>> Announcer: Live from the Moscone Center, it's theCUBE covering AWS Summit San Francisco, 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. (techy music playing) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost Jeff Frick, and this is theCUBE's live coverage of AWS Summit San Francisco. We are thrilled to welcome back to the program Sandy Carter, who's a vice president with Amazon Web Services. Been with the company about a year. We've had you on the program many times, but first time since you've been at AWS, so... >> That's right, I'm celebrating my year yesterday with Amazon Web Services. >> Stu: And no cake, all right. >> I had a cake yesterday, actually, cake and champagne, by the way. (laughing) >> Sandy, we always love to hear, you know, you talk to so many customers, you know, bring us back for a little bit. What brought you to AWS, what's exciting to your customers when you're talking to them today? >> Well, you know, I really love innovation, I love being innovative, and you know, bar none Amazon is the most innovative company out there today, but really what brought me to Amazon was their focus on the customer, really "obsession" on the customer. When they say obsession they really mean obsession. They work backwards from the customer. We really have this big, big thrust. In fact, one of my favorite stories is when I first came to Amazon we'd be in these meetings and people would say, "Well, what does Low Flying Hawk think about this," or "What does Low Flying Hawk think about that," and I was like, "Who is Low Flying Hawk?" Well, he's a person who would give comments on a forum and just a person who wasn't even spending millions of dollars with Amazon but just had a lot of big clout. We actually just opened a building named Low Flying Hawk, believe it or not. >> Jeff: Have you identified this person? >> They do know who he is, yes. (laughing) But it's really, it just symbolizes the focus that Amazon has on the customer and why that's so important. >> And Sandy, at re:Invent you actually, you spoke to the analyst, I was listening to the session. It's not just kind of, people think AWS they think public cloud. You work for Amazon, it's everything kind of across what you think of Amazon.com, AWS, everything from drones and using Kindles and everything like that. Can you give us a little bit of kind of that pan view of how Amazon looks at innovation? >> Yeah, so it's really interesting. Amazon is very methodical in the way that we innovate, and what we do is we really try to understand the customer. We work backwards from the customer, so we do a press release first, we do frequently asked questions next, and then we do a narrative-- >> You're saying you do an internal press release, yes, yes. >> Yeah, internal press release. Internal frequently asked questions, and then we review a six-page document, no PowerPoints whatsoever, which enables us to debate and learn from each other and just iterate on the idea that makes it better and better and better so that when we come out with it it's a really powerful idea and powerful concept, something that the customers really want. >> So, we'll ask you what you're doing now, but one more kind of transition question, what was your biggest surprise? You know, there's a lot of kind of mystery from people on the outside looking in in terms of culture, and we know it's car driving and innovative growing like crazy company, not only in business but in terms of people. What was your biggest surprise once you kind of got on the inside door? >> My biggest surprise was just how incredibly encouraging and supportive the team is at AWS. My boss is Matt Garman, he's been supportive since day one, you know, Andy, they just cheer you on. They want you to do well and I've really never been at a company that everybody's really pulling for you to be successful, not political infighting but really pulling for you to be successful. So, that's really was the biggest surprise to me, and then that customer obsession. Like, it's not customer focus, it really is customer obsession. >> Right, I think it's so well illustrated by the, again not AWS, but Amazon with the store, right, with no cash register, no people. >> Sandy: Amazon Go. >> To think about that-- >> Sandy: Yeah. >> From the customer point of view is nobody likes to stand in line at the grocery store, so it's such a clean illustration of a customer centric way to attack the problem. >> And I love that because what we did is we opened up the beta first for employees, so we would go in and play with it and test it out, and then we opened it up in Seattle and we would give customer tours. Now it's open to the public in Seattle, so it just again shows you that iterative process that Amazon uses and it's super cool, have you guys been? >> Jeff: Have not been. >> Ugh, in fact, my daughter went in. She put on a mask, she was going to fool the system but it wasn't fooled. All the ML and all the AI worked brilliantly. >> I love how everyone loves to get so creative and try to, you know, get through the system, right, try to break the system. >> I know, but my daughter, that's what I would figure for sure. (laughing) >> So, what are you working on now? You've been there a year, what are you working on? >> So, we are innovating around the enterprise workload, so we know that a lot of startups and cloud native companies have moved to the cloud, but we're still seeing a lot of enterprises that are trying to figure out what their strategy is, and so, Stu and Jeff, what I've been working on is how do we help enterprises in the best way possible. How can we innovate to get them migrated over as fast as possible? So for instance, we have Windows that runs on AWS. It's actually been running there longer than with any other vendor and we have amazing performance, amazing reliability. We just released an ML, machine learning OMI for Windows so that you can use and leverage all that great Windows support and applications that you have, and then you guys saw earlier I was talking to VMware. We know that a lot of customers want to do hybrid cloud on their journey to going all-in with the cloud, and so we formed this great partnership with VMware, produced an offering called VMware Cloud on AWS and we're seeing great traction there. Like Scribd's network just talked about how they're using it for disaster recovery. Other customers are using it to migrate. One CIO migrated 143 workloads in a weekend using that solution. So, it just helps them to get to that hybrid state before they go all-in on the cloud. >> So, are they, I was going to say, are they building a mirror instance of what their on-prem VMware stack is in the