be almost broken up by the DOJ from the Bill Gates kind of DNA and bomber to continued, be competitive, live in this new era. Really tough challenge. Well, he's he's a bright guy. He, as I said, has great humility and has the respect of the team. And it's been interesting to see the internal shift behavior and attitude with a guy who I jokingly say he has two ears and one mouth and he uses them proportionately. And that's a very important lesson for someone trying to transform a company. You must listen more than you talk, and I think he does a great job. We try to do that. The Cuban we talk all day long way do interviews, but I gotta ask you back to virtual instruments. Okay, gets a good business going on with the emcee Goto partner about the anywhere in the federation of a partner with you as well, say, Is it all Federation? It's mostly through E M. C. And while the em wears of small V I customer, we don't do much with them on the go to market side on the go to market side. We rely more heavily, if you will. On AMC, that partnership has evolved. I mean, from the early days it was viewed as G. We're not sure who you are and what you do and whether or not you're competitive with us today, we have very, very common go to market processes around the globe. I'd love to see them stronger. I just left to cheese office in San GI Joe. We could doom. Or but when it's when it's all said and gone, this is one of the strongest go to market partners we have that's also shared the folks out there what they might not know about insurance, that you could share their hearing this now for the first time and working on the radar future of your business, your division product, extensive bility. Future of Internet of everything. Future Internet of things, whatever you want to put on a big data and the data center now, and the migration of cloud is all here. So at our core, we believe that every large enterprise will inevitably have some, if not all, of their work in the class. So the question is, how do you help them manage that inevitable migration to the cloud by de risking the migration and ensuring appropriate infrastructure performance management. Once you arrive there, we focus on the largest enterprises in the world. So unlike many tech startups, that will start with a midsize or small company and work their way up well, the largest banks in the universe, the largest insurance companies in the universe, the largest of every sector in the universe is a customer of the eye or will be someday. And that notion of solving very, very complex problems is something that our team has great pride in our ability to do that I want to get philosophical with you. You can for second kind of sit back and, you know, have a glass of wine and kind of talk to the younger generation out there with all your history on experience. How great of an opportunity for the young entrepreneurs and CEOs out there right now. Given the the confluence of the shift and inflection points, can you compare this to an error? We on the Cubes say It's like the PC revolution bundled in with the clients, terrorists and the Internet. All kind of at once do you agree? And would you say it? Guys, you have an amazing opportunity. Well, I think example of just how crazy it is. I I was driving to the airport this morning, and what I thought would be our long drive took two hours. Because there's so many people on the road in the Valley going to work. There's just so much going on in Silicon Valley right now. It is amazing. And for anyone who has a really, really great idea, the thing that's equally amazing is there's lots of capital out there to support those ideas. And so I would encourage any young entrepreneur who has a thought socialize your thought, Get it out so people can learn about it and then go get money to support and back that though. There's lots of money out there for good ideas. Lots of money. \ewelry officially taking the time coming out. Your busy schedule. CEO Virtual Instruments, chairman of Microsoft Here inside the Cube tech athletes is a big deal. You are one of the great great. Always have a conversation with you, sharing your thanks so much. Just the Cuban. Be right back with more insights and the signal from the noise at this short break

>> from Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's the Q covering the Churchills 2019 brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jefe Rick here with the Cube. We're in Santa Clara, California At the Churchills. It's the ninth annual kind of awards banquet at the Church O Club. It's on, and the theme this year is all about leadership. And we're excited to have not one of the winners, but one of the newest board members of the church, Oh, club. And someone is going to be interviewing some of the winners at a very many time. Cuba LEM Ray Wong, You know, from Constellation Research of founder, chief analyst >> and also >> a new board member for the Churchill Club Brigade, is >> also being back here. I love this event. There's one my favorite ones. You get to see all the cool interviews, >> right? So you're interviewing Grandstand from Pallet on for the life changer award. >> Yeah, so this is really incredible. I mean, this company has pretty much converge right. We're talking, It's media, It's sports, It's fitness. It's like social at the same time. And it's completely changed. So many people they've got more writers than soul cycle. Can you believe that? >> Yeah. I like to ride my bike outside, so I'm just not part of this whole thing. But I guess I guess on those bikes you can write anywhere >> you can write anywhere, anywhere with anyone. But it's not that. It's the classes, right? You basically hop on. You see the classes. People are actually pumping you up there. Okay, Go, go, go. You can see all the other riders are in the space. It's kind >> of >> addictive. Let's let's shift gears. Talk about leadership more generally, because things were a little rough right here in the Valley right now. And people are taking some hits and black eyes. You talk to a lot of leaders. She go to a tonic, shows you got more shows. A. We go to talk to a lot of CEOs when you kind of take a step back about what makes a good leader, what doesn't make a good leader? What are some of the things that jump into your head? >> You know, we really think about a dynamic leadership model. It's something conceit on my Twitter handle. It's basically the fact that you got a balance. All these different traits. Leaders have to perform in different ways in different situation. Something like Oh, wow, that's a general. They've done a great job commanding leadership. Other times we had individuals, a wonderful, empathetic leader, right? There's a balance between those types of traits that have to happen, and they curve like seven different dimensions and each of these dimensions. It's like sometimes you're gonna have to be more empathetic. Sometimes you got to be more realistic. Sometimes you're going to be harder. And I think right now we have this challenge because there's a certain style that's being imposed on all the leaders that might not be correct >> theater thing. The hypothesis for you to think about is, you know, when a lot of these people start the Silicon Valley companies the classic. It's not like they went to P and G and work their way up through the ranks. You know, they started a company, it was cool. And suddenly boom. You know, they get hundreds of millions of dollars, the I po and now you've got platforms that are impacting geopolitical things all over the world. They didn't necessarily sign up for that. That's not necessarily what they wanted to do, and they might not be qualified. So, you know, Is it? Is it fair to expect the leader of a tech company that just built some cool app that suddenly grew into, ah, ubiquitous platform over the world that many, many types of people are using for good and bad to suddenly be responsible? That's really interesting situation for these people. >> Well, that's what we talked about the need for responsive and responsible leadership. Those are two different types of traits. Look, the founding individual might not be the right person to do that, but they can surround themselves with team members that can do that. That could make sure that they're being responsive or responsible, depending on what's required for each of those traits. You know, great examples like that Black Mirror episode where you see the guru of, like, some slasher meet a guy. Some guys like Colin is like, you know, he wants to make sure that you know someone's paying attention to him. Well, the thing is like a lot of times, at least folks are surrounded by people that don't have that empathetic You might not have had what a founder is looking at, or it could be the flip side. The founder might not be empathetic. They're just gung ho, right, ready to build out the next set of features and capabilities that they wanted to d'oh! And they need that empathy that's around there. So I think we're going to start to see that mix and blend. But it's hard, right? I mean, going through a start up as a CEO and founder is very, very different than coming in through the corporate ranks. There's a >> very good running a company, you know. It's funny again. You go to a lot of shows. We get a lot of shows, a lot of key, knows a lot of CEO keynotes, and it's just interesting. Some people just seem to have that It factor one that jumps off the top is Dobie. You know, some people just seemed >> like the have it >> where they can get people to follow, and it's it's really weird. We just said John W. Thompson, on talking about Sathya changing the culture at Microsoft, with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of employees distributed all over the world. What a creative and amazing job to be able to turn that ship. >> Oh, it is. I mean, I can turn on the charm and just, like, get your view Lee excited about something just like that, right? And it's also about making sure you bring in the input and make people feel that they're inclusive. But you gotta make decisions at some point, too. Sometimes you have to make the tough choices. You cut out products, you cut out certain types of policies, or sometimes you gotta be much more responsive to customers. Right? Might look like you're eating crow. But you know what? At the inn today, cos they're really built around customers or state Kohler's stay close air bigger today than just shareholders. >> Right. Last question. Churchill Club. How'd you get involved? What makes you excited to jump on board? >> You know, this is like an institution for the valley, right? This is you know, if you think about like the top interviews, right? If you think about the top conversations, the interesting moments in the Valley, they've all happened here. And it's really about making sure that you know, the people that I know the people that you know there's an opportunity to re create that for the next set of generations. I remember coming here when it's like I go back, I think give Hey, just I don't hear anybody in 96 right? And just thinking like, Hey, what were the cool activities? What were the interesting conversations and the church? The club was definitely one of those, and it's time to give back. >> Very good. All right, well, congrats on that on that new assignment. And good luck with the interview tonight. Hey, thanks a lot. All right. He's Ray. I'm Jeff. You wanted the Cube with that? Churchill's in Santa Clara, California. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: From Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering the Churchills 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Santa Clara, California at the ninth annual Churchills. It's an awards banquet put on by the Churchill Club and this year's theme is all about leadership and we're excited to have with us today the MC, he's Rich Karlgaard, the co-founder of the Churchill Club and also a publisher at Forbes. Rich, thanks for stopping by. >> Oh, it's an honor to be here, Jeff. >> So, busy night tonight. The theme is leadership, but we've been suffering a little bit of a black eye on leadership lately in the tech scene in Silicon Valley. >> Well, I really think we have. I travel the world a lot and around the United States and I have to say that large parts of the world and the United States are falling out of love with Silicon Valley. And I think that's directly attributable to some of the companies and some of the leaders who are maybe moving so fast that they're forgetting to do the right things for customers, for employees, and for their community at large. >> Yeah, I'm wondering, get your take, a lot of these guys and gals become successful for a whole bunch of reasons, right? and they happen to be at the top of a company. I'll just pick on Zuckerberg 'cause he's easy to pick on. But you know, he had an application, it was about getting people together, and suddenly these platforms get so big and so ubiquitous, you know, is he the right guy? He never signed up to be the leader of the platform world, and yet he's kind of put in that position. We see that kind of with YouTube, because again, the platform is so big and I think it almost feels like it grows beyond the tentacles of the control. >> Well, it remains to be seen if Mark Zuckerberg is the right guy. I think of somebody from more my era, Bill Gates. And Bill Gates was a fabulous leader of Microsoft, but they ran too fast, they ran too hard, they got in trouble with the U.S. Department of Justice, and Bill Gates ended up resigning from Microsoft. And he served as a great board member of Microsoft ever since, was instrumental, along with John Thompson, the board chairman who will be honored tonight, in bringing in the person I think is the best CEO in the world today, Satya Nadella of Microsoft. Sometimes you have to hand the baton. >> Right, right. But are there some lessons that people should be thinking about when they're maybe thrust into this position that they weren't necessarily ready for? I mean, one thing about Gates is he gave up his CEO job pretty early to Ballmer, arguably whether that was super successful or not. But some of them kind of get out of the way and some of them don't. And they don't necessarily have the skills to take on some of these huge kind of geopolitical, socioeconomic issues. >> Well I think that's right. Another example, Larry Ellison led the brilliant early days of Oracle but when he got in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission, he had to really make way for a strong number two, Ray Lane, and that turned out to be the perfect complement, you see. You had Ellison's vision and drive but you had Lane's ability to run really good operations. Steve Jobs never got into trouble but having a really solid number two like Tim Cook was very valuable. So some of these brilliant entrepreneurs need solid number two's, so I think they have lieutenants but I don't think they have really solid number two's. >> So what are you excited about tonight? We got some really great people, you already mentioned John W. Thompson, we've had him on a ton of times, great leader. Who are some of the people you're excited to see tonight? >> Well, we have three great companies, we have Slack, Zoom, and my personal favorite, Peloton. I'm kind of lusting for a Peloton bike in my garage. I hope it arrives under the Christmas tree this year. >> (laughs) All right, Rich. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes and good luck tonight on the MC duties. >> Yeah, well, thank you Jeff. >> All right, he's Rich, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're at the Churchills, the ninth annual awards banquet here with the Churchill Club. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018 brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. >> And we are back live here at Dell Technologies World 2018. We're at the Sands this week. Day one of three days of coverage here on the CUBE. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, and this is really kind of the John segment, if you will. Got John Grieco and Jon Siegal with us. John Grieco is the CTO of the University of Vermont Health Network. John, good to see you, sir. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> John W.: You bet, and Jon Siegal, VP of product marketing at Dell EMC. Jon, pleasure to have you aboard as well. >> Glad to be here again. >> Alright, let's talk about the university, if you will. I can imagine health, obviously, critical data. What's your data center environment like and how's cloud playing into that? >> Yeah, right now we are a seven hospital system with seven data centers managed by seven different IT organizations. So the role I have is really how do we take those >> John W.: You still have hair too, by the way. >> I do, but every day it's getting thinner and thinner. And I'm going to be able to tell with these cameras I hear. But what we're trying to do is really start working as one cohesive system. Give the patient the same experience as they travel through our system, and how do we do that with technology? And what we're trying to do is really simplify and standardize everything we do. Consolidate and centralize our data centers. So we're going from a seven data center infrastructure growth to a two data center platform, one in New York and one in Vermont. But most likely over time, pushing as many of our workloads to the cloud. Really creating that triangle, where you have your private cloud that has rigor and resilience with our clinical most critical workloads close to our IT shop, and we leverage a lot of the nontrivial nonvalue add applications into the cloud. >> John, you threw out a term, private cloud. >> Yes. >> Can you help define for us what that means to your organization? >> Absolutely. It's just like a public cloud, like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft Azure, but you're doing it in your local data center itself. So what we're doing at the University of Vermont Health Network is we're trying to make our private cloud that's local in our data centers act and become more of a private cloud look and feel. We understand that many of our users are leveraging the public cloud, even in their home use. So how do we bring some of that into the private data center that we own and manage, but give our users the look and feel of that public cloud? >> Alright, Jon Siegal, you chuckled a little bit when I said private cloud. It's one of those things we've debated for awhile. We don't need to get into semantics, but underneath Dell EMC provides some of the infrastructure, the platform for those. Maybe give us a little bit of insight as to what are doing there. >> Yeah, as you know, as we've talked about before, cloud is an operating model, right? Not a place. And I think John, and what he's done at the University of Vermont Health Network, really I think shows that. And it takes a change agent, by the way, too, not just technology to do that, I think. You know, he's making it sound easy, but he can tell us a little bit how he's done that. But it's a combination of technology, how you modernize the infrastructure, but also, what are you doing to actually transform that organization to deliver IT as a service. Right, because it's not just a plug and play. You just, you know, plug in a new infrastructure product line and then boom, it works, right? It's not that simple. >> Absolutely. We want to really put a lot of our IT talent into what I call above the value line. In my business, it's closer to the bedside. The new IT is really enabling the business to provide, in my business, better care. So how do we get them out of the data center per se and into the business to enable what they do each and every day? The way we do that is really standardizing on a ruthless infrastructure like Block, Rack, and Rail, and on top of that, automating everything we do within IT from a workflow perspective. >> Give me an example, a real world example. 'Cause you're talking about the patient experience. You have seven hospitals, seven data centers, seven sets of patients, if you will. But are you talking about as people migrate from one healthcare facility to another, something's not going with them or what exactly are you trying to improve in terms of real life care for people that this migration's going to let you facilitate? >> Absolutely. On one of our converged platforms, we're running a vendor neutral archive, and it's going to allow our patients, anytime we have them scan an image, it immediately goes to a central repository where any one of our hospitals can then take a look at that image. And what you're going to see over time is specializing our seven hospitals into certain treatments. So if we have a radiology department that we want to spend send some of our patients to, we want to make sure that they have the data and are reading that data before the patient's there. So the ability to take the image once and read the image while our patient is in transit to get that care. So when they arrive at that hospital, we are ready to take on that patient and immediately provide them the care they're there for. Running on one platform, sharing that platform across our seven hospital system. >> And so what currently happens? What's the situation now for a patient? >> Right now a patient would get an image at one hospital, travel to the other hospital. The image would not be there. We would then retake another image at that hospital, and go through the same exercise. So not only is the patient there when they don't want to, but we're going through repetitive questions and answering. >> John W.: Same song and dance. >> And the outcome is a negative patient experience, which we're avoiding through IT. >> You threw out Blocks, Rails, and Racks. I recognize those as the Dell EMC products. What does hyper converged infrastructure, converged infrastructure, you know, how does that impact what you're doing? And if I saw right, you use some of each, so how do you sort that out? You know, how do you integrate those pieces together? >> Really what drives is the requirements of the applications you're managing. So we do a deep dive with the applications we take in and we decide, based on the requirements of that application, which of those three platforms run the best. What I've seen is a lot of our critical mission, critical have to keep up 24/7 365 workloads, we are leveraging the VX Block for a lot of that. We're seeing a lot of those medium to low-end workloads on Rack or Rail, where we have the ability to really scale out quick and dynamically with those smaller type applications that are mini in size, where we're trying to standardize with our clinical ones more on our Block. So really the application requirement drives where that application sits in our environment. >> Alright, so Jon, how do customers like John you know manage that, this environment then? We want things to get simpler and, you know, even if they've got some various products of yours, how do we pull them all together? >> Well, as you know, I think the promise of converge and hyper converge is to simplify IT, right? And I think this is what you're seeing here, so. A lot of it is automating everything, or at least helping to really simplify everything from deployment, right, to managing the entire infrastructure as one. As well as sustaining it and life cycle managing it as one as well, right? And actually simplifying the upgrade path because I think that's, that can be the most time consuming thing, right? But that's the promise of converged infrastructure. Seven or eight years ago when we came out with VX Block or V Block at the time, it was about, how do we help customers like you get out of the infrastructure business day to day, the mundane business if you will? So you can spend more time, really upleveling your staff to do other more business critical and mission critical tasks. Is that fair? >> It is. We have to. I think we're being asked to move the needle within the business. As Michael Dell says, the business strategy really is the IT strategy. And for that to happen, we really have to bring our IT talent up the stack into where it's really enabling the business. And that's usually at that application layer, not at that infrastructure. We want to leverage our partners, like Dell Technologies, and their technology, to really run the business for us while our IT is more in the transfer informative, innovative and growth of that business. >> Alright. So I loved that you started out with seven data centers and the seven and seven and seven. What's the after state? You know, how does your IT team, you know, look at your operations and your technology? >> What we're doing is we're trying to create one shared service model. Even though we'll have people sitting at the seven hospitals, we are all working in unison. We're all leveraging the same workflows, the same technology, the same skill set. So in essence, we become a dynamic IT shop that I can leverage wherever there's a need. I can take IT personnel and have them move to another and it's the same look and feel. Just like the experience we want to give our users, the same look and feel as they travel, we want to do the same for IT. One logical shared service vision of a department that offers services to our hospitals that they consume, all like for like. >> And Jon just touched on this. He was talking about the mundane, right? And removing that and letting you basically to get a little more creative, but I think take on a different set of challenges. So how do you work with your staff in order to get them to change that mindset so that they can shift? Because it's not just you at the top, you've got to plant this vision, right, for people. So I'm taking this away from you, this is what I do. But now we're going to take what you know and we're going to let you do something else. But you got to get 'em there. So for people maybe watching that share that challenge, maybe, what would you say to them about how you've done that? >> Well as Jon mentioned, you need a change agent, you need a champion, most likely at the senior level, that's going to really ride through this journey, through the ebbs and flows of the challenges you have to deal with. And when you look at people, process, technology, as you mentioned, changing the mind of a person is probably the hardest thing to do of the three. But what we're trying to do is really change one mind at a time. If I can change one mind at a time persistently as a champion of where we're going, and answer the why and the awareness and the desire of someone wanting to go on that journey with us, on behalf of that patient, each and every day is how we're going to do it. Case by case, opportunity by opportunity, mind by mind. We will eventually get them to look at what we're doing and understand this is where I want IT to be. That's how we're going to do it at the University. >> I think the University of Vermont has the right guy for the job. >> Thank you. >> John, thank you for being, John, and Jon, both of you. Thank you for being with us here. We appreciate the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Yeah, and good luck down the road. Well that's it, wrapping up our coverage here on the CUBE. Thanks for joining us for day one. We are back tomorrow. Days two and three, live here at the Sands. Until then, for Stu Miniman and the rest of our CUBE crew, have a good night. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and it's partner ecosystem. >> Welcome back, live here on theCUBE along with John Furrier, I'm John Walls. Welcome to AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Again, live from Washington, D.C., your nation's capital, our nation's capital. With us now is our host for the week, puts on one heck of a show, I'm want to tell you, 10,000 strong here, jammed into the Washington Convention Center, Theresa Carlson from World Wide Public Sector. Nice to have you here, Theresa. >> Hi, good afternoon. >> Thanks for joining us. >> Love theCUBE and thank you for being here with us today. >> Absolutely. >> All week in fact. >> It's been great, it really has. Let's just talk about the show first off. Way back, six years ago, we could probably get everybody there jammed into our little area here, just about I think. >> Pretty much. >> Hard to do today. >> That's right. >> How do you feel about when you've seen this kind of growth not only of the show, but in your sector in general? >> I think at AWS we're humbled and excited and, on a personal level because I was sort of given the charge of go create this Public Sector business world-wide, I'm blown away, I pinch myself every time because you did hear my story. The first event, we had about 50 people in the basement of some hotel. And then, we're like, okay. And today, 10,000 people. Last year we had it at the Marriott Wardman Park and we shut down Connecticut Avenue so we knew we needed to make a change. (laughing) But it's great, this is really about our customers and partners. This is really for them. It's for them to make connections, share, and the whole theme of this is superheroes and they are our superheroes. >> One of the heroes you had on the stage today, John Edwards from the CIA, one of your poster-children if you will for great success and that kind of collaboration, said something to the effect of quote, "The best decision we ever made at the CIA "was engaging with AWS in that partnership." When you hear something like that from such a treasured partner, you got to feel pretty good. >> You just have to drop the microphone, boom, and you're sort of done. They are doing amazing work and their innovation levels are really leading, I would say, in the US Public Sector for sure and also, not just in US Public Sector but around the world. Their efforts of what they're doing and the scale and reach at which they're doing it so that's pretty cool. >> John, you've talked about the CIA moment, I'd like to hear the story, share with Theresa. >> Oh, you're going to steal my thunder here? >> No, I'm setting you up. That's what a good partner does. It's all yours. >> Well, John, we've talked multiple times already so I'll say it for the third time. The shot heard around the cloud was my definition of seminal moment, in big mega-trends there's always a moment. It was when Obama tweeted, Twitter grew, plane landing on the Hudson, there's always a seminal moment in major trends that make or break companies. For you guys, it was the CIA. Since then, it's just been a massive growth for you guys. That deal was interesting because it validated Shadow IT, validated the cloud, and it also unseated IBM, the behemoth sales organization that owned the account. In a way, a lot of things lined up. Take us through what's happened then, and since then to now. >> Well, you saw between yesterday at Werner Vogels' keynote and my keynote this morning, just the breadth and depth of the type of customers we have. Everything from the UK government, GCHQ, the Department of Justice with the IT in the UK, to the centers for Medicare for HHS, to amazing educational companies, Cal. Polytech., Australian Tax Office. That's just the breadth and depth of the type of customers we have and all of their stories were impactful, every story is impactful in their own way and across whatever sector they have. That really just tells you that the type of workloads that people are running has evolved because I remember in the early days, when you and I first talked, we talked about what are the kind of workloads and we were talking a little bit about website hosting. That's, of course, really evolved into things like machine learning, artificial intelligence, a massive scale of applications. >> Five or six years ago when we first chatted at re:Invent, it's interesting 'cause now this is the size of re:Invent what it was then so you're on a same trajectory from a show size. Again, validation to the growth in Public Sector. But I was complimenting you on our opening today, saying that you're tenacious because we've talked early days, it was a slog in the early days to get going in the cloud, you were knocking on a lot of doors, convincing people, hey, the future's going to look his way and I don't want to say they slammed the proverbial door in your face but it was more of, woah, they don't believe the cloud is ever going to happen for the government. Share some of those stories because now, looking back, obviously the world has changed. >> It has and, in fact, it's changed in many aspects of it, from policy makers, which I think would be great for you all to have on here sometime to get their perspective on cloud, but policy makers who are now thinking about, we just had a new modernization of IT mandate come out in the US Federal Government where they're going to give millions and millions of dollars toward the modernization of IT for US Government agencies which is going to be huge. That's the first time that's ever happened. To an executive order around cyber-security which is pretty much mandated to look at cloud and how you use it. You're seeing thing like that to even how grants are given where it used to be an old-school model of hardware only to now use cloud. Those ideas and aspects of how individuals are using IT but also just the procurements that are coming out. The buying vehicles that you're seeing come out of government, almost all of them have cloud now. >> John and I were talking about D.C. and the political climate. Obviously, we always talk about it on my show, comment on that. But, interesting, theCUBE, we could do damage here in D.C.. So much target-rich environment for content but more than ever, to me, is the tech scene here is really intrinsically different. For example, this is not a shiny new toy kind of trend, it is a fundamental transformation of the business model. What's interesting to me is, again, since the CIA shot heard around the cloud moment, you've seen a real shift in operating model. So the question I have for you, Theresa, if you can comment on this is: how has that changed? How has the procuring of technology changed? How has he human side of it changed? Because people want to do a good job, they're just on minicomputers and mainframes from the old days with small incremental improvement over the years in IT but now to a fundamental, agile, there's going to be more apps, more action. >> You said something really important just a moment ago, this is a different kind of group than you'll get in Silicon Valley and it is but it's very enterprise. Everybody you see here, every project they work on, we're talking DoD, the enterprise of enterprises. They have really challenging and tough problems to solve every day. How that's changed, in the old days here in government, they know how to write acquisitions for a missile or a tank or something really big in IT. What's changing is their ability to write acquisitions for agile IT, things like cloud utility based models, moving fast, flywheel approach to IT acquisitions. That's what's changing, that kind of acquisition model. Also, you're seeing the system integrator community here change. Where they were, what I call, body shops to do a lot of these projects, they're having to evolve their IT skills, they're getting much more certified in areas of AWS, at the system admin to certified solution architects at the highest level, to really roll these projects out. So training, education, the type of acquisition, and how they're doing it. >> What happened in terms of paradigm shift, mindset? Something had to happen 'cause you brought a vision to the table but somebody had to buy it. Usually, when we talk about legacy systems, it was a legacy mindset too, resistant, reluctant, cautious, all those things. >> Theresa: Well, everything gets thrown out. >> What happened? Where did it tip the other way? Where did it go? >> I think, over time, it's different parts of the government but culture is the hardest thing to, always, change. Other elements of any changes, you get there, but culture is fundamentally the hardest thing. You're seeing that. You've always heard us say, you can't fight gravity, and cloud is the new normal. That's for the whole culture. People are like, I cannot do my project anymore without the use of cloud computing. >> We also have a saying, you can't fight fashion either, and sometimes being in fashion is what the trends are going on. So I got to ask you, what is the fashion statement in cloud these days with your customers? Is it, you mentioned there, moving much down in the workload, is it multi-cloud? Is it analytics? Where's the fashionable, cool action right now? >> I think, here, right now, the cool thing that people really are talking about are artificial intelligence and machine learning, how they take advantage of that. You heard a lot about recognition yesterday, Poly and Lex, these new tools how they are so differentiating anything that they can possibly develop quickly. It's those kind of tools that really we're hearing and of course, IOT for state and local is a big deal. >> I got to ask you the hard question, I always ask Andy a hard question too, if he's watching, you're going to get this one probably at re:Invent. Amazon is a devops culture, you ship code fast and you make all these updates and it's moving very, very fast. One of the things that you guys have done well, but I still think you need some work to do in terms of critical analysis, is getting the releases out that are on public cloud into the GovCloud. You guys have shortened that down to less than a year on most things. You got the east region now rolled out so full disaster recovery but government has always been lagging behind most commercial. How are you guys shrinking that window? When do you see the day when push button commercial, GovCloud are all lockstep and pushing code to both clouds? >> We could do that today but there's a couple of big differentiators that are important for the GovCloud. That is it requires US citizenship, which as you know, we've talked about the challenges of technology and skills. That's just out there, right? At Amazon Web Services, we're a very diverse company, a group of individuals that do our coding and development, and not all of them are US citizens. So for these two clouds, you have to be a US citizen so that is an inhibitor. >> In terms of developers? In terms of building the product? >> Not building but the management aspect. Because of their design, we have multiple individuals managing multiple clouds, right? Now, with us, it's about getting that scale going, that flywheel for us. >> So now it's going to be managed in the USA versus made in the USA with everything as a service. >> Yeah, it is. For us, it's about making sure, number one, we can roll them out, but secondly, we do not want to roll services into those clouds unless they are critical. We are moving a lot faster, we rolled in a lot more services, and the other cool thing is we're starting to do some unique things for our GovCloud regions which, maybe the next time, we can talk a little bit more about those things. >> Final question for me, and let John jump in, the CIA has got this devops factory thing, I want you to talk about it because I think it points to the trend that's encouraging to me at least 'cause I'm skeptical on government, as you know. But this is a full transformation shift on how they do development. Talk about these 4000 developers that got rid of their development workstations, are now doing cloud, and the question is, who else is doing it? Is this a trend that you see happening across other agencies? >> The reason that's really important, I know you know, in the old-school model, you waited forever to provision anything, even just to do development, and you heard John talk about that. That's what he meant on this sort of workstation, this long period of time it took for them to do any kind of development. Now, what they do is they just use any move they have and they go and they provision the cloud like that. Then, they can also not just do that, they can create armies of cores or Amazon machine images so they have super-repeatable tools. Think about that. When you have these super-repeatable tools sitting in the cloud, that you can just pull down these machine images and begin to create both code and development and build off those building blocks, you move so much faster than you did in the past. So that's sort of a big trend, I would say they're definitely leading it. But other key groups are NASA, HHS, Department of Justice. Those are some of the key, big groups that we're seeing really do a lot changes in their dev. >> I got to ask you about the-- >> Oh, I have to say DHS, also DHS on customs and border patrols, they're doing the same, really innovators. >> One of the things that's happening which I'm intrigued by is the whole digital transformation in our