>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment. We have Michael Liebow. He is the Global Managing Director Accenture Cloud platform, and Chris Milkosky, Enterprise Architect at ETS. Thank you both for coming on theCube. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> Thanks, great to be here. >> So, Chris, I'm going to start with you. ETS, the world's largest non-profit education testing service. Give our viewers a little history. >> Sure, we're the guerrilla in the test assessment industry. So, ETS, Educational Testing Services, been around since the 1940s. We do... our mission is to advance the quality and equity in education through test assessments, through research, and related services. Big thing of what we do is just try to find out more about the state of education in the world, in the United States, and then do what we can to improve that. ETS has grown up with-- to relate this to Accenture and everything-- ETS has grown up with IT. We've been around since the 40s and so we've used traditional IT for quite a long time. Over time, we realized obviously that there's constraints and stuff like that on some of the traditional IT. We understood that we needed to figure out ways to become more competitive, to stay a leader in the industry, to innovate, innovate faster. That's how we ended up engaging Accenture, and working on an effort to migrate to the Cloud, and give ourselves capabilities to become more innovative. >> So, you're talking about this need to innovate, this need to stay competitive and ahead of the crowd. So why, so tell me, you announced a big partnership with Accenture this morning. A large transformation project. Do you want, tell us a little bit more about that. >> Yeah, no, absolutely, this has been the-- Chris has been the principal architect, driving that whole agenda for some time, so why, why Accenture, why look to the outside in order to partner with somebody in order to realize that innovation? >> Yeah, so, I'll give you a little bit of history on that. Back in we've been for years actually messing around with things in the Cloud, trying out Amazon and everything. We quickly realized after doing some POCs and pilots that there's a lot to this. It's not just going to be a trend and it's not just a fad that's out there and everything. It's hard, it's tough. What we needed is we needed somebody who had the capabilities, the experience, the knowledge, the history of doing this already before. In around 2017, we engaged Accenture already early on. They helped give us some foundational understanding about movement to the Cloud. Then over time we decided, yeah, you know what, we really need a lot more help with this. We need a managed service provider in the mix. We need capabilities to migrate to the Cloud. We need help with security, that kind of thing. Ultimately though, the big goal here is to be more agile, to be more innovative and we have to do it fast and we have to do it at scale. Yeah, so we did our due diligence. We looked around and after talking to Accenture, it was clear to us that they had that capability. >> So that's why Accenture. Tell me a little bit about what Accenture-- what does partnership entail? >> What do we bring into it. >> Exactly, what are you bringing to the >> It's a great question. >> Table in helping ETS achieve it's goals? >> Yeah, oh no, absolutely. We've been partnered for a while, as Chris indicates, and what you realize is there's a journey. You know where, since 1940, right, you have this IT organization, you're delivering whatever set of value and capability to the business, but the business is hungry, right? The leadership wants to innovate, they want to do new things, but they can't. They realize that and if you move on your own, you move slowly, and if speed is of the essence, which for most organizations it is, then what do you need? Well, you need the tools, the capabilities, the skills. You have to trust somebody to enable that vision. And it's kind of like if you're a surgeon, right, you know, do surgery. We'll do everything else in order to enable you to spend time innovating. What we bring is the whole strategy, the business case development as part of the journey. We show what we can do, kind of where you are today, and where you will be quickly. We can migrate and transform the workload. When we talk about this relationship, it's the whole end to end but it doesn't stop there. It's not just what we should build, how we should build it, the architecture, it's not just moving the workload into the Cloud, it's then running it securely, as Chris pointed out and to optimize it, so that it's not just this whole notion of devops and agility, those terms are tied together. We want to enable the agility, but we want them to be able to then leverage it. Don't go direct to Amazon, go direct to any other provider. Enjoy the innovation that we're hearing about this week and leverage all that. This is the key thing. This partnership creates the ETS Cloud platform. It's their basis, their foundation to now innovate and enable their broader business, so they can bring new capabilities to education. I'm so excited. This is such a great partnership, and the outcome is going to be so important, I think, to ourselves, to our communities. It's great stuff. The last thing though is we want to de-risk this. The point here is how do package all that? We have something Accenture Prime. Not to offend my friends. (laughs) >> I've heard of another Prime. >> Right, so this is about how Accenture's priming the capacity, the services, and being on point for ETS. So, one throat to choke, kind of, right? You can, you know, that's my throat. I'm here to make sure he's successful. And the organization is successful. That's really the point. Everything from the tooling of the