(high intensity music) >> Everyone, welcome back to theCube coverage of AWS, Amazon Web Services, Public Sector Summit live in D.C. We're in-person, I'm John Furrier, the host of theCube. I'm here with Max Peterson, the Head of Public Sector, Vice President. Max, great to see you in in-person event. >> Great to be here. We're in-person and we're also live streaming. So, we're here, however customers, however partners want to participate. >> I got to say, I'm very impressed with the turnout. The attendance is strong. People excited to be here. We're not wearing our masks cause we're on stage right now, but great turnout. But it's a hybrid event. >> It is. >> You've got engagement here physically, but also digitally as well with theCube and other live streams everywhere. You're putting it everywhere. >> It's been a great event so far. We did a pre-day yesterday. We had great participation, great results. It was about imagining education. And then today, from the executive track to the main tent, to all of the learning, live streaming 'em, doing things in person. Some things just don't translate. So, they'll won't be available, but many things will be available for viewing later as well. So all of the breakout sessions. >> The asynchronous consumption, obviously, the new normal, but I got to say, I was just on a break. I was just walking around. I heard someone, two people talking, just cause I over walk pass them, over hear 'em, "Yeah, we're going to hire this person." That's the kind of hallway conversations that you get. You got the programs, you got people together. It's hard to do that when you're on a virtual events. >> Max: It's hard. The customers that we had up on stage today, the same sort of spontaneity and the same sort of energy that you get from being in-person, it's hard to replicate. Lisa from State of Utah, did a great job and she got an opportunity to thank the team back home who drove so much of the innovation and she did it spontaneously and live. You know, it's a great motivator for everybody. And then Lauren from Air force was phenomenal. And Suchi, our "Imagine Me and You" artist was just dynamite. >> I want to unpack some of that, but I want to just say, it's been a really change of a year for you guys at Public Sector. Obviously, the pandemic has changed the landscape of Public Sector. It's made it almost like Public-Private Sector. It's like, it seems like it's all coming together. Incredible business performance on your end. A lot of change, a lot of great stuff. >> We had customers we talked today with SBA, with VA, with NASA, about how they just embraced the challenge and embraced digital and then drove amazing things out onto AWS. From the VA, we heard that they took tele-health consultations. Get this from 25,000 a month to 45,000 a day using AWS and the Cloud. We heard SBA talk about how they were able to turn around the unemployment benefits programs, you know, for the unemployed, as a result of the traumatic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in a matter of weeks. And then, scaled their systems up just to unbelievable heights as President Biden announced the news. >> You had a lot of announcement. I want to get to a couple of them. One of them was the health equity thing. What is that about? Take us through that announcement. >> So the pandemic, it was hard. It was traumatic in a lot of different ways. It also turned into this little innovation laboratory, but one of the things that it laid bare more than anything else where the inequities associated with some of these systems that had to spring into action. And in particular, in the space of health, healthcare equity. We saw simply communities that didn't have access and weren't included in the same sorts of responses that the rest of the community may have been included in. And so we launched this global initiative today to power health equity solutions. It's a $40 million program. Lasts for three years. And it's open to customers or it's open to partners. Anybody who can contribute to three different areas of health equity. It's people who are leveraging data to build more equal, more sustainable health systems. Is people that are using analytics to do greater study of socioeconomic and social situational conditions that contribute to health inequities. And then finally, it's about building systems that deliver more equitable care to those who are underserved around the world. >> So, just to get this right, 40 million. Is that going to go towards the program for three years and are you going to dolo that out or as funding, or is that just a fund the organization? >> It's actually very similar to the development diagnostic initiative that we ran when COVID hit. We've launched the program. We're welcoming applications from anybody who is participating in those three developmental areas. They'll get Cloud credits. They'll get technical consulting. They may need professional services. They'll get all manner of assistance. And all you have to do is put in an application between now and November 15th for the first year. >> That's for the health equity? >> For the health equity. >> Got it. Okay, cool. So, what's the other news? You guys had some baseline data, got a lot of rave reviews from ACORE. I interviewed Constance and Thompson on the Cube earlier. That's impressive. You guys really making a lot of change. >> Well, you're hundred percent right. Sustainability is a key issue from all of our customers around the world. It's a key issue for us, frankly, as inhabitants of planet earth, right? >> John: Yeah. >> But what's really interesting is we've now got governments around the world who are starting to evaluate whether they're not their vendors have the same values and sustainability. And so that the AWS or the Amazon Climate Pledge is a game changer in terms of going carbon zero by 2040, 10 years ahead of most sort of other programs of record. And then with ACORE, we announced the ability to actually start effecting sustainability in particular parts around the world. This one's aim at that. >> But the key there is that, from what I understand is that, you guys are saying a baseline on the data. So, that's an Amazonian kind of cultural thing, right? Like you got to measure, you can't know what you're doing. >> The world is full of good intentions, but if you want to drive change at scale, you've got to figure out a way to measure the change. And then you've got to set aggressive goals for yourself. >> That's really smart. Congratulations! That's a good move. Real quick on the announcement at re:Invent, you've talked about last re:Invent, you're going to train 29 million people. Where are you on that goal? >> Well, John, we've been making tremendous progress and I'm going to use theCube here to make a small teaser. You know, stay tuned for our re:Invent conference that comes up shortly because we're actually going to be sharing some more information about it. But we've done digital trainings, self-training, online skills workshops. We just took a program called re/Start, which serves an unemployed or underemployed individuals. We launched that around the world and we're really excited. Today, we announced we're bringing it to Latin America too. So we're expanding into Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Brazil, and Argentina. And the amazing thing about that re/Start program, it's a 12 week intensive program. Doesn't require skills in advance. And after 12 weeks, 90% of the people graduating from that course go right onto a job interview. And that's the real goal, not just skills, but getting people in jobs. >> Yeah. The thing about the Cloud. I keep on banging the drum. I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, but the level up, you don't need to have a pedigree from some big fancy school. The Cloud, you can be like top tier talent from anywhere. >> And you heard it from some of our speakers today who said they literally helped their teams bootstrap up from old skills like COBOL, you know, to new skills, like Cloud. And I will tell you, you know, right now, Cloud skills are still in a critical shortage. Our customers tell us all the time they can use every single person we can get to 'em. >> I'm going to tell my son, who's a sophomore in CS. I'm like, "Hey, work on COBOL Migration to AWS. You'll be a zillionaire." (John and Max laughs) No one knows what the passwords of the COBOL. I love that 80s jazzy jokes from two re:Invents ago. (John laughs) I got to ask you about the National-Local Governments, how they're monetizing Cloud of the past 18 months. What have you seeing at that level? >> Yeah. National and Local Governments, of course, were tremendously impacted first by the pandemic itself and the health concerns around it, but then all of the secondary effects, you know, unemployment. And immediately, you needed to put into action unemployment benefits systems. We work with the U.S. Small Business Administration, 15 other States across the U.S. You know, to have those systems in place in like weeks to be able to serve the unemployed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then you saw things progress, to the point where we had States across the country, standing up call centers on Amazon Connect. Instantly, they could have a high scalable volume call center that was situated for their instantly remote workforce, as opposed to their old call center technology. So, across the U.S. we saw those. And in fact, around the world, as governments mobilized to be able to respond to citizens. But the final thing that I think is really incredible, is though is the way that the AWS teams and partners sprung into action to work with National Governments around the world. Over 26 National Governments run their vaccine management scheduling systems on AWS. The largest to date, being in India, where in a single day, the vaccine management system scheduled and conducted 22.5 million vaccinations. Which is more than the population of New York State in one week and one day. >> Wow. That's good. That's great progress. I got to say, I mean, that kind of impact is interesting. And we had Shannon Kellogg on earlier, talking about the Virginia impact with the Amazon $220 million being spread over a few Counties just in one year. The partnership between business... and governments with the Cloud, so much more agility. This really strikes at the core of the future of government. >> Max: I think so. People have talked about private-public partnerships for a long time. I'm really proud of some of the work that Amazon and the whole team is doing around the world in those types of public private partnerships. Whether they're in skilling and workforce with partnerships, like eight different States across the U.S. to deliver skills, training through community college based systems. Whether it's with healthcare systems. Like NHS or GEL over in the UK, to really start applying cloud-scale analytics and research to solve the problems that eventually you're going to get us to personalized healthcare. >> That's a great stuff. Cloud benefits are always good. I always say the old joke is, "You hang around the barbershop long enough, you'll get a haircut." And if you get in the Cloud, you can take advantage of the wave. If you don't get on the wave, your driftwood. >> And States found that out, in fact. You'd have customers who were well on their journey. They were really able to turn on a dime. They pivoted quickly. They delivered new mission systems with customers. Those who hadn't quite progressed to the same state, they found out their legacy. IT systems were just brittle and incapable of pivoting so quickly to the new needs. And what we found, John, was that almost overnight, a business, government, which was largely in-person and pretty high touch had to pivot to the point where their only interaction was now a digital system. And those who- >> John: Middle of the day, they could have race car on the track, like quickly. >> Well, we've got it. We do have race cars on the track, right? Every year we've got the artificial intelligence powered Amazon DeepRacer and Red River on the track. >> I can see it. Always a good showing. Final question. I know you got to go on and I appreciate you coming on- >> It's been great. >> with all your busy schedule. Looking ahead. What tech trends should we be watching as Public Sector continues to be powered by this massive structural change? >> Well, I think there's going to be huge opportunity in healthcare. In fact, this afternoon at four o'clock Eastern, we're talking with Dr. Shafiq Rab from Wellforce. He and folks at Veterans Affairs to tell you telehealth and telemedicine are two, the areas where there's still the greatest potential. The number of people who now are serviced, and the ability to service a population far more broadly dispersed, I think has dramatic potential in terms of simply making the planet more healthy. >> Like you said, the pandemics have exposed the right path and the wrong path. And agility, speed, new ways of doing things, telemedicine. Another example, I interviewed a great company that's doing a full stack around healthcare with all kinds of home, agents, virtual agents, really interesting stuff. >> It is. I think it's going to change the world. >> John: Max Peterson, Head of Public Sector. Thank you for coming on theCube, as always. >> John, it's my pleasure. Love the cube. We've always had a good time. >> Yeah. Great stuff. >> Peter: We'll keep on making this difference. >> Hey, there's too many stories. We need another Cube here. So many stories here, impacting the world. Here at the Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>>from around the globe. It's >>the Q with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. Hello. I'm John for a host of the Cube. We're here covering A W. S s international public sector virtual event. We have a great guest. The star of the program is Max Peterson, Good friend of the Cube. Also Vice President of A W s International for Public Sector Max. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on this virtual remote interview. Cuban interview. Hey, >>John. Great to be back on the Cube, even if it is virtual >>well, you know, we're not face to face. We have to go virtual. So the cube virtual, you've got to public sector summit. Virtual. Um, this is the time of the year where normally we'd be out on the road in Bahrain, Japan, Asia, Pacific Europe. We'd be out on the summits talking to all the guests and presenting that the update on public sector. But we have to do it remotely. Um, a little bit of trade off. The good news is with cove it for at least you guys. It's a global media network. And with these remote interviews. Uh, public sector is seeing a lot more global activity, and that's what I want to get your thoughts on. What is the business update internationally for public sector? I'm sure that with CO over the pandemic, you're seeing a lot of activity. How is the public sector business doing internationally? >>John, You know, you mentioned one of the silver linings of a pretty bad situation with the Koven pandemic. And that's been that it has meant that people have to be resourceful. Governments have to be resourceful on DSO. There's been a tremendous amount of innovation people have gotten used to now using modern cloud technology to support remote work and remote war learning. Um, out of necessity, we've had to figure out how do we deliver far greater health care services using digital technology, telemedicine, digital social care, uh, chime rooms? Uh, it really, in a nutshell, has been a tough six months for people, but a relative relatively busy six months for innovation. And for i t for the public sector customers, >>you know, I did an interview a few months ago for one of the award programs in Canada. Um, with the center had a customer on disk customers. The classic customer, a Amazon. You know, I'm not sure we do it all internally. He deployed A W S Connect in literally days that saved the lives of many of his countrymen and women by getting the entitlement checks out. And he was a glowing endorsement because, he said, with Cove in 19 they were crippled. He said they will. They stood up a call center and literally he was converted. That's just one example again. That's Canada of the kind of solutions that you guys air, enabling with Cloud to quickly respond to the crisis, to use technology to solve other technology problems and also business problems. Can you give an example on the international front of where you're seeing some activity? Because this seems to be the same pattern we're seeing, People who have used in the cloud we cube virtual. Will there be no Cuba's wasn't for our cloud implementations, but this is, um, obvious, but I want to call it out. It's important. Can you share some examples of people internationally using the cloud to get and respond to the to the cove in 19 pandemic in delivering services? >>Yeah, In fact, John, we're focusing a lot on that at the public sector summit online that comes up here in October. Um, a couple of quick examples. In fact, one of the top learnings is speed matters. And so we have Eve Curry from Australia, who talks about social and health care and how they were able to get a complete digital suite up and running for supporting 5000 elderly patients and over 3000 employees in less than a week, and that included getting up and running a video conferencing and tele consultation capability using AWS chime. It involved getting up and running collaboration space for the remote workers using work work docks. And it involves setting up a complete call center on the cloud, using Amazon time and literally that was done in less than a week. Another example, really ambitious example, which again is a testament to the innovation and, uh, the capability, the capability that AWS brings to customers. I'm in India. They had a number of tele medicine applications. They were available for a fee, but they didn't have a universal way to reach the vast population in India. And so when the pandemic hit three organization that was responsible for the public health component was challenged to get a no cost tele consultation hella medicine system up and running for outpatient services that could scale to reach a billion people. Um, they did that in 19 days. They got the system up and running Now hasn't gotten to a billion people online at one time. But there right now, doing 6000 consultations a day with about 4000 doctors, and they're headed toward 100,000 consultations today. Eso just to your point, speed and scale. We're seeing it across the board from from our public sector customers. >>You know, it's just mind boggling just to kind of pinch myself from it in 19 days. It's crazy, right? I mean, crazy fast If you throw back to the eighties and nineties when I broke into the business, you know, young gun client server was all the rage back then. And if you wanted to do, like a big apt upon an oracle s a p, whatever it was years, it was months just to do planning. E mean, I mean, think about the telemedicine example 19 days. That's huge. I mean, just the scale is just off the charts. So So I mean, even if you're not a believer in cloud I don't feel should be should just go home and retire at this point because it's just obvious. Uh, the question I wanna ask you specifically because Theresa brought this up on my last interview with her. And I wanna ask you the same question is, what is AWS doing specifically to help customers? I know customers are helping themselves. You mentioned that. What are you guys doing? Toe? Accelerate this. How are you helping of you guys changed a little bit. Can you just share what you guys specifically doing to help customers pivot toe not only solving it, but having a growth strategy behind it? >>Yeah, John, that's a great question. Some of the things that we're doing our long standing programs and so customers from day one have had a need for skills and workforce development. We keep on doubling down on those programs. Things like a W s academy aws educate our restart programs in different countries. So number one is we continue to help customers double down on getting the right cloud skills to enable the digital workforce. The second thing, in fact, if I can, for just amendment, um, there is actually a section of the public sector online called the New Workforce, which talks about both the digital skills that are required and then also some of the remote working skills that we need to help folks with. So So workforce is a big one. Um, the second one. Yeah, and I'm super excited about this because we've opened up the opportunity, form or customers around the globe to participate in our city on the Cloud Challenge Onda That gives a great opportunity to showcase and highlight the innovation of public sector customers and, you know, win some AWS credits and technical assistance to help them build their programs. But I think one of the most the things I'm most proud about in the last 6 to 9 months was when the when this pandemic struck and we listen to our customers about what they needed. We came out with something called the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative, and that was a program specifically aimed at providing technical assistance. Um, a ws cloud credits all to researchers to help them, um, tackle the tough questions that need to be answered to help us deal with and then hopefully resolve the pandemic. >>So on the international front, like I said earlier in the open, we would've been in Bahrain. That's a new region, only a couple of years old, Obviously the historic, um this, um, geopolitical things happening there, opening things up, that's been a very successful region. This is the playbook. Can you just give us an update on some of the successes in the different regions by rain and then a pack and other areas? What? Some of the highlights? >>Sure, John, One of the things that I think it's super exciting is that all of these customers are developing new capabilities right now. Um, one example from Egypt. Uh, they had to get literally an entire student population back to school. When the pandemic hit on DSO. They quickly pivoted to bringing a online learning management system or LMS up on the cloud on AWS. Um, and they have been able to continue to teach classes, literally to millions of students there. We've seen that same sort of distance learning online education across the globe. Another example would be when countries needed to figure out how to beam or effective in that sort of time tested, contact tracing process. So So when ah person has been found to have the the flu or the illness the subject illness, um, they typically have a lot of manual contact tracers that have to try to identify kind of where that person's been and see if they can. Then, um, helped to control the spread of whatever the diseases Kobe 19. In this case, um, we put together with governments across the world with a W s partners across the world again in very fast order, automated systems to help governments manage this, um, Singapore is a super example. India's a massively scaled example, but we did it in countries of across the globe, and we did it by working with them and the partners there to specifically respond to their needs. So everybody's case, while similar at a high level, you know, was unique in the way that they had to implement it. >>And it's been a great, great ride international us with co vid. You guys have ah current situation. You guys are providing benefits and I'll see the cloud itself for the customer to build those modern APS. The question I wanna ask you, Max, as an executive at eight of yourself. So you've been in the industry, Um, with public sector pre covert, it's, you know, it's before Cove. And there's after Govind is gonna be kind of like that demarcation line in the society. Um, it has become a global thing. I just did an event with Cal Poly was mentioned before we came on, um, small little symposium that would have been, you know, face to face. But because we did it virtually it's now global reinvents coming up. That's gonna be essentially virtual. So it's gonna be more global, less physical, space to face. Everything is introduced, no boundaries. So how >>does that >>impact? How do you How do you guys, How do you look at that? Because it impacts you, I guess a little bit because there's no boundaries, >>right? You know, John, I think this plays into what we're talking about in terms of people and governments and organizations getting used to new ways of working on de so some of our new workforce development is based around that, not just the digital skills in the cloud skills a couple of the things that we've recognized by the way, Um, it's different, but done well, there's new benefits. And so so one of the things that we've seen is where people employ chime, for instance, Uh, video conferencing solution or solutions from our partners like Zoom and others. Onda people have been able to actually be Maurin touch, for instance, with elder care. Um, there were a number of countries that introduced shielding. That meant that people couldn't physically go and visit their moms and dads. Um and so what we've seen is a number of systems on care organizations that have responded andare helping thing the elderly, uh, to use this new tech on. But it's really actually, uh, heartwarming, uh, to see those connections happen again, even in this virtual world. And the interesting thing is, you can actually step up the frequency on DSO. You don't have to be there physically, but you can be there, Andi and interact and support with the number of these thes tools. I think one of the other big learnings that we've seen for many organizations and just about every public sector group has toe work with, um uh, their constituents on the phone. Of course, we've got physical offices, you know, whether it's a hospital or a outpatient center or a social care center. Um, but you always have to have a way to work on phones. What's happened during the Cove in 19 Pandemic is there's been a surge is where information needed to get out to citizens or where citizens literally rushed the phone lines to be able to get the most current information back. Andi, the legacy called systems have been completely overwhelmed, their inadequate. And we've seen customers launch the online call center in the cloud piece, using Amazon connect as their starting point. But then, you know, continuously innovating. And so starting to use things like Lex to be able to deliver a chat box function, Um, in the in the US, for example, one of our partners, Smartronix, was able to automate the welfare and social care systems for a number of different states to the point now where 90 plus percent of those calls get initially handled, satisfied using a chat bots, which frees up agents the deal, you know, with the more difficult inbound calls that they get. >>I gotta ask you, where do we go from here? What's next for these organizations? Post Covad World. You know, if we're sitting at a cocktail party was sitting down having dinner or where he talking remotely here, how would you? How would you explain to me what's what's next? Where do we go from here? And how do organizations take that next post co vid recovery and growth? What's your take? >>And John? I think that's a fantastic question to ask. Let me tell you what we learn from our customers every day because we see them try and do new things. If I had to take my sort of crystal ball, I think we're in version one of figuring out How do we work in this new environment? I think there's a couple of key things that we're going to see. Number one. Um, resilience and continuity of service is not gonna be optional. Everybody is coming to expect that government care, not for profits. Education is going to be able to seamlessly continue to deliver the core services irrespective of these world events or emergencies on B C customers. Now you know, really getting that right. It used to take. You talked about it? Um, heck, you couldn't get a system up and running in 19 days. You'd be lucky if you cut a purchase order in 19 days and citizens and constituents that aren't going to accept that anymore, right? That's one big, uh, change that I think is with us. And we'll keep on driving cloud adoption. I think the next one is how do we start putting the pieces together in ways that make some of this invisible and an example? Um, you know, kind of starts with that with that example in the US with partner that was building systems to help, uh, welfare and social care call centers operate smoother. But if you think about the range of AWS services and the building blocks that customers have, we'll find customers starting to create that virtual experience in aversion to dot away where they tie the contact center into chat box and into transcription. Like, for instance, being able to have a conversation with the parents and using comprehend medical actually get a medically accurate transcription. So the doctor can focus on that patient interaction and not on actually data captured, right, and then if that patient asks. Well, g Doc, could you give me more information about, you know, X y z, uh, medication, or about what a course of treatment sounds like? Instead of tying up the doctors time, you could go and use a tool like Amazon Polly to then go text to speech and give all of that further rich information to that citizen. Um e think some of them things. Same scenarios, right? How do we go from this? This very fast version one dot response to a a mawr immersive, less tech evident capability that strings these things together that to meet kind of unique use cases or unique needs. >>Yeah, I think that's totally right. I think you know the 19 days. Yeah, I'm blown away by that. But I think you know, we thought about agility. That was a cloud term. Being more agile with your code business. Agility has come on the scene and then with business agility you have I call I call business latency. Andi, you went from years to months, months, two days. And I think now, as you get into the decks versions, it's days, two hours, hours, two minutes, hours two seconds Because when you look at the scale of the cloud some of things we were talking what's going on? Space force and globally around with space Leighton See, technically and business late and see this is the new dynamic and it's gonna be automation. Ai these air. This is the new reality. I think co vid points that out. Uh, what's your reaction to that? And give a final message to the AWS international community out there on on how to get through this and what you guys are doing? >>Yeah, John, I think your observation is you know that increasingly, uh, there needs to be a connectedness between the services that thes public sector customers deliver on dso Um, that connectedness can be in terms of making sure that a citizen who eyes on their life journey doesn't need to continuously explain to government where they're at. But rather, government learns how to create secure, scalable data stores so that so that they understand the journey of the citizen and can provide help through that journey. Eso it becomes mawr citizen centric. I think another example is in the entire healthcare arena where what we have found is that the ability thio to securely collaborate on very complex problems and complex data sets? Uh, like like genomes, um is increasingly important on DSO. I think what you'll find is you'll find we're seeing it today, right? With customers like, uh, Genomics England and the UK Bio Bank were there, in fact, creating these secure collaboration spaces so that the best researchers can work against these very important data sets in a secure, yet trusted collaboration environment. So I think we're seeing much more of that on I would say The third thing that we're probably learning from our customers is just how important that skills and workforce pieces. Um, with the accelerated pace, we continue to see pressure on smart skills, and resource is that our customers need. Fortunately, we've got a great global partner ecosystem, Um, but you'll see us continuing to push that forward as a zone agenda that will help customers with eso. I guess my parting comment would be how could it not be? I hope that the customers that attend the summit are from all over the world. I hope they find something that's useful to them in pursuing their mission and in their journey to the cloud. And John, I just This is always a pleasure to join the Cube. Thanks very much for the time today. Thank >>you, Max. Great. Call out. Just I'll call it out. One more time to amplify the learnings in the workforce development starting younger and younger. The path to get proficiency is quickly. You could be a cloud computing cybersecurity application, modern application development, all hot areas. Uh, the new playbook is cloud. It's all there online. And, of course, Max. Global footprint with the regions, the world has changed, and it's gonna be pretty busy. Time for you. We'll be covering it. Thanks for coming on. >>That's great. Thanks, John. >>Okay, I'm John. Free with the Cube. You're watching any of US? Public sector summit, The international online event. I'm John. Hard to keep your host. Thank you for watching