culture, right, society. Certainly, the Federal Government wants to take care of the civil liberties of the citizens. So it's not a privacy question, it's more about where smart cities is going. We're starting to see, I call, the digital parks, if you will, where you're starting to see a digital park go into Yosemite and camping out and using pristine resources and enjoying them. There's a demand for citizens to democratize resources available to them, supercomputing or datasets, what's your philosophy on that? What is Amazon doing to facilitate and accelerate the citizen's value of technology so it can be in the hands of anyone? >> I love that question because I'll tell you, at the heart of our business is what we call citizen service, paving the way for disruptive innovation, making the world a better place. That's through citizen's services and they're access. For us, we have multiple things. Everything from our dataset program, where we fund multiple datasets that we put up on the cloud and let everybody take advantage of them, from the individual student to the researcher, for no fee. >> John F.: You pick up the cost on that? >> We do, we fund, we put those datasets in completely, we allow them to go and explore and use. The only time they would ever pay is if they go off and start creating their own systems. The most highly curated datasets up there right now are pretty much on AWS. You heard me talk about the earth, through AWS Earth that we have that shows the earth. We have weather datasets, cancer datasets, we're working with so many groups, genomic, phenotypes, genomes of rice, the rice genome that we've done. >> So this is something that you see that you're behind, >> Oh, completely. >> you're passionate about and will continue to do? >> Because you never know when that individual student or small community school is out there and they can access tools that they never could've accessed before. The training and education, that creativity of the mind, we need to open that up to everybody and we fundamentally believe that cloud is a huge opportunity for that. You heard me tell the 1000 genomes story in the past of where took that cancer dataset or that genome dataset from NIH, put it into AWS for the first time, the first week we put it up we had 3200 new researchers crowdsource on that dataset. That was the first time, that I know of, that anyone had put up a major dataset for researchers. >> And the scale, certainly, is a great resource. And smart cities is an interesting area. I want to get your thoughts on your relationship with Intel. They have 5G coming out, they have a full network transformation, you're going to have autonomous vehicles out there, you're going to have all kinds of digital. How are you guys planning on powering the cloud and what's the role that Intel will play with you guys in the relationship? >> Of course, serverless computing comes into play significantly in areas like that because you want to create efficiencies, even in the cloud, we're all about that. People have always said, oh, AWS won't do that 'cause that's disrupting themselves. We're okay with disrupting ourselves if it's the right thing. We also don't want to hog resourcing of these tools that aren't necessary. So when it comes to devices like that and IOT, you need very efficient computing and you need tools that allow that efficient computing to both scale but not over-resource things. You'll see us continue to have models like that around IOT, or lambda, or serverless computing and how we access and make sure that those resources are used appropriately. >> We're almost out of time so I'd like to shift over if we can. Really impressed with the NGO work, the non-profit work as well and your work in the education space. Just talk about the nuance, differences between working with those particular constituents in the customer base, what you've learned and the kind of work you're providing in those silos right now. >> They are amazing, they are so frugal with their resources and it makes you hungry to really want to go out and help their mission because what you will find when you go meet with a lot of these not-for-profits, they are doing some of the most amazing work that even many people have really not heard of and they're being so frugal with how they resource and drive IT. There's a program called Feed the World and I met the developer of this and it's like two people. They've fed millions of people around the world with like three developers and creating an app and doing great work. To everything from like the American Heart Association that has a mission, literally, of stopping heart disease which is our number one killer around the world. When you meet them and you see the things they're doing and how they are using cloud computing to change and forward their mission. You heard us talk about human trafficking, it's a horrible, misunderstood environment out there that more of us need to be informed on and help with but computing can be a complete differentiator for them, cloud computing. We give millions of dollars of grants away, not just give away, we help them. We help them with the technical resourcing, how they're efficient, and we work really hard to try to help forward their mission and get the word out. It's humbling and it's really nice to feel that you're not only doing things for big governments but you also can help that individual not-for-profit that has a mission that's really important to not only them but groups in the world. >> It's a different level of citizen service, right? I mean, ocean conservancy this morning, talking about that and tidal change. >> What's the biggest thing that, in your mind, personal question, obviously you've been through from the beginning to now, a lot more growth ahead of you. I'm speculating that AWS Public Sector, although you won't disclose the numbers, I'll find a number out there. It's big, you guys could run the table and take a big share, similar to what you've done with startup and now enterprise market. Do you have a pinch-me moment where you go, where are we? Where are you on that spectrum of self-awareness of what's actually happening to you and this world and your team? In Public Sector, we operate just like all of AWS and all of Amazon. We really have treated this business like a startup and I create new teams just like everybody else does. I make them frugal and small and I say go do this. I will tell you, I don't even think about it because we are just scratching the surface, we are just getting going, and today we have customers in 155 countries and I have employees in about 25 countries now. Seven years ago, that was not the case. When you're moving that fast, you know that you're just getting going and that you have so much more that you can do to help your customers and create a partner ecosystem. It's a mission for us, it really is a mission and my team and myself are really excited, out there every day working to support our customers, to really grow and get them moving faster. We sort of keep pushing them to go faster. We have a long way to go and maybe ask me five years from now, we'll see. >> How about next year? We'll come back, we'll ask you again next year. >> Yeah, maybe I'll know more next year. >> John W.: Theresa, thank you for the time, very generous with your time. I know you have a big schedule over the course of this week so thank you for being here with us once again on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Many time CUBE alum, Theresa Carlson from AWS. Back with more here from the AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, Washington, D.C. right after this. (electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Washington D.C., it's theCube, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its partner Ecosystem. >> Good morning, welcome back here on theCube, the Silicon Valley or Siliconangle TV flagship broadcast, here as we continue our coverage live from the Nation's capital, Washington D.C., the AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. I'm John Walls, we're glad to have you hear on theCube along with John Furrier, good morning. >> Morning. >> Good night? >> Great night. I had two great meetings, learned some information, got some exclusive material for a story that has to do with government stuff. >> So you were kind of working then weren't you? >> I'm always working. We're in D.C. I want to put my ear to the ground and bring all these stories back to my show, Silicon Valley Friday Show, which has been on hiatus during the month of May and June for all theCube events. >> Slacker. >> I got some great metadata as they say. (laughter) >> Good about data. >> I went home and watched the Nat's game. That was my big night. Jeff McAllister is with us now, he is the GM of the Americas for Druva and Jeff, glad to have you on theCube, we appreciate the time. >> Oh gee, thank you for the opportunity and it's a pleasure to meet you. >> Alright so you guys are all data, all the time on the Cloud right? >> That's right. >> All about data protection and security, availability. Tell us a little big more just about Druva and then we'll get into maybe your relationship with AWS but first off about you, about Druva. >> I've been fortunate to be with Druva since we really embarked on our enterprise strategy. I've been part of the team that made the investment a couple of years ago to start to pursue FedRAMP and some of the specifications for the Federal Government. And as you know, we are Cloud native. We are for the Cloud and built on the Cloud. We've been a partner with AWS for over eight years now. So we've had a very strong working relationship with them and the opportunity to come and speak here today and with you gentlemen, has really been tremendously exciting and frankly they're absolutely wonderful partners to go to market with. >> Yeah, talk about a minute about how integral that obviously is to your business to have not just a relationship, but to have the relationship that you do with AWS. >> Well, AWS obviously provides a world-class platform on which to build a service like ours. For our customers, it means tremendous levels of security, tremendous data durability, a reliability and availability of that data, but also the idea that many of our customers are very mobile. They have great geographic dispersion among their employees. Their employees are engaging in other parts of the world. So availability of that Cloud and that Cloud infrastructure, in local areas is tremendously important. And for our Federal customers, the certification for ITAR and other things that are specific to that market, having a platform like GovCloud, built specifically to their specifications, to service them, creates great leverage for us and our customers. >> John F.: I mean, eight year relationship, and that's going back. >> Yes it is. >> And they're only 10 years old and they spent their 10th birthday going on their 11th year, just AWS. So, obviously they saw some federal action right away, or public sector action right away. Nature of the Cloud, very friendly to developers back then. But still it was building blocks foundational back then. >> That's right, exactly. >> What's changed? How would you chronicalize that change other than the massive growth we've seen in the market place which we've chronicalized as well but I mean, from your perspective in the public sector, this is on a nice trajectory. >> I've been in the business now for over 30 years. Started out at Data General through Sun Microsystems and I've seen much of the industry change. The one thing that has been very impressive with the public sector, is that the interval in product innovation would come to the public sector a year or two years behind what we saw in the commercial marketplace. That time and space is absolutely shrinking down to nothing. They are pursuing the same business continuity, data transformation issues the Cloud-first strategies that our commercial customers are. And frankly, the government worker today has become more mobile. And the requirements to protect that data and secure it, are at an all-time high. And the AWS platform in combination with what we do, really provides a level of security that is hard to do on your own. >> So yesterday, we talked about a term I coined, or phrase I coined, around the seminal moments in GovCloud's history and really in the Amazon public sector. Is called "the shot heard around the Cloud", and that was the CIA deal where AWS came in and beat IBM, which had a lock-in spec and they're old-school IBM, they know how to sell. The sponsorships, they had everything locked and loaded. Who knows what they were doing, wining and dining. You know how the Federal Government is? >> Jeff: That's right. >> Things were very much picked out, everything's buttoned up and then boom, Shadow IT is happening, Amazon wins. Since then, we've seen a lot of change in how people are securing, how people are deploying. >> Jeff: Right. >> No better example than data protection because there's no wall, there's no firewall. You're in the middle of it. Talk about that dynamic about how the no walls, no perimeter in the Cloud has changed the role of data and data protection. >> Sure. So, gone are the days where we can dictate the device, how somebody wants to work, what solutions they're going to use. Cloud applications like Office 365, Box, Slack, other, have really created an environment where the IT folks, want to stimulate innovation, stimulate the work in places where people want to get done. But then provide the same level of protection and governance that they would on a non-platform solution. So, watching that evolution take place, its really driven us to really have to be mindful that we're in the performance business and with that performance we have to be respectful of the requirements from a security and protection standpoint that our customers call for. FIP certification became fundamental for us being able to service the government. That led us into the pursuit now of FedRAMP, which we're now FedRAMP ready. But all of those things provide the infrastructure to allow them to embrace these new strategies and this digital transformation, be it in my Cloud-first strategy or my mobility strategy, and be able to extend that same level of security that I would need, and provide that flexibility for my users to get their jobs done. >> Yeah and honestly, Cloud native, as you know, we love Cloud native, we've covered it. >> We do too. >> Covered it from day one. (laughs) Cloud-first is kind of like a moniker that people use. >> Sure. >> Kind of an ethos. It's more of a manifesto, it's more agile. But really Amazon has never hidden the ball in the fact what they believe the future will be and that is API economy. And from day one it's all about APIs and they believe that you should have APIs everywhere. The Cloud has no perimeter so that changes the security game. But the one thing that's emerged out of all this, is a new SaaS business model for businesses and government, and federal, and education. So everything's as a service. >> Jeff: Correct. >> That is a huge deal and this is maybe nuanced a bit, but how does public sector turn into a service model with the Cloud? 