>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE! Covering AWS Reinvent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> And we are back live here in Las Vegas. We are at the Sands as Reinvent day two wraps up. AWS here for four days and we'll be here live again tomorrow, by the way on theCUBE continuing our coverage. We're wrapping up here today saving the best for last. No doubt about that. Stu Miniman and John Walls were joined by a couple of folks from SoftwareONE. Mike Gersten, immediately to my right. Global Innovation and Strategy. Mike, good to see you, sir. >> Yeah, likewise, thanks for having us. >> And Lawrence Schwartz on the far side there. The CMO at SoftwareONE, Lawrence, good to see you. >> Pleasure to see you again. >> Tell us a little bit, first off, about not only what you do but why you're here. >> Sure, yeah. So, SoftwareONE, we're in the business of making sure that people are spending the right amount of money on their software. Not too much, and you know making sure they're not underspending either. So all that optimization to spend. We also help customer implement their technology. We're at this show because we help customers do that in a Cloud environment so obviously natural to be at AWS. We help them do that on premise as well and we find a lot of our customers here. People we've been talking to for a long time. New people as well trying to move over. So it's a great environment for us. We kind of see what's going on in the innovation side from AWS too so... >> And so Mike, what do you make of the show in general. I'm just curious about your take, two day take. We've been here a couple of days. By now it's sunk in a little bit, I would think. >> It's incredible. You know, we were here last year and there was roughly 30,000 attendees. We're here again, there's over 45,000 attendees. I walk the floor here, I see dozens of providers that I didn't see here last year. Some of them are one guy with a six foot table, who's got some pretty interesting technology. So I would say that the pace with which this ecosystem is growing isn't showing any signs of slowing down. >> One of the things we've been hearing for a while is, boy, Amazon keeps innovating but it's been adding to complexity. The Amazon catalog itself, you know, 30,000 line items there. Then you add on top of that the marketplace and I'm like I'm pretty sure it's infinite at this point. And marketplace has been, you know, a huge driver in growth. I have to expect that marketplace impacted your business quite a bit in a good way, I would think. >> Yeah, for us that's probably one of the most exciting announcements that we've heard this week is around the marketplace specifically. We have a 30 year history selling software so to see now AWS taking what they did in the online retail business and in essence doing it for software in the marketplace is a good opportunity for us to connect our global catalog to their global catalog and provide a much wider range of software options for customers. >> And Mike, I wonder if I could... Can I ask you? Explain to our audience that might not have been in the keynote, gone to a break, what is it about this announcement that is so special from Amazon? So today they have about 4,000 or a little bit over 4,000 applications that sit in the marketplace and the idea is that any customer ought to be able to go up to the marketplace and with the click of a button, procure some software, have it put into a, maybe a reserved instance or some hosted infrastructure from Amazon and then be off to the races. No configuration, no support, no installation. >> Yeah, that was my tongue in cheek "so it's an infinite marketplace." >> It's an infinite-- >> As of today, right? Lawrence, one of the things we've been kind of wrestling with the last few years is this term, multi-Cloud. We hear an update from Andy every year as to how they look at it. Of course, I think it's, "everything is everything" is Amazon >> Right, right, yeah. and of course I think they've made an announcement about everything. And we still have a couple of days left. How are customers, you know, your customers looking at that multi Cloud, what are you seeing? Give us a little insight as to... and how does SoftwareONE help? >> Yeah, what's interesting for us is because that's what we see all the time, and we were talking about this a little bit beforehand and all of the customers that we have, we have tens of thousands of customers, we don't have any real conversations where people are talking about a single Cloud that they're working with, right. They're working with multiple. Maybe they're more in one today than another, but they're kind of looking at multiple solutions. So it's part of the business of what they do. And in a lot of cases it's just another extension of what's happening, you know, on premise today or in the data center. And so they always have to think about that. So, it's a part of it. There's lots of reasons for them to kind of go into that multi Cloud environment. Some of it might be for redundancy, some of it for flexibility on contracting. Some of it is for things like GDPR where they're worried about where their data sits and some of the local requirements. So it's part of the conversations that we always have and it's good to see some of the solutions that they're doing here where they think about that and they've really thought about how different ways customers can go in there and look at it, a really dispersed environment, so... >> So I mean how does the... In a multi Cloud world, I mean, how does that changing in terms of people optimizing their software, making these decisions that you're trying to steer, you're trying to advise them on. What's the impact that that's having kind of on what they're deciding to do going forward? >> There's a couple of things. First of all, I couldn't agree more with Lawrence. Tens of thousands of customers. I can't think of a time where I've talked to a customer that wasn't multi Cloud. So it's almost I would say all customers are multi Cloud. The challenge for our customers is how do you take all the different Cloud environments you're working with that use different vernacular, bring it into one system that then is using a common language to, you know, a common language around the resources that sit in those Cloud