>> From Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back, everyone, to CUBE coverage here in Bahrain for AWS Summit. Cloud computing's changing the landscape, startups, business, government, and society. We're here with a special guest, His Excellency, Aymen Tawfiq Almoayed. Thank you very much, thanks for coming, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> And of course Max Peterson, Vice President of International Sales, Worldwide Public Sector for Amazon Web Services. >> Good to be here, John. >> Your Excellency, this program you're doing with Amazon, this MOU you've signed is interesting, I want to unpack it, because it speaks to the bigger picture of how the region is shaped by its generational shift of cloud computing and the people here. This is a really big part of this modernization plan. >> No question, no question. So the program that the government adopted, so Vision 2030, which was adopted a while ago, is based on one premise, one key premise. That the government is going to move from operator to regulator, and our focus would be to focus on and establish, create almost, an open, just, competitive environment. So the idea is for us to provide the platform and then allow the meritocratic system to let those that can aspire to opportunities and reach these opportunities come up through the system. So this program really sets the stage to get a new level going. >> Explain the difference with this program and why it's different than some of the things we've been hearing. We saw a cloud computing degree coming out of the University of Bahrain. We're seeing a lot of job skill training. This is different, this is a unique thing. Can you give a more detail around how it works. >> So, what we're doing is we're looking at very quick wins. And for us, six months, for somebody to spend six months, one year, in Amazon is a very quick win. This is not an extended degree. What this is is it's an opportunity to interact with the best of the best in their world sector. And to, honestly it's almost like a reset, where what Max and I were talking about earlier is somebody that spends a year with Amazon, I think that something happens to the pulse rate, right. So your pulse literally starts to beat much faster. >> Max knows all about that. >> Exactly, exactly. We hear about their traveling patterns, and that in itself is amazing. So in any case, so the reason it's different from a degree is it gives you real-life vocational experience. It gives you the networking opportunity. It gives you the lifestyle exposure. And then it gives you the shortcuts in organization. >> So you're exposing them to the excellence of what a culture looks like, Amazon in this case. They're hard-charging, they're fast. Anyone who's worked with Amazon knows that they move pretty quickly. But they're disciplined. It's a world-class organization. It's like a sports team being promoted to varsity or the pro team. Work their way up from the entry-level. >> So maybe the difference as well is, in this sort of program it's sink or swim. It's really as simple as that. I mean, you need to hit the ground running and take off. Maybe with a degree, it's much less so. With a degree, you go through your first year, your second year, your sophomore and so on. So what we do, what we want, is we want our youth to hit the ground running. We want very quick wins and I have no doubt that once the first trench, first team goes out to Amazon, comes back, I'm sure that the ripple effect that you see in industry and you see in the marketplace will be tremendous. >> Max, what's your take on this? 'Cause obviously you're on the Amazon side. You're taking them in Amazon Web Services here in Bahrain, or is it outside corporate headquarters in Seattle? Is there a definition around? >> All good questions. First, we're excited to be the first company that is partnered with the Ministry on this effort. We're sure many others are going to join, but we're excited to be first. I think what makes it different is the aspect of experiential. There's a lot of experiential learning that's going on different than the academic learning. Equally or maybe even more necessary is the sort of organizational cultural learning. Just what does it take to operate at world scale or at pace. And then to be able to bring that back to the region. We'll do that wherever we've got the right mix of skills. So it could be in Bahrain, where we've got a big office now, it could be in London, could be Washington, D.C., could be Seattle. >> Your Excellency, we always talk about on theCUBE over the years, tech athletes. Because, you know, to be an athlete, you got to have durability, intelligence, stability. Being a tech athlete, the travel schedules, we were just joking last night about it, you mentioned it. But also the intelligence and the integrity to do this at this speed. So this is kind of, I love the theme, so I want you to elaborate why this connects in with your vision and how did this idea get started, what was the origination around this effort? >> So initially the, again, if one takes a step back, we started experimenting about a year ago, a year and a half ago with the sports sector. So what we were doing with the sports sector, because it was a much smaller sector. What we're trying to experiment there is, if you were to allow our athletes to interact with the best in class, what would happen? Would they live up to that experience or not? And so one of the segments that we were looking at is, for example, triathlons. So about two years ago, this sport, triathlons in general, just simply didn't exist in the region. So two, maximum three years ago, they just, they were nonexistent. So His Highness had ordered that we go ahead and see if we can develop this and see if we can develop the athletes for it. And so what we needed to do, essentially, was pick some-- >> Find the athletes. (laughs) >> Is find the athletes, exactly. Send them out, we did a few triathlons. They did Kuna and Florida, came back, loved it, the addiction and the adrenaline kicked in, and then we started arranging duathlons and then triathletes here in Bahrain. Of course, I don't know if you know this, a year, fast forward, a year and a half later, and BE13, which is our triathlon team, is number one in the world. Simply it's number one in the world. Now we're doing this, we tried this with biking. So we sent a team to the Tour de France, and we started to do exactly the same thing. We were aspiring to look at greats like Sky team and the rest, and just learning from them, imitate, and then innovate, and-- >> One, if you have to have the talent to begin with, your theory is put 'em in, let 'em see it, and they'll either level up or they won't. It's self selection. >> Absolutely, no question. >> And you want to bring that formula to tech. >> It's pure meritocratic sink or swim. So we've got, so there's two, there's two phrases that we live by, all right. Number one, our role is open, competitive, just environment. That's it, all right. The number two is we open doors with no hand-holding. Simply no hand-holding, but we'll get you the opportunity. But if Amazon calls us and says participant number 606 or whatever isn't up to the cut, then they're not up to the cut. And what our youth have proven to us time after time is they're always up to the cut. As long as you make that clear, they-- >> The expectation defines the experience. So if you say this is what it is, you can swim or you can sink, your choice, people will tap out, they won't even jump in. >> I like the tech athletes piece. >> Yeah, I'm loving it, absolutely. >> Well, I mean, a lot of tech athletes, it takes a lot of energy, it is like you said, you don't know what it takes to build a company, it's really hard, I mean, it's not easy. >> It is, and the thing, just like this program, the thing that was interesting about the University of Bahrain idea was they're going to try and immerse everybody, because cloud and technology now is immersed in any field. I mean, anything becomes digital. And we were talkin' earlier about e-sports, so you need a whole bunch of great tech athletes to start bringing e-sports services to the world. >> Absolutely. >> Do you see e-sports emerging? >> Yeah, no doubt. So what we did on Friday is we signed the first agreement, this is the first time that a region hosts, we're hosting BLASTPro's finals in Bahrain, this is going to be on the 13th and the 14th of December, and that's running, streaming on Twitch. So we're excited, we're excited to be doing this with the guys at BLASTPro, and we're excited to be using Amazon's infrastructure to do it. So yes, absolutely, there is amazing things to be seen in e-sports and we're excited. >> This is awesome, digital disruption, you guys have been so proactive on this. I was commenting this morning on Twitter, then stats went out about entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley in the U.S., 51% of all ventures fail. And some other ones, 4% become unicorns, but it was all about optionality, et cetera, et cetera, and entrepreneurs are about getting on the right wave and falling and trying again, and this is, you guys have been very proactive on this. >> Right, so that's exactly why we think that sports plays a big role. So the idea behind the program was simply to gamify everything. The idea behind this program, the idea behind adopting the new bankruptcy law in Bahrain, and the new reform regulations that are coming in, all we're doing is we're gamifying things. What we're simply saying is when you fall, it's OK to fall. As long as you get back up and hit the ground running once again, we're OK with that. So you'll start to hear phrases that are pretty interesting. Like I said, with the entrepreneurships, what we're looking at is unlocking levels. So we're gamifying. With education we're doing exactly the same thing, we're looking at vocational training where you get to unlock levels. So as long as people know that the name of the game is just to stay in the game, and then outpace everybody else, then we're good. >> And the funding's been fantastic. You guys have been supporting it with resources. Now that the region's up and running, Max, do you feel good about the development so far with the new region? Therese was just on earlier, she mentioned first day they turned it on, a bunch of companies were launched already. >> Besides the cannons and the confetti that shot out today at the summit, the other exciting thing's I think when we launched the region, we had over 350 different companies, many small businesses, small and medium enterprises that put their offerings into the AWS Marketplace. When it was launched, anybody in the region, anybody in Bahrain, could literally turn on 1,700 different types of software solutions at the push of a button, so I think that's big. I think we heard how 35 local companies have created migration offerings and fast-start offerings. We heard from one great entrepreneur on stage today and we heard from government about how government's operating faster than business, I think Sheikh Salman threw down a bit of a challenge to the rest of the government and state enterprises and even corporations. And then of course I think we saw the digital bank of the future from Bank ABC with their first virtual banking assistant up on stage who, by the way, lives in the cloud over Bahrain. >> Yeah, digital employee, we had a great chat about that. This speaks to the generational shift, this is something that's going to be an interesting footnote in history. The sea change around expectations, you brought this up earlier, I think this is important. The younger generation, they want the world to be at a different speed, and they don't want an intolerant blockers in their way. And so whoever can be out front on setting up the environment, whether it's society, government, citizen services, but money-making potential, banks got to operate. So this is the replatforming of society is happening. >> No question, yeah, no question. I'll give you just the, when you compare ministries, when you compare government entities, you would walk in and you'd assume the ultra-bureaucratic system is still in place where you've got to go through tiers and so on and so forth. As far as the youth at the Ministry of Youth is involved, these guys are running things with chats, we've got internal chat systems, and so there is no memo-writing process where you then have to escalate it, and then it goes to the minister's office and so on. Absolutely not. These guys are on the likes of Slack, the likes of Teams from Microsoft and so on, and that's how government is run. >> Max, email's for old people like us. >> Hey, modern digital governments are redesigning the way all this stuff works, and it doesn't, the thing that's interesting to me is it doesn't just impact these things that you would think of as tech. I thought the example of going from 130 days to 5 days for permitting approvals-- >> For building permits, sure. >> That takes out a massive amount of inefficiency from the industry, right, and it enables that very industry to then move faster, instead of government as a blocker to so many of these things, becomes an enabler. And I think it's that attitude about modernized, customer-focused or citizen-focused that is the hallmark of what folks are doing now to make a difference. >> Well, thanks for coming in and sharing the insights. Your Excellency, great to see you. I have one final question, take a minute to explain to the folks what is the Ministry of Youth and Sports Affair, what's the charter, you going to add tech athletes to the mix now that we've kind of defined that term? But take a minute to explain-- >> Tech athletes. So the vast majority of the population is under the age of 35. The ministry's mandate is to make sure that anybody within that constituency, their touchpoints are being managed in the right way. So our job, very, very simply, is to be effectively the change agent for them, number one, and number two, to protect their interests. So we're the ones that are negotiating regulations that come in, but what touchpoint really is relevant? We're negotiating new laws that impact youth when it comes to their trades, new laws that impact youth when it comes to their rights, new laws-- >> Whether it's culture or art or whatever. >> Any touchpoints, so effectively we're customer-relations for youth, or client relations for youth. So that's that from one perspective. With regards to sports, we're simply regulators. So what we're doing is we're moving from an operator model to a regulator model, and what we're trying to do is we're trying to create a sports industry. So instead of us focusing on the actual tournament itself only, we're looking at sports diplomacy, we're looking at sports industry, we're looking at human performance and things like that. So any sectors that we can catalyze to grow in Bahrain that relates in any way, shape, or form to sports, whether it was medicinal development, technological development, regulations or otherwise, that falls under Ministry of Youth and Sports. >> You're charged to look at the whole individual across all spectrums touchpoints. >> Exactly >> That's awesome. >> So we're a horizontal as opposed to a vertical. >> Your Excellency, great to have you on theCUBE, great topic, could talk about it forever. We love sports, of course, on theCUBE, we love talkin' sports, Max, you're a tech athlete. >> I'm a tech athlete, I learned that today. Brilliant. >> You go from city to city, hit a home run everywhere you go. >> I'm looking for the next league to compete in. >> Guys, thanks so much for the insights. CUBE coverage here at AWS Summit in Bahrain, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> from the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the Cube covering Cooper inspired 2019. Brought to You by Cooper. >> Welcome to the Q. But Lisa Martin on the ground in Las Vegas for Cooper Inspire. 19 Hot Vegas. Fresh Insight. I'm pleased to welcome Max Ground, the managing director from Deloitte to the program. Hey, Max. >> Good morning. Good afternoon. >> Good afternoon. Whatever time it is, Vegas Right here is this. It's a time warp. They don't like you see outside It's >> only place the world. The 25th hour. >> Right? So here we are. It inspired 19 kick Everything kicked off this morning with the general session. I was teasing Rob Bernstein a couple hours ago and I had him on that. I learned three things in the general session. He likes pizza, he likes kittens. And Cuba's platform now has 1.2 trillion dollars of spending data going through it. And I thought, man procurement is not what I thought. It wa ce and you have a really >> interesting story about procurement. I'd love for you to share with our audience >> because you said in your session earlier today you said people in this standing your morning session. How many of you wanted to be on procurement? Anybody that raises their hands of line tell me about the procurement of yesterday, the >> opportunities that it's given you and what it is now. >> So I think >> in the past, >> security has been something that had to happen. It was a must have not a place that people saw value. But was the rule enforcers right? So trying to do that and really adding value by discipline, where today, if you think about it, the value that they can add by driving savings authorization drops right to the bomb line. So all the savings that are out there, all >> the negotiations that are doing, it's really unique skill set >> and something that people really should move into finance folks when they're looking for a new opportunity. It's a great skill set to have. Lately I've come across a former attorneys are practicing law but now doing strategic sourcing, doing procurement, work, people from finance because the talent that you have to have is field work with people within their companies, understand their needs, negotiate with suppliers, do hard core analytics and, oh, by the way, we're talking about Cooper has helped in change and implemented technology like that. It's really fascinating. >> It's so much more than >> being a buyer or being somebody that's controlling a particular business unit's ability to buy and spend. >> One of the interesting things about Cooper is this platform that allows what started, I >> think, initially as more procurement corner invoicing is now expanded to also include payments and expenses and travel management and contingent workhorse management. So what the CPO now has the opportunity to do is get this visibility right across an entire business of all of the spending, to your point, make massive impacts to the bottom line. >> Yeah, I >> mean, data is so important, right? In the past, the vendors had all the information. Why? Because the sales people how to get commissions. They knew exactly what was being bought of that company. Today, you can reverse engineer saying, selling cells. I say it's reverse sales. I can't go in there and I tell them now I have the full picture. So if it's divided up that category by three or four different vendors, they're making assumptions about how much market share they have. I know it all. I can create a model, a pricing model on the reverse. Engineer it. It's really for sales. I'm telling them now why they should give me a great discount for the organization and >> I >> have the ability to actually enforce that and drive the savings that we have for the organization. It also helped them drive their numbers on sales. So it's a mutually beneficial relationship. They have more market share. I drive better value for the organization. It really works well, >> Well, one of the destructor is that you're kind of alluded to Is this consumer ization? You know, when you go to buy >> a car these days, you just walk in there. You have as a as a buyer of the consumer oven automobile. You have access to every piece of information possible, the whole transaction process. The sales process is different. So as consumers in our regular lives, we have so much expectation that weaken, find anything good Amazon, find anything that we want, get it delivered tomorrow and have all these information on what? Where's the best place I could get it? Who's selling it for what? How is this person that you know, more trustworthy supplier So this consumer ization element and how it's changing the role of the CPO in the CFO is >> really revolutionary. >> It really isn't so you think about it. Most of us go out to Amazon by something, and really the only control there for me, for example, is my wife has to approve it, right, so that's the only veto authority. So that's really the only difference between the two platforms. If you think about it is, there's controls in place, so you're doing the right thing. But from an end user perspective, if I go out there and find the right item and again in Amazon, I don't to go find the supplier. I don't know if that be on contract. Why don't you do that work? We shouldn't have to. I should just go out there and say, I need this And in the background, Cooper is working all those things, presenting the right products on the right contracts, driving right value and almost is important, minimizing the risk. So across all those different lenses, you see why the value of Cooper is for the end user. They're getting what they need for the organization, for the company we're reducing risk and we're increasing value, and then you have rich reporting on the back end. So it's just it's a great way of doing business. It really is taking what you used to do or what you do. It's Sunday afternoon like Rob, you say Monday at work, and I think that's really powerful thing of perspective. >> It is. And it can be so impactful if applied in the right way with an organization, whether it's a manufacturer or hospital or retailer that has a culture that is willing to embrace change, right? I mean, there's that right, Especially >> get him to get your >> perspective on when you're implementing Cooper at a large organization. Maybe have been around for many, many years versus maybe a more modern that we think might be more nimble organization. Culturally, Do you see massive differences in how they're leading procurement, and are you able to sort of level the playing field and show them doesn't matter what your culture is? Here's how your business, your body. >> So from a change perspective, I think there's a different perception. The newer, nimbler organization believes that they changed easy, but it still may have people the older organisation again still made people most people don't like to change. What I have learned is if you help them understand the value of it, how they're doing it, how their jobs are going to change and give them the tools to do it. Some people are gonna be early adopters. But finding that one person, the organization, no matter what level they are in that business unit or in that department that has that informal voice that people look to naturally, that the Nazi leader who's in a leadership position with leader from a personality perspective get them on board. And sometimes that's the hardest thing to do. They might be the most changed resistant, but was that person flips, They become your greatest greatest advocate out there. So it's a personal thing. This is hard work. That's why I talk about in our sessions, is going through. This requires a lot of work, but it's worth it. You can measure the value on the end that you got help. People understand why you're going on this journey and have have resource is there for help. >> So what were some of that? You said you did good Q and a session during your break out this afternoon. >> Tell me some of >> the things that that some of the audience said that you thought was really like they're getting it, >> Yes. So the whole point of our session was going live is not really the goal, right? That's just >> a guess, the exact right. >> And so most people focus on going live, and the answer is congratulations. You purchased the product, Kuba, and now it's working. So what? You don't have any real data? What do you do in the future? Some questions were as they're going through Supplier Neighborhood. The shift between procurement now taking a larger role in the relationships with the vendors. Well, that's great. It should be a balanced relationship. You know, there's a procurement role in that. And then there's the end. Users are the people in the organization from the business. You have to relate with those suppliers, so work together. If you were together in the past now it's a great time to do that. There's some other questions about if something is not working correctly. Post go live how quick It's not broken, but it could be optimized or you're getting complaints about. How quick should you change it? The answer is, I don't know, measuring yourself. I mean, obviously it's broken. Fix it. But it might be something around change. And maybe you have to help people understand why they're doing this new process. If people are giving feedback positive, negative, mostly native, was positive. We just go off our way. Welcome to Yelp. But if it's negative feedback, listen, don't get offended, understand that perspective and then measure it. Say, Is this something that we did is saying the platform, or is it just changed and work with it? What I tell our clients to is in Cooper, Just cause you can doesn't mean you should. I mean, that's really easy to build a field custom field, really easy to build, custom approval chance, really hard to maintain that stuff. So try to do it out of the not out of the box, but configured without as much customization as possible, and they can always improve it, understand it better. >> I think the key to adoption is the more customization that you have. I imagine the adoption funnel gets narrower and narrower. It's got >> interesting, so you customize because you think that's the way the process should go, because that's how we do it today. So if your goal is to take how you do your process today and put into Cooper, also tell clients congratulations. If you had a bad process now you're bad process that works faster. So take the time to say, Let's step back. Companies evolve, right? And so as they're evolving, if you haven't taken a really a view purposeful of you backwards and measure organization, where you're out from a charity model assessment, then you probably don't know where your gaps are. Take the opportunity when you're implying Cooper to use kind of leading practice that Cooper has start with that and said, Going back to what you're doing today, you know what a great example. That's improvers, right? So people like to have 10 approve er's because they think it reduces risk. So if I go back and look and I asked the audience, say, how many purchase order requests rejected? Very few. And how long do people actually have it open when they re prove it? So that's three seconds when they open it up and looked at it, do they really assess it from a risk perspective? Probably not. But if four people ahead of them approved it, that person's just gotta prove it, because I think it's okay because they're assuming someone else is looking at it, as opposed to in Cooper. Now I have the rich data to understand it. I could minimize risk that way instead of trying to do it. And what is a false sense of security? >> So getting people on board with bringing in automation and leveraging like I was saying in the beginning, the 1.2 trillion of spend that's going through the Cooper platform toe leverage that intelligence to not only have Cooper create the prescriptions for companies to be able to go. Okay, we don't we shouldn't your point. We shouldn't take a process that was clunky before and just do it faster. Still clunky, being able to have the automation thing. Analytics. Really, Those core enabling technologies can also be quite revolutionary. >> Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So the coop insights now, and you're seeing that measured against others and its mass, but you see how you're doing it, So this is really powerful sitting your goals out there and seeing how you're doing. Adjusting those really question yourself is, if we're not getting is approved in the speed that we thought, How do we do it differently? Right, So and that's nice about Cuba. It is really sounds right, and they really do come out with three releases a year, which is powerful. And so it's always changing, which means you have to be nimble. Understand your organization, adopting the new technologies to come out. They're also looking at their acquisitions and seeing that fits into what you're doing. >> Exactly. Last question for you is the announcement of the expansion of their in the AWS marketplace today and thinking, Wow, the I t person is probably gonna finally all these Shadow I T units that are popping up in finance and marketing and engineering and whatnot. They now have the ability to see and manage the entire software from search to deployment and management through AWS. What advantage is that going to give Deloitte when you're working with Cooper customers on implementation? >> That's probably too soon to say on that one. All the expansions they're having really help us with another tool. Tell clients I would say that there's always measuring the benefit for that client in the risk. So even if you take Amazon, for example, just opened by for Cooper is managing that So Amazon. When they first came out with Amazon for business open by, you couldn't control the categories that were exposed to the client. Now you can, but you can't control the items. So having a process in place, having a category strategy and then maximizing it if Amazon works that client fantastic, AWS is gonna get them or visibility across their platforms to manage those better. Fantastic. I think it just gives another opportunity to bring clients back into Cooper. Have a look at the value for Cooper from an end and solution, and all these wraparound acquisitions are making our expansions with their clients, people pay and all those other pieces out there. It's just another thing for them to have a goal and understand make a decision from their business, whether they're going to use it or not. But there's there's value across the board. Every every client is different, >> Absolutely. But it's also that that consumer ization approach that if you can take a process that somebody does on their own time, whether they're buying soccer balls or pool and bring that to their business life, that consumer ization following them. You think with potential there to transform every industry, every function, every line of business. It's just infinite. So >> truly dot, >> dot dot to me. Continue. Absolutely Wish we had more time. But Max, thank you so much for joining me on the Cube today and talk doing talking to me about what's going on at Deloitte and congrats on having us standing. You're only sessions. That's good, right? Take for Max Ground like I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Cooper Inspire 19. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from London, England, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit London 2019, brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Today, we're here at the AWS Summit live at the ExCel Center in London. I'm Susannah Streeter, and this is my cohost Dave Vellente, here today. Now, we've talked a lot about the benefits of Cloud and the opportunities, and also the challenges sometimes, for startups and other businesses. But, also, there has been massive growth of the use of Cloud services by public sector organizations. And our next two guests here on theCUBE today, really, this is your area of business isn't it? So, we have Johnny Hugill, who's from Public, but also Max Peterson, VP of Worldwide Public Sector, AWS. Thank you very much for coming on to talk to us. >> Thank you. >> Now it's really interesting, during the keynote speeches, I was really taken by one of the speeches from the Chief Digital Information Officer at the Ministry of Justice, Tom Read, and he says, "We don't innovate for professional advantage, we do it to take care of people." And, Johnny, this is what your business is about, isn't it? Trying to link up startups and public sector organizations, to ensure that more people are taken care of. >> Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. I think what we've seen in sort of almost every other sector you can think of, is this big proliferation of startups, of new market entrant's of completely new companies, really kind of coming to dominate those markets. And we haven't quite seen as much of that as I would like to see in the public sector. So, what we're trying to do is help tech startups, help innovative new companies, to come in and ultimately to deliver better services for everyone. >> There is real concern, though, among traditional companies about this. For example, your local pharmacy concerned that a really big player is going to move in and take away what they do. How do you kind of bring them along and say, well actually, if you work with a startup, it could improve the way you do business and keep you in business. >> Totally. I think pharmacy is a really interesting example. Because, in the UK, we've seen a bunch of new digital-first pharmacies come in and completely transform how people can access their pharmacy. So, Echo is one example of a UK startup that, now, you can get door-to-door prescriptions, instead of having to go to your pharmacy, make appointments, you know, waste loads of time queuing. My view is that these organizations really have to kind of get up to speed with how things work in the wider digital economy. So, people have certain expectations for how services should be delivered, for how quickly they should be accessed, to be able to access things. I think government services are no different. That's pharmacies, that's schools, that's teaching, that's everything. >> We're here in London. How big is the UK in terms of the growth of your business? >> Max: Well, the UK has been a leader for a long time, so from the time that they undertook the government digital services business through the G Cloud, 11 iterations, with big ministries, like the UK MOJ that you heard, with big nonprofits, like Comic Relief, and everything in between, educational institutions, startups. We're very proud we've partnered with Public to help continue to encourage that kind of innovation in government technology. >> I think, when we last talked Max, you, John and I, I think we were in DC. >> I think it was. >> And you were helping us understand, look, this public sector is not just about DC. And you've got a number of activities. We interviewed several of theCUBE yesterday At AWS headquarters. One of the things we talked about was GDPR. We were having a conversation with a privacy expert earlier today. He said, you know, the big players really haven't, really weren't ready for GDPR. You made a point in DC last year, you said, day-one you guys were ready, end-to-end encryption, a number of other services. so, I wanted to circle back to you. >> Max: Sure. >> I said, okay, we gotta peel the onion. I gotta ask Max, put him on the spot. You guys really anticipated this, it's not like you were scrambling at the last minute. Is that fair to say, and I wonder, if, Johnny, if you could confirm or deny that. >> Well, I would tell you that at Amazon, we think security is job-zero. If we are not making sure that we are continuously raising the bar to improve customer security, security for small businesses, then we need to do a better job. A couple of examples: GDPR was a good one, where, two months before GDPR came into a lawful requirement, Amazon announced that we were GDPR compliant. So people could confidently build on top of Amazon. In the UK, early on in 2016, we delivered one of our advanced security services called AWS Shield, which gives everybody using the AWS Cloud in the UK and, in fact, around the world, automatic protection against DDoS. No additional cost. You get it by using the Cloud. Those are the types of security services that Amazon delivers, and probably one of the most important these days, when you're working with sensitive workloads, is encryption. On Amazon, it's check-the-box easy to implement encryption for your data on the fly or when it's at rest. >> So, I hear that a lot, about encryption, and how simple it is. You guys using encryption? Do you guys got it as part of your... >> So, we work with technology companies who want to work with government, so many of the companies we back are using encryption. As I'd say, some of the, sort of, particularly in policing and defense, and some of the more sensitive areas of the public sector, this stuff is really, really crucial. And you simply can't, kind of, get into government without being GDPR compliant, and without having all of the SAP security essentials. A lot of the companies we've backed, are using AWS Cloud, have gone on to win public sector business, so, in that sense, I'm sure everything's E-checked. >> Are there any special considerations, with regard to encryption, things like, out-of-scope requirements that I should think about as a customer, or is it really as simple as Max is saying, click a button and check a box and don't even worry about it, it's all taken care of. What's your advice to people on encryption, is it just encrypt everything? >> Yeah. >> Are there performance considerations or...? >> I mean, again, it totally depends on the scale of the contract, of the requirements that your kind of going off of. For big major contracts with Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Defense, there are a number of different performance, kind of requirements, that you need to consider. But, in general, I think, yeah, it's pretty quite straightforward. >> Yes, kind of a no-brainer. >> I think the answer is encrypt everything, everywhere, all the time. And that also means on premise, it also means on your devices, right? I mean it needs to be just the standard approach that people take to data protection these days. And, unfortunately, for many organizations internally, it's hard, and so that's why people are moving to Amazon so that they get that security built in. It actually is the number one reason why people are moving to AWS today. They want the built-in security and then, after that, they want speed and innovation. And there was a really interesting statistic today at the keynote. Did you hear that LSE, London School of Economics, just completed a study and they showed that 95% of all startups that happen today would not happen if they had to depend on legacy infrastructure, because it was hard and expensive, and that's, candidly, why being a startup in today's Cloud-based world, is a much better value proposition. You can focus on the problem rather than all of these important but complicated factors like encryption. >> The other thing there, the London School of Economics study showed is the productivity gains for those companies that use Cloud. Now, there haven't been obvious productivity gains as a result of technology across the board. We're starting to finally see the uptick. Remember back in the PC days, you could see productivity, you could see upticks everywhere except in productivity, and then all of a sudden it shot up. And we've been predicting, for a couple of years now, you're going to start to see it, Cloud being one of the reasons, other new technologies, and so that was another key finding of that study that I found intersting. >> Well, Sainsbury was up on the stage today again, and what they have now found, right, was they have found a 60% to 70% improvement in productivity. That was their number up on the stage. >> Interesting, you're talking about kind of legacy companies. We've got Ministry of Justice, in fact there was a bit of a battle wasn't there? Yeah, well we've been balanced since 1170. (laughter) >> That was hilarious wasn't it? >> Sainsbury's only 150 years old. >> MOJ got up and said, "Well, in this battle of historical significance, our mission started in 1178. (laugher) >> But it's interesting to talk about those, but really, your bread and butter, Johnny Hugill, is the startups, isn't it, trying to spot talent out there and think, who could I partner these guys up with. >> Yeah, totally right. A really important thing to any organization that is trying to innovate today can do is to market horizon scanning, really understand what is out there, what the art of the possible looks like, what the new technologies that are going to change the game look like, what these companies are actually really capable of, where their sweet spot of innovation is. >> Susannah: And they might not know that themselves. >> But it's a really difficult thing to know, especially if you think about what the kind of day-to-day job of government is, which is really running the country, right? It's pretty difficult to ask them, by the way guys, you also need to really understand what the prospects of AI startups are looking like across the country, or across the world. You need to understand who the kind of BotChain innovators are. It's a big challenge, and it's something that we are really trying to help them along the way. As you said, a lot of that is partnering with bigger companies, and kind of forming the right ecosystems of smaller companies, large companies that can help them scale, and kind of taking government on that journey along with them. >> Well, and the pace of change is another challenge. Six months in this business now is an eternity it seems like. I remember crypto was so hot a year ago, I mean I'm a fan of a lot of the underlying technologies. It was interesting to see how Amazon dealt with that. You asked a lot of questions, like what do you really need to do this, you guys came up with a couple of solutions there, but, keeping up with the pace of change is one of the, I would think, one of the key values that you provide. >> It's really a challenge, and I think now, in infant tech, 15% of the financial revenue in the UK has come from startups founded in the last five years, right? So a big legacy market as important as financial services, has just been completely turned on its head, by Revolut, by Monzo, by all these new guys. And in government we are going to see the same thing at some point. >> Dave: I'd observe that in financial services those are good examples, but the industry still hasn't been disrupted yet. Healthcare still hasn't been disrupted. They're both ripe for disruptions and it's happening. >> Max: Yeah, but I think if you look at those, that's part of what Johnny was saying. Some of these early industries, like finance, have maybe been the initial disrupters, but I do believe that there is a wave of opportunity and disruption coming in this whole gov-tech space. One of them recently was at Zuna. Zuna came in and acquired a contract with UK government that completely upended an old way of doing job search. They had a better mousetrap. And, fortunately, in this case, government recognized it and they used them. >> [Johnny} Yeah, I mean, I would say that was a really momentous thing. The most used website in the entire UK Government, which is the kind of find-a-job search site. As Zuna came along, replaced an incumbent supplier who'd been doing it for years, probably quite badly, came along with their new AI-driven platform, using AWS Cloud and are now just delivering a service that everyone prefers. >> Dave: I saw NHS has announced, what, a half-billion pound almost, transformation project, modernization. And when you peel the onion, you see a lot of startups. Behind the startups, you see a lot of Cloud going on because the Cloud attracts startups, startups are where the innovation is, and if you're going to modernize and spend a half-billion pounds, you better look to the innovation engine. >> Yeah, one of the things about the Cloud computing and one of the things about government policy that's critical, is that it actually encourages that kind of innovation. Because a lot of small companies are the source of new ideas, but, procurement sometimes gets in the way. One of the things that we think, in fact, has worked well is the UK G Cloud contract, where on the UK G Cloud, over 90% of the suppliers on the G Cloud contract are in fact small and medium enterprises, and where 45% of the sales since inception on G Cloud have actually gone to SMEs. >> So it's really transformative. >> yeah. >> Well thank you very much for talking to us about this really fascinating space. I really appreciate it Max Peterson and Johnny Hugill. Thank you for joining us on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Great talk. >> That's all from us for now from the Excel Center AWS Summit here in London.