'Cause that's something that everyone's kind of going at. You have Cloud natives great, we're going to be Cloud natives, check. But really what they're getting to is, everything's as a service. >> Right. It's created a lot of flexibility in the buying process. First of all, you're bringing that elasticity of demand, right? So they are able to embrace the idea that, I only pay for the services I actually consume. So, should I have a movement in employees, should I change in structure, should my usage suddenly spike, I have the ability to adjust on the fly. That's a big part of it. But the other piece of it is that we can deliver our service at a fixed price cost for a certain period of time within that government fiscal year. So not only does it become easy to manage technologically, but from a budget stand point, it makes it a very predictable cost. I'm no longer having an explosion of data that I have to manage and go off books to try and find data to provide those IOPS and storage on sight. I can simply continue to go at the same budget level that I've already set aside. >> One dynamic that has come up while you brought this up, 'cause I think it's relevant to what we were just talking about is, lock-in. Right? I mean the word lock-in has always been vendor lock-in but really that's on one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is user lock-in. So last night, one of my secret meetings I had last night was with a senior government official and we were talking about how, they're all pissed 'cause they got Microsoft Surfaces instead of Macs. They wanted Macs. So they were just handed a bunch of Microsoft Surfaces. No offense Microsoft, I love the Surface personally, but I've got a Mac here. The point is, they didn't want it. >> Jeff: Right. >> It was forced down their throat. >> Let's just shut that for a moment here. (laughs) >> This is the old way. We made a decision, we're going with this product. So this is really the flexibility point is, very interesting, 'cause now with the Cloud, you can actually do these really agile deployments. >> Jeff: Exactly. >> And give people more choice. >> That's right. The time to value on these products, we have a very large defense contractor inside the Beltway. We were able to deploy to 23,000 users worldwide in under six weeks. But we understand that we're in the performance business and the idea that our customers could leave us at any point in time when the term is up, keeps us very conscious of the specifications that they require. And frankly, it requires us to be innovative on their behalf. Certainly taking their feedback, but really starting to anticipate their requirements, so that we continue to earn that business year over year. And frankly, if you want to talk about lock-in, SaaS provides tremendous flexibility to switch when a contractor isn't performing to spec, versus a perpetual license where I'm locked in for the duration. >> And that's a fear obviously that they're going to use their dollars wisely. I want to get you to weigh in on Druva's digital transformation in back of the customer. Obviously you guys are doing well, you're in the sweet spot, data protection is a hot area. It's one of the hottest area no one really kind of looks at, but it's really hot with the Cloud. What impact are you having with customers and how are you rolling out your value proposition to the public sector? What are the key highlights? I mean, how do they work with you? Is it FedRAMP? Is it GovCloud? Just take us through your value proposition with respect to the- >> Our value proposition, I think is fairly unique. So first, we run on the most wildly accepted Cloud platform by the public sector, AWS GovCloud. Without question the market leader there. We bring all of our experience from the commercial marketplace into that same experience on GovCloud. With the added certifications of FIPS, certification 140-2 moderate. Our FedRAMP in process. We're also HIPPA certified so that we have the ability to address HHS and FDA as some of our customers. 'Cause they also process a lot of personal information that is unique to that particular agency. But at the end of the day, the piece that really is most interesting to our public sector customers is, one, this is a very easy service to bring to the Cloud at lower cost and frankly higher value. The plethora of features and the security, the ease of management that we bring, relieving them of having to manage hundreds of terrabytes of data and apps on behalf of this service, is tremendously beneficial. The predictability of the cost year over year, makes it very very easy to manage. But I think the biggest thing that people have come to embrace is that the innovation that takes place in the Cloud comes to market so much faster in the Cloud. Just think of the QA cycles and how they've been reduced 'cause we're QAing for one platform. Being able to consistently, quarter in, quarter out, deliver that additional feature set and additional value, at no additional cost to our customers, is really what they've really gelled around. >> How do you guys handle the certification processes that are going? I'm sure there'll be more. I mean, they're coming. With all the free-flowing data, I'm sure there's going to be a lot of regulations and policies and governance issues. But you've got to move fast. How do you guys move fast to certify? Is there a secret sauce? Is there a secret playbook? How do you guys stay on top of it? 'Cause automations, machine learning, what's the secret sauce? >> You know, I think it's interesting, part of the uniqueness that is Druva I think is, our ability to anticipate market demand. I think we have a very experienced team of individuals. Look at the choice to go to AWS eight years ago. It was unthinkable at that time, but its turned out to be a visionary sort of choice. We identified that FedRAMP and FIPs certification, three or four years ago, was an absolute mandate to play in this marketplace. So we went there way ahead of our success in the market but we saw a very unique opportunity to go there. So I think it's just a tremendously creative group of people. It's a very dynamic marketplace. And it's one that requires a little bravery and a little bit of thinking in advance of the marketplace. I don't know that we have any magic sauce, but so far it's worked pretty well. I think it's worked out alright. >> I always ask just to see. >> Although that's a good question. >> To that point though, eight years ago when you went, it was a leap right? >> It was. >> Big leap. And now here you are 2017, things are rolling along. I imagine your sale or your pitch has taken on a different tone because you have so much proof in the pudding now, right? >> Oh, it does. A long time ago it was strictly backup. We've now moved into governance, e-discovery, the idea of user behavior analysis so I can find anomalies that may occur so that I can avoid Cryptolocker or other sorts of viruses or things that may be able to affect the operation of my customers. All of those things have come into play that weren't there four years ago. So it's really been an advancement of the added services beyond what we just did in backup, that have really kind of driven the business and differentiated us from the market. But it's still kind of fundamentally that idea that I'm going to protect your data, make it available to you and separate now from your device and really help you manage your data wherever you're doing your work. >> I know we're running tight on time, I do want to get one more question in from your perspective because again, present and creation is really a benefit to Druva, congratulations on that. You get to ride the wave and now the wave is bigger and more sets coming in. That's to use the surfing analogy. But talk about the perspective from your personal standpoint, just the changes going on in this marketplace right now. Teresa Carlson, when we were commenting on our opening, how tenacious she's been. She's knocked on a lot of doors. Eight years ago, what the hell's cloud? No one even knew what it was right? And then the shot heard around the Cloud with the CIA deal and just more and more and more in them, this is just a great business opportunity for Amazon Web Services, not just the enterprise, which they're doing well in now. >> Right. >> They own the startup market. This could be, it could have a 90% market share of public sector. >> That's right, that's right. >> John F.: Talk about the change. What's going on? Is it the perfect storm? Is it like right now, what's the progress. >> Well you know, it seems like its a perfect storm but for somebody who's been banging at it for the last four or five years, it seems to be a little bit more evolutionary. But it's interesting, when I started at Druva, if I looked across our opportunities across the Americas. It was fairly evenly split between the idea that I'm going to do this on premise or I'm going to do it in the Cloud. Today, if I look across all o6f North America and all the commercial entities and public sector entities that we're dealing with, we're probably engaged in well over 500 opportunities at any one time, literally less than two, quarter over quarter, is now on premise. People have come to embrace the idea that this is a place where I can conduct business safely and securely. And frankly, for us, you look at that digital transformation or business transformation, we become two really compelling services to start and experiment with moving to the Cloud. So very often, we are the tip of that spear. Lets backup our endpoint devices to the Cloud, let's get out of that business, 'cause we can do it much more effectively with Druva than we can for ourselves at less cost. >> It's almost the reverse of what on prem was. I've had many opportunities where I've bumped into IT practitioners, friends and what not in the industry. "Oh, I forgot to do the backup plan. I got the procurement going on." It's kind of an afterthought, it's been kind of an afterthought. I am oversimplifying but generally, it's not the primary. When you go outside the walls of a company, into the Cloud where there's no perimeter, it's the first conversation. >> That's right. >> So I hear what you're saying and I totally agree. This is unique, it's a complete flip around. >> Well it's amazing. So often, we're backing up server data to the cloud. So now it used to be just backing up to the Cloud. Now it's, I have the application running in the Cloud and I want to back it up and secure it into another Cloud. It's completely morphing into all sorts of interesting places. But the part that's really interesting is that we will bring to our customers disaster recovery, for example. Well that's a service, we turn it on and if you never experience the disaster, you don't pay for it. It just creates a whole new mindset of how we're going to think and how we're going to approach the infrastructure that we're now building. >> No license fee. It's just if you need it, you get whacked on it and you deserve to get whacked on it because you need the service. >> Well, they know what the cost will be. We've set it up for a nominal fee but if you're fortunate enough that you never experience the problem, why should you pay for it. So literally cutting that price in half, removing the requirement of 2XL Servers and 430 tip. >> John F.: It's a new operating model. >> That's right. And the flexibility that it creates to change to your computing requirements is just phenomenal. >> Well, phenomenal, I think would be a way to describe your ascent as well. >> Oh thank you. >> So congratulations on that front. Glad you could be with us Jeff, at the show. Continued success and we hope to see you down the road on theCube. >> John, John, it was a real pleasure. >> John W.: First time right? >> It was, it was, thank you. >> John W.: You're a tour alum now or a Cube alum. (laughs) >> John F.: Cube alumni. >> Good to have you with us. >> Jeff: Thank you, thank you so much. >> Jeff McAllister with Druva. Back with more here from AWS Public Sector Summit 2017 on theCube. You're watching live in Washington D.C..