environments. A common language around how you map those resources to your organizational structure or how you manage your business. So that you're looking at your Cloud resources, you're planning for them financially but in the context of your business, using a common vernacular across all Cloud providers. That's a difficult thing to do if you're just going to a point solution from one of the publishers. >> And so why do that? I mean, why not simplify? Why not, why not just keep it in one environment or maybe two environment? Why branch out? Why take it to a different sphere? >> Well, I think, Lawrence touched on some of the reasons which is some of it's price Some of it is I've got legacy applications that don't work in one Cloud infrastructure but will work in another Cloud infrastructure. Some of it is security. Some of it is just simply I don't have any control over it. People are acquiring Cloud infrastructure via credit card within departments. You can't say, "You have to use Amazon "or you have to use Microsoft." You're not controlling that. >> You know we've talked before. SoftwareONE has a different legacy than say, what I'd say the Cloud management providers that are out there. But some of the things are very similar that you're attacking because everybody, I think, has identified this multi Cloud and it's the big elephant and everybody's trying to take bites out of it. Can you maybe give us a little bit of a compare contrast about... Think there's all these companies out there that start with Cloud and have one or two other words with them. How's SoftwareONE? What's similar and what's different? >> Yeah, I think when you look at that, there's certainly a lot of vendors here do a good job of starting to think about that. But a lot of vendors have started with the Cloud and kind of built around that and for companies that are born in the Cloud and that's all they focus on, that might be a great solution. But a lot of the enterprises that we deal with, our larger customers, that mix of what's on premise and what's in the Cloud, is still a minority is going to be in the Cloud. It is gonna be definitely less than 50 percent for a lot of the companies. Even smaller for some of the big places. So if you get really really good visibility, even in a multi Cloud environment, on only 20 or 30 percent of your environment, then you're not getting the whole big picture of what's happening, particularly on the expense side and where you're spending the money. So what we bring to the table that's a little bit unique here is we come from the history of doing this for many years on premise. We give a good visibility into what they're doing, how their assets are being utilized, giving them thoughts and contributions on how they price it and what they buy to it. So we give them that good view of on premise as well as what's happening in the Cloud. So now when they make decisions, they're getting that wholistic view. So marketing might come in there and they might have a software catalog that's part in Cloud and part of it's on premise. Their CRM might be on premise. So if they're looking at, What's my overall budget and spend there? How do I consolidate it? How do I make it better? You just can't look at the SAS applications and what's in the Cloud or what's in Amazon. You've really gotta get that full picture and that's what we can bring to bare. And the other thing is, a lot of the solutions that you see, a lot of the vendors are very focused on one particular country or environment. SoftwareONE is really spread out across the globe. We're in 80 plus countries. So when you're looking at okay, now I've gotta figure out who's buying whatever in Switzerland and the UK and the US, how do I simplify procurement for it? How do I get visibility across all of that? I'm prim in the Cloud. That becomes a much more complex question and those are the things that we can help enterprises with that's a little bit above and beyond what you might see on some of the kind of pure Cloud focused players. >> Mike, I had a interesting session I got to sit in with Amazon talking about how they are helping customers with innovation. And one of the things they put forth is, you know, companies have usually hundreds or thousands of applications but at least the premise they put forth is there's usually a handful of companies that are the strategic ones. There's maybe a next tier that are kind of important and then there's whole lots of other stuff. Maybe they're not all applications But they're putting out. But they're coming to Amazon and saying, "You're innovating. "You're moving fast. "How do we do that? "How do we help with the digital transformation?" How does SoftwareONE get involved in kind of the innovation, helping them along that journey? >> It's true that we work with over 9,000 publishers and I would say that the top seven or eight make up the lion's share of both our revenue and our customer's spend. However, if you take the what we call the tail end spend, if you take not just those top tier providers and not the middle tier but all of those small little applications they're using departmentally, they don't seem to add up to a lot when you look at them each department or each geography. When you bring them together for the enterprise, it's a large spend and it's very hard for our customers to get control of that. So when we talk about innovation, I would not suggest that you innovate just around the top five to 10 publishers. You have to be able to provide a cost management solution across the entire portfolio for customers, across the entire life cycle, that's on premises, that's multi Cloud, hybrid Cloud, and that's from acquisition through disposition and that includes the tail end spend. >> So is a lot of that when you give the visibility into the client as to what they're doing across the enterprise? They might not realize how deeply involved they are and that could give them leverage for pricing and then the lend. >> The best example is SAS Today, because SAS has enabled shadow IT in a way that we've never seen. Now people are just buying whatever application they want in their department with their credit card. Well, the IT department, the procurement department, the compliance group, they have no idea where that spend is coming from. They haven't discovered those unknown SAS