>> From Seattle, Washington, it's 'theCUBE' Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018, brought to you by 'redhat' The CloudNative computing foundation and it's ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to live CUBE coverage here at Seattle for KubeCon, CloudNativeCon2018. I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman, breaking down all the action here for CloudNative, trend, a lot of ecosystem partners, a lot of new developers, a lot of great open-source action in the cubes here covering it. We've been there from the beginning, our next guest and user, Max Schulze, Advisor and Founder of NBF, welcome to the CUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thank-you, thank-you for having me. >> So tell me about what you're working on. You are doing something pretty compelling with Kubernetes and CloudNative, take a minute to explain what you do. >> Yeah actually, we are advising a very large energy utility in the Nordics and what we're trying to do with Openshift and Kubernetes is actually to shift loads between different data centers based on power availability. So if you have wind and solar power, you know that you only get energy when the wind is blowing so you really need to be able to match that load of the data center with the actually energy production which is quite challenging to be honest. >> Max you have different take on 'Follow-the-sun' that we used to talk about in IT I'm guessing, yes? >> Yes >> Take us inside a little bit, the sustainability is really interesting and how some of the power, you know, usage and heat and everything and maybe you can explain that a little bit before we get into the data. >> Of course, so generally how we got to a sustainable data center source was that in the Nordics you see a big growth of data centers in general so all the hyperscalers: Google, Microsoft, AWS. They are all coming to build data centers in Nordics. It's cold, power is cheap, you have lots of renewable energy available and we started to think 'Okay, but they have two problems essentially.' They generate a lot of heat, which is just emitted into the atmosphere so it's wasted, and the second problem is that they want 100% reliable power and reliable power you only get from nuclear, you get from gas, coal fire power plants not from renewables. So we looked into this, and we started to think about okay can we maybe get the heat out? Can we extract the heat from a data center and inject it into district heating grids and actually heat homes? With a hyperscale data center from Microsoft, 300 megawatts you can heat about 150,000 homes, that's quite significant. >> Yeah and how are you doing that? I mean I talked to a company once that was like 'Oh well we're going to, you know, we'll just distribute the servers different places and there will be ambient heat off of it.' But you're extracting the heat and sharing it. Explain that a little bit more. >> So most existing data center projects, they extract the heat out of the air but that's really inefficient. You get to about 100 degrees Fahrenheit which is not uh high quality heat. So what we want is 140 degrees Fahrenheit, about 60 degrees celsius, which means that we have to use liquid. So we have to use water in this case and we use a cooling system that is quite ironic from a start up in Germany called Cloud & Heat that uses hot water to cool servers. So the water really flows at a very very high speed through the data center and on it's way picks up a very low amount of temperature and we get out the temperature, we get out the water at 140 degrees Fahrenheit and we put it in at 120 degrees Fahrenheit. So it's quite, not a big difference, but it flows at a very high speed. >> So it makes it work? Makes the numbers work. >> Exactly. And so what's the home count again you mentioned one hyperscale data center, like a Microsoft data center powers heat for how many homes? >> About 150,000 homes from 300 megawatts worth of data center. >> And you guys put this into a grid so that's, does the location of the homes need to be nearby, is there a co-location kind of map or? >> Yeah actually, in order to do this we have to move data centers closer to cities. But luckily, data centers actually want to be closer to cities because your closer to peering points and one of the reasons why they usually can't come closer to cities is because power is not available near a city. So we um try, we can give them both. Right, they can come closer to the city and we can give them power, and we get the heat in return. So, so everybody wins. >> Yeah so I mean, a lot of the discussion we've had is the interaction between software and my data center infrastructure. You've got a story of software, with you know, actual like city underneath the infrastructure. Maybe you got to help explain how that was built out, what tools you're using and walk us through this all. >> So we originally started with Openstack, which was the first test because we need, in order to do this heat extraction we need to also steer really the software, the workloads that run on the data center because you know a chip only gets hot when the server actually does something so we really had to figure this out. We started with Openstack and then we started looking into load shifting which immediately brought us to Kubernetes and then Openshift because you can use the internal scheduler to basically force loads across different locations. We connect it to our energy systems, to our forecasting systems and to our heat load management systems and then basically push workloads around. Right now we have two sites where we test this and it's not as easy as it sounds. And we basically want to move workloads, concentrate them where we want, we have heat. So um yeah, Redhat is helping us a lot doing this but still it's not that easy. >> Yeah yeah, it's interesting. You know, I think back you know, virtualization was about you know, how can we drive some utilization and get some out? You really want to you know, concentrate and run things hot. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Quite inter- Alright tell us about your involvement in this ecosystem, you know, what brings you to the show this week, what do you get out of coming to a show like this? >> Yeah, actually I came because Redhat invited us to talk at the Openshift gathering at the beginning of the conference. And generally, we don't really have a commercial interest in making data centers or data infrastructure sustainable, we, we don't gain anything from that, but we believe it's necessary. If you look at the growth curve of data centers you can really see that they will consume more and more power, and then the power they consume is not compatible with renewable energy. So we are hoping that we can influence people and we come here to tell people our story and we actually get great feedback from most of the nerds. >> Well it's a great story. It's one of those things where you're starting to see data centers trying to solve these problems. It's great with the renewable energy, having that kind of success story is really huge. Um, You mentioned that data centers want to be close to cities. I got to ask the question, in Europe, well you've lived around a lot of places. Is there a more cloud city oriented, like is it London, you got Paris, you got... I know Amazon's got data centers in Ireland. Is there certain cities that are more CloudNative culture? How would you break down the affinity towards CloudNative? If you had to map Europe, which major countries and cities would you think are advanced, cloud thinking vs. tire kickers or you know, people just kind of just trying it? >> In Europe there is a region called the FLAP region, that's Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris. Those are where you have the highest concentration of data centers, but it terms of CloudNative adoption, I would say that probably in the UK you have the most adoption rates and in the Netherlands. Germany is always, I am German so I can say this, we are always a bit behind in terms of cloud technology because we're a bit scared and we don't know- >> You'll watch everyone test it out and then you guys will make it go faster. (john laughs) >> Maybe, maybe, maybe a bit more efficient but uh, generally I think the cloud adoption rate in Germany is the lowest and the UK and the Netherlands is the highest I would say, yeah. >> Awesome, well thanks so much. Congratulations on your success, we'll keep following you and when we're in Europe we're going to come by and say hello. Thanks for coming and sharing the stories. The CUBE, breaking down all the action at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. I'm John with Stu Miniman. Day 2, we got three days of wall to wall coverage. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome back. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage. We're here in Washington, D.C. for live coverage of theCUBE here at Amazon Web Services, AWS Public Sector Summit. This is the re-invent for the global public sector. Technically they do a summit but it's really more of a very focused celebration and informational sessions with customers from Amazon Web Services, GovCloud, and also international, except China, different world. John Furrier, Dave Vellante here for our third year covering AWS Public Sector Summit and again our next guest is Max Peterson, the Vice President of International Sales Worldwide for public sector data, Max, good to see you, thanks for coming back. >> It's good to see you again, John, thank you. >> So, we saw you at dinner last night, great VIP Teresa Carlson dinner last night, it's a who's who in Washington, D.C., but also international global public sector. >> Absolutely. >> And so, I want to get your thoughts on this, because AWS is not just in D.C. for GovCloud, there's a global framework here. What's goin' on, what's your take on how this cloud is disrupting the digital nations, and obviously here at home in D.C.? >> Well, John, so first of all, I love your description of this as a celebration, because really that's one of the things that we do, is we celebrate customer success, and so when you look at AWS around the world, we've got customers that are delivering solutions for citizens, new solutions for healthcare, a great solution to education all around the world. In Europe, we serve all those customers from London, Ireland, Germany, Frankfurt, Paris, all open regions, and we're bringing two new regions that we've announced, in the Middle East, which is an exciting part of the Europe, Middle East, and Africa business, and then also up in the Nordics, with Sweden. >> Yeah, so I want to ask you about EMEA, Europe, Middle East and Africa, it's the acronym for essentially international. Huge growth, obviously Europe is a mature set of countries, and it has its own set of issues, but in the Middle East and outside of Europe there's a huge growing middle class of digital culture. >> Yes. >> You're seeing everything from cryptocurrency booming, blockchain, you're seeing kind of the financial industries changing, obviously mobile impact, you got a new revolution going on with digital. You guys have to kind of thread the needle on that. What are you guys doing to support those regions? Obviously, you got to invest, got GDP always in the headlines >> Right. >> Recently, that's Europe's issue, and globally, but you got Europe, and you got outside of Europe. Two different growth strategies, how is AWS investing, what are some of the things you guys are doing? >> Sure, let me try and get all of those questions >> (laughs) Just start them one at a time >> That was very good, yeah. So, let's do the invest and grow piece. Digital skills are critical, and that's one of the challenges with the overall digital transformation, and, by the way, that's not just EMEA, that's all around the world, right? Including the U.S., and so we're doing a lot of things to try to address the digital skills requirement, a program that we've got called AWS Educate just yesterday announced the Cloud Academy Course. So, career colleges, technical colleges will be able to teach a two-year course specifically on cloud, right? For traditional university education, we provide this thing called AWS Educate. We, in the UK, we started a program over 18 months ago called Restart, where we focus on military leavers, spouses, and disadvantaged youth through the prince's trust, and we're training a thousand people a year on AWS cloud computing and digital skills. Taking them, in this case, out of military, or from less advantaged backgrounds and bringin' 'em into tech. And then, finally in April of this year, at our Brussels public sector summit, a celebration of customers in EMEA, we announced that we're going to be training 100,000 people across Europe, Middle East and Africa, with a combination of all of these programs, so skills is absolutely top in terms of getting people on to the cloud, right, and having them be digitally savvy, but the other part that you talked about is really the generational and cultural changes. People expect service when they touch a button on the phone. And that's not how most governments work, it's not how a lot of educational institutions work, and so we're helping them. And so, literally now, across the region, we've got governments that are delivering online citizen services at the touch of a button. Big organizations, like the UK Home Office, like the Department for Wealth and Pensions, like the Ministry of Justice. And then, I think the other thing that you asked about was GDPR. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Am I covering all the bases? >> You're doing good Max. >> You keep it rollin'. >> You're a clipping machine, here. >> So, GDPR might be thought of as a European phenomenon, but my personal opinion is that's going to set the direction for personal data privacy around the world, and we're seeing the implementation happen in Europe, but we're seeing also customers in the Middle East, in Asia, down in Latin America going, "Hey, that's a good example." And I think you'll see people adopt it, much like people have adopted the NIST definition of cloud computing. Why re-invent it? If there's something that's good, let's adopt it and go, and Amazon understood that that was coming, although some people act like it's a surprise. >> Yeah. >> Did your e-mail box get flooded with e-mail? >> Oh, Gosh. >> God, tons Well the day >> Day before. >> Yes! >> (laughs) >> Yes, day before! Acting like this was, like a surprise. It started two years before, so Amazon actually started our planning so that when the day arrived for it to be effective, AWS services were GDPR compliant so that customers could build GDPR compliant solutions on top of the cloud. >> So, I mean generally I know there's a lot of detail there, but what does that mean, GDPR compliant? 'Cause I like having my data in the cloud with GDPR, 'cause I can push a lot of the compliance onto my cloud provider, so what does that really mean, Max? >> Yeah, well fundamentally, GDPR gives people control of their information. An example is the right to be forgotten, right? Many companies, good companies were already doing that. This makes it a requirement across the entire EU, right? And so, what it means to be compliant is that companies, governments, people need to have a data architecture. They really have to understand where their data is, what information they're collecting, and they have to make the systems follow the rules for privacy protection. >> So how does AWS specifically help me as a customer? >> Right, so our customers around Europe, in fact, around the world build their solutions on top of Amazon. The Amazon services do things that are required by GDPR like encryption, alright? And so, you're supposed to encrypt and protect private data. In Amazon, all you do is click a button, and no matter where you store it, it's encrypted and protected. So a lot of organizations struggled to implement some of these basic protections. Amazon's done it forever, and under GDPR, we've organized those so that all of our services act the same. >> Max, this brings up security questions, 'cause, you know obviously we hear a lot of people use the cloud, as an example, for getting things stood up quickly, >> Yep. >> Whether it's an application in the past, and then say a data warehouse, you got redshifts, and kinesis, and at one point was the fastest growing service, as Andy Jassy said, now that's been replaced by a bunch of other stuff. You got SageMaker around the corner, >> SageMaker's awesome. >> So you got that ability, but also data is not just a data warehouse question. It's really a central value proposition, whether you're talking about in the cloud or IOT, so data becomes the center of the value proposition. How are you guys ensuring security? What are some of the conversations, because it certainly differs on a country by country basis. You got multiple regions developing, established and developing new ones for AWS. How do you look at that? How do you talk to customers and say, "Okay, here's our strategy, and here's what we're doing to secure your data, here's how you can go faster (laughs), keep innovating, because you know they don't want to go slower, because it's complicated. To do a GDPR overhaul, for some customers, is a huge task. How do you guys make it faster, while securing the data? >> Yeah, so first of all, your observation about data, having gravity, is absolutely true. What we've struggled with, with government customers, with healthcare and commercial enterprise, is people have their data locked up in little silos. So the first thing that people are doing on the cloud, is they're taking all that and putting it into a data warehouse, a data repository. Last night we heard from NASA, and from Blue Origin about the explosion in data, and in fact, what they said, and we believe, is that you're going to start bringing your compute to the data because the amount of information that you've got, when you've got billions of sensors, IOT, billions of these devices that are sending information or receiving information, you have to have a cloud strategy to store all that information. And then secondly, you have to have a cloud compute strategy to actually make use of that information. You can't download it anymore. If you're going to operate in real time, you've got to run that machine learning, right, in real time, against the data that's coming in, and then you've got to be able to provide the information back to an application or to people that makes use of it. So you just can't do it in-house anymore. >> You mentioned the talk last night as part of the Earth and Science Program, which you guys did, which by the way, I thought was fabulous. For the folks watching, they had a special inaugural event, before this event around earth and space, Blue Origin was there, Jet Propulsion Lab, much of the NASA guys, a lot of customers. But the interesting thing he said also, was is that they look at the data as a key part, and then he called himself a CTO, Chief Toy Officer. And he goes, "you got to play with the toys before they become too old," but that was a methodology that he was talking about how they get involved in using the tooling. Tooling becomes super important. You guys have a set of services, AWS, Amazon Web Services, which essentially are tools. >> Yeah. >> Collectively tools, you know global, you end up generalizing it, but this is important because now you can mix and match. Talk about how that's changed the customer mindset and how they roll out technology because they got to play, they got to experiment, as Andy Jassy would say, but also, also put the tools into production. How is it changing the face of your customer base? >> Sure, well, one of the things that customers love, is the selection of tools, but one of the most important things we actually do with customers, is help them to solve their problems. We have a professional service organization, we have what we call Envision Engineering, which is a specialized team that goes in and develops prototypes with customers, so that they understand how they can use these different tools to actually get their work done. One quick example: in the UK, the NHS had to implement a new program for people calling in to understand health benefits. And they could've done this in a very traditional fashion, it would've taken months and months to set up the call center and get everything rolling. Fortunately, they worked with one of our partners, and they understood that they could use new speech and language processing tools like Lex, and Amazon's in-the-cloud call center tools, like Connect. In two weeks, they were able to develop the application that handled 42% of the inbound call volume entirely automated, with speech and text processing, so that the other 52% could go to live operators where they had a more complex problem. That was prototyped in two weeks, it was implemented in three more weeks, a total of five weeks from concept to operation of a call center receiving thousands and thousands of inbound calls on the cloud. >> Max, can you paint a picture of the EMEA customer base, how it sort of compares to the US, the profile? I mean, obviously here, in the United States, you got a healthy mix of customers. You got startups, you're announcing enterprises, you got IOT use cases. I imagine a lot of diversity in EMEA, but how does it compare with the US, how would you describe it? Paint a picture for us. >> Yeah sure, candidly, we see the same exact patterns all around the world. Customers are in different stages of readiness, but across Europe, we have central governments that are bringing online, mission systems to the cloud. I mentioned Home Office, I mentioned DWP, I mentioned Her Majesty Revenue and Customs, HMRC. They're bringing real mission systems to the cloud now because they laid the right foundations, right? They've got a cloud native policy, and that's what directs government, that says stop building legacy systems and start building for the future by using the cloud. Educational institutions across the board are using AWS. Science and research, like the European Space Agency is using AWS, so we see, really, just the same pattern going on. Some areas of the world are newer to the cloud, so in the Middle East, we're seeing that sort of startup phase, where startup companies are gettin' onto the cloud. Some of 'em are very big. Careem is a billion dollar startup running on AWS, right. But we're helping startups just do the basics on the cloud. In Bahrain, which is a small country in the Middle East, they realized the transformative opportunity with cloud computing, and they decided to take the lead. They worked with AWS, they produced a national cloud policy, their CIO said we will move to the cloud, and that's key. Leadership is absolutely key. And then they put in place a framework, and they very systematically identified those applications that were ready, and they moved those first. Then they tackled the ones that weren't quite ready, and they moved those. They moved 450 applications in a matter of three months, to the cloud, but it was by having a focused program, top-level leadership, the right policy, and then we provided technical resources to help them do it. >> Max, I want to get one last question before the time comes up, but I want to put you on the spot here. >> Oh good. >> In the United States, Amazon Web Services public sector has really kind of changed the game. You saw the CIA deal that you guys did years ago, the Department of Defense is all in the news, obviously it's changing the ecosystem. How is that dynamic happening in Europe? You said the patterns are the same. Take a minute to just quickly describe, what's going on in the ecosystem? What's the partner profile look like? You've got a great partner ecosystem, and there are different partners. You mentioned Bahrain, Digital Nation, changing the game. You guys seem to attract kind of a new guard, a new kind of thinking, partners. What is the ecosystem partnerships look like for you guys, internationally, and is there the same dynamic going on that's happening in the US with the CIA, and DOD leaders around changing the narrative, changing the game, with technology? >> Sure, good questions. We wouldn't be able to deliver the solutions that we deliver to customers without our partner ecosystem. And sometimes, they're small, born in the cloud partners, the same sort of phenomenon that we have in the US. The example with the National Health Service was delivered by a expert consulting partner called Arcus Global, about a hundred person strong consulting organization that just knows cloud and makes it their business. And we see those throughout Europe, Middle East, and into Africa. We have our large global partners, Capgemini, Accenture, and then I think the other thing that's really important, is the regional partners. So what's happening is we're seeing those regional partners, partners like Everee, or Dee-Ecto, or SCC. We're seeing them now realize that their customers want to be agile, they want to be innovative, they want to be fast, and it doesn't hurt that they're going to save some money. And so we're seeing them change their business model, to adopt cloud computing, and that's the tipping point. When that middle, that trusted middle of partners, starts to adopt cloud and help the customers, that's when it really swings the other direction. >> It's great growth, and new growth brings new partners, new profiles, new brands, new names, and specialty is key. Max, thanks for coming on the CUBE. Really appreciate you taking the time. International, we're riding the wave of home sector with CUBE here in the US, soon we'll see you in some international summits. >> I'm looking forward, >> Alright. >> John, Dave, it was awesome to talk to you. >> Thanks Max. >> Alright, we are here live in Washington, D.C., for Amazon Web Services, AWS, Public Sector Summit 2018, we are in Washington, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, and also Stu Miniman is here, the whole CUBE team is here, unpacking the phenomenon that is AWS, rocking the government and digital nations around the world. We're back with more, after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington DC, it's the CUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its partner Ecosystem. >> Welcome back here on the CUBE, the flagship broadcast of Silicon Angle TV along with John Furrier, I'm John Wallace. We're here at AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, the sixth one in its history. It's grown leaps and bounds and still a great vibe from the show for us. It's been packed all day John. >> It's the new reinvent for the public sector, so size wise it's going to become a behemoth very shortly. Our first conference, multi-year run covering Amazon, thanks to Theresa Carlson for letting us come and really on the front lines here, it's awesome. It's computing right here, edge broadcasting, we're sending the data out there. >> We are, we're extracting the signal from the noise as John always likes to say. Government, educations all being talked about here this week. And with us to talk about that is Max Peterson, he's a general manager at the AWS and Max, thank you for joining us, we appreciate that. >> Thank you for the invitation. >> And I knew we were in trouble with our next guest, cause I said this is John, I'm John, he said, this is Max and I'm Max. I said no you're not, I know better than that. Andre Pienaar who's a founder and chairman of C5 Consulting, Andre, thank you for being here on the CUBE. >> It's great pleasure being here. >> Alright let's just start off first off with core responsibilities and a little bit about C5 too for our audience. First off, if you would Max, tell us a little bit about your portfolio-- >> Sure. >> At AWS and then Andre, we'll switch over to C5. >> I think I might have the best job in the world because I get to work with government customers, educational institutions, nonprofits who are all working to try and improve the lives of citizens, improve the lives of students, improve the lives of teachers and basically improve the lives of people overall. And I do that all around the world. >> That is a good job. Yeah, Andre. >> Max will have to arm wrestle for who has got the best job in the world, because in C5, we have the privilege of investing into fast growing companies that are built on Amazon Cloud and that specializes in cyber security, big data and cloud computing and helps to make the world a safer place. >> I'm willing to say >> Hold on I think we have the best job. >> we both have the best job. >> Now wait a minute, we get to talk to the two of you, are you kidding? >> Yeah, I've got the best, we talk to all the smartest people like you guys and it can't get better than that. >> You're just a sliver of our great day. >> That's awesome, we have established we all have great jobs. >> Andre, so you hit cyber, obviously there is not a hotter topic, certainly in this city that is talked about quite a bit as you're well aware so let's just talk about that space in general and the kinds of things that you look for and why you have this interest and this association with AWS. >> So the AWS cloud platform is a game changer for cyber security. When we started investing in cyber security, and people considered cloud, one of their main concerns was do I move my data into the cloud and will it be secure? Today it's the other way around because of the innovation that AWS has been driving in the cyber security space. People are saying, we feel we are much more secure having the benefit of all innovation on the cloud platform in terms of our cyber security. >> And the investment thesis that you guys go after, just for the record, you're more on the growth side, what stage of investments do you guys do? >> We're a later stage investor so the companies we invest in are typically post revenue but fast growing in visibility and on profitability. >> So hot areas, cyber security, surveillance, smart cities, autonomous vehicles, I mean there's a data problem going on so you see data and super computing coming back into vogue. Back when I was a youngling in college, they called it data processing. The departments and mainframes, data processing and now you have more compute power, edge compute, now you have tons of data, how is all that coming in for and inching in the business models of companies. This is a completely different shift with the cloud. But you still need high performance computing, you still need huge amounts of data science operations, how do companies and governments and public sectors pull up? >> I think just the sheer volume of data that's being generated also by the emerging internet of things necessitates new models for storing and processing and accessing data and also for securing it. When big enterprises and governments think about cyber security, they really think about how do we secure the most valuable data that's in our custody and our stewardship and how do we meet that obligation to the people who have provided that data to us. >> How would you summarize the intrinsic difference between old way, new way? Old way being non-cloud and new way being cloud as we look forward? >> I think that was a pretty good summary right there. New way is cloud, old way is the legacy that people have locked up in their data centers and it's not just the hardware that is the legacy problem, the data is the legacy problem. Because when you have all that information built in silos around government, it makes it impossible to actually implement a digital citizen experience. You as a citizen would like to be able to just ask your question of government and let them sort out what your postal code was, what your benefits information was, right? You can't do that when you've got the data, much less the systems, locked up in a whole bunch of individual departments. >> Well merging of data, sharing data as an ethos and the cyber security world, where there's an ethos of hey, you know, we're going to help each other out because the more data, the more they can get patterns into the analytics which is a sharing culture. That's not really the way it is. I got governance, I got policy issues. >> Well policing is a good example. In the Washington DC area, there are 19 law enforcement agencies with arresting powers and that data is being kept in completely separate silos. Whereas if we're able to integrate and share that data, you will be able to draw some very useful predictive policing conclusions from that which can prevent and detect crime. >> That's a confidence issue and that's where your security point weighs in. Let me get back to what you said about the old way, new way thing. Another bottleneck or barrier, or just hurdle if you will, in cloud growth, has been cultural. Mindset of management and also operational practices, you have a waterfall development cycles or project management versus agile, which is different. That's a different cultural thing so you got all the best intentions in the world, people could raise their hand put stuff in the cloud, but if you can't scale out, you're going to be on this cadence where projects aren't going to get that ROI picture generated so the agility, how are you guys seeing that developing? >> I would tell you the first thing that it takes is leaders and that's what this conference is about. It's about telling the stories of customers who have seen the potential and who are now leaders. It takes something, it takes a spark to start it and the most powerful spark that we've seen, are customer testimonials, who come forward and they explain, hey I was doing this the old way. A lot of times for a cost reason or a new mandate, they have to come up with a new way to invent and they made that selection of the cloud and that's what so often changed the opportunity that they can address. Here's just using that data as an example, transport for London in the UK has a massive amount of data that comes from all of the journey information. They started their journey to the cloud four years ago and it started with the simple premise of I needed to save costs. They saved money and they were able to take that money and reprogram it now to figuring out how do we unlock the data to generate more information for commuters. Finally, they were able to take that learning and start spinning it into how do I actually improve the journey by using machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data techniques? Classic progression along the cloud. Save some money, reinvest the savings and then start delivering new innovation on that point. >> I was going to ask you the use cases. You jumped right in. Andre, can you just chime in and share your opinion on this or anecdotal or story or data around use cases that you see out there that can point to saying, that's game changing that's transformative, that's disruptive. >> Well one of the customer stories that Max referred to that was a real game changer in cyber security was when the CIA said that they were going to adopt the AWS cloud platform. Because people said if US Intelligence community has the confidence to feel secure on AWS cloud, why can't we? AWS have evolved cyber security from being an offering which is on top of the cloud and the responsibility of the client to something which is inside the cloud which involves a whole range of services and I think that's been a complete game changer. >> The CIA deal, Dave Velanto is not here, my partner in crime as well, I call it the shot heard all around the cloud, that was a seminal moment for AWS in chronicling your guys journey over the years but I've been following you guys since the barely birth days and how you've grown up, that was a really critical moment for AWS in the public sector so I want to ask you guys both a question, right now, 2017 here at public sector conference, what's the perception of AWS outside of the ecosystem? Clearly cloud is the new normal, we heard previously, I agree with that. But what's the perception of the viability, the production level? What's the progress part in the minds of the folks? How far are we in that journey cause this is a breakout year, this year. That was the shot heard around the cloud, now there seems to be a breakout year, almost a hockey stick pick up. >> It's another example of how it takes leadership and it was the shot heard round the cloud, what we're seeing though is now many, many people are picking up that lead and using it to their advantage. The National Cyber Security Center in the UK told a story today that's pretty much a direct follow on. They're now describing to their agencies what they should do to be safe on the cloud. They're not giving them a list of rules that they need to try and go check off. It's very much about enabling and it's very much about providing the right guidance and policy. It's unlocking it instead of using security as a blocker in that example. Much more than just that one example, all over the world-- >> But people generally think okay this is now viable. So in terms of the mind of the people out in the trenches, not in the front lines like here, thoughts on your view on the perception of the progress bar on AWS public sector. >> John, one of the best measures of how the AWS cloud is perceived is what's happening in the startup scene. 