(energetic techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, and its partner, Ecosystem. >> Interviewer: So what can Fugue do for you? Well, I'm going to guess that they can take your agency to the Cloud. >> Josh: You're, you're correct, Jeff. >> John W.: That's exactly what I'm looking at over here, the Fugue booth here, on the show floor at AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Welcome inside, live on theCUBE channel, John Wells and John Furrier, and Josh Stella, who is the founder, and CEO of Fugue. Did I get it right, by the way? >> You did get it right. >> Jeff: You're taking the agencies to the Cloud, correct. >> Taking agencies to the Cloud, taking companies to the Cloud, too, but of course, this is worldwide public sector, so we're focused on the agencies today. >> Yeah, we were just talking before this even started, just a little historical background here, you were with Amazon back in 2012, when this show started, and you told me that your commission with your colleagues was to get 600 attendees. >> Yeah, we wanted to get 600, I think we got 750, which is classic Amazon style, right. >> John W.: Bonus year. >> We go over. But yeah, over 10,000 registered this year, it's amazing. >> Which shows you that this explosive growth of this area, in terms of the public sector. So let's talk about Fugue a little bit. >> Sure. >> Before we dive a little bit, share with our viewers, core competencies, what your primary mission is. >> So Fugue is an automation system. Fugue is a way to completely automate the Cloud API surface. It's true infrastructure as code, so unlike a deployment tool that just builds something on Cloud, Fugue builds it, monitors it, self-heals it, modifies it every time, alerts if anything drifts, and we've added a layer to that for policy as codes. So you can actually express the rules of your organization, so if you're a government agency, those might be NIST or FISMA rules. If you're a start-up, those might be, we don't open SSH to the world. Those can be just expressed as code. So Fugue fully automates the stack, it doesn't just do deployment, and we just released the team conductor, that will manage dozens of AWS accounts for you, so many of our customers in financial services, and other enterprises have many, many AWS accounts. Fugue allows you to kind of centralize all of that control without slowing down your developers. Without getting in the way of going fast. >> John W.: And what, why is that big news? >> It's big news because in the past, the whole core value prop of Cloud is to go fast, is to innovate, iterate, be disruptive, and move quickly. What happens, though, is as you do that, at the beginning, when you're starting small, it looks pretty easy. You can go fast. But you learn pretty quickly over time that things get very messy and complex. So Fugue accelerates that going-fast part, but keeps everything kind of within the bounds of knowing who's running things, knowing what resources you're actually using. Who built what, who has permissions to do what. So it's really this foundational layer for organizations to build and control Cloud environments. >> Josh, one of the things we talked about in the opening was the government's glacial case of innovation over the years. But the pressure is on the innovate. So the, lot of emphasis on innovation. In an environment that's constrained by regulation, governance, policies. So they have kind of an Achilles heal there, but Cloud gives them an opportunity at a scale point to do something differently, I want to dip into that, but I'll set this question up by quoting a CIO I chatted with who's in the government sector. He's like, "Look, Cloud's like, jumping out of a plane "with a parachute I didn't even know was going to open up." So this is kind of a mindset, he was over generalizing, but again, to the point is, trust, scale, execution, risk. >> Mhm, mhm. >> It's a huge thing. >> Absolutely. >> How do you guys solve that problem for the agencies that want to go to the Cloud, because, certainly they want to go there, I think it's a new normal as Werner said. What do you guys do to make that go away? How do you make it go faster? >> Sure, so Amazon and other Cloud vendors have done a great job of building a very highly trusted, low level infrastructure that you can put together into systems. That's really the core offering. But there's still, in government agencies, as you point out, this need to follow rules and regulations and policies, and check those. So, one of the things Fugue does, is allows you to actually turn those rules into executable compiled code. So, instead of finding out you're breaking a rule a month later, in some meeting somewhere, that's going to loop back, it'll tell you in ten milliseconds. And how to fix it. So we allow you to go just as fast as anyone can on Cloud, but meeting all those extra constraints and so on. >> So you codify policies, and governance type stuff, right? >> That's part of what we do, but we also automate the entire infrastructure and grid. >> So this is the key, this is what I want to kind of jump to that next point. That's cool, but it would make sense that machine learning would probably be like an interesting take away. Cuz' everyone talks about training, data models, and it sounds like what you're doing, if you codify the policies, you probably set up well for growing and scaling in that world. Is that something that's on your radar? >> Sure. >> How do you guys look at that whole, okay I've got machine learning coming down the pike, everyone wants to get their hands on some libraries, and they want to get to unsupervised at some point. >> Yes, yeah it's a great question. So Fugue is really a bridge to that future where the entire infrastructure layer is automated and dynamic. And that's what you're talking about, where you have machine learning that are helping you make decisions about how to do computing. A lot of folks aren't ready for that yet. They're still thinking about the Cloud as kind of a remote data center, in our view, it's actually just a big distributed computer. And so, when you think about things like whether it's machine learning, or just algorithms to run over time that modify these environments to make them more efficient. Fugue is definitely built to get you there, but we start where you're comfortable now, which is just the first thing we have. >> Yeah of course, when you're still early to tells in the water, all kinds of data issues, you see the growth there. So the question is, what is the low hanging fruit for you? What are the use cases? Where are you guys winning, and what's new with your codifying the policies that you're releasing here? What's the use cases, and what're you guys releasing? >> Yeah, so common use case for us is integration with CI, CD, and DevOps for the entire infrastructure chain. So, you'll have organizations that want to go to a fully automated deployment management of infrastructure. And what they've learned in the past is, without Fugue, they might get some of the deployment automated, with a traditional CM tool or something like this, but because they're not doing the self healing, the constant maintenance on the environment, the updating of the environment, the alerting on it, there's a big missing link in terms of that automation. So, we're getting a lot of resonance in the financial services sector, and folks who are sophisticated on Cloud, and are doing large-scale Cloud operations. So, if you think about, uh, Netflix can build full automation for themselves, because they're Netflix. But not everyone fits in that boat. So Fugue is sort of the sorts of capabilities that Netflix built in a very specific way for themselves, we don't use their tools. We're a general purpose solution to that same class of problems. So, really, where we're winning is in automation of, again, deployments and operations of those deployments, but also in things like policy. We're seeing that not just in government but in the private sector as well. >> What are the big bottlenecks, what are the roadblocks for the industry? >> The roadblocks for the industry certainly are bringing, sort of, a legacy patterns to Cloud. Imagining it's a remote data center, thinking of it as virtual machines and storage, instead of just, infinite compute, and infinite resources that you put together. >> John F.: So the mindset's the bottleneck. >> Absolutely, it's cultural, yeah, yeah. And skillset, because in the DevOps Cloud world, everything should be code, and therefore everyone has to be a developer. And so, that's a little new. >> Is scale a big issue for you guys, with your customers? Is that something that they're looking for? And what's the kind of, scope of some of your customers and your use cases in government Clouds. >> Yeah, sure, absolutely. I mean, a lot of us came from AWS, so we know how to build things at scale. But yeah, y'know, a lot of folks start small with Fugue, but they go to very large, very quickly, has been our experience. So, scale across dozens, or hundreds AWS accounts-- >> That's where the automation, if they're not set up properly, bites them in the butt pretty much, right? >> Absolutely, absolutely. So yeah, we get a lot of that too. Going back in and helping people put their system back together the right way for Cloud, because they went there from the-- >> Alright, so what's the magnified learnings from this, from your experience with your company, mobile rounds of finance, you guys are well financed, one of the best venture capitals, the firm's NEA, great backer, you guys are doing well. Over the years, what have you learned, what's the magnification of the learnings, and how do you apply it to today's marketplace? >> Um, we are in a massive transition. We're just beginning to see the effects of this transition. So, from 1947 until the Cloud, you just had faster, smaller, Von Neumann machines in a box. You had any ax that got down to the size of your wristwatch. The Cloud is intrinsically different. And so there is an opportunity now, that's a challenge, but it's a massive opportunity to get this new generation of computing right. So I'd say that the learnings for me, as a technologist coming into a CEO role, are how to relate these deeply technical concepts to the world in ways that are approachable, and that can show people a path that they want to get involved with. But I think the learnings that I've had at AWS and at Fugue are, this is the beginning of this ride. It's not going to end at containers, it's not going to end at Lambda, it's going to continue to evolve. And the Cloud in ten years is going to look massively different than it does now. >> So, when you said, "to get it right," the computer, I mean, such as, or in what way, I mean, we have paths right, routes you could take. So you're saying that there are a lot of options that will be pitfalls, and the others that would be great opportunities. >> Well, that's absolutely right. So, for example, betting on the wrong technologies too soon, in terms of where the Cloud is going to finally land, is a box canyon, right. That's an architectural dead end. If you cannot compose systems across all these disparate Cloud surfaces, the application boundary, the system boundary is now drawn across services. You used to be able to open an IDE, and see your application. Well, now that might be spread across virtual machines, containers, Lambda, virtual discs, block storage, machine learning services, human language recognition services. That's your application boundary. So, if you can't understand all of that in context, you're in real trouble. Because the change is accelerating. If you look at the rate of new services, year over year in the Cloud, it's going up, not down. So the future's tougher. >> So, if I'm a government service, though, and I think John just talked about this, I'm just now getting confidence, right? >> Yes. >> I'm really feeling a little bit better, because I met somebody to hold my hand. And then I hear on the other hand, say, we have to make sure we get this right. So now all of a sudden, I'm backing off the edge again. I'm not so sure. So how do you get your public sector client base to take those risks, or take those daring steps, if you will. You know, we've had a lot of really great conversations and have a lot of great relationships in public sector, what we're seeing there is, like in the commercial world. I mean, public sector wasn't that far behind commercial on Cloud. When I was at Amazon, y'know, five years ago, I worked mostly with public sector costumers, and they were trying hard there, they were champions already, moving there. So, one of the things that Fugue does very effectively is, because we have this ability to deterministically, programmatically follow the rules, it takes it off of the humans, having to go and check. And that's always the slow and expensive part. So we can give a lot of assurance to these government agencies that, for example, if one of their development teams chooses to deploy something to Cloud, in the past, they'd have to go look for that. Well, with Fugue, they literally cannot deploy it, unless it's correct. And that's what I mean by "get it right." Is the developer, who's sitting there, and I've been a developer for decades, they want to do things by the rules. They want to do things correctly. But they don't always want to read the stack of books like this, and follow, y'know, check their boxes. So, with Fugue, you just get a compiler error and you keep going. >> Josh, I wanted to ask you about a new category we see