subscriptions and you can't budget for it. You can't manage what you can't see. >> What's the shocker then? I mean, when you come in, just in general, to a business, what's the eye opening moment for them you think in terms of what you're uncovering or what you're showing them about their own process that you think they would know but you give them a little aha. >> Yeah, I think one example... we work with a lot of the companies, but one not that far from here. We work with LA Metro, the county and what they do there and on transportation. And they were looking at their environment and their spend in the Cloud and once we gave them our platform to kind of see what was going on, give them full visibility on what's happening with their VMs, what's happening in the Cloud, they saw that they're basically spending two to three X what they needed to before hand. Right before they really took a look, a good look at it. I think they were surprised by that, but it was a really good opportunity to take a good hard look at what VMs I might need to spend down, what ones do I need to throttle, what ones aren't being active, and again, you want to make sure you're right sized for what you're doing, instead of just over provisioning and kind of taking a guess at it if you will and overspending at the end of the day. >> Interestingly enough, just to add on to that, I was talking to a CIO that we work with maybe a month ago. We surveilled all of our customers on their spend. By and large, most of them know they're overspending on software. The estimates go anywhere between 25 and 35 percent, especially in the Cloud. But they know they're overspending. So some of them don't... they just can't solve the problem so they just budget for the overspend. So I was meeting with her and I said to her, "Do you know you're overspending?" She said, "Yeah, we're definitely overspending about 30%." I said, "What are you doing about that?" She says, "I just put it into my budget." I says, "That's crazy. Why wouldn't you want to solve that problem?" And the irony is that she's actually the CIO for a tax and accounting firm. (laughter) But they're just burying it. So, yeah. >> Yeah, that is funny. So, Andy Jassy did quite an extensive keynote. Lots of announcements. Kind of gave you the wild card. Something that jumped out at you, you wanna build on, any announcements or any pieces of Andy's presentation. >> Yeah, I think overall he kept talking about innovation and what they're doing. I think for us, we were talking a little bit about the marketplace. But you also see things they're doing on the database side. Are they strengthening aurora? Making post gray more attractive as an alternative to some of the legacy systems. And that complements well what we see as a migration and people wanna do, right. If you really strengthen the offering, it makes it more attractive and then certainly makes it interesting for the ecosystem which we're part of to help contribute that for people to move over there. I also really liked his analogy there. He kept going back to the musicians and kind of the relationship they have or thinking that compared to developers. Having all the instruments that you need to kind of build what you want and having that flexibility of choice and I think it's a great analogy. I think the flip side to that is: Hey, if you've got a jam session here and you're bringing in all of these different instruments: a guitar player, a tuba player, whatever it is to build this up, you also have to look at what do you have in house? You probably already have a pretty good size orchestra. Some of it might be legacy. Some people might be playing the harpsichord, the recorder, whatever it is. And you've got to figure out how does, In some cases, how do I blend that together? If I'm bringing them in, is it just for a jam session or do I need them here for a full set or for like a year long concert? And if you're not careful, you could end up spending a lot of money on bringing in all of these different players and I think that's an interesting way to think about this is it's great to have the flexibility but how do you make sure you have the visibility, the cost controls, so that doesn't overdo or overspend what you wanna do to get that creativity that you need. >> Everybody's gotta play in the same key too, right? Alright, let's all get on the same page Same page of music. >> So SoftwareONE is a global company. I know you both do a lot of travel. Give us kind of... We're here in the center of AWS. 43,000 devoted, super excited, passionate people but what are you seeing out there in the globe? Where does AWS specifically, Public Cloud in general, still need to push? What are some of the concerns, challenges, things that you see out there? >> Geographically? >> Yeah. >> Well, I mean certainly in APAC there's the challenge that any Cloud infrastructure provider is gonna face and that's Jolicloud. Jolicloud is a fairly dominant player in China and Japan, and they have a good presence throughout APAC. I think that AWS is making strong strides in Asia. Clearly the market leader worldwide. Everybody is chasing them. With over a thousand features and enhancements announced just within the last year, the pricing changes happening at such rapid fire that I think it's difficult for the other guys to keep up with them. So I'd say there's no question they're the market leader globally. Asia Pacific is probably their biggest challenge. >> Lawrence? >> I concur with a lot of that. I mean, we've seen in our own company a lot of activities starting in India and even in South America. Some good relationships with AWS. Some early adoption there. But yeah, I think those comments on APAC, I think you've got some good experiences there. >> Well, gentlemen, thanks for joining us. We appreciate the time here on theCUBE. Good luck with the rest of the show and I'll be kind of curious to see where this goes. The vibe is good, right? >> The vibe's unbelievable. >> Fantastic. >> And you've got a big runway so good luck with that. >> Thank you. >> Alright. >> Alright gentlemen. That's it for our coverage here on theCUBE. Today, day two here at Reinvent. Back with more live tomorrow morning 11:00 Pacific time. We'll be with you 2:00 on the East Coast and we'll see you right here. Until then have a good night. (upbeat music)