90% of all startups today get born on the Amazon cloud in the US. 70% of all startups in France gets born in AWS cloud. This is the future voting for cloud and saying this is where we want to be, this is where we can scale this is where we can grow-- >> If you can believe APIs will be the normal operational interface subsystems and data, then you essentially have a holistic distributed cloud, aka computer. That's the vision. So what's the challenge? What do you guys see as the challenge, is it just education, growth? You only have 10,000 people here, it's not like it's 30 yet. >> Well you heard one of the, or you hit on one of the things that's key and that's policy. You really do have to break through the old government bureaucracy and the old government mentality and help set the new policies. Whether it's economic policies that help enable small businesses to launch and use the cloud. Whether it's procurement policies that allow people to actually buy tech and use tech fast, or whether it's the basic policy of the country. The UK now has a policy of being digital native, cloud native. >> The ecosystem's interesting, Andre, you mentioned startup, because I think for me, challenge opportunity is to have Amazon scale up, to handle the tsunami of Ecosystem partners that could be as you said, we just talked to Fugue here. Amazing startup funded by New Enterprise Associates, NEA, they're kicking ass, they're just awesome. You go back 10 years ago, they wouldn't even be considered. >> Absolutely. >> So you've got an opportunity to jam everyone in the marketplace and let it be a free for all, it's kind of like a fun time. >> It's a great time and in the venture capital world, being architect on the Amazon cloud has become a badge of quality. So increasingly venture capital firms are looking for startups that run on the AWS cloud and use them in an innovative way. >> Well on the efficiency on the product side, but also leverage on the capital side. >> Exactly. You need less capital. >> Been a provision of data center, what? >> You need less capital and secondly, also, you can fail much faster and then still have space and time to build it and restart. I think failing faster is something from an investment point of view that is really attractive. >> John: Final question. >> John: Failing faster? >> Failing faster. Because what you don't want are the long drawn out deaths of businesses. Because that's a sure way to destroy value of money. >> I think the other part though is fix faster. >> Fix faster. >> And that's exactly what the cloud does so instead of spending an immense amount of time and energy trying to figuring out precisely what I need to build, I can come up with the basic idea, I can work quick, I can fail fast, but I can fix it fast. >> Alright, well you mentioned the golden time, the golden era, and I think you both have captured it, so I think both your jobs would be up there at the top of the shelf. >> Thank you John. >> You mentioned 19 agencies by the way here in DC that can arrest, I have parking tickets from every one of them. >> Andre: I'm glad they haven't arrested you yet John. >> No, that's the price you pay for living in this city. >> Thanks John and John. >> Max, Andre thank you very much. >> John and John thank you. >> Cheers. >> Back with more here from AWS Public Sector Summit 2017, live, Washington DC, you're watching the CUBE.

(upbeat instrumental music) >> TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (uplifting instrumental music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE Live at MWC '23. I'm Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante, our co-founder, our co-CEO of theCUBE, you know him, you love him. He's here as my co-host. Dave, we have a great couple of guests here to break down day one keynote. Lots of meat. I can't wait to be part of this conversation. Chris Lewis joins us, the founder and MD of Lewis Insight. And Sarbjeet Johal, one of you know him as well. He's a Cube contributor, cloud architect. Guys, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for joining Dave and me today. >> Lovely to be here. >> Thank you. >> Chris, I want to start with you. You have covered all aspects of global telecoms industries over 30 years working as an analyst. Talk about the evolution of the telecom industry that you've witnessed, and what were some of the things you heard in the keynote that excite you about the direction it's going? >> Well, as ever, MWC, there's no lack of glitz and glamour, but it's the underlying issues of the industry that are really at stake here. There's not a lot of new revenue coming into the telecom providers, but there's a lot of adjustment, readjustment of the underlying operational environment. And also, really importantly, what came out of the keynotes is the willingness and the necessity to really engage with the API community, with the developer community, people who traditionally, telecoms would never have even touched. So they're sorting out their own house, they're cleaning their own stables, getting the cost base down, but they're also now realizing they've got to engage with all the other parties. There's a lot of cloud providers here, there's a lot of other people from outside so they're realizing they cannot do it all themselves. It's quite a tough lesson for a very conservative, inward looking industry, right? So should we be spending all this money and all this glitz and glamour of MWC and all be here, or should would be out there really building for the future and making sure the services are right for yours and my needs in a business and personal lives? So a lot of new changes, a lot of realization of what's going on outside, but underlying it, we've just got to get this right this time. >> And it feels like that monetization is front and center. You mentioned developers, we've got to work with developers, but I'm hearing the latest keynote from the Ericsson CEOs, we're going to monetize through those APIs, we're going to charge the developers. I mean, first of all, Chris, am I getting that right? And Sarbjeet, as somebody who's close to the developer community, is that the right way to build bridges? But Chris, are we getting that right? >> Well, let's take the first steps first. So, Ericsson, of course, acquired Vonage, which is a massive API business so they want to make money. They expect to make money by bringing that into the mainstream telecom community. Now, whether it's the developers who pay for it, or let's face it, we are moving into a situation as the telco moves into a techco model where the techco means they're going to be selling bits of the technology to developer guys and to other application developers. So when he says he needs to charge other people for it, it's the way in which people reach in and will take going through those open APIs like the open gateway announced today, but also the way they'll reach in and take things like network slicing. So we're opening up the telecom community, the treasure chest, if you like, where developers' applications and other third parties can come in and take those chunks of technology and build them into their services. This is a complete change from the old telecom industry where everybody used to come and you say, "all right, this is my product, you've got to buy it and you're going to pay me a lot of money for it." So we are looking at a more flexible environment where the other parties can take those chunks. And we know we want collectivity built into our financial applications, into our government applications, everything, into the future of the metaverse, whatever it may be. But it requires that change in attitude of the telcos. And they do need more money 'cause they've said, the baseline of revenue is pretty static, there's not a lot of growth in there so they're looking for new revenues. It's in a B2B2X time model. And it's probably the middle man's going to pay for it rather than the customer. >> But the techco model, Sarbjeet, it looks like the telcos are getting their money on their way in. The techco company model's to get them on their way out like the app store. Go build something of value, build some kind of app or data product, and then when it takes off, we'll take a piece of the action. What are your thoughts from a developer perspective about how the telcos are approaching it? >> Yeah, I think before we came here, like I said, I did some tweets on this, that we talk about all kind of developers, like there's game developers and front end, back end, and they're all talking about like what they're building on top of cloud, but nowhere you will hear the term "telco developer," there's no API from telcos given to the developers to build IoT solutions on top of it because telco as an IoT, I think is a good sort of hand in hand there. And edge computing as well. The glimmer of hope, if you will, for telcos is the edge computing, I believe. And even in edge, I predicted, I said that many times that cloud players will dominate that market with the private 5G. You know that story, right? >> We're going to talk about that. (laughs) >> The key is this, that if you see in general where the population lives, in metros, right? That's where the world population is like flocking to and we have cloud providers covering the local zones with local like heavy duty presence from the big cloud providers and then these telcos are getting sidetracked by that. Even the V2X in cars moving the autonomous cars and all that, even in that space, telcos are getting sidetracked in many ways. What telcos have to do is to join the forces, build some standards, if not standards, some consortium sort of. They're trying to do that with the open gateway here, they have only eight APIs. And it's 2023, eight APIs is nothing, right? (laughs) So they should have started this 10 years back, I think. So, yeah, I think to entice the developers, developers need the employability, we need to train them, we need to show them some light that hey, you can build a lot on top of it. If you tell developers they can develop two things or five things, nobody will come. >> So, Chris, the cloud will dominate the edge. So A, do you buy it? B, the telcos obviously are acting like that might happen. >> Do you know I love people when they've got their heads in the clouds. (all laugh) And you're right in so many ways, but if you flip it around and think about how the customers think about this, business customers and consumers, they don't care about all this background shenanigans going on, do they? >> Lisa: No. >> So I think one of the problems we have is that this is a new territory and whether you call it the edge or whatever you call it, what we need there is we need connectivity, we need security, we need storage, we need compute, we need analytics, and we need applications. And are any of those more important than the others? It's the collective that actually drives the real value there. So we need all those things together. And of course, the people who represented at this show, whether it's the cloud guys, the telcos, the Nokia, the Ericssons of this world, they all own little bits of that. So that's why they're all talking partnerships because they need the combination, they cannot do it on their own. The cloud guys can't do it on their own. >> Well, the cloud guys own all of those things that you just talked about though. (all laugh) >> Well, they don't own the last bit of connectivity, do they? They don't own the access. >> Right, exactly. That's the one thing they don't own. So, okay, we're back to pipes, right? We're back to charging for connectivity- >> Pipes are very valuable things, right? >> Yeah, for sure. >> Never underestimate pipes. I don't know about where you live, plumbers make a lot of money where I live- >> I don't underestimate them but I'm saying can the telcos charge for more than that or are the cloud guys going to mop up the storage, the analytics, the compute, and the apps? >> They may mop it up, but I think what the telcos are doing and we've seen a lot of it here already, is they are working with all those major cloud guys already. So is it an unequal relationship? The cloud guys are global, massive global scale, the telcos are fundamentally national operators. >> Yep. >> Some have a little bit of regional, nobody has global scale. So who stitches it all together? >> Dave: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. >> Absolutely. >> I know that saying never gets old. It's true. Well, Sarbjeet, one of the things that you tweeted about, I didn't get to see the keynote but I was looking at your tweets. 46% of telcos think they won't make it to the next decade. That's a big number. Did that surprise you? >> No, actually it didn't surprise me because the competition is like closing in on them and the telcos are competing with telcos as well and the telcos are competing with cloud providers on the other side, right? So the smaller ones are getting squeezed. It's the bigger players, they can hook up the newer platforms, I think they will survive. It's like that part is like any other industry, if you will. But the key is here, I think why the pain points were sort of described on the main stage is that they're crying out loud to tell the big tech cloud providers that "hey, you pay your fair share," like we talked, right? You are not paying, you're generating so much content which reverses our networks and you are not paying for it. So they are not able to recoup the cost of laying down their networks. By the way, one thing actually I want to mention is that they said the cloud needs earth. The cloud and earth, it's like there's no physical need to cloud, you know that, right? So like, I think it's the other way around. I think the earth needs the cloud because I'm a cloud guy. (Sarbjeet and Lisa laugh) >> I think you need each other, right? >> I think so too. >> They need each other. When they said cloud needs earth, right? I think they're still in denial that the cloud is a big force. They have to partner. When you can't compete with somebody, what do you do? Partner with them. >> Chris, this is your world. Are they in denial? >> No, I think they're waking up to the pragmatism of the situation. >> Yeah. >> They're building... As we said, most of the telcos, you find have relationships with the cloud guys, I think you're right about the industry. I mean, do you think what's happened since US was '96, the big telecom act when we started breaking up all the big telcos and we had lots of competition came in, we're seeing the signs that we might start to aggregate them back up together again. So it's been an interesting experiment for like 30 years, hasn't it too? >> It made the US less competitive, I would argue, but carry on. >> Yes, I think it's true. And Europe is maybe too competitive and therefore, it's not driven the investment needed. And by the way, it's not just mobile, it's fixed as well. You saw the Orange CEO was talking about the her investment and the massive fiber investments way ahead of many other countries, way ahead of the UK or Germany. We need that fiber in the ground to carry all your cloud traffic to do this. So there is a scale issue, there is a competition issue, but the telcos are very much aware of it. They need the cloud, by the way, to improve their operational environments as well, to change that whole old IT environment to deliver you and I better service. So no, it absolutely is changing. And they're getting scale, but they're fundamentally offering the basic product, you call it pipes, I'll just say they're offering broadband to you and I and the business community. But they're stepping on dangerous ground, I think, when saying they want to charge the over the top guys for all the traffic they use. Those over the top guys now build a lot of the global networks, the backbone submarine network. They're putting a lot of money into it, and by giving us endless data for our individual usage, that cat is out the bag, I think to a large extent. >> Yeah. And Orange CEO basically said that, that they're not paying their fair share. I'm for net neutrality but the governments are going to have to fund this unless you let us charge the OTT. >> Well, I mean, we could of course renationalize. Where would that take us? (Dave laughs) That would make MWC very interesting next year, wouldn't it? To renationalize it. So, no, I think you've got to be careful what we wish for here. Creating the absolute clear product that is required to underpin all of these activities, whether it's IoT or whether it's cloud delivery or whether it's just our own communication stuff, delivering that absolutely ubiquitously high quality for business and for consumer is what we have to do. And telcos have been too conservative in the past. >> I think they need to get together and create standards around... I think they have a big opportunity. We know that the clouds are being built in silos, right? So there's Azure stack, there's AWS and there's Google. And those are three main ones and a few others, right? So that we are fighting... On the cloud side, what we are fighting is the multicloud. How do we consume that multicloud without having standards? So if these people get together and create some standards around IoT and edge computing sort of area, people will flock to them to say, "we will use you guys, your API, we don't care behind the scenes if you use AWS or Google Cloud or Azure, we will come to you." So market, actually is looking for that solution. I think it's an opportunity for these guys, for telcos. But the problem with telcos is they're nationalized, as you said Chris versus the cloud guys are still kind of national in a way, but they're global corporations. And some of the telcos are global corporations as well, BT covers so many countries and TD covers so many... DT is in US as well, so they're all over the place. >> But you know what's interesting is that the TM forum, which is one of the industry associations, they've had an open digital architecture framework for quite some years now. Google had joined that some years ago, Azure in there, AWS just joined it a couple of weeks ago. So when people said this morning, why isn't AWS on the keynote? They don't like sharing the limelight, do they? But they're getting very much in bed with the telco. So I think you'll see the marriage. And in fact, there's a really interesting statement, if you look at the IoT you mentioned, Bosch and Nokia have been working together 'cause they said, the problem we've got, you've got a connectivity network on one hand, you've got the sensor network on the other hand, you're trying to merge them together, it's a nightmare. So we are finally seeing those sort of groups talking to each other. So I think the standards are coming, the cooperation is coming, partnerships are coming, but it means that the telco can't dominate the sector like it used to. It's got to play ball with everybody else. >> I think they have to work with the regulators as well to loosen the regulation. Or you said before we started this segment, you used Chris, the analogy of sports, right? In sports, when you're playing fiercely, you commit the fouls and then ask for ref to blow the whistle. You're now looking at the ref all the time. The telcos are looking at the ref all the time. >> Dave: Yeah, can I do this? Can I do that? Is this a fair move? >> They should be looking for the space in front of the opposition. >> Yeah, they should be just on attack mode and commit these fouls, if you will, and then ask for forgiveness then- >> What do you make of that AWS not you there- >> Well, Chris just made a great point that they don't like to share the limelight 'cause I thought it was very obvious that we had Google Cloud, we had Microsoft there on day one of this 80,000 person event. A lot of people back from COVID and they weren't there. But Chris, you brought up a great point that kind of made me think, maybe you're right. Maybe they're in the afternoon keynote, they want their own time- >> You think GSMA invited them? >> I imagine so. You'd have to ask GSMA. >> I would think so. >> Get Max on here and ask that. >> I'm going to ask them, I will. >> But no, and they don't like it because I think the misconception, by the way, is that everyone says, "oh, it's AWS, it's Google Cloud and it's Azure." They're not all the same business by any stretch of the imagination. AWS has been doing loads of great work, they've been launching private network stuff over the last couple of weeks. Really interesting. Google's been playing catch up. We know that they came in readily late to the market. And Azure, they've all got slightly different angles on it. So perhaps it just wasn't right for AWS and the way they wanted to pitch things so they don't have to be there, do they? >> That's a good point. >> But the industry needs them there, that's the number one cloud. >> Dave, they're there working with the industry. >> Yeah, of course. >> They don't have to be on the keynote stage. And in fact, you think about this show and you mentioned the 80,000 people, the activity going on around in all these massive areas they're in, it's fantastic. That's where the business is done. The business isn't done up on the keynote stage. >> That's why there's the glitz and the glamour, Chris. (all laugh) >> Yeah. It's not glitz, it's espresso. It's not glamour anymore, it's just espresso. >> We need the espresso. >> Yeah. >> I think another thing is that it's interesting how an average European sees the tech market and an average North American, especially you from US, you have to see the market. Here, people are more like process oriented and they want the rules of the road already established before they can take a step- >> Chris: That's because it's your pension in the North American- >> Exactly. So unions are there and the more employee rights and everything, you can't fire people easily here or in Germany or most of the Europe is like that with the exception of UK. >> Well, but it's like I said, that Silicone Valley gets their money on the way out, you know? And that's how they do it, that's how they think it. And they don't... They ask for forgiveness. I think the east coast is more close to Europe, but in the EU, highly regulated, really focused on lifetime employment, things like that. >> But Dave, the issue is the telecom industry is brilliant, right? We keep paying every month whatever we do with it. >> It's a great business, to your point- >> It's a brilliant business model. >> Dave: It's fantastic. >> So it's about then getting the structure right behind it. And you know, we've seen a lot of stratification where people are selling off towers, Orange haven't sold their towers off, they made a big point about that. Others are selling their towers off. Some people are selling off their underlying network, Telecom Italia talking about KKR buying the whole underlying network. It's like what do you want to be in control of? It's a great business. >> But that's why they complain so much is that they're having to sell their assets because of the onerous CapEx requirements, right? >> Yeah, they've had it good, right? And dare I say, perhaps they've not planned well enough for the future. >> They're trying to protect their past from the future. I mean, that's... >> Actually, look at the... Every "n" number of years, there's a new faster network. They have to dig the ground, they have to put the fiber, they have to put this. Now, there are so many booths showing 6G now, we are not even done with 5G yet, now the next 6G you know, like then- >> 10G's coming- >> 10G, that's a different market. (Dave laughs) >> Actually, they're bogged down by the innovation, I think. >> And the generational thing is really important because we're planning for 6G in all sorts of good ways but actually what we use in our daily lives, we've gone through the barrier, we've got enough to do that. So 4G gives us enough, the fiber in the ground or even old copper gives us enough. So the question is, what are we willing to pay for more than that basic connectivity? And the answer to your point, Dave, is not a lot, right? So therefore, that's why the emphasis is on the business market on that B2B and B2B2X. >> But we'll pay for Netflix all day long. >> All day long. (all laugh) >> The one thing Chris, I don't know, I want to know your viewpoints and we have talked in the past as well, there's absence of think tanks in tech, right? So we have think tanks on the foreign policy and economic policy in every country, and we have global think tanks, but tech is becoming a huge part of the economy, global economy as well as national economies, right? But we don't have think tanks on like policy around tech. For example, this 4G is good for a lot of use cases. Then 5G is good for smaller number of use cases. And then 6G will be like, fewer people need 6G for example. Why can't we have sort of those kind of entities dictating those kind of like, okay, is this a wiser way to go about it? >> Lina Khan wants to. She wants to break up big tech- >> You're too young to remember but the IT used to have a show every four years in Geneva, there were standards around there. So I think there are bodies. I think the balance of power obviously has gone from the telecom to the west coast to the IT markets. And it's changing the balance about, it moves more quickly, right? Telecoms has never moved quickly enough. I think there is hope by the way, that telecoms now that we are moving to more softwarized environment, and God forbid, we're moving into CICD in the telecom world, right? Which is a massive change, but I think there's hopes for it to change. The mentality is changing, the culture is changing, but to change those old structured organizations from the British telecom or the France telecom into the modern world, it's a hell of a long journey. It's not an overnight journey at all. >> Well, of course the theme of the event is velocity. >> Yeah, I know that. >> And it's been interesting sitting here with the three of you talking about from a historic perspective, how slow and molasseslike telecom has been. They don't have a choice anymore. As consumers, we have this expectation we're going to get anything we want on our mobile device, 24 by seven. We don't care about how the sausage is made, we just want the end result. So do you really think, and we're only on day one guys... And Chris we'll start with you. Is the theme really velocity? Is it disruption? Are they able to move faster? >> Actually, I think invisibility is the real answer. (Lisa laughs) We want communication to be invisible, right? >> Absolutely. >> We want it to work. When we switch our phones on, we want it to work and we want to... Well, they're not even phones anymore, are they really? I mean that's the... So no, velocity, we've got... There is momentum in the industry, there's no doubt about that. The cloud guys coming in, making telecoms think about the way they run their own business, where they meet, that collision point on the edges you talked about Sarbjeet. We do have velocity, we've got momentum. There's so many interested parties. The way I think of this is that the telecom industry used to be inward looking, just design its own technology and then expect everyone else to dance to our tune. We're now flipping that 180 degrees and we are now having to work with all the different outside forces shaping us. Whether it's devices, whether it's smart cities, governments, the hosting guys, the Equinoxis, all these things. So everyone wants a piece of this telecom world so we've got to make ourselves more open. That's why you get in a more open environment. >> But you did... I just want to bring back a point you made during COVID, which was when everybody switched to work from home, started using their landlines again, telcos had to respond and nothing broke. I mean, it was pretty amazing. >> Chris: It did a good job. >> It was kind of invisible. So, props to the telcos for making that happen. >> They did a great job. >> So it really did. Now, okay, what have you done for me lately? So now they've got to deal with the future and they're talking monetization. But to me, monetization is all about data and