emerging, it's really not kind of mainstream yet, by Wikibon research, and still getting in theCUBE, we get to see things a little bit early. Plus we have a data science team to skim through the predictive analytics. One thing that's clear is SAS businesses are emerging. So, SAS is growing at an astounding rate, platform is a service, and infrastructure's a service, I mean, Javassist doesn't think to see it that way, I don't you do either. It's infrastructure and SAS pretty much. So pretty much, everyone's going to, at some point, be a Cloud service provider. And there'll be a long tail distribution, we believe, on niche, to completely huge, and the big ones are going to be the Amazons, the Facebooks, the Google, but then there's going to be service providers that is going to emerge. They're going to be on Clouds, with governments, so we believe that to be true. If you believe that to be true, then the question is, how do I scale it? So, now I'm a solution architect in an enterprise. And like you said, it's intrinsically different in the Cloud than it was, say on premise, or even the critical traditional enterprise computing. I've got to now completely change my architectural view. >> Yes. >> If you think it's a big computer, then you've got to be an operating systems guy. (laughs) You've got to say, okay, there's a linker, there's a load, there's a compiler, I've got subsystems, I got IO. You got to start thinking that way. How do you talk to your friends, and colleagues, and customers around how to be a new solutions architect. >> Yeah, so I think it's a balancing act. Because we are this transition stage, right. The modern Cloud is still a Prius. (chuckles) And the future Cloud is the Tesla, in terms of how customers use it. We're in this transition phase in technologies, so you have to have one foot in both camps. Immutable infrastructure patterns are incredibly important to any kind of new development, and if you go to the Fugue.cosite or O'Reily, we wrote a little book with them on immutable infrastructure patterns. So, the notion there is, you don't maintain anything, you just replace it. So you stand a compute instance, Verner likes to talk about, these are cattle, not pets, Y'know, or paper cuff computing, that's right. You never touch it, you never do configuration management, you crumple it up, throw it away, and make a new one. That's the right new pattern, but a lot of the older systems that people still rely upon don't work that way. So, you have to have a foot in each camp as a solutions architect in Cloud, or as the CEO of a Cloud company. You have to understand both of those, and understand how to bridge between them. And understand it's an evolution-- >> And the roles within the architecture, as well. >> That's right. >> They coexist, this coexistence. >> Absolutely. You know, it's interesting you said, "everyone's going to become a service provider." I'd put that a little differently, the only surface that matters in the future is APIs. Everything is APIs. And how you express your APIs is a business question. But, fundamentally, that's where we are. So, whether you're a sales force with a SAS, I really don't like the infrastructure and SAS delineation, because I think the line's very blurred. It's just APIs that you compose into applications. >> Well, it's a tough one, this is good debate we could have, certainly, we aren't going to do it live on theCUBE, and arm wrestle ourselves here, and talk about it. But, one of the things about the Cloud that's amazing is the horizontal scalability of it. So, you have great scalability horizontally, but also, you need to have specialty, specialism at the app layers. >> Josh: Yes. >> You can't pick one or the other, they're not mutually exclusive. >> Josh: That's right. >> So, you say, okay, what does a stack look like? (laughs) If everything's in API, where the hell's the stack? >> Yeah, well that's why we write Fugue. Because Fugue does unify all that. Right, you can design one composition in Fugue. One description of that stack. And then run the whole thing as a process, like you would run Apache. >> So you're essentially wrapping a system around, you like almost what Docker Containers is for microservices. You are for computing. >> And including the container's managers. (John F. Laughs) So that's just one more service to us, that's exactly right. And, y'know, you asked me earlier, "how does this affect agencies?" So one thing we're really excited about today is, we just announced today, we're live on GovCloud, so we support GovCloud now, you can run in the commercial regions, you can run in GovCloud, and one of the cool things you can do with Fugue, because of that system wrapping capability, is build systems in public regions, and deploy them on GovCloud and they'll just work, instead of having to figure out the differences. >> Oh that's what what you think about the Cloud, standing up's something that's a verb now. "Hey I'm going to stand this up." That's, what used to be Cloud language, now that's basically app language. >> I think what you're getting at here is something near to my heart, which is all there are anymore are applications. Talking about infrastructure is kind of like calling a chair an assembly of wood. What we're really about are these abstractions, and the application is the first class citizen. >> I want to be comfortable, and sit down, take a load off. >> Josh: That's right, that's right. >> That's what a chair does. And there's different versions. >> John W.: You don't want to stand up, you want to sit down. >> And there's different, there's the Tesla of the chairs, and then there's the wooden hard chair for your lower back, for your back problems. >> Josh: Exactly, exactly. >> The Tesla really is a good use case, because that points to the, what I call, the fine jewelry of a product. Right, they really artistically built amazing product, where the value is not so much the car, yeah there's some innovations with the car, you've got that, with electric. But it's the data. The data powering the car that brings back the question of the apps and the data, again, I want to spend all my time thinking about how to create a sustainable, competitive advantage, and serve my customers, rather than figure out how to architect solutions that require configuration management, and tons of labor. This is here the shift is. This is where the shift is going from non-differentiated operations to high-value added capabilities. So, it's not like jobs are going up. Yeah, some jobs are going away, I believe that. But, it's like saying bank tellers were going to kill the bank industry. Actually, more branches opened up as a result. >> Oh yeah, this is the democratization of computing as a service. And that's only going to grow computing as a whole. Getting back to the, kind of, fine jewelry, you talked about data as part of that, I believe another part of that is the human experience of using something. And I think that is often missing in enterprise software. So, you'll see in the current release of Fugue, we just put into Beta a very, we've spent about two years on it, a graphic user interface that shows you everything about the system in an easily digestible way. And so, I think that the, kind of, the effect of the iPhone on computing in the enterprise is important to understand, too. The person that's sitting there at an enterprise environment during their day job gets in their Tesla, because they also love beautiful things. >> Well, I mean, no other places for you guys to do that democratization, and liberation, if you will. The government Cloud, and public sector, is the public sector. They need, right now they've been on antiquated systems for (chuckles) yeah, not only just antiquated, siloed, y'know, Cobol systems, main framed, and they've got a lot of legacy stuff. >> There is, there's a lot of legacy stuff, and they're a lot of inefficiencies in the process model in how things get done, and so, we love that AWS has come in, and when we were there, we helped do that part. And now with Fugue, we want to take these customers to kind of, the next level of being able to move forward quickly. >> Well, if you want to take your agency to the Cloud, Fugue is your vehicle to do that. Josh Stella, founder, CEO. Thanks for being with us here on theCUBE. >> Thanks so much. >> We appreciate it. We'll continue, live from Washington, D.C. Nation's capital here, AWS Public Sector Summit, 2017 on theCUBE. >> John F.: Alright, great job, well done. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, DC, it's theCube, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its partner ecosystem. >> Welcome inside the convention center here in Washington, DC. You're looking at many of the attendees of the AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. We're coming to you live from our nation's capital. Several thousand people on hand here for this three-day event, we're here for two days. John Walls, along with John Furrier. John, good to see you again, sir. >> Sir, thank you. >> We're joined by Jay Littlepage, who is the VP of Infrastructure and Operations at Digital Globe, and Jay, thank you for being with us at theCube. >> My pleasure. >> John W: Good to have you. First off, your company, high-resolution, earth imagery satellite stuff. Out-of-this world business. >> Yep. >> Right, tell our viewers a little bit about what you do, I mean, the magnitude of, obviously, the environmental implications of that or defense, safety security, all those realms. >> Okay, well, stop me when I've said too much because I get pretty excited about this. We work for a very cool company. We've been taking earth imagery since 1999, when our first satellite went up in the sky. And, as we've increased our capabilities with our constellation, our latest satellite went up last November. We're flying, basically, a giant camera that we can fly like a drone. So, and when I say giant camera, it's about the size of a school bus, and the lens is about the size of the front of the school bus, and we can take imagery from 700 miles up in space and resolve a pixel about the size of a laptop. So, that gives us an incredible amount of capability, and the flying like a drone, besides just being really cool and geeky, we can sling the lens from basically Kansas City to here in Washington in 15 seconds and take a shot. And so, when world events happen, when an earthquake happens, you know, they're generally not scheduled events, we don't have to have the satellite right above the point where there's something going on on the ground, we can take a shot from an angle of 1,000 miles away, and with compute power and good algorithms, we can basically resolve the picture of the earth, and it looks like we're right overhead, and we're getting imagery out immediately to first responders, to governmental agencies so they can respond very quickly to a disaster happening to save lives. >> So, obviously, the ramifications are endless, almost, right? >> Yes. >> All that data, I mean, you can't even imagine the amount, talk about storage. So, that's certainly a complexity, and then, they are making it useful too all these different sectors. Without getting too simple, how do you manage that? >> Well, you know, it's a big trade-off because, ideally, if storage was free, all of our imagery in its highest consumable form would be available all the time to everybody. Each high-resolution image might be 35 gig by itself. So, you think of that long of flying a constellation, we've got 100 petabytes of imagery. That's too much, it's too expensive to have online all of the time. And so, we have to balance what's going to be relevant and useful to people versus cost. You know, a lot of the imagery goes through cycle where it's interesting until it's not, and it starts to age off. The thing about the planet, though, is we never know what's going to happen, and when something that aged off is going to be relevant again. And so, the balance for my team is really making sure we're hitting the sweet spot on there. The imagery that is relevant is readily accessible, and the imagery that's not is, in its cheapest form, fact or possible, which for us, is compressed, and it's in some sort of archival storage, which for us, now that we've used the Snowmobile, is Glacier. >> Jay, I want to ask to give your thoughts. I want you to talk about DigitalGlobe, before that, some context. This weekend, I was hanging out with my friends in Santa Cruz and kids were surfing. He's a big drone guy, he used to work for GoPro, and she used to buy the drones and, hey, how's it going with the drones. It got kind of boring, here's a great photo I created, but after a while, it just became like Google Earth, and it got boring. Kind of pointed out that he wanted more, and we got virtual reality, augmented reality, experience is coming to users. That puts imagery, place imagery, the globe, pictures, places and things is what you guys do. So, that's not going away any time soon. So, talk about your business, what you guys do, some of the things that you do, your business model, how that's changing, and how Amazon, here in the public sector, is changing that. >> Well, that's a fantastic questions, and our business is changing pretty rapidly. We have all that imagery, and it's beautiful imagery, but increasingly, there's so much of it, and so many of the use cases aren't about human eyeballs staring at pixels. They're about algorithms extracting information from the pixels. And, increasingly, from either the breadth of pixels, instead of just looking at a small area, you can look around it and see what's happening around it and use