Amazon version? Is that how they're kind of negotiating that transition or how does that work? >> So, with VMware they don't have to refactor, so they can just go straight over. With Microsoft workloads what we're seeing a lot of times is maybe they'll bring a sequel app over and they'll just do a lift and shift, and then once they feel comfortable with the cloud they'll go to Aurora, which as you've found was the fastest growing service that AWS has ever had, and so we see a lot of that, you know, movement. Bring it over, lift and shift, learning and you know, if you think about it, if you're a large enterprise one of your big challenges is how do I get my people trained, how do I get them up to speed, and so we've done... Like, we've got a full dot net stack that runs on AWS, so their people don't even have to learn a new language. They can develop in Visual Studio and use PowerShell but work on AWS and bring that over. >> You know, Sandy, bring us inside your customers because the challenge for most enterprises is they have so many applications. >> Sandy: Yeah. >> And you mentioned lift and shift. >> Sandy: Yeah. >> You know, I know some consultant's out there like, "Lift and shift is horrible, don't do it." It's like, well, there's some things you'll build new in the cloud, there's some things you'll do a little bit, and there's some stuff today lift and shift makes sense and then down the road I might, you know, move and I've seen, you know, it was like the seven Rs that Amazon has as to do you re-platform, refactor-- >> That's right. >> You know, all that and everything, so I mean, there's many paths to get there. What are some of the patterns you're hearing from customers? How do they, how is it easier for them to kind of move forward and not get stuck? >> Well, we're seeing a lot of data center evacuations, so those tend to be really fast movement and that's typically-- >> Jeff: Data center evacuation-- >> Yeah, that's what-- >> I haven't heard that one. >> Yeah, that's what, evacuation, they've got to get out of their data center buyer for a certain date for whatever reason, right? They had a flood or a corporate mandate or something going on, and so we are seeing those and those are, Stu, like lift and shift quickly. We are seeing a lot of customers who will create new applications using containers and serverless that we talked about today a lot, and that's really around the innovative, new stuff that they're doing, right. So, Just Eat, for instance, is a large... They do online food service out of the UK. I love their solution because what they're doing is they're using Alexa to now order food, so you can say, "Alexa, I want a pizza delivered "in 20 minutes, what's the best pizza place "that I can get in 20 minutes?" Or "I want sushi tonight," and Alexa will come back and say, "Well, it's going to take "an hour and a half, you had sushi two days ago. "Maybe you want to do Thai food tonight." (laughing) And so it's really incredible, and then they even innovated and they're using Amazon Fire for group ordering. So, if there's a big football game or something going on they'll use Amazon Fire to do that group ordering. All that is coming in through Alexa, but the back end is still Windows on AWS. So, I love the fact that they're creating these new apps but they're using some of that lift and shift to get the data and the training and all that moving and grooving, too. >> Yeah, what do you, from the training standpoint, how, you know, ready are customers to retrain their people, you know, where are there shortages of skillsets, and how's Amazon, you know, helping in that whole movement? >> Well, training is essential because you've got so many great people at enterprises who have these great skills, so what we see a lot of people doing is leveraging things like dot net on AWS. So, they actually... They have something they know, dot net, but yet they're learning about the cloud, and so we're helping them do that training as they're going along but they still have something very familiar. Folks like Capital One did a huge training effort. They trained 1,000 people in a year on cloud. They did deep dives with a Tiger Team on cloud to get them really into the architecture and really understanding what was going on, so they could leverage all those great skills that they had in IT. So, we're seeing everything from, "I got to use some of the current tools that I have," to "Let me completely move to something new." >> And how have you, you've been in the Bay Area also for about a year, right, if I recall? >> Actually, I just moved, I moved to Seattle. >> Jeff: Oh, you did make the move, I was going to say-- >> I did. (laughing) >> "So, are they going to make you move up north?" >> I did because I was-- >> You timed it in the spring, not in November? >> I did, there you go. (laughing) When it's nice and sunny, but it's great. >> Exactly. >> It's great to live in Seattle. Amazon has such a culture that is in person, you know, so many people work there. It's really exhilarating to go into the office and brainstorm and whiteboard with people right there, and then our EBCs are there, so our executive briefing center is there, so customers come in all the time because they want to go see Amazon Go, and so it's really an exciting, energizing place to be. >> Yeah, I love the line that Warner used this morning is that AWS customers are builders and they have a bias for action. So, how do you help customers kind of translate some of the, you know, the culture that Amazon's living and kind of acting like a startup for such a large company into kind of the enterprise mindset? >> That's a great question, so we just proposed this digital innovation workshop. We are doing this now with customers. So, we're teaching them how to work backwards from the customer, how to really understand what a customer need is and how to make sure they're not biased when they're getting that customer need coming in. How to do, build an empathy map and how to write that press release, that internal press release and think differently. So, we're actually teaching customers to do it. It's one of our hottest areas today. When customers do that they commit to doing a proof of concept with us on AWS on one of the new, innovative ideas. So, we've seen a lot of great and exciting innovation coming out of that. >> All right, well, Sandy Carter, so glad we could catch up with you again. Thanks for bringing discussion of innovation, what's happening in the enterprise customers to our audience. For Jeff Frick, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back will lots more coverage here, you're watching theCUBE. (techy music playing)