not necessarily just the network data. Yeah, they can sell that 'cause they own that but what kind of incremental value are they going to create for the consumers that... >> Yeah, actually that's a problem. I think the problem is that they have been strangled by the regulation for a long time and they cannot look at their data. It's a lot more similar to the FinTech world, right? I used to work at Visa. And then Visa, we did trillion dollars in transactions in '96. Like we moved so much money around, but we couldn't look at these things, right? So yeah, I think regulation is a problem that holds you back, it's the antithesis of velocity, it slows you down. >> But data means everything, doesn't it? I mean, it means everything and nothing. So I think the challenge here is what data do the telcos have that is useful, valuable to me, right? So in the home environment, the fact that my broadband provider says, oh, by the way, you've got 20 gadgets on that network and 20 on that one... That's great, tell me what's on there. I probably don't know what's taking all my valuable bandwidth up. So I think there's security wrapped around that, telling me the way I'm using it if I'm getting the best out of my service. >> You pay for that? >> No, I'm saying they don't do it yet. I think- >> But would you pay for that? >> I think I would, yeah. >> Would you pay a lot for that? I would expect it to be there as part of my dashboard for my monthly fee. They're already charging me enough. >> Well, that's fine, but you pay a lot more in North America than I do in Europe, right? >> Yeah, no, that's true. >> You're really overpaying over there, right? >> Way overpaying. >> So, actually everybody's looking at these devices, right? So this is a radio operated device basically, right? And then why couldn't they benefit from this? This is like we need to like double click on this like 10 times to find out why telcos failed to leverage this device, right? But I think the problem is their reliance on regulations and their being close to the national sort of governments and local bodies and authorities, right? And in some countries, these telcos are totally controlled in very authoritarian ways, right? It's not like open, like in the west, most of the west. Like the world is bigger than five, six countries and we know that, right? But we end up talking about the major economies most of the time. >> Dave: Always. >> Chris: We have a topic we want to hit on. >> We do have a topic. Our last topic, Chris, it's for you. You guys have done an amazing job for the last 25 minutes talking about the industry, where it's going, the evolution. But Chris, you're registered blind throughout your career. You're a leading user of assertive technologies. Talk about diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, some of the things you're doing there. >> Well, we should have had 25 minutes on that and five minutes on- (all laugh) >> Lisa: You'll have to come back. >> Really interesting. So I've been looking at it. You're quite right, I've been using accessible technology on my iPhone and on my laptop for 10, 20 years now. It's amazing. And what I'm trying to get across to the industry is to think about inclusive design from day one. When you're designing an app or you're designing a service, make sure you... And telecom's a great example. In fact, there's quite a lot of sign language around here this week. If you look at all the events written, good to see that coming in. Obviously, no use to me whatsoever, but good for the hearing impaired, which by the way is the biggest category of disability in the world. Biggest chunk is hearing impaired, then vision impaired, and then cognitive and then physical. And therefore, whenever you're designing any service, my call to arms to people is think about how that's going to be used and how a blind person might use it or how a deaf person or someone with physical issues or any cognitive issues might use it. And a great example, the GSMA and I have been talking about the app they use for getting into the venue here. I downloaded it. I got the app downloaded and I'm calling my guys going, where's my badge? And he said, "it's top left." And because I work with a screen reader, they hadn't tagged it properly so I couldn't actually open my badge on my own. Now, they changed it overnight so it worked this morning, which is fantastic work by Trevor and the team. But it's those things that if you don't build it in from scratch, you really frustrate a whole group of users. And if you think about it, people with disabilities are excluded from so many services if they can't see the screen or they can't hear it. But it's also the elderly community who don't find it easy to get access to things. Smart speakers have been a real blessing in that respect 'cause you can now talk to that thing and it starts talking back to you. And then there's the people who can't afford it so we need to come down market. This event is about launching these thousand dollars plus devices. Come on, we need below a hundred dollars devices to get to the real mass market and get the next billion people in and then to educate people how to use it. And I think to go back to your previous point, I think governments are starting to realize how important this is about building the community within the countries. You've got some massive projects like NEOM in Saudi Arabia. If you have a look at that, if you get a chance, a fantastic development in the desert where they're building a new city from scratch and they're building it so anyone and everyone can get access to it. So in the past, it was all done very much by individual disability. So I used to use some very expensive, clunky blind tech stuff. I'm now using mostly mainstream. But my call to answer to say is, make sure when you develop an app, it's accessible, anyone can use it, you can talk to it, you can get whatever access you need and it will make all of our lives better. So as we age and hearing starts to go and sight starts to go and dexterity starts to go, then those things become very useful for everybody. >> That's a great point and what a great champion they have in you. Chris, Sarbjeet, Dave, thank you so much for kicking things off, analyzing day one keynote, the ecosystem day, talking about what velocity actually means, where we really are. We're going to have to have you guys back 'cause as you know, we can keep going, but we are out of time. But thank you. >> Pleasure. >> We had a very spirited, lively conversation. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you very much. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live in Barcelona, Spain at MWC '23. We'll be back after a short break. See you soon. (uplifting instrumental music)

(vibrant electronic music) >> Welcome back to SuperCloud2. You know, this event, and the Super Cloud initiative in general, it's an open industry-wide collaboration. Last August at SuperCloud22, we really honed in on the definition, which of course we've published. And there's this shared doc, which folks are still adding to and refining, in fact, just recently, Dr. Nelu Mihai added some critical points that really advanced some of the community's initial principles, and today at SuperCloud2, we're digging further into the topic with input from real world practitioners, and we're exploring that intersection of data, data mesh, and cloud, and importantly, the realities and challenges of deploying technology to drive new business capability, and I'm pleased to welcome Ash Naseer to the program. He's a Senior Director of Data Engineering at Warner Bros. Discovery. Ash, great to see you again, thanks so much for taking time with us. >> It's great to be back, these conversations are always very fun. >> I was so excited when we met last spring, I guess, so before we get started I wanted to play a clip from that conversation, it was June, it was at the Snowflake Summit in Las Vegas. And it's a comment that you made about your company but also data mesh. Guys, roll the clip. >> Yeah, so, when people think of Warner Bros., you always think of the movie studio. But we're more than that, right, I mean, you think of HBO, you think of TNT, you think of CNN. We have 30 plus brands in our portfolio, and each have their own needs. So the idea of a data mesh really helps us because what we can do is we can federate access across the company, so that CNN can work at their own pace, you know, when there's election season, they can ingest their own data. And they don't have to bump up against, as an example, HBO, if Game of Thrones is goin' on. >> So-- Okay, so that's pretty interesting, so you've got these sort of different groups that have different data requirements inside of your organization. Now data mesh, it's a relatively new concept, so you're kind of ahead of the curve. So Ash, my question is, when you think about getting value from data, and how that's changed over the past decade, you've had pre-Hadoop, Hadoop, what do you see that's changed, now you got the cloud coming in, what's changed? What had to be sort of fixed? What's working now, and where do you see it going? >> Yeah, so I feel like in the last decade, we've gone through quite a maturity curve. I actually like to say that we're in the golden age of data, because the tools and technology in the data space, particularly and then broadly in the cloud, they allow us to do things that we couldn't do way back when, like you suggested, back in the Hadoop era or even before that. So there's certainly a lot of maturity, and a lot of technology that has come about. So in terms of the good, bad, and ugly, so let me kind of start with the good, right? In terms of bringing value from the data, I really feel like we're in this place where the folks that are charged with unlocking that value from the data, they're actually spending the majority of their time actually doing that. And what do I mean by that? If you think about it, 10 years ago, the data scientist was the person that was going to sort of solve all of the data problems in a company. But what happened was, companies asked these data scientists to come in and do a multitude of things. And what these data scientists found out was, they were spending most of their time on, really, data wrangling, and less on actually getting the value out of the data. And in the last decade or so, I feel like we've made the shift, and we realize that data engineering, data management, data governance, those are as important practices as data science, which is sort of getting the value out of the data. And so what that has done is, it has freed up the data scientist and the business analyst and the data analyst, and the BI expert, to really focus on how to get value out of the data, and spend less time wrangling data. So I really think that that's the good. In terms of the bad, I feel like, there's a lot of legacy data platforms out there, and I feel like there's going to be a time where we'll be in that hybrid mode. And then the ugly, I feel like, with all the data and all the technology, creates another problem of itself. Because most companies don't have arms around their data, and making sure that they know who's using the data, what they're using for, and how can the company leverage the collective intelligence. That is a bigger problem to solve today than 10 years ago. And that's where technologies like the data mesh come in. >> Yeah, so when I think of data mesh, and I say, you're an early practitioner of data mesh, you mentioned legacy technology, so the concept of data mesh is inclusive. In theory anyway, you're supposed to be including the legacy technologies. Whether it's a data lake or data warehouse or Oracle or Snowflake or whatever it is. And when you think about Jamak Dagani's principles, it's domain-centric ownership, data as product. And that creates challenges around self-serve infrastructure and automated governance, and then when you start to combine these different technologies. You got legacy, you got cloud. Everything's different. And so you have to figure out how to deal with that, so my question is, how have you dealt with that, and what role has the cloud played in solving those problems, in particular, that self-serve infrastructure, and that automated governance, and where are we in terms of solving that problem from a practitioner's standpoint? >> Yeah, I always like to say that data is a team sport, and we should sort of think of it as such, and that's, I feel like, the key of the data mesh concept, is treating it as a team sport. A lot of people ask me, they're like, "Oh hey, Ash, I've heard about this thing called data mesh. "Where can I buy one?" or, "what's the technology that I use to get a data mesh? And the reality is that there isn't one technology, you can't really buy a data mesh. It's really a way of life, it's how organizations decide to approach data, like I said, back to a team sport analogy, making sure that everyone has the seat on the table, making sure that we embrace the fact that we have a lot of data, we have a lot of data problems to solve. And the way we'll be successful is to make everyone inclusive. You know, you think about the old days, Data silos or shadow IT, some might call it. That's been around for decades. And what hasn't changed was this notion that, hey, everything needs to be sort of managed centrally. But with the cloud and with the technologies that we have today, we have the right technology and the tooling to democratize that data, and democratize not only just the access, but also sort of building building blocks and sort of taking building blocks which are relevant to your product or your business. And adding to the overall data mesh. We've got all that technology. The challenge is for us to really embrace it, and make sure that we implement it from an organizational standpoint. >> So, thinking about super cloud, there's a layer that lives above the clouds and adds value. And you think about your brands you got 30 brands, you mentioned shadow IT. If, let's say, one of those brands, HBO or TNT, whatever. They want to go, "Hey, we really like Google's analytics tools," and they maybe go off and build something, I don't know if that's even allowed, maybe it's not. But then you build this data mesh. My question is around multi-cloud, cross cloud, super cloud if you will. Is that a advantage for you as a practitioner, or does that just make things more complicated? >> I really love the idea of a multi-cloud. I think it's great, I think that it should have been the norm, not the exception, I feel like people talk about it as if it's the exception. That should have been the case. I will say, though, I feel like multi-cloud should evolve organically, so back to your point about some of these different brands, and, you know, different brands or different business units. Or even in a merger and acquisitions situation, where two different companies or multiple different companies come together with different technology stacks. You know, I feel like that's an organic evolution, and making sure that we use the concepts and the technologies around the multi-cloud to bring everyone together. That's where we need to be, and again, it talks to the fact that each of those business units and each of those groups have their own unique needs, and we need to make sure that we embrace that and we enable that, rather than stifling everything. Now where I have a little bit of a challenge with the multi-cloud is when technology leaders try to build it by design. So there's a notion there that, "Hey, you need to sort of diversify "and don't put all your eggs in one basket." And so we need to have this multi-cloud thing. I feel like that is just sort of creating more complexity where it doesn't need to be, we can all sort of simplify our lives, but where it evolves organically, absolutely, I think that's the right way to go. >> But, so Ash, if it evolves organically don't you need some kind of cloud interpreter, to create a common experience across clouds, does that exist today? What are your thoughts on that? >> There is a lot of technology that exists today, and that helps go between these different clouds, a lot of these sort of cloud agnostic technologies that you talked about, the Snowflakes and the Databricks and so forth of the world, they operate in multiple clouds, they operate in multiple regions, within a given cloud and multiple clouds. So they span all of that, and they have the tools and technology, so, I feel like the tooling is there. There does need to be more of an evolution around the tooling and I think the market's need are going to dictate that, I feel like the market is there, they're asking for it, so, there's definitely going to be that evolution, but the technology is there, I think just making sure that we embrace that and we sort of embrace that as a challenge and not try to sort of shut all of that down and box everything into one. >> What's the biggest challenge, is it governance or security? Or is it more like you're saying, adoption, cultural? >> I think it's a combination of cultural as well as governance. And so, the cultural side I've talked about, right, just making sure that we give these different teams a seat at the table, and they actually bring that technology into the mix. And we use the modern tools and technologies to make sure that everybody sort of plays nice together. That is definitely, we have ways to go there. But then, in terms of governance, that is another big problem that most companies are just starting to wrestle with. Because like I said, I mean, the data silos and shadow IT, that's been around there, right? The only difference is that we're now sort of bringing everything together in a cloud environment, the collective organization has access to that. And now we just realized, oh we have quite a data problem at our hands, so how do we sort of organize this data, make sure that the quality is there, the trust is there. When people look at that data, a lot of those questions are now coming to the forefront because everything is sort of so transparent with the cloud, right? And so I feel like, again, putting in the right processes, and the right tooling to address that is going to be critical in the next years to come. >> Is sharing data across clouds, something that is valuable to you, or even within a single cloud, being able to share data. And my question is, not just within your organization, but even outside your organization, is that something that has sort of hit your radar or is it mature or is that something that really would add value to your business? >> Data sharing is huge, and again, this is another one of those things which isn't new. You know, I remember back in the '90s, when we had to share data externally, with our partners or our vendors, they used to physically send us stacks of these tapes, or physical media on some truck. And we've evolved since then, right, I mean, it went from that to sharing files online and so forth. But data sharing as a concept and as a concept which is now very frictionless, through these different technologies that we have today, that is very new. And that is something, like I said, it's always been going on. But that needs to be really embraced more as well. We as a company heavily leverage data sharing between our own different brands and business units, that helps us make that data mesh, so that when CNN, as an example, builds their own data model based on election data and the kinds of data that they need, compare that with other data in the rest of the company, sports, entertainment, and so forth and so on. Everyone has their unique data, but that data sharing capability brings it together wherever there is a need. So you think about having a Tiger Woods documentary, as an example, on HBO Max and making sure that you reach the audiences that are interested in golf and interested in sports and so forth, right? That all comes through the magic of data sharing, so, it's really critical, internally, for us. And then externally as well, because just understanding how our products are doing on our partners' networks and different distribution channels, that's important, and then just understanding how our consumers are consuming it off properties, right, I mean, we have brands that transcend just the screen, right? We have a lot of physical merchandise that you can buy in the store. So again, understanding who's buying the Batman action figures after the Batman movie was released, that's another critical insight. So it all gets enabled through data sharing, and something we rely heavily on. >> So I wanted to get your perspective on this. So I feel like the nirvana of data mesh is if I want to use Google BigQuery, an Oracle database, or a Microsoft database, or Snowflake, Databricks, Amazon, whatever. That that's a node on the mesh. And in the perfect world, you can share that data, it can be governed, I don't think we're quite there today, so. But within a platform, maybe it's within Google or within Amazon or within Snowflake or Databricks. If you're in that world, maybe even Oracle. You actually can do some levels of data sharing, maybe greater with some than others. Do you mandate as an organization that you have to use this particular data platform, or are you saying "Hey, we are architecting a data mesh for the future "where we believe the technology will support that," or maybe you've invented some technology that supports that today, can you help us understand that? >> Yeah, I always feel like mandate is a strong area, and it breeds the shadow IT and the data silos. So we don't mandate, we do make sure that there's a consistent set of governance rules, policies, and tooling that's there, so that everyone is on the same page. However, at the same time our focus is really operating in a federated way, that's been our solution, right? Is to make sure that we work within a common set of tooling, which may be different technologies, which in some cases may be different clouds. Although we're not that multi-cloud. So what we're trying to do is making sure that everyone who has that technology already built, as long as it sort of follows certain standards, it's modern, it has the capabilities that will eventually allow us to be successful and eventually allow for that data sharing, amongst those different nodes, as you put it. As long as that's the case, and as long as there's a governance layer, a master governance layer, where we know where all that data is and who has access to what and we can sort of be really confident about the quality of the data, as long as that case, our approach to that is really that federated approach. >> Sorry, did I hear you correctly, you're not multi-cloud today? >> Yeah, that's correct. There are certain spots where we use that, but by and large, we rely on a particular cloud, and that's just been, like I said, it's been the evolution, it was our evolution. We decided early on to focus on a single cloud, and that's the direction we've been going in. >> So, do you want to go to a multi-cloud, or, you mentioned organic before, if a business unit wants to go there, as long as they're adhering to those standards that you put out, maybe recommendations, that that's okay? I guess my question is, does that bring benefit to your business that you'd like to tap, or do you feel like it's not necessary? >> I'll go back to the point of, if it happens organically, we're going to be open about it. Obviously we'll have to look at every situations, not all clouds are created equal as well, so there's a number of different considerations. But by and large, when it happens organically, the key is time to value, right? How do you quickly bring those technologies in, as long as you could share the data, they're interconnected, they're secured, they're governed, we are confident on the quality, as long as those principles are met, we could definitely go in that direction. But by and large, we're sort of evolving in a singular direction, but even within a singular cloud, we're a global company. And we have audiences around the world, so making sure that even within a single cloud, those different regions interoperate as one, that's a bigger challenge that we're having to solve as well. >> Last question is kind of to the future of data and cloud and how it's going to evolve, do you see a day when companies like yours are increasingly going to be offering data, their software, services, and becoming more of a technology company, sort of pointing your tooling and your proprietary knowledge at the external world, as an opportunity, as a business opportunity? >> That's a very interesting concept, and I know companies have done that, and some of them have been extremely successful, I mean, Amazon is the biggest example that comes to mind, right-- >> Yeah. >> When they launched AWS, something that they had that expertise they had internally, and they offered it to the world as a product. But by and large, I think it's going to be far and few between, especially, it's going to be focused on companies that have technology as their DNA, or almost like in the technology sector, building technology. Most other companies have different markets that they are addressing. And in my opinion, a lot of these companies, what they're trying to do is really focus on the problems that we can solve for ourselves, I think there are more problems than we have people and expertise. So my guess is that most large companies, they're going to focus on solving their own problems. A few, like I said, more tech-focused companies, that would want to be in that business, would probably branch out, but by and large, I think companies will continue to focus on serving their customers and serving their own business. >> Alright, Ash, we're going to leave it there, Ash Naseer. Thank you so much for your perspectives, it was great to see you, I'm sure we'll see you face-to-face later on this year. >> This is great, thank you for having me. >> Ah, you're welcome, alright. Keep it right there for more great content from SuperCloud2. We'll be right back. (gentle percussive music)

(upbeat music) >> Good morning, everyone. Welcome back to "theCUBE." Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. This is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage of VMware Explore. John and I are pleased to welcome back one of our alumni, Muddu Sudhakar, the CEO of AISERA. Welcome to the program, Muddu. It's great to meet you. >> Thank you, Lisa. Thanks for having me. Thank you, John. >> Great to see you again. You're like an industry analyst coming on "theCUBE". You should be like a guest analyst, breaking down. I know you got your own company to run, and by the way, the recent funding you had, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> In a market that's not getting a lot of funding. You get an up around. Congratulations on that. >> Thank you. >> Business is good? >> Very good, thank you. Look, Goldman Sachs Investing, along with Zoom and Thoma Bravo, it was great for us. >> Great stuff. Well, I'm glad we could get you in. This day three, Lisa and I and Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson have all been talking to everyone for two days here at VMware Explore, formerly VMworld, our 12th year covering their annual conference, as you know, and we've been telling the executives, but day three is more of, we're going to mix it up. We're going to bring people in and get their opinions about Supercloud, does VMware go post-Broadcom? Obviously, that's going to happen. Looks like nothing's going to stop that from happening. What's next? What's the impact? Who wins? Who loses? VMware certainly not acting like they're going to get gutted. They're all full throttle ahead. They're laying down some announcements, vSphere 8, you got vSAN 8, they got cloud-native, they're talking multi-cloud. VMware's not looking like they're flinching. What's going on, in your view, outside of the bubble that we're here in San Francisco, out in the real world, in the trenches. What are people talking about? What do you see? >> Lot to unpack. (all laugh) >> Start at wherever you want. >> Yes. You know, I was a VMware alumni too. >> Yes >> You sold the company to VMware. You know the inside. Okay, So then, even then- >> I worked with Paul and Pat and Raghu. It's great to be back at VMware now. I think there's a lot going on in VMware. VMware is here to stay. The brand will stay. The VMware customers will stay for years to come. I think Broadcom and VMware, I think it's a great industry consolidation, the way in which I see it. And it is going to help all the customers too, right? Broadcom, having such a large foot play into both CA, the software business, the hardware business. I think what will happen is that Broadcom will try to create a hybrid cloud of their own with VMware. So there'll be a fourth player in the cloud industry. And then back to John, your Supercloud. The Supercloud by definition, there'll be private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds. I think Broadcom with VMware will help your vision of the Supercloud and what your customers are asking. >> Yeah, one of the things I want to get your thoughts on, Lisa and I were talking yesterday with the executives, AJ Patel in particular, he's a middleware guy. >> Right. >> So what he did was Oracle. He did a lot of the fusion stuff at Oracle. He now runs Modern Apps. And you came in at the time, I think, when they were just getting that app vision going, and Paul Moritz actually had it early with his 2010 vision, but too early on the app side. But that ended up happening too. So the question is, is Broadcom going to be this middleware layer, and treat the cloud like hardware. And then, apps or apps. Companies are apps. In a digital transformation, technology is the company. >> Right >> So the company is the app. >> That's right, >> Is an application. So apps and hardware, middle, a middleware model emerging. Do you think they're going for that? Or am I just making this up in my head? >> No, I think to me, I see Broadcom as much more, they're like a peer company at the high level. So they're funded by- >> Like a private equity company. >> Private equity company. >> You mean from a dollar standpoint. >> From a dollar standpoint. So Broadcom is going to fund companies. They're going to buy companies. They bought CA, they bought all the other assets. So Broadcom will have always hardware. The middle level could be VMware, but they also have CA, right? They have a bunch of apps here. So I see the Broadcom is also using VMware to run applications. So the consolidation will be they'll create a Supercloud using VMware. They're going to own their own apps. I don't think Broadcom's story is stopped. Its journey to come. They're going to buy more acquisitions, more apps companies. I won't be surprised, in the future, they buy Zendesk. I won't be surprised, in the future, they buy other apps companies, SaaS companies and cloud enterprise companies. Right? So that's where the P is coming. So the broad conversion is, I need a base middleware, like you're saying. There's no other middleware on top of hardware better than VMware. >> So do you think that they'll keep the stuff that's coming out of the other? 'Cause we've been speculating on "theCUBE" this week. They have the core business, but there's all this stuff that's kind of coming out of the oven that's not EBITDA-oriented yet. Do you think they keep that or they let it go? >> I think that's a great question to hang their CEO of Broadcom. But to me, I think, knowing them, they're going to keep, and if you look at Symantec, they kept parts of Symantec, this whole parts of it. So I think all options are on the table for them, right? They'll do whatever it is. But I think it has to be the ones that high growth companies they may give it. It all goes back to is it a profitability to it or not? But his vision is very good. I want to own the middleware, right? He will own the middleware using VMware to your vision, create a Supercloud and own the apps. So I think you'll see Broadcom is the fourth vendor in the cloud race. You have Microsoft, AWS, Google, and Broadcom is actually going to compete with this four. >> So you think there'll be a hyper scale? They'll be in the top three or four. >> There'll be top four. >> Okay. >> Along with Oracle. So now, we are talking about the five vendors will be Amazon, Azure, Google, Oracle, and Broadcom. >> We had Amazon guy on, Steve Jones. I should have asked him that question. I just don't see that happening yet. They have to have the full hardware side. How do you see that coming in? 