that as signal information, or you can go deep into an archive and see the same location on the planet over and over over years and see the changes that had happened in terms of time frame. So, increasingly, our market is about extracting information and extracting insights from the imagery more so than it is the imagery itself. And so that's driving an analytics business for us, and it's also driving a services business for us, which is particularly important in the public sector to actually use that for different purposes. >> You can imagine the creativity involved and developers out there watching or even thinking about using satellite imagery in conflux with other data. Remember, they're in the Web 2.0 craze earlier in the last decade. You saw mashups of API with Google Max. Oh yeah, pull a little pin, and then the mobile came. But now, you're seeing mashups go on with other data. And I've heard stats at Uber, for instance, remaps New York City every five days with all that GPS data of the cars, which are basically sensors. So, you can almost imagine the alchemy, the convergence of data. This is exciting for you, I can imagine. Won't you share with us, anecdotally or statistically what you're seeing, how this is playing out? >> Well, yes, some of our biggest commercial customers of our products now are location-based services. So, Uber's using our imagery because the size of the aperture of our lens means we have great resolution. And so, they've been consuming that and consuming our machine learning algorithms to basically understand where traffic is and where people are so that they can refine, on an ongoing basis, where the best pick-up and drop-off locations are. That really drives their business. Facebook's using the imagery to basically help build out the Internet. You know, they want to move into places on the planet where Internet doesn't exist. Well, in order to really understand that, they need to understand where to build, how to build, how many people are there, and you can actually extract all that from imagery by going in in detail and mapping roofs' shapes and roofs' sizes, and, from there, extracting pretty accurate estimates of how many people live in a particular area, and that's driving their project, which is ultimately going to drive access for... >> Intelligence in software, we look at imagery. I mean, we here at Amazon, recognition's their big product for facial recognition, among other pictures. But this is what's getting at, this notion of actually extracting that data. >> Well, you think about it. You know, once the data is available, once our imagery is available, then the sky's the limit. You know, we have a certain set of algorithms that we apply to help different industries, you know, to look at rooftops, to look at water extractions. After a hurricane, we can actually see how the coverage has changed. But, you look at a Facebook, and they're applying their own algorithms. We don't force our algorithms to be used. We provide the information, we try to provide the data. Companies can bring their own algorithms, and then, it's all about what can you learn, and then, what can you do about it, and it's amazing. >> So, here's the question. With the whole polyglot conversation, multiple languages that people speak that's translated into the tech industry, and interdisciplinary forces are in play: Data science, coding, cognitive, machine learning. So, the question is, for you, is that, okay, as this stuff comes together, do you speak DevOps? It's kind of a word, and we hear people say, is that in Russian or is that like English? DevOps is a cloud language mindset. And so, that brings up the question of, are you guys friendly to developers, and because people want to have microservices, I'm from a developer, I'm like, hey, I want those maps. How do I get them, can I buy it as a service, are they loaded on Amazon, how to I gauge with DataGlobe, as a developer or a company? >> Well, you think about what you just said and the customers I just talked about. They're not geospatial customers. You know, they're not staffed with people that are PhDs in extracting information. They're developers that are working for high-tech companies that have a problem that want to solve. >> There are already mobile apps or doing some cool database working in here. >> So, we're providing the raw imagery and the algorithms to very tried and true systems where people can plug into work benches and build artificial intelligence without necessarily being experts in that. And, as a case in point, my team is an IT team. You know, we've got a part of the organization that is all staffed with PhDs. They're the ones that are driving our global... >> John W: PhD is a service. (laughter) >> Well, kind of. I mean, if you think about it, they're driving the leading edge, for these solutions to our customers. But, I've got an IT team, and I've got this problem with all this data that we talked about earlier. Well, how am I actually going to manage that? I'm going to be pulling in all sorts of different sources of data, and I'm going to be applying machine learning using IT guys that aren't PhDs to actually do that, and I'm not going to send them to graduate school. They're going to be using standard APIs, and they're going to be applying fairly generic algorithms, and... >> So, is that your model, is it just API, is there other... >> I think the real key is the API makes it accessible, but a machine learning algorithm is only as good as its training. So, the more it's used, the more it refines itself, the better our algorithm gets. And so, that is going to be the type of thing that the IT developer, the infrastructure engineer of the future becomes, and I've already, basically, in the last couple of years, as we started this journey at AWS, 20% of my staff now, same size staff, but they're software developers now. >> So, I'll take this to the government side. We talked a lot about commercial use. But at the government side, I'm thinking about FEMA, disaster response, maybe a core of engineers, you know, bridge construction, road construction, coastline management. Are all those kind of applications that we see on the dot gov side? >> There are all things that you see that can be done on the dot gov side, but we're doing them all in the commercial environment. The USC's region for AWS, and I think that's actually a really important distinction, and it's something that I think more and more of the government agencies are starting to see. We do a lot of work for one particular government agency and have for years. But 99 point something percent of our imagery is commercial unclassified, and it's available for the purposes that our customers use it for, but they're also available for all those other customers I've talked about. And more and more of what we do, we are doing on the completely open but secure commercial environment because it's ubiquitous for our customers. Not all of our customers do that type of work. They don't need to comply with those rigid standards. It's generally where all AWS products that are released are released to, with the other environments lagging, and they probably don't want me saying that on TV, but I just did. And it's cheaper, you know, we're a commercial company that does public sector work. We have to make a profit, and the best way to do that is to put your environment in a place where if you're going to repeat an operation, like pulling an image of Glacier and build it into something that is consumable by either a human or an algorithm and put it back. If you're going to do something like that a million times, you want to do it really inexpensively. And so, that's where... (crosstalking) >> Lower prices, make things fast, that's Jeff Hayes' ethos, shipping products, that these books in the old days. Now, they're shipping code and making lower-latency systems. So, you guys are a big customer. What are the big implementation features that you have with AWS, and then, the second part of the question is, are you worried about locking. At some point, you're so big, the hours are going to be so massive, you're going to be paying so much cash, should you build your own, that's the big debate. Do you go private cloud, do you stay in the public? Thoughts on those two options? >> Well, we have both. Right now, we're running a 15-year-old system, which is where we create the imagery that comes off the satellites, and it goes into a tape archive. Last year, Reinvent... >> John F: Tape's supposed to be dead! >> Tape will die someday! It's going to die really soon, but, at the Reinvent Conference last year, AWS rolled out a semi truck. Well, the real semi truck was in our parking lot getting loaded with all those tapes, and it's sad... >> John F: Did you actually use the semi? >> We were the first customer ever, I believe, of the Snowmobile. And so, it takes a lot of time and effort to move 12,000 LTO 5 tapes loaded onto a semi and send it off. You know, that represents every image ever taken by DG in the history of our company, and it's now in AWS. So, to your second part of your question, we're pretty committed now. >> John F: Are you okay with that? >> Well, we're okay with that for a couple of reasons. One is, I'm not constraining the business. AWS is cheaper. It will be even cheaper for us as we learn how to pull all the levers and turn all the dials in this environment. But, you know, you think about that, we ran a particular job last year for a customer that consumes 750,000 compute hours in 22 days. We couldn't have done that in our data center. We would have said no. And so, I would... >> I know, I can't do, you can't do it. >> We can't do it! Or, we can do it, come back, the answer will be here in six months. So, time is of the essence in situations like that, so we're comfortable with it for our business. We're also comfortable with it because, increasingly, that's where our customers already are. We are creating something in our current environment and shipping it to Amazon anyway. >> We're going to start a movie about you, with Jim Carrey, Yes Man. (laughter) You're going to say yes to everything now with Amazon. Okay, but this is a good point. Joking aside, this is interesting because we have this debate all the time, when is the cloud prohibitive. In this case, your business model, based on that fact that variables spend that you turn up your Compute is based upon cadence of the business. >> That's exactly right. You know, the thing that's really changed for the business with this model is historically, IT has been a call center, and moving into Amazon, I manage our storage, and I pay for our storage because it's a shared asset. It's something that is for the common good. The business units and different product managers in our business now have the dial for what they spend on the Compute and everything else. So, if they want to go to market really rapidly, they can. If they want to spin it up rapidly, they can. If they want to turn it down, they can. And it's not a fixed investment. So, it allows the business philosophy that we've never had before. >> Jay, I know we're getting tight on time, but I do want to ask you one question, and I did not know that you were the first Snowmobile customers, so, that's good trivia to have on theCube and great to have you. So, while we got you here, being the first customer of AWS Snowmobile when they rolled out at Amazon Reinvent, we covered on SiliconAngle. Why did you jump on that and how was your experience been, share some color onto that whole process. >> Okay, it's been an iterative learning process for both us and for Amazon. We were sitting on all this imagery. We knew we wanted to get in AWS. We started using the Snowballs almost a year and a half ago. But moving 100 petabytes, 80 terabytes at a time, it's like using a spoon to move a haystack. So, when Amazon approached us, knowing the challenge we had about moving it all at once, I initially thought they were kidding, and I realized it was Amazon, they don't kid about things like this, and so we jumped on pretty early and worked with them on this. >> John F: So, you've got blown away like, what? >> Just like. >> What's the catch? >> Really, a truck, really? Yeah, but really. So, it's as secure as it could possibly be. We're taking out the Internet and all the different variables in that, including a lot of cost in bandwidth and strengths, and basically parking and next to our data, and, you know, it's basically a big NFS file system, and we loaded data onto it, the constraint for us being, basically that tape library with 10,000 miles of movement on the tape pads. We had to balance between loading the Snowmobile and basically responding to our regular customers. You know, we pulled 4 million images a year off that tape library. And so, loading every single image we've ever created onto the Snowmobile at the same time was a technical challenge on our side more so than Amazon's side. So, we had to find that sweet spot and then just let it run. >> John F: Now, it's operational. >> So, the Snowmobile is gone. AWS has got it. They're adjusting it right now into the West Region, and we're looking forward to being able to just go wild with that data. >> We got Snowmobiles, we got semis, we have satellites, we have it all, right? >> We have it all, yeah. >> It's massive, obviously, but impressed with what you're doing with this. So, congratulations on that front, and thank you again for being with us. >> My pleasure, thanks for having me. >> You bet, we continue our coverage here from Washington, DC, live on theCube. SiliconAngle TV continues right after this. (theCube jingle)