'Cause Amazon's innovating at the atom level and they're working on stuff that's physical, transit, physics stuff, like down to the root level. >> I think Broadcom figure, look, they own the chips out right, at the end of the day. They also have a lot of chips such to supply to both mobile and this. So if there's anybody who can figure out the hardware, it will be Broadcom. That is their core of area. They didn't have the core in the software and the middleware. VMware is going to give them the OS, the Kubernetes, the VMs. Once you have that layer, I think you can innovate both up and below, right? So I think, John, I think Broadcom VMware will be a force to reckon with and I think these guys are going to get into healthcare space though. So if you see the way they battle, you and me are talking Lisa, like Microsoft bought new ones, Oracle bought Cerner. So they all paid 30 billion each. So the next battle ground will be, they'll start in the healthcare industry. Somebody's going to go look at the healthcare apps like Epic, right? They're going to look at how we can do the hospitals. They're going to look at hospital healthcare professionals. That area will be disrupted a lot in the same. >> What other industries do you think, besides healthcare, are ripe for disruption with Broadcom VMware? >> I think endpoint management, like remember VMware bought AirWatch when I was there back then, right? That whole area is called digital experience management. So that endpoint mainly will be disrupted. So Broadcom with VMware will go again into endpoint. I'm talking endpoint could be the servers, desktops, VMware Max, right? Virtual Desktop VDI. So that whole management of mobile devices to desktop, that whole industry will be disrupted. A lot of players are there trying to do more consulting services. I think VMware is a great assets and tools. If I'm Broadcom, my chip sets are going into the endpoint. So that area will be disrupted a lot with Broadcom in VMware. >> Yeah, one of the things that VMware, people have been talking about, is that the CA acquisition that Broadcom did was the playbooks public. Everyone saw what they did. They killed sales and market and they killed all the execs, metaphorically speaking. They fired them. VMware's got a different vibe here. I'm feeling like it could go one way or the other. I think they should keep them, personally. But you don't know. If they're a PE company, they EBIDA driven, maybe it's just simply numbers. >> Right. >> If that's the case, then I'm worried. But VMware's got pride, they got mojo, and they've got expertise in software. Maybe a little bit different circumstance? What's take on this? Or do you think it's going to be black and white to the numbers? >> I think, knowing Hank's playbook, if he knows what he's going to do, right? His playbook will be consistent with Symantec. >> You think he already knows what he wants to do? >> I think so. I think at that level, both with Simulink and Broadcom, they already know the playbook. At this stage the games, people already know their game. It's like a chess move. They already know. They'll look at VMware and see which assets to keep, which one not to keep, which organization, but I think Hank is a master at this one. To me, I'm personally excited with the VMware Broadcom combination. It's a great thing for the industry. It's great for VMware and VMware customers and partners. >> Well, John, you and Dave had a chance to sit down with Raghu. What were some of the things that he unpacked about the Broadcom acquisition? >> He was on talking points. He was on message. He was saying the things that any CEO was going to make a lot of cash on this deal. And he's proud. I think it wasn't about the money for him. I sensed that he's certainly going to make a lot of cash on this deal as an executive, but he's a long time VMware employee and a well loved and revered person. He's done a lot of great work, technically set the agenda. So I think their mindset is we're going to just continue to do an amazing job as VMware as we are and then let Broadcom, let the chips fall where they may, and hopefully, if they do a good job, maybe they'll either refactor some of their base plans or they laid it all out in the field, so to speak. So that's my vibe. Now specifically, he made some comments, like, "Yeah, we're really proud." And he staying technical. He's still like, "This is really happening." So I think he's going to, essentially, to the very end, be like, "Cross cloud and hybrid cloud. This is our third generation." So there he's hanging onto the VMware third act that they're saying, and he hopes that it comes home. And I think he's going to just deal with it. He didn't seem flustered and he didn't seem overly confident. >> Okay. >> I guess that's my opinion. What do you think? >> Personally worked with Raghu, worked for Raghu, so I think of him as the greatest CEO for VMware ever could have, right? It's a journey. It was Paul Maritz, then Pat Gelsinger, now Raghu. I think he's in the right place, right time to lead VMware, and Raghu's doing a fantastic job. And personally, getting these two companies married, I think Raghu did the right partnership with Broadcom. >> Well, I think if this event's any indication if they're just sitting back and waiting, they're not, and this event was well done, it was pulled off. The branding's amazing. I thought they did a good job with the name change. And then in light of all the Broadcom issues, the execution was great. It was not a bad show here. It was a good show. It wasn't terrible at all. People were excited. I think the ecosystem also felt that Broadcom, like an electronic shock to the system, like something's going to happen. Let's wait and see. I'm going to go to the event to see if it's going to be around and kind of getting a feel first party, in person, what's happening. Again, remember VMware didn't have an event since 2019. This is a community that thrives on physical, face to face camaraderie, community. And so, I think the show was a success. And I think that's a result of Raghu and his team. >> Because we have a booth there for AISERA, my company, we have a booth. We are offering coffee and donuts. You guys should come by and tell people. You'll get a free coffee and a donut, but it's one of the best shows I've seen. Well, I think people after pandemic are back, people are interacting. We have 500 people in one day at our booth. So for a startup company like us, getting that much crowd is unheard of. So it's great. We're very excited. >> The vibe from the partner community, I had a chance to talk with a lot of partners, AWS, NetApp, Rackspace, really seems like the partnerships side of VMware is very, very strong and the partners are excited about what's next for VMware. Did you have a chance to talk with any of the partners? >> Actually, look. I'm actually meeting with Karen. So Karen Egan is my contact at VMware too, and Sumit, (indistinct) a bunch of the customer success organization. We talk to people in their digital experience management team. We are very excited to be partner with both VMware's customer, partner, and all experts, right? I'll need the VMware ecosystem for my company to thrive. So for us, VMware customers are my customers and leveraging VMware APIs into VMware, that's that's important for us. >> Lisa, that's a great question because that brings us to the question of, okay, clearly this show also proves to us from our conversations and exploring the floor, the wave is coming. This next cloud wave is here. We're calling it Supercloud, whatever you want to call it, it's coming and it's real, and people know it. And also the lines of sight into economics around where people can fit in this next level ecosystem is becoming clear. So I think people kind of know what's the right side of the street to be on in this next shift. So that's coming. That's independent of Broadcom. So the floor represents to me the excitement for not only the VMware workload powering software, with or without Broadcom, but the next wave. So the question is if Broadcom goes down their path and Hank does what he does, who wins and who loses on where things flow? Because this energy is going to flow somewhere. Is it going to flow to AWS? Is it going to flow to Microsoft? Is it going to flow to HPE with Green Lake getting some great traction? NetApp's doing great. We just heard from them. So the partners aren't hurting. It's only going to get better. re:Invent's right around the corner. That's a packed house. Their ecosystem's growing like a weed. Who wins? 'Cause the customers at VMware are enterprise customers. They're used to being serviced. They have sales reps from Microsoft, they got sales reps from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, real senior enterprise stakeholders there. So someone's going to end up filling in as VMware settles into their broad composition. Who wins and who loses, in your mind? >> A Very good question. So my thing is, I think it's... Well, I put Microsoft and Amazon the winners. In that way, actually mean Microsoft will win because in a true Supercloud, your vision, back to hybrid cloud on-prem and public cloud, VMware disruption with Broadcom, as if there's any bridge in the market, Microsoft will take advantage of it. Azure, right? Amazon VMware is there. Then, you have Google and VMware. So I think Azure will probably try to take advantage of this, but very next will be Amazon, right away there. That leaves you with Google Cloud, right? Google Cloud is the one. So they're the people that are able to figure out what to do in this equation. And then, obviously, the other one is Oracle. Oracle has no hearts in this game. So to me, the people who are going to probably lose impact model will be Oracle if the Broadcom and VMware will happen. So it's Azure, Amazon winning the race, probably Google is right behind them. Oracle will be distinct. Other side is Dell. Actually, Dell has no game in this. Our Broadcom and VMware, Dell should be the one. >> Dell might have a little secret sauce on the table with Michael Dell. >> That's true. >> If he convert his shares, he might be the largest shareholder at Broadcom. >> That's true. >> He could end up owning all the back. >> So he may be the winner all the time. (all laugh) >> Don't count him out. Well, this is a good question. I want to just double click on this. So you get customer dynamic. Where do they go? You get the community, which is a big force multiplier in this world, and if you had to bet on community between Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, Amazon trumps Microsoft on force multiplier community. Ecosystem, AWS beats Microsoft on that one. So it's interesting because it's now multiple dimensions we're talking about here. It's customers. That's the top order, right? The customers. But also, you got community, the people who put on sessions, the people in the community that are the influencers that are leading the trends, and developers are very trending, relative to what kind of code they use, what's their environments? So the developers is changing that landscape and, ultimately, the ecosystem of partners, right? 'Cause there's a lot more overlap between AWS and VMware's ecosystem than there is between Microsoft and that. And HPE is just starting an ecosystem. So it's going to be very interesting. >> It is. It is. I think Broadcom and VMware cannot be any best time for the industry, right? As you said. HP is coming in. Oracle is coming in. And to your point, VMware and AWS are another best partners. Now, this going to create any gap for Microsoft to enter for Azure? I think that's where the market is saying that it's going to open up a hybrid cloud player for Microsoft to enter what is to be a tight relationship with VMware and Amazon. Right? So people will rethink through their apps. And more importantly, the end point to me. See, the key is, like you talk about with Supercloud, nobody's talking about Supercloud for the endpoint. >> You mean Edge or security? >> Not an Edge endpoint. Endpoint could be your devices, laptop, desktop. >> Or a building or a light bulb or whatever. >> Desktop or VDI desktop services servers, right? So we call it endpoint cloud. There's no endpoint Supercloud. John, that's an area that you should double click on. Super cloud for the servers is different from Supercloud for endpoint. >> Well, SuperCloud.World is the URL out there. If you're interested in Supercloud, we are adding tracks to that body of work. So we had our event on August 9th. It was virtual event, where Dave and I are going to add a data track, we're going to add a security track, and we should add, maybe, an endpoint workspace, work. >> That's a VMware brand, Workspace and Horizon. So that whole workspace endpoint for Supercloud is going to happen. >> Yes. >> Right. That kind of deviates from- >> Do you like Supercloud? Are you bullish on Supercloud? >> I'm very bullish on Supercloud because I, myself, is running on-prem in VPCs, public clouds, private clouds. Supercloud kind of composites it so app should be designed. 'Cause I don't want to design an app for one cloud. It's not going to work. So it's like how Java came and I can run it on any platform. The ideas you build it on Supercloud, run it, whatever you want. Right? >> That's exactly it. So what would you want to see in Supercloud as it evolves? And we were part of this open conversation. This is our point for today. We're going to have a great panel come up later today. We're going to have the influencers come on to debate what Supercloud should or shouldn't be. If you want to add to the contribution, we'll add this into the work, what should what's needed in Supercloud? What's table stakes. >> I think we need a Java compiler that will happen for Supercloud. I build it once, execute in any place I want, right? Using the Terraform, HashiCorp (indistinct) So what I don't want is keep building this thing for every cloud. I want to abstract that out. The whole idea of Supercloud is how Java gave me the abstraction for hardware 20 years back or 30 years back, we need the same abstraction for the cloud today. Otherwise, I'm customizing for VM Cloud, I'm customizing for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud. We, as an application vendor, it's too hard to keep doing it. I have now thousand tuners. I don't need thousand DevOps people. I need maybe 10 DevOps people. So there's a clear abstraction complexity that industry should develop, and your concept Supercloud with everybody thinking that, and it has to start from the grassroots with ecosystem. >> What do you think about the participants in this abstraction layer? Because someone said on "theCUBE" here this week, the people in the abstraction layer shouldn't be participants in the below or above the abstraction. >> I think it should be everybody, right? It's all inclusive. You need the apps guys to come in. You need the OS players to come in. You need the cloud vendors to come in, infrastructure. So you need everybody. >> Okay, let's just say that you were the spokesperson for the Supercloud organization, Supercloud.World. How would you sell AWS on why it's important for them? >> It's because they can build it and sell it in AWS and multiple AWS Gov Cloud, AWS On-prem, VPCs. It's even important for them, their expansion, their market time upfront. If I'm (indistinct), if I'm built on Supercloud, I can increase my time share. Otherwise I'm bringing only to public cloud. >> Okay, so I'll say, I'm Amazon and we have a concept called "One Way Doors." We don't want to go through a one way door. Is Supercloud a one way door for them? What's in it for them? Do they make more? Does it help their ecosystem? And the same question from Microsoft Azure and Google cloud. >> They're make more money. They're making their apps run in multiple places. It's a natural expansion. You are solving your customer problems for Amazon and DGC, right? My job is give people choices. I give choice to Lisa. Lisa can run it on public cloud. John, you can run it on VPC, AWS. >> So you're saying, so you think customers are asking for this right now? >> Everybody's asking. >> But don't really know how to say it? >> Customers are asking. Partners are asking. All of us are asking. >> Okay, what's the ask? >> Ask is give me a one place to build applications and run it anywhere without adding the complexity. >> Okay. Done. That's Supercloud. It'll ship tomorrow. (Lisa laughs) Well done. (John laughs) All right, well done. Final question for you. Lisa and I have been talking with folks here. What advice would you give the folks that are in here? 'Cause we have a lot of activity, people with marketing their solutions and products. They're trying to put a voice out there around thought leadership and trying to figure out what side of the street they should be on relative to the next 10 years as they're here at VMware Explore, as the next gen cloud comes around. What's the right narrative? What's the right positioning for companies to be on right now to be the most relevant and in the flow? >> I don't know about 10 years, but right now we are in difficult economic times, right? Markets are down. Inflation is up. So I think the fastest cost, people should focus on cost. How can it take cost? Automation is the key, right? Whether you use AI or automation , like you and me talking, John, last week, right? That's important. Every CEO I talk to is focused on cost. How do I cut my cost? How can I do with fewer resources? How can I do with fewer people, right? So the new budget right now is cut your budget in half. So every company, every exec should think about how can you be a good citizen? How can I get growth and scale? How can I do more with less? And that should be the next 12 months. >> That was a lot of the theme of conversations that I had with the VMware ecosystem, doing more with less. So that's definitely on everyone's minds. >> Right, and that's what my company is fully focused on. AISERA is all about AI automation. How can we solve your thing? We want to be solving customer problem. We are like your automation engine for your enterprise, right? We are a platform of platform. That's why I like the Supercloud. I can run AISERA as a platform on top of Supercloud. >> Excellent. >> Wow! If only we had more time! I know that you guys could really dig into Supercloud and take it even further. So you have to come back, Muddu. >> I will. >> He always wants to come back. >> I will be back. >> He's on the team. He's has contributed to the open source effort of Supercloud. Thank you. >> Yes. >> All right, thank you so much for joining John and me and kind of breaking down your vision on VMware Broadcom and the future. Next step, we've got to get some customers on here. I really want to understand what the customer experience is going to be like, but we'll have to another segment on that one. >> We will do that. Thank you, Lisa, for having me. >> My pleasure. >> John. >> Thank you very much. Thank you. >> For our guest and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" live on day three of our coverage of VMware Explore. We'll be back after a short break. (upbeat corporate music)

>>Welcome back everyone to the cubes coverage of VM wear Explorer, 2022 formerly VM world. The Cube's 12th year covering the annual conference. I'm Jennifer Daveon. We got Jason Bloomberg here. Who's a Silicon angle contributor guest author, president of inte analyst firm. Great to see you, Jason. Thanks for coming on the queue. >>Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks a lot. >>And thanks for contributing to Silicon angle. We really appreciate your articles and, and so does the audience, so thanks for that. >>Very good. We're happy >>To help. All right. So I gotta ask you, okay. We've been here on the desk. We haven't had a chance to really scour the landscape here at Moscone. What's going, what's your take on what's going on with VMware Explorer, not world. Yeah. Gotta see the name change. You got the overhang of the, the cloud Broadcom, which from us, it seems like it's energized people like, like shocked to the system something's gonna happen. What's your take. >>Yeah, something's definitely going to happen. Well, I've been struggling with VMware's messaging, you know, how they're messaging to the market. They seem to be downplaying cloud native computing in favor of multi-cloud, which is really quite different from the Tansu centric messaging from a year or two ago. So Tansu is still obviously part of the story, but it's really, they're relegating the cloud native story to an architectural pattern, which it is, but I believe it's much more than that. It's really more of a paradigm shift in how organizations implement it. Broadly speaking, where virtualization is part of the cloud native story, but VMware is making cloud native part of the virtualization story. Do so >>Do you think that's the, the mischaracterization of cloud native or a bad strategy or both? >>Well, I think they're missing an opportunity, right? I think they're missing an opportunity to be a cloud native leader. They're well positioned to do that with Tansu and where the technology was going and the technology is still there. Right? It's not that that >>They're just downplaying it. >>They're just downplaying it. Right. So >>As, as they were security too, they didn't really pump up security at >>All. Yeah. And you know, vSphere is still gonna be based on Kubernetes. So it's, they're going to be cloud native in terms of Kubernetes support across their product line. Anyway. So, but they're, they're really focusing on multi-cloud and betting the farm on multi-cloud and that ties to the change of the name of the conference. Although it's hard to see really how they're connecting the dots. Right. >>It's a bridge you can't cross, you can't see that bridge crossing what you're saying. Yeah. I mean, I thought that was a clever way of saying, oh, we're exploring new frontiers, which is kinda like, we don't really know what it is >>Yet. Yeah. Yeah. I think the, the term Explorer was probably concocted by a committee where, you know, they eliminated all the more interesting names and that was the one that was left. But, you know, Raghu explained that that Explorer is supposed to expand the audience for the conference beyond the VMware customer to this broader multi-cloud audience. But it's hard to say whether you >>Think it worked. Was there people that you recognize here or identified as a new audience? >>I don't think so. Not, not at this show, but over time, they're hoping to have this broader audience now where it's a multi-cloud audience where it's more than just VMware. It's more than just individual clouds, you know, we'll see if that works. >>You heard the cl the cloud chaos. Right. Do you, do you think they're, multi-cloud cross cloud services is a solution looking for a problem or is the problem real? Is there a market there? >>Oh, oh, the cloud chaos. That's a real problem. Right? Multi-cloud is, is a reality. Many organizations are leveraging different clouds for different reasons. And as a result, you have management security, other issues, which lead to this chaos challenge. So the, the problem is real aria. If they can get it up and running and, you know, straightened out, it's gonna be a great solution, but there are other products on the market that are more mature and more well integrated than aria. So they're going to, you know, have to compete, but VMware is very good at that. So, you know, I don't, I don't count the outing. Who >>Do you see as the competition lay out the horses on the track from your perspective? >>Well, you know, there's, there's a lot of different companies. I, I don't wanna mention any particular ones cuz, cuz I don't want to, you know, favor certain ones over others cuz then I get into trouble. But there's a, a lot of companies that >>Okay, I will. So you got a red hat with, you got obvious ones, Cisco, Cisco, I guess is Ashi Corp plays a role? Well, >>Cisco's been talking about this, >>Anybody we missed. >>Well, there's a number of smaller players, including some of the exhibitors at the, at the show that are putting together this, you know, I guess cloud native control plane that covers more than just a single cloud or cover on premises of virtualization as well as multiple clouds. And that's sort of the big challenge, right? This control plane. How do we come up with a way of managing all of this, heterogeneous it in a unified way that meets the business need and allows the technology organization, both it and the application development folks to move quickly and to do what they need to do to meet business needs. Right? So difficult for large organizations to get out of their own way and achieve that, you know, level of speed and scalability that, that, that technology promises. But they're organizationally challenged to, >>To accomplish. I think I've always looked at multi-cloud as a reality. I do see that as a situational analysis on the landscape. Yeah, I got Azure because I got Microsoft in my enterprise and they converted everything to the cloud. And so I didn't really change that. I got Amazon cause that's from almost my action is, and I gotta use Google cloud for some AI stuff. Right. All good. Right. I mean that's not really spanning anything. There's no ring. It's not really, it's like point solutions within the ecosystem, but it's interesting to see how people are globbing onto multi-cloud because to me it feels like a broken strategy trying to get straightened out. Right. Like, you know, multi-cloud groping from multi-cloud it feels that way. And, and that makes a lot of sense cuz if you're not on the right side of this historic shift right now, you're gonna be dead. >>So which side of the street do you wanna be on? I think it's becoming clear. I think the good news is this year. It's like, if you're on this side of the street, you're gonna be, be alive. Yeah. And this side of the street, not so much. So, you know, that's cloud native obviously hybrid steady state mul how multi-cloud shakes out. I don't think the market's ready personally in terms of true multi-cloud I think it's, it's an opportunity to have the conversation. That's why we're having the super cloud narrative. Cause it's a lit more attention getting, but it focuses on, it has to do something specific. Right? It can't be vaporware. The market won't tolerate vaporware and the new cloud architecture, at least that's my opinion. What's your reaction? Yeah. >>Well the, well you're quite right that a lot of the multiple cloud scenarios involve, you know, picking and choosing the various capabilities each of the cloud provider pro offers. Right? So you want TensorFlow, you have a little bit of Google and you want Amazon for something, but then Amazon's too expensive for something else. So you go with a Azure for that or you have Microsoft 365 as well as Amazon. Right? So you're, that's sort of a multi-cloud right there. But I think the more strategic question is organizations who are combining clouds for more architectural reasons. So for example, you know, back backup or failover or data sovereignty issues, right, where you, you can go into a single cloud and say, well, I want, you know, different data and different regions, but they may a, a particular cloud might not have all the answers for you. So you may say, okay, well I want, I may one of the big clouds or there's specialty cloud providers that focus on data sovereignty solutions for particular markets. And, and that might be part of the mix, right? Isn't necessarily all the big clouds. >>I think that's an interesting observation. Cause when you look at, you know, hybrid, right. When you really dig into a lot of the hybrid was Dr. Right? Yeah. Well, we got, we're gonna use the cloud for backup. And that, and that, what you're saying is multi-cloud could be sort of a similar dynamic, >>The low-head fruit, >>Which is fine, which is not that interesting. >>It's the low hanging fruit though. It's the easy, it's that risk free? I won't say risk free, but it's the easiest way not to get killed, >>But there's a translate into just sort of more interesting and lucrative and monetizable opportunities. You know, it's kind of a big leap to go from Dr. To actually building new applications that cross clouds and delivering new monetization value on top of data and you know, this nerve. >>Yeah. Whether that would be the best way to build such applications, the jury's still out. Why would you actually want to do well? >>I was gonna ask you, is there an advantage? We talked to Mariana, Tess, who's, you know, she's CTO of into it now of course, into it's a, you know, different kind of application, but she's like, yeah, we kinda looked hard at that multiple cloud thing. We found it too complex. And so we just picked one cloud, you know, in, for kind of the same thing. So, you know, is there an advantage now, the one advantage John, you pointed this out is if I run on Microsoft, I'll make more money. If I run on Amazon and you know, they'll, they'll help me sell. So, so that's a business justification, but is there a technical reason to do it? You know, global presence, there >>Could be technical reason not to do it either too. So >>There's more because of complexity. >>You mean? Well, and or technical debt on some services might not be there at this point. I mean the puzzle pieces gotta be there, assume that all clouds have have the pieces. Right. Then it's a matter of composability. I think E AJ who came on AJ Patel who runs modern applications development would agree with your assessment of cloud native being probably the driving front car on this messaging, because that's the issue like once you have the, everything there, then you're composing, it's the orchestra model, Dave. It's like, okay, we got everything here. How do I stitch it together? Not so much coding, writing code, cuz you got everything in building blocks and patterns and, and recipes. >>Yeah. And that's really what VMware has in mind when they talk about multi-cloud right? From VMware's perspective, you can put their virtual machine technology in any cloud. So if you, if you do that and you put it in multiple clouds, then you have, you know, this common, familiar environment, right. It's VMware everywhere. Doesn't really matter which cloud it's in because you get all the goodness that VMware has and you have the expertise on staff. And so now you have, you know, the workload portability across clouds, which can give you added benefits. But one of the straw men of this argument is that price arbitrage, right. I'm gonna, you know, put workloads in Amazon if it's cheaper. But if then if Amazon, you know, Azure has a different pricing structure for something I'm doing, then maybe I'll, I'll move a workload over there to get better pricing. That's difficult to implement in practice. Right. That's so that's that while people like to talk about that, yeah. I'm gonna optimize my cost by moving workloads across clouds, the practicalities at this point, make it difficult. Yeah. But with, if you have VMware, any your clouds, it may be more straightforward, but you still might not do it in order to save money on a particular cloud bill. >>It still, people don't want data. They really, really don't want to move >>Data. This audience does not want do it. I mean, if you look at the evolution, this customer base, even their, their affinity towards cloud native that's years in the making just to good put it perspective. Yeah. So I like how VMware's reality is on crawl, walk, run their clients, no matter what they want 'em to do, you can't make 'em run. And when they're still in diapers right. Or instill in the crib. Right. So you gotta get the customers in a mode of saying, I can see how VMware could operate that. I know and know how to run in an environment because the people who come through this show, they're like teams, it's like an offsite meeting, meets a conference and it's institutionalized for 15 plus years of main enterprise workload management. So I like, that's just not going away. So okay. Given that, how do you connect to the next thing? >>Well, I think the, the missing piece of the puzzle is, is the edge, right? Because it's not just about connecting one hyperscaler to another hyperscaler or even to on-premises or a private cloud, it's also the edge, the edge computing and the edge computing data center requirements. Right. Because you have, you could have an edge data center in a, a phone tower or a point of presence, a telco point of presence, which are those nondescript buildings, every town has. Right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you know, we have that >>Little colo that no one knows about, >>Right, exactly. That, you know, used to be your DSL end point. And now it's just a mini data center for the cloud, or it could be the, you know, the factory computer room or computer room in a retailer. You know, every retailer has that computer room in the modern retails target home Depot. They will have thousands of these little mini cloud data centers they're handling their, their point of sale systems, their, you know, local wifi and all these other local systems. That's, that's where the interesting part of this cloud story is going because that is inherently heterogeneous inherently mixed in terms of the hardware requirements, the software requirements and how you're going to build applications to support that, including AI based applications, which are sort of the, one of the areas of major innovation today is how are we going to do AI on the edge and why would we do it? And there's huge, huge opportunity to >>Well, real time referencing at the edge. Exactly. Absolutely. With all the data. My, my question is, is, is, is the cloud gonna be part of that? Or is the edge gonna actually bring new architectures and new economics that completely disrupt the, the economics that we've known in the cloud and in the data center? >>Well, this for hardware matters. If form factor matters, you can put a data center, the size of four, you know, four U boxes and then you're done >>Nice. I, >>I think it's a semantic question. It's something for the marketers to come up with the right jargon for is yeah. Is the edge part of the cloud, is the cloud part of the edge? Are we gonna come up with a new term, super cloud HyperCloud? >>Yeah. >>Wonder woman cloud, who knows? Yeah. But what, what >>Covers everything, but what might not be semantic is the, I, I come back to the Silicon that inside the, you know, apple max, the M one M two M two ultras, the, what Tesla's doing with NPUs, what you're seeing, you know, in, in, in arm based innovations could completely change the economics of computing, the security model. >>As we say, with the AJ >>Power consumption, >>Cloud's the hardware middleware. And then you got the application is the business everything's completely technology. The business is the app. I >>Mean we're 15 years into the cloud. You know, it's like every 15 years something gets blown up. >>We have two minutes left Jason. So I want to get into what you're working on for when your firm, you had a great, great traction, great practice over there. But before that, what's the, what's your scorecard on the event? How would you, what, what would be your constructive analysis? Positive, good, bad, ugly for VMwares team around this event. What'd they get right? What'd they need to work on >>Well as a smaller event, right? So about one third, the size of previous worlds. I mean, it's, it's, it's been a reasonably well run event for a smaller event. I, you know, in terms of the logistics and everything everything's handled well, I think their market messaging, they need to sort of revisit, but in terms of the ecosystem, you know, I think the ecosystem is, is, is, is doing well. You know, met with a number of the exhibitors over the last few days. And I think there's a lot of, a lot of positive things going on there. >>They see a wave coming and that's cloud native in your mind. >>Well, some of them are talking about cloud native. Some of them aren't, it's a variety of different >>Potentially you're talking where they are in this dag are on the hardware. Okay, cool. What's going on with your research? Tell us what you're focused on right now. What are you digging into? What's going on? Well, >>Cloud native, obviously a big part of what we do, but cybersecurity as well, mainframe modernization, believe it or not. It's a hot topic. DevOps continues to be a hot topic. So a variety of different things. And I'll be writing an article for Silicon angle on this conference. So highlights from the show. Great. Focusing on not just the VMware story, but some of the hot spots among the exhibitors. >>And what's your take on the whole crypto defi world. That's emerging. >>It's all a scam hundred >>Percent. All right. We're now back to enterprise. >>Wait a minute. Hold on. >>We're out of time. >>Gotta go. >>We'll make that a virtual, there are >>A lot of scams. >>I'll admit that you gotta, it's a lot of cool stuff. You gotta get through the underbelly that grows the old bolt. >>You hear kit earlier. He's like, yeah. Well, forget about crypto. Let's talk blockchain, but I'm like, no, let's talk crypto. >>Yeah. All good stuff, Jason. Thanks for coming on the cube. Thanks for spending time. I know you've been busy in meetings and thanks for coming back. Yeah. Happy to help. All right. We're wrapping up day two. I'm Jeff David ante cube coverage. Two sets three days live coverage, 12th year covering VMware's user conference called explore now was formerly VM world onto the next level. That's what it's all about. Just the cube signing off for day two. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Snowflake Summit '22 live from Caesar's Forum in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, my cohost Dave Vellante, we've been here the last day and a half unpacking a lot of news, a lot of announcements, talking with customers and partners, and we have another great session coming for you next. We've got a customer and a partner talking tech and data mash. Please welcome Mitesh Shah, VP in market strategy at Elation. >> Great to be here. >> and Ash Naseer great, to have you, senior director of data engineering at Warner Brothers Discovery. Welcome guys. >> Thank you for having me. >> It's great to be back in person and to be able to really get to see and feel and touch this technology, isn't it? >> Yeah, it is. I mean two years or so. Yeah. Great to feel the energy in the conference center. >> Yeah. >> Snowflake was virtual, I think for two years and now it's great to kind of see the excitement firsthand. So it's wonderful. >> Th excitement, but also the boom and the number of customers and partners and people attending. They were saying the first, or the summit in 2019 had about 1900 attendees. And this is around 10,000. So a huge jump in a short time period. Talk a little bit about the Elation-Snowflake partnership and probably some of the acceleration that you guys have been experiencing as a Snowflake partner. >> Yeah. As a snowflake partner. I mean, Snowflake is an investor of us in Elation early last year, and we've been a partner for, for longer than that. And good news. We have been awarded Snowflake partner of the year for data governance, just earlier this week. And that's in fact, our second year in a row for winning that award. So, great news on that front as well. >> Repeat, congratulations. >> Repeat. Absolutely. And we're going to hope to make it a three-peat as well. And we've also been awarded industry competency badges in five different industries, those being financial services, healthcare, retail technology, and Median Telcom. >> Excellent. Okay. Going to right get into it. Data mesh. You guys actually have a data mesh and you've presented at the conference. So, take us back to the beginning. Why did you decide that you needed to implement something like data mesh? What was the impetus? >> Yeah. So when people think of Warner brothers, you always think of like the movie studio, but we're more than that, right? I mean, you think of HBO, you think of TNT, you think of CNN, we have 30 plus brands in our portfolio and each have their own needs. So the idea of a data mesh really helps us because what we can do is we can federate access across the company so that, you know, CNN can work at their own pace. You know, when there's election season, they can ingest their own data and they don't have to, you know, bump up against as an example, HBO, if Game of Thrones is going on. >> So, okay. So the, the impetus was to serve those lines of business better. Actually, given that you've got these different brands, it was probably easier than most companies. Cause if you're, let's say you're a big financial services company, and now you have to decide who owns what. CNN owns its own data products, HBO. Now, do they decide within those different brands, how to distribute even further? Or is it really, how deep have you gone in that decentralization? >> That's a great question. It's a very close partnership, because there are a number of data sets, which are used by all the brands, right? You think about people browsing websites, right? You know, CNN has a website, Warner brothers has a website. So for us to ingest that data for each of the brands to ingest that data separately, that means five different ways of doing things and you know, a big environment, right? So that is where our team comes into play. We ingest a lot of the common data sets, but like I said, any unique data sets, data sets regarding theatrical as an example, you know, Warner brothers does it themselves, you know, for streaming, HBO Max, does it themselves. So we kind of operate in partnership. >> So do you have a centralized data team and also decentralized data teams, right? >> That's right. >> So I love this conversation because that was heresy 10 years ago, five years ago, even, cause that's inefficient. But you've, I presume you've found that it's actually more productive in terms of the business output, explain that dynamic. >> You know, you bring up such a good point. So I, you know, I consider myself as one of the dinosaurs who started like 20 plus years ago in this industry. And back then, we were all taught to think of the data warehouse as like a monolithic thing. And the reason for that is the technology wasn't there. The technology didn't catch up. Now, 20 years later, the technology is way ahead, right? But like, our mindset's still the same because we think of data warehouses and data platforms still as a monolithic thing. But if you really sort of remove that sort of mental barrier, if you will, and if you start thinking about, well, how do I sort of, you know, federate everything and make sure that you let folks who are building, or are closest to the customer or are building their products, let them own that data and have a partnership. The results have been amazing. And if we were only sort of doing it as a centralized team, we would not be able to do a 10th of what we do today. So it's that massive scale in, in our company as well. >> And I should have clarified, when we talk about data mesh are we talking about the implementing in practice, the octagon sort of framework, or is this sort of your own sort of terminology? >> Well, so the interesting part is four years ago, we didn't have- >> It didn't exist. >> Yeah. It didn't exist. And, and so we, our principle was very simple, right? When we started out, we said, we want to make sure that our brands are able to operate independently with some oversight and guidance from our technology teams, right? That's what we set out to do. We did that with Snowflake by design because Snowflake allows us to, you know, separate those, those brands into different accounts. So that was done by design. And then the, the magic, I think, is the Snowflake data sharing where, which allows us to sort of bring data in here once, and then share it with whoever needs it. So think about HBO Max. On HBO Max, You not only have HBO Max content, but content from CNN, from Cartoon Network, from Warner Brothers, right? All the movies, right? So to see how The Batman movie did in theaters and then on streaming, you don't need, you know, Warner brothers doesn't need to ingest the same streaming data. HBO Max does it. HBO Max shares it with Warner brothers, you know, store once, share many times, and everyone works at their own pace. >> So they're building data products. Those data products are discoverable APIs, I presume, or I guess maybe just, I guess the Snowflake cloud, but very importantly, they're governed. And that's correct, where Elation comes in? >> That's precisely where Elation comes in, is where sort of this central flexible foundation for data governance. You know, you mentioned data mesh. I think what's interesting is that it's really an answer to the bottlenecks created by centralized IT, right? There's this notion of decentralizing that the data engineers and making the data domain owners, the people that know the data the best, have them be in control of publishing the data to the data consumers. There are other popular concepts actually happening right now, as we speak, around modern data stack. Around data fabric that are also in many ways underpinned by this notion of decentralization, right? These are concepts that are underpinned by decentralization and as the pendulum swings, sort of between decentralization and centralization, as we go back and forth in the world of IT and data, there are certain constants that need to be centralized over time. And one of those I believe is very much a centralized platform for data governance. And that's certainly, I think where we come in. Would love to hear more about how you use Elation. >> Yeah. So, I mean, elation helps us sort of, as you guys say, sort of, map, the treasure map of the data, right? So for consumers to find where their data is, that's where Elation helps us. It helps us with the data cataloging, you know, storing all the metadata and, you know, users can go in, they can sort of find, you know, the data that they need and they can also find how others are using data. So it's, there's a little bit of a crowdsourcing aspect that Elation helps us to do whereby you know, you can see, okay, my peer in the other group, well, that's how they use this piece of data. So I'm not going to spend hours trying to figure this out. You're going to use the query that they use. So yeah. >> So you have a master catalog, I presume. And then each of the brands has their own sub catalogs, is that correct? >> Well, for the most part, we have that master catalog and then the brands sort of use it, you know, separately themselves. The key here is all that catalog, that catalog isn't maintained by a centralized group as well, right? It's again, maintained by the individual teams and not only in the individual teams, but the folks that are responsible for the data, right? So I talked about the concept of crowdsourcing, whoever sort of puts the data in, has to make sure that they update the catalog and make sure that the definitions are there and everything sort of in line. >> So HBO, CNN, and each have their own, sort of access to their catalog, but they feed into the master catalog. Is that the right way to think about it? >> Yeah. >> Okay. And they have their own virtual data warehouses, right? They have ownership over that? They can spin 'em up, spin 'em down as they see fit? Right? And they're governed. >> They're governed. And what's interesting is it's not just governed, right? Governance is a, is a big word. It's a bit nebulous, but what's really being enabled here is this notion of self-service as well, right? There's two big sort of rockets that need to happen at the same time in any given organization. There's this notion that you want to put trustworthy data in the hands of data consumers, while at the same time mitigating risk. And that's precisely what Elation does. >> So I want to clarify this for the audience. So there's four principles of database. This came after you guys did it. And I wonder how it aligns. Domain ownership, give data, as you were saying to the, to the domain owners who have context, data as product, you guys are building data products, and that creates two problems. How do you give people self-service infrastructure and how do you automate governance? So the first two, great. But then it creates these other problems. Does that align with your philosophy? Where's alignment? What's different? >> Yeah. Data products is exactly where we're going. And that sort of, that domain based design, that's really key as well. In our business, you think about who the customer is, as an example, right? Depending on who you ask, it's going to be, the answer might be different, you know, to the movie business, it's probably going to be the person who watches a movie in a theater. To the streaming business, to HBO Max, it's the streamer, right? To others, someone watching live CNN on their TV, right? There's yet another group. Think about all the franchising we do. So you see Batman action figures and T-shirts, and Warner brothers branded stuff in stores, that's yet another business unit. But at the end of the day, it's not a different person, it's you and me, right? We do all these things. So the domain concept, make sure that you ingest data and you bring data relevant to the context, however, not sort of making it so stringent where it cannot integrate, and then you integrate it at a higher level to create that 360. >> And it's discoverable. So the point is, I don't have to go tap Ash on the shoulder, say, how do I get this data? Is it governed? Do I have access to it? Give me the rules of it. Just, I go grab it, right? And the system computationally automates whether or not I have access to it. And it's, as you say, self-service. >> In this case, exactly right. It enables people to just search for data and know that when they find the data, whether it's trustworthy or not, through trust flags, and the like, it's doing both of those things at the same time. >> How is it an enabler of solving some of the big challenges that the media and entertainment industry is going through? We've seen so much change the last couple of years. The rising consumer expectations aren't going to go back down. They're only going to come up. We want you to serve us up content that's relevant, that's personalized, that makes sense. I'd love to understand from your perspective, Mitesh, from an industry challenges perspective, how does this technology help customers like Warner Brothers Discovery, meet business customers, where they are and reduce the volume on those challenges? >> It's a great question. And as I mentioned earlier, we had five industry competency badges that were awarded to us by Snowflake. And one of those four, Median Telcom. And the reason for that is we're helping media companies understand their audiences better, and ultimately serve up better experiences for their audiences. But we've got Ash right here that can tell us how that's happening in practice. >> Yeah, tell us. >> So I'll share a story. I always like to tell stories, right? Once once upon a time before we had Elation in place, it was like, who you knew was how you got access to the data. So if I knew you and I knew you had access to a certain kind of data and your access to the right kind of data was based on the network you had at the company- >> I had to trust you. >> Yeah. >> I might not want to give up my data. >> That's it. And so that's where Elation sort of helps us democratize it, but, you know, puts the governance and controls, right? There are certain sensitive things as well, such as viewership, such as subscriber accounts, which are very important. So making sure that the right people have access to it, that's the other problem that Elation helps us solve. >> That's precisely part of our integration with Snowflake in particular, being able to define and manage policies within Elation. Saying, you know, certain people should have access to certain rows, doing column level masking. And having those policies actually enforced at the Snowflake data layer is precisely part of our value product. >> And that's automated. >> And all that's automated. Exactly. >> Right. So I don't have to think about it. I don't have to go through the tap on their shoulder. What has been the impact, Ash, on data quality as you've pushed it down into the domains? >> That's a great question. So it has definitely improved, but data quality is a very interesting subject, because back to my example of, you know, when we started doing things, we, you know, the centralized IT team always said, well, it has to be like this, Right? And if it doesn't fit in this, then it's bad quality. Well, sometimes context changes. Businesses change, right? You have to be able to react to it quickly. So making sure that a lot of that quality is managed at the decentralized level, at the place where you have that business context, that ensures you have the most up to date quality. We're talking about media industry changing so quickly. I mean, would we have thought three years ago that people would watch a lot of these major movies on streaming services? But here's the reality, right? You have to react and, you know, having it at that level just helps you react faster. >> So data, if I play that back, data quality is not a static framework. It's flexible based on the business context and the business owners can make those adjustments, cause they own the data. >> That's it. That's exactly it. >> That's awesome. Wow. That's amazing progress that you guys have made. >> In quality, if I could just add, it also just changes depending on where you are in your data pipeline stage, right? Data, quality data observability, this is a very fast evolving space at the moment, and if I look to my left right now, I bet you I can probably see a half-dozen quality observability vendors right now. And so given that and given the fact that Elation still is sort of a central hub to find trustworthy data, we've actually announced an open data quality initiative, allowing for best-of-breed data quality vendors to integrate with the platform. So whoever they are, whatever tool folks want to use, they can use that particular tool of choice. >> And this all runs in the cloud, or is it a hybrid sort of? >> Everything is in the cloud. We're all in the cloud. And you know, again, helps us go faster. >> Let me ask you a question. I could go on forever in this topic. One of the concepts that was put forth is whether it's a Snowflake data warehouse or a data bricks, data lake, or an Oracle data warehouse, they should all be inclusive. They should just be a node on the mesh. Like, wow, that sounds good. But I haven't seen it yet. Right? I'm guessing that Snowflake and Elation enable all the self-serve, all this automated governance, and that including those other items, it's got to be a one-off at this point in time. Do you ever see you expanding that scope or is it better off to just kind of leave it into the, the Snowflake data cloud? >> It's a good question. You know, I feel like where we're at today, especially in terms of sort of technology giving us so many options, I don't think there's a one size fits all. Right? Even though we are very heavily invested in Snowflake and we use Snowflake consistently across the organization, but you could, theoretically, could have an architecture that blends those two, right? Have different types of data platforms like a teradata or an Oracle and sort of bring it all together today. We have the technology, you know, that and all sorts of things that can make sure that you query on different databases. So I don't think the technology is the problem, I think it's the organizational mindset. I think that that's what gets in the way. >> Oh, interesting. So I was going to ask you, will hybrid tables help you solve that problem? And, maybe not, what you're saying, it's the organization that owns the Oracle database saying, Hey, we have our system. It processes, it works, you know, go away. >> Yeah. Well, you know, hybrid tables I think, is a great sort of next step in Snowflake's evolution. I think it's, in my opinion, I, think it's a game changer, but yeah. I mean, they can still exist. You could do hybrid tables right on Snowflake, or you could, you know, you could kind of coexist as well. >> Yeah. But, do you have a thought on this? >> Yeah, I do. I mean, we're always going to live in a time where you've got data distributed in throughout the organization and around the globe. And that could be even if you're all in on Snowflake, you could have data in Snowflake here, you could have data in Snowflake in EMEA and Europe somewhere. It could be anywhere. By the same token you might be using. Every organization is using on-premises systems. They have data, they naturally have data everywhere. And so, you know, this one solution to this is really centralizing, as I mentioned, not just governance, but also metadata about all of the data in your organization so that you can enable people to search and find and discover trustworthy data no matter where it is in your organization. >> Yeah. That's a great point. I mean, if you have the data about the data, then you can, you can treat these independent nodes. That's just that. Right? And maybe there's some advantages of putting it all in the Snowflake cloud, but to your point, organizationally, that's just not feasible. The whole, unfortunately, sorry, Snowflake, all the world's data is not going to go into Snowflake, but they play a key role in accelerating, what I'm hearing, your vision of data mesh. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think going forward in the future, we have to start thinking about data platforms as just one place where you sort of dump all the data. That's where the mesh concept comes in. It is going to be a mesh. It's going to be distributed and organizations have to be okay with that. And they have to embrace the tools. I mean, you know, Facebook developed a tool called Presto many years ago that that helps them solve exactly the same problem. So I think the technology is there. I think the organizational mindset needs to evolve. >> Yeah. Definitely. >> Culture. Culture is one of the hardest things to change. >> Exactly. >> Guys, this was a masterclass in data mesh, I think. Thank you so much for coming on talking. >> We appreciate it. Thank you so much. >> Of course. What Elation is doing with Snowflake and with Warner Brothers Discovery, Keep that content coming. I got a lot of stuff I got to catch up on watching. >> Sounds good. Thank you for having us. >> Thanks guys. >> Thanks, you guys. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Snowflake Summit '22. We'll be back after a short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Snowflake Summit '22 live from Caesar's Forum in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, my cohost Dave Vellante, we've been here the last day and a half unpacking a lot of news, a lot of announcements, talking with customers and partners, and we have another great session coming for you next. We've got a customer and a partner talking tech and data mash. Please welcome Mitesh Shah, VP in market strategy at Elation. >> Great to be here. >> and Ash Naseer great, to have you, senior director of data engineering at Warner Brothers Discovery. Welcome guys. >> Thank you for having me. >> It's great to be back in person and to be able to really get to see and feel and touch this technology, isn't it? >> Yeah, it is. I mean two years or so. Yeah. Great to feel the energy in the conference center. >> Yeah. >> Snowflake was virtual, I think for two years and now it's great to kind of see the excitement firsthand. So it's wonderful. >> Th excitement, but also the boom and the number of customers and partners and people attending. They were saying the first, or the summit in 2019 had about 1900 attendees. And this is around 10,000. So a huge jump in a short time period. Talk a little bit about the Elation-Snowflake partnership and probably some of the acceleration that you guys have been experiencing as a Snowflake partner. >> Yeah. As a snowflake partner. I mean, Snowflake is an investor of us in Elation early last year, and we've been a partner for, for longer than that. And good news. We have been awarded Snowflake partner of the year for data governance, just earlier this week. And that's in fact, our second year in a row for winning that award. So, great news on that front as well. >> Repeat, congratulations. >> Repeat. Absolutely. And we're going to hope to make it a three-peat as well. And we've also been awarded industry competency badges in five different industries, those being financial services, healthcare, retail technology, and Median Telcom. >> Excellent. Okay. Going to right get into it. Data mesh. You guys actually have a data mesh and you've presented at the conference. So, take us back to the beginning. Why did you decide that you needed to implement something like data mesh? What was the impetus? >> Yeah. So when people think of Warner brothers, you always think of like the movie studio, but we're more than that, right? I mean, you think of HBO, you think of TNT, you think of CNN, we have 30 plus brands in our portfolio and each have their own needs. So the idea of a data mesh really helps us because what we can do is we can federate access across the company so that, you know, CNN can work at their own pace. You know, when there's election season, they can ingest their own data and they don't have to, you know, bump up against as an example, HBO, if Game of Thrones is going on. >> So, okay. So the, the impetus was to serve those lines of business better. Actually, given that you've got these different brands, it was probably easier than most companies. Cause if you're, let's say you're a big financial services company, and now you have to decide who owns what. CNN owns its own data products, HBO. Now, do they decide within those different brands, how to distribute even further? Or is it really, how deep have you gone in that decentralization? >> That's a great question. It's a very close partnership, because there are a number of data sets, which are used by all the brands, right? You think about people browsing websites, right? You know, CNN has a website, Warner brothers has a website. So for us to ingest that data for each of the brands to ingest that data separately, that means five different ways of doing things and you know, a big environment, right? So that is where our team comes into play. We ingest a lot of the common data sets, but like I said, any unique data sets, data sets regarding theatrical as an example, you know, Warner brothers does it themselves, you know, for streaming, HBO Max, does it themselves. So we kind of operate in partnership. >> So do you have a centralized data team and also decentralized data teams, right? >> That's right. >> So I love this conversation because that was heresy 10 years ago, five years ago, even, cause that's inefficient. But you've, I presume you've found that it's actually more productive in terms of the business output, explain that dynamic. >> You know, you bring up such a good point. So I, you know, I consider myself as one of the dinosaurs who started like 20 plus years ago in this industry. And back then, we were all taught to think of the data warehouse as like a monolithic thing. And the reason for that is the technology wasn't there. The technology didn't catch up. Now, 20 years later, the technology is way ahead, right? But like, our mindset's still the same because we think of data warehouses and data platforms still as a monolithic thing. But if you really sort of remove that sort of mental barrier, if you will, and if you start thinking about, well, how do I sort of, you know, federate everything and make sure that you let folks who are building, or are closest to the customer or are building their products, let them own that data and have a partnership. The results have been amazing. And if we were only sort of doing it as a centralized team, we would not be able to do a 10th of what we do today. So it's that massive scale in, in our company as well. >> And I should have clarified, when we talk about data mesh are we talking about the implementing in practice, the octagon sort of framework, or is this sort of your own sort of terminology? >> Well, so the interesting part is four years ago, we didn't have- >> It didn't exist. >> Yeah. It didn't exist. And, and so we, our principle was very simple, right? When we started out, we said, we want to make sure that our brands are able to operate independently with some oversight and guidance from our technology teams, right? That's what we set out to do. We did that with Snowflake by design because Snowflake allows us to, you know, separate those, those brands into different accounts. So that was done by design. And then the, the magic, I think, is the Snowflake data sharing where, which allows us to sort of bring data in here once, and then share it with whoever needs it. So think about HBO Max. On HBO Max, You not only have HBO Max content, but content from CNN, from Cartoon Network, from Warner Brothers, right? All the movies, right? So to see how The Batman movie did in theaters and then on streaming, you don't need, you know, Warner brothers doesn't need to ingest the same streaming data. HBO Max does it. HBO Max shares it with Warner brothers, you know, store once, share many times, and everyone works at their own pace. >> So they're building data products. Those data products are discoverable APIs, I presume, or I guess maybe just, I guess the Snowflake cloud, but very importantly, they're governed. And that's correct, where Elation comes in? >> That's precisely where Elation comes in, is where sort of this central flexible foundation for data governance. You know, you mentioned data mesh. I think what's interesting is that it's really an answer to the bottlenecks created by centralized IT, right? There's this notion of decentralizing that the data engineers and making the data domain owners, the people that know the data the best, have them be in control of publishing the data to the data consumers. There are other popular concepts actually happening right now, as we speak, around modern data stack. Around data fabric that are also in many ways underpinned by this notion of decentralization, right? These are concepts that are underpinned by decentralization and as the pendulum swings, sort of between decentralization and centralization, as we go back and forth in the world of IT and data, there are certain constants that need to be centralized over time. And one of those I believe is very much a centralized platform for data governance. And that's certainly, I think where we come in. Would love to hear more about how you use Elation. >> Yeah. So, I mean, elation helps us sort of, as you guys say, sort of, map, the treasure map of the data, right? So for consumers to find where their data is, that's where Elation helps us. It helps us with the data cataloging, you know, storing all the metadata and, you know, users can go in, they can sort of find, you know, the data that they need and they can also find how others are using data. So it's, there's a little bit of a crowdsourcing aspect that Elation helps us to do whereby you know, you can see, okay, my peer in the other group, well, that's how they use this piece of data. So I'm not going to spend hours trying to figure this out. You're going to use the query that they use. So yeah. >> So you have a master catalog, I presume. And then each of the brands has their own sub catalogs, is that correct? >> Well, for the most part, we have that master catalog and then the brands sort of use it, you know, separately themselves. The key here is all that catalog, that catalog isn't maintained by a centralized group as well, right? It's again, maintained by the individual teams and not only in the individual teams, but the folks that are responsible for the data, right? So I talked about the concept of crowdsourcing, whoever sort of puts the data in, has to make sure that they update the catalog and make sure that the definitions are there and everything sort of in line. >> So HBO, CNN, and each have their own, sort of access to their catalog, but they feed into the master catalog. Is that the right way to think about it? >> Yeah. >> Okay. And they have their own virtual data warehouses, right? They have ownership over that? They can spin 'em up, spin 'em down as they see fit? Right? And they're governed. >> They're governed. And what's interesting is it's not just governed, right? Governance is a, is a big word. It's a bit nebulous, but what's really being enabled here is this notion of self-service as well, right? There's two big sort of rockets that need to happen at the same time in any given organization. There's this notion that you want to put trustworthy data in the hands of data consumers, while at the same time mitigating risk. And that's precisely what Elation does. >> So I want to clarify this for the audience. So there's four principles of database. This came after you guys did it. And I wonder how it aligns. Domain ownership, give data, as you were saying to the, to the domain owners who have context, data as product, you guys are building data products, and that creates two problems. How do you give people self-service infrastructure and how do you automate governance? So the first two, great. But then it creates these other problems. Does that align with your philosophy? Where's alignment? What's different? >> Yeah. Data products is exactly where we're going. And that sort of, that domain based design, that's really key as well. In our business, you think about who the customer is, as an example, right? Depending on who you ask, it's going to be, the answer might be different, you know, to the movie business, it's probably going to be the person who watches a movie in a theater. To the streaming business, to HBO Max, it's the streamer, right? To others, someone watching live CNN on their TV, right? There's yet another group. Think about all the franchising we do. So you see Batman action figures and T-shirts, and Warner brothers branded stuff in stores, that's yet another business unit. But at the end of the day, it's not a different person, it's you and me, right? We do all these things. So the domain concept, make sure that you ingest data and you bring data relevant to the context, however, not sort of making it so stringent where it cannot integrate, and then you integrate it at a higher level to create that 360. >> And it's discoverable. So the point is, I don't have to go tap Ash on the shoulder, say, how do I get this data? Is it governed? Do I have access to it? Give me the rules of it. Just, I go grab it, right? And the system computationally automates whether or not I have access to it. And it's, as you say, self-service. >> In this case, exactly right. It enables people to just search for data and know that when they find the data, whether it's trustworthy or not, through trust flags, and the like, it's doing both of those things at the same time. >> How is it an enabler of solving some of the big challenges that the media and entertainment industry is going through? We've seen so much change the last couple of years. The rising consumer expectations aren't going to go back down. They're only going to come up. We want you to serve us up content that's relevant, that's personalized, that makes sense. I'd love to understand from your perspective, Mitesh, from an industry challenges perspective, how does this technology help customers like Warner Brothers Discovery, meet business customers, where they are and reduce the volume on those challenges? >> It's a great question. And as I mentioned earlier, we had five industry competency badges that were awarded to us by Snowflake. And one of those four, Median Telcom. And the reason for that is we're helping media companies understand their audiences better, and ultimately serve up better experiences for their audiences. But we've got Ash right here that can tell us how that's happening in practice. >> Yeah, tell us. >> So I'll share a story. I always like to tell stories, right? Once once upon a time before we had Elation in place, it was like, who you knew was how you got access to the data. So if I knew you and I knew you had access to a certain kind of data and your access to the right kind of data was based on the network you had at the company- >> I had to trust you. >> Yeah. >> I might not want to give up my data. >> That's it. And so that's where Elation sort of helps us democratize it, but, you know, puts the governance and controls, right? There are certain sensitive things as well, such as viewership, such as subscriber accounts, which are very important. So making sure that the right people have access to it, that's the other problem that Elation helps us solve. >> That's precisely part of our integration with Snowflake in particular, being able to define and manage policies within Elation. Saying, you know, certain people should have access to certain rows, doing column level masking. And having those policies actually enforced at the Snowflake data layer is precisely part of our value product. >> And that's automated. >> And all that's automated. Exactly. >> Right. So I don't have to think about it. I don't have to go through the tap on their shoulder. What has been the impact, Ash, on data quality as you've pushed it down into the domains? >> That's a great question. So it has definitely improved, but data quality is a very interesting subject, because back to my example of, you know, when we started doing things, we, you know, the centralized IT team always said, well, it has to be like this, Right? And if it doesn't fit in this, then it's bad quality. Well, sometimes context changes. Businesses change, right? You have to be able to react to it quickly. So making sure that a lot of that quality is managed at the decentralized level, at the place where you have that business context, that ensures you have the most up to date quality. We're talking about media industry changing so quickly. I mean, would we have thought three years ago that people would watch a lot of these major movies on streaming services? But here's the reality, right? You have to react and, you know, having it at that level just helps you react faster. >> So data, if I play that back, data quality is not a static framework. It's flexible based on the business context and the business owners can make those adjustments, cause they own the data. >> That's it. That's exactly it. >> That's awesome. Wow. That's amazing progress that you guys have made. >> In quality, if I could just add, it also just changes depending on where you are in your data pipeline stage, right? Data, quality data observability, this is a very fast evolving space at the moment, and if I look to my left right now, I bet you I can probably see a half-dozen quality observability vendors right now. And so given that and given the fact that Elation still is sort of a central hub to find trustworthy data, we've actually announced an open data quality initiative, allowing for best-of-breed data quality vendors to integrate with the platform. So whoever they are, whatever tool folks want to use, they can use that particular tool of choice. >> And this all runs in the cloud, or is it a hybrid sort of? >> Everything is in the cloud. We're all in the cloud. And you know, again, helps us go faster. >> Let me ask you a question. I could go on forever in this topic. One of the concepts that was put forth is whether it's a Snowflake data warehouse or a data bricks, data lake, or an Oracle data warehouse, they should all be inclusive. They should just be a node on the mesh. Like, wow, that sounds good. But I haven't seen it yet. Right? I'm guessing that Snowflake and Elation enable all the self-serve, all this automated governance, and that including those other items, it's got to be a one-off at this point in time. Do you ever see you expanding that scope or is it better off to just kind of leave it into the, the Snowflake data cloud? >> It's a good question. You know, I feel like where we're at today, especially in terms of sort of technology giving us so many options, I don't think there's a one size fits all. Right? Even though we are very heavily invested in Snowflake and we use Snowflake consistently across the organization, but you could, theoretically, could have an architecture that blends those two, right? Have different types of data platforms like a teradata or an Oracle and sort of bring it all together today. We have the technology, you know, that and all sorts of things that can make sure that you query on different databases. So I don't think the technology is the problem, I think it's the organizational mindset. I think that that's what gets in the way. >> Oh, interesting. So I was going to ask you, will hybrid tables help you solve that problem? And, maybe not, what you're saying, it's the organization that owns the Oracle database saying, Hey, we have our system. It processes, it works, you know, go away. >> Yeah. Well, you know, hybrid tables I think, is a great sort of next step in Snowflake's evolution. I think it's, in my opinion, I, think it's a game changer, but yeah. I mean, they can still exist. You could do hybrid tables right on Snowflake, or you could, you know, you could kind of coexist as well. >> Yeah. But, do you have a thought on this? >> Yeah, I do. I mean, we're always going to live in a time where you've got data distributed in throughout the organization and around the globe. And that could be even if you're all in on Snowflake, you could have data in Snowflake here, you could have data in Snowflake in EMEA and Europe somewhere. It could be anywhere. By the same token you might be using. Every organization is using on-premises systems. They have data, they naturally have data everywhere. And so, you know, this one solution to this is really centralizing, as I mentioned, not just governance, but also metadata about all of the data in your organization so that you can enable people to search and find and discover trustworthy data no matter where it is in your organization. >> Yeah. That's a great point. I mean, if you have the data about the data, then you can, you can treat these independent nodes. That's just that. Right? And maybe there's some advantages of putting it all in the Snowflake cloud, but to your point, organizationally, that's just not feasible. The whole, unfortunately, sorry, Snowflake, all the world's data is not going to go into Snowflake, but they play a key role in accelerating, what I'm hearing, your vision of data mesh. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think going forward in the future, we have to start thinking about data platforms as just one place where you sort of dump all the data. That's where the mesh concept comes in. It is going to be a mesh. It's going to be distributed and organizations have to be okay with that. And they have to embrace the tools. I mean, you know, Facebook developed a tool called Presto many years ago that that helps them solve exactly the same problem. So I think the technology is there. I think the organizational mindset needs to evolve. >> Yeah. Definitely. >> Culture. Culture is one of the hardest things to change. >> Exactly. >> Guys, this was a masterclass in data mesh, I think. Thank you so much for coming on talking. >> We appreciate it. Thank you so much. >> Of course. What Elation is doing with Snowflake and with Warner Brothers Discovery, Keep that content coming. I got a lot of stuff I got to catch up on watching. >> Sounds good. Thank you for having us. >> Thanks guys. >> Thanks, you guys. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Snowflake Summit '22. We'll be back after a short break. (upbeat music)

>>The cube presents, Coon and cloud native con Europe 22, brought to you by the cloud native computing foundation. >>Welcome to Melissa Spain. And we're at cuon cloud native con Europe, 2022. I'm Keith Townsend. And my co-host en Rico senior Etti en Rico's really proud of me. I've called him en Rico and said IK, every session, senior it analyst giga, O we're talking to fantastic builders at Cuban cloud native con about the projects and the efforts en Rico up to this point, it's been all about provisioning insecurity. What, what conversation have we been missing? >>Well, I mean, I, I think, I think that, uh, uh, we passed the point of having the conversation of deployment of provisioning. You know, everybody's very skilled, actually everything is done at day two. They are discovering that, well, there is a security problem. There is an observability problem. And in fact, we are meeting with a lot of people and there are a lot of conversation with people really needing to understand what is happening. I mean, in their classroom, what, why it is happening and all the, the questions that come with it. I mean, and, uh, the more I talk with, uh, people in the, in the show floor here, or even in the, you know, in the various sessions is about, you know, we are growing, the, our clusters are becoming bigger and bigger. Uh, applications are becoming, you know, bigger as well. So we need to know, understand better what is happening. It's not only, you know, about cost it's about everything at the >>End. So I think that's a great set up for our guests, max, Provo, founder, and CEO of storm for forge and Patrick Britton, Bergstrom, Brookstone. Yeah, I spelled it right. I didn't say it right. Berg storm CTO. We're at Q con cloud native con we're projects are discussed, built and storm forge. I I've heard the pitch before, so forgive me. And I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm kind of torn. I have service mesh. What do I need more like, what problem is storm for solving? >>You wanna take it? >>Sure, absolutely. So it it's interesting because, uh, my background is in the enterprise, right? I was an executive at United health group. Um, before that I worked at best buy. Um, and one of the issues that we always had was, especially as you migrate to the cloud, it seems like the CPU dial or the memory dial is your reliability dial. So it's like, oh, I just turned that all the way to the right and everything's hunky Dory. Right. Uh, but then we run into the issue like you and I were just talking about where it gets very, very expensive, very quickly. Uh, and so my first conversations with Matt and the storm forge group, and they were telling me about the product and, and what we're dealing with. I said, that is the problem statement that I have always struggled with. And I wish this existed 10 years ago when I was dealing with EC two costs, right? And now with Kubernetes, it's the same thing. It's so easy to provision. So realistically, what it is is we take your raw telemetry data and we essentially monitor the performance of your application. And then we can tell you using our machine learning algorithms, the exact configuration that you should be using for your application to achieve the results that you're looking for without over provisioning. So we reduce your consumption of CPU of memory and production, which ultimately nine times outta 10, actually I would say 10 out of 10 reduces your cost significantly without sacrificing reliability. >>So can your solution also help to optimize the application in the long run? Because yes, of course, yep. You know, the lowing fluid is, you know, optimize the deployment. Yeah. But actually the long term is optimizing the application. Yes. Which is the real problem. >>Yep. So we actually, um, we're fine with the, the former of what you just said, but we exist to do the latter. And so we're squarely and completely focused at the application layer. Um, we are, uh, as long as you can track or understand the metrics you care about for your application, uh, we can optimize against it. Um, we love that we don't know your application. We don't know what the SLA and SLO requirements are for your app. You do. And so in, in our world, it's about empowering the developer into the process, not automating them out of it. And I think sometimes AI and machine learning sort of gets a bad wrap from that standpoint. And so, uh, we've at this point, the company's been around, you know, since 2016, uh, kind of from the very early days of Kubernetes, we've always been, you know, squarely focused on Kubernetes using our core machine learning, uh, engine to optimize metrics at the application layer, uh, that people care about and, and need to need to go after. And the truth of the matter is today. And over time, you know, setting a cluster up on Kubernetes has largely been solved. Um, and yet the promise of, of Kubernetes around portability and flexibility, uh, downstream when you operationalize the complexity, smacks you in the face. And, uh, and that's where, where storm forge comes in. And so we're a vertical, you know, kind of vertically oriented solution. Um, that's, that's absolutely focused on solving that problem. >>Well, I don't want to play, actually. I want to play the, uh, devils advocate here and, you know, >>You wouldn't be a good analyst if you didn't. >>So the, the problem is when you talk with clients, users, they, there are many of them still working with Java with, you know, something that is really tough. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, I mean, we loved all of us loved Java. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe 20 years ago. Yeah. But not anymore, but still they have developers. They are porting applications, microservices. Yes. But not very optimized, etcetera. C cetera. So it's becoming tough. So how you can interact with these kind of yeah. Old hybrid or anyway, not well in generic applications. >>Yeah. We, we do that today. We actually, part of our platform is we offer performance testing in a lower environment and stage. And we like Matt was saying, we can use any metric that you care about and we can work with any configuration for that application. So the perfect example is Java, you know, you have to worry about your heap size, your garbage collection tuning. Um, and one of the things that really struck, struck me very early on about the storm forage product is because it is true machine learning. You remove the human bias from that. So like a lot of what I did in the past, especially around SRE and, and performance tuning, we were only as good as our humans were because of what they knew. And so we were, we kind of got stuck in these paths of making the same configuration adjustments, making the same changes to the application, hoping for different results. But then when you apply machine learning capability to that, the machine will recommend things you never would've dreamed of. And you get amazing results out of >>That. So both me and an Rico have been doing this for a long time. Like I have battled to my last breath, the, the argument when it's a bare metal or a VM. Yeah. Look, I cannot give you any more memory. Yeah. And the, the argument going all the way up to the CIO and the CIO basically saying, you know what, Keith you're cheap, my developer resources expensive, my bigger box. Yep. Uh, buying a bigger box in the cloud to your point is no longer a option because it's just expensive. Talk to me about the carrot or the stick as developers are realizing that they have to be more responsible. Where's the culture change coming from? So is it, that is that if it, is it the shift in responsibility? >>I think the center of the bullseye for us is within those sets of decisions, not in a static way, but in an ongoing way, especially, um, especially as the development of applications becomes more and more rapid. And the management of them, our, our charge and our belief wholeheartedly is that you shouldn't have to choose, you should not have to choose between costs or performance. You should not have to choose where your, you know, your applications live, uh, in a public private or, or hybrid cloud environment. And so we want to empower people to be able to sit in the middle of all of that chaos and for those trade-offs and those difficult interactions to no, no longer be a thing. You know, we're at, we're at a place now where we've done, you know, hundreds of deployments and never once have we met a developer who said, I'm really excited to get outta bed and come to work every day and manually tune my application. <laugh> One side, secondly, we've never met, uh, you know, uh, a manager or someone with budget that said, uh, please don't, you know, increase the value of my investment that I've made to lift and shift us over mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know, to the cloud or to Kubernetes or, or some combination of both. And so what we're seeing is the converging of these groups, um, at, you know, their happy place is the lack of needing to be able to, uh, make those trade offs. And that's been exciting for us. So, >>You know, I'm listening and looks like that your solution is right in the middle in application per performance management, observability. Yeah. And, uh, and monitoring. So it's a little bit of all of this. >>So we, we, we, we want to be, you know, the Intel inside of all of that, mm-hmm, <affirmative>, we don't, you know, we often get lumped into one of those categories. It used to be APM a lot. We sometimes get a, are you observability or, and we're really not any of those things in and of themselves, but we, instead of invested in deep integrations and partnerships with a lot of those, uh, with a lot of that tooling, cuz in a lot of ways, the, the tool chain is hardening, uh, in a cloud native and, and Kubernetes world. And so, you know, integrating in intelligently staying focused and great at what we solve for, but then seamlessly partnering and not requiring switching for, for our users who have already invested likely in a APM or observability. >>So to go a little bit deeper. Sure. What does it mean integration? I mean, do you provide data to this, you know, other applications in, in the environment or are they supporting you in the work that you >>Yeah, we're, we're a data consumer for the most part. Um, in fact, one of our big taglines is take your observability and turn it into actionability, right? Like how do you take the it's one thing to collect all of the data, but then how do you know what to do with it? Right. So to Matt's point, um, we integrate with folks like Datadog. Um, we integrate with Prometheus today. So we want to collect that telemetry data and then do something useful with it for you. >>But, but also we want Datadog customers. For example, we have a very close partnership with, with Datadog, so that in your existing data dog dashboard, now you have yeah. This, the storm for capability showing up in the same location. Yep. And so you don't have to switch out. >>So I was just gonna ask, is it a push pull? What is the developer experience? When you say you provide developer, this resolve ML, uh, learnings about performance mm-hmm <affirmative> how do they receive it? Like what, yeah, what's the, what's the, what's the developer experience >>They can receive it. So we have our own, we used to for a while we were CLI only like any good developer tool. Right. Uh, and you know, we have our own UI. And so it is a push in that, in, in a lot of cases where I can come to one spot, um, I've got my applications and every time I'm going to release or plan for a release or I have released, and I want to take, pull in, uh, observability data from a production standpoint, I can visualize all of that within the storm for UI and platform, make decisions. We allow you to, to set your, you know, kind of comfort level of automation that you're, you're okay with. You can be completely set and forget, or you can be somewhere along that spectrum. And you can say, as long as it's within, you know, these thresholds, go ahead and release the application or go ahead and apply the configuration. Um, but we also allow you to experience, uh, the same, a lot of the same functionality right now, you know, in Grafana in Datadog, uh, and a bunch of others that are coming. >>So I've talked to Tim Crawford who talks to a lot of CIOs and he's saying one of the biggest challenges, or if not, one of the biggest challenges CIOs are facing are resource constraints. Yeah. They cannot find the developers to begin with to get this feedback. How are you hoping to address this biggest pain point for CIOs? Yeah. >>Development? >>Just take that one. Yeah, absolutely. That's um, so like my background, like I said, at United health group, right. It's not always just about cost savings. In fact, um, the way that I look about at some of these tech challenges, especially when we talk about scalability, there's kind of three pillars that I consider, right? There's the tech scalability, how am I solving those challenges? There's the financial piece, cuz you can only throw money at a problem for so long. And it's the same thing with the human piece. I can only find so many bodies and right now that pool is very small. And so we are absolutely squarely in that footprint of, we enable your team to focus on the things that they matter, not manual tuning like Matt said. And then there are other resource constraints that I think that a lot of folks don't talk about too. >>Like we were, you were talking about private cloud for instance. And so having a physical data center, um, I've worked with physical data centers that companies I've worked for have owned where it is literally full wall to wall. You can't rack any more servers in it. And so their biggest option is, well, I could spend 1.2 billion to build a new one if I wanted to. Or if you had a capability to truly optimize your compute to what you needed and free up 30% of your capacity of that data center. So you can deploy additional name spaces into your cluster. Like that's a huge opportunity. >>So either out of question, I mean, may, maybe it, it doesn't sound very intelligent at this point, but so is it an ongoing process or is it something that you do at the very beginning mean you start deploying this. Yeah. And maybe as a service. Yep. Once in a year I say, okay, let's do it again and see if something changes. Sure. So one spot 1, 1, 1 single, you know? >>Yeah. Um, would you recommend somebody performance tests just once a year? >>Like, so that's my thing is, uh, previous at previous roles I had, uh, my role was you performance test, every single release. And that was at a minimum once a week. And if your thing did not get faster, you had to have an executive exception to get it into production. And that's the space that we wanna live in as well as part of your C I C D process. Like this should be continuous verification every time you deploy, we wanna make sure that we're recommending the perfect configuration for your application in the name space that you're deploying >>Into. And I would be as bold as to say that we believe that we can be a part of adding, actually adding a step in the C I C D process that's connected to optimization and that no application should be released monitored and sort of, uh, analyzed on an ongoing basis without optimization being a part of that. And again, not just from a cost perspective, yeah. Cost end performance, >>Almost a couple of hundred vendors on this floor. You know, you mentioned some of the big ones, data, dog, et cetera. But what happens when one of the up and comings out of nowhere, completely new data structure, some imaginable way to click to elementry data. Yeah. How do, how do you react to that? >>Yeah. To us it's zeros and ones. Yeah. Uh, and you know, we're, we're, we're really, we really are data agnostic from the standpoint of, um, we're not, we we're fortunate enough to, from the design of our algorithm standpoint, it doesn't get caught up on data structure issues. Um, you know, as long as you can capture it and make it available, uh, through, you know, one of a series of inputs, what one, one would be load or performance tests, uh, could be telemetry, could be observability if we have access to it. Um, honestly the messier, the, the better from time to time, uh, from a machine learning standpoint, um, it, it, it's pretty powerful to see we've, we've never had a deployment where we, uh, where we saved less than 30% while also improving performance by at least 10%. But the typical results for us are 40 to 60% savings and, you know, 30 to 40% improvement in performance. >>And what happens if the application is, I, I mean, yes, Kubernetes is the best thing of the world, but sometimes we have to, you know, external data sources or, or, you know, we have to connect with external services anyway. Mm-hmm <affirmative> yeah. So can you, you know, uh, can you provide an indication also on, on, on this particular application, like, you know, where the problem could >>Be? Yeah, yeah. And that, that's absolutely one of the things that we look at too, cuz it's um, especially when you talk about resource consumption, it's never a flat line, right? Like depending on your application, depending on the workloads that you're running, um, it varies from sometimes minute to minute, day to day, or it could be week to week even. Um, and so especially with some of the products that we have coming out with what we want to do, you know, partnering with, uh, you know, integrating heavily with the HPA and being able to handle some of those bumps and not necessarily bumps, but bursts and being able to do it in a way that's intelligent so that we can make sure that, like I said, it's the perfect configuration for the application regardless of the time of day that you're operating in or what your traffic patterns look like. Um, or you know, what your disc looks like, right? Like cuz with our, our low environment testing, any metric you throw at us, we can, we can optimize for. >>So Madden Patrick, thank you for stopping by. Yeah. Yes. We can go all day. Because day two is I think the biggest challenge right now. Yeah. Not just in Kubernetes, but application replatforming and re and transformation. Very, very difficult. Most CTOs and S that I talked to, this is the challenge space from Valencia Spain. I'm Keith Townsend, along with my host en Rico senior. And you're watching the queue, the leader in high tech coverage.