Cloud management capabilities, to set the policies, the security, cross manage the Cloud management services, the cost in Cloud optimization and the contracting is all through Accenture. One stop shop. That's what we're here for. >> That's really important to us because ETS, our goal isn't to be out there and be the best at creating the Cloud, building a Cloud environment, migrating to the Cloud, managing the service of the Cloud, and secure. We want to do what our core competencies are in furthering education and advancing the quality of it. Accenture allows us to do that. They are the enabler. We can now, we don't have to worry about that part. >> I love this that Accenture is really allowing you to do surgery, or really to actually focus on the testing. With Accenture taking care of you, enabling you, how are you now innovating? What are the goals and aspirations on the table now that Accenture, because they're in the background helping you. >> Sure, so yeah, we're going to be able to do more in the mobile space. We're going to work in furthering our capabilities in doing data analytics. We want to, oh my goodness, the conference it's all about artificial intelligence. There's a whole lot of stuff on that. We need to figure out, how are we going to do that? And how are we going to use that to get better information to, again, accomplish that mission, to further quality of and equity in education. The capabilities and the speed at which we're going to be able to things is just very exciting. What's really cool is that you see it in people, they see the change in ETS already, and they know what's coming. It's already fostered this new and renewed feeling of creativity and it's becoming pervasive, and so you feel it. Everybody's coming up with new ideas and we're trying out new things. With the help of Accenture, we're going to be able to do that a lot faster and in volume and another thing I didn't mention is, and I think you might have said this earlier, what's really nice, too, is we know that in the Cloud you can do cost optimization. Cost optimization, it takes a lot of paying attention to, and a lot of attention. The folks at Accenture, they explained to us what they would do. It's great how your service provider is telling you how to save money. I just love that, you know. (laughing) It's awesome. You know that, right? >> You can do that for everyone, right? >> But it's great, you know, there's so much you can do in the Cloud and to be able to leverage that, so, again, we can focus on our core competencies. It's just an excellent story. It's a good thing. >> Excellent, excellent. And Michael, is that really what you're always bringing to the table? You focus on your core competencies, we can take care of the rest. >> Yeah, you think about a managed service and how do you allow you to do what you do, but also do you de-risk the whole value prop? Because a lot of organizations honestly struggle with how to move to the Cloud. One of the things that Accenture's done, I'm not sure if you know, is we've moved our entire business to the public Cloud. We're 95% in the public Cloud today, and so I've made a lot of mistakes, all right. But we've taken all those lessons learned, and we've built that into our platform, our skills, our competencies. Now we can apply that so Chris doesn't have to make the same mistakes. >> You were your own guinea pig. >> Right, we ate our own dog food, right? Because we figured early on a number of years ago, that you can't really sell this stuff if you don't use this stuff. That was an aha moment, I would say, at one of the Reinvents four years ago. We really have to go all in. We have to move our business so that we can learn how to help others do it. It's thrilling, it really is, because you see that with organizations that are just starting today. They really don't know what they don't know. All right, call me. We will help you understand that and we've structured this under this notion of joining the Cloud where you can apply that to your business and you want to get there in a year, two years, we've done this with various organizations. Let's just move, let's get there. Stop the analysis paralysis and let's go. That's the message. >> What will we be talking about at next year's Accenture, AWS Executive Summit? When you think about ETS and the things that you're going to be able to accomplish faster this year and in the years to come, what's most exciting to you about this? >> Well I know from my side, I'm hoping that you guys are going to be saying, "Oh my goodness, ETS has become "a lean, mean, innovation machine." >> All right. (laughs) Okay, yeah. >> That's what I want. That's what I want to see. I think with Accenture's help we're going to be there, so that's what I think you'll see. We're going to be one to watch along with Accenture. Absolutely. >> Yeah. No, that's great. We love the fact that ETS wanted to come out at this event and say, "This is what we're doing. "We're going to climb that mountain, we're going." I love that. And to help others realize, yes, you can. Let's go do this. Here's an organization, 70 odd years old, right, saying, no, we wa-- this guy sounds like a startup guy from the Valley. >> That's what we want. We want to become like a startup again. We got to have that attitude again. >> Enthusiasm. >> Yeah, no, it's true. >> The energy. >> Right, right. >> That's what we want to do. >> And he was talking about the cultural differences. Everyone's feeling more creative and get the juices flowing and sharing ideas and insights. >> And the ability to fail. >> A hundred percent, yes. You need to be able to fail faster and be okay with that. It's a whole cultural change, too, you know. There was a lot in the traditional IT, everything back then, it's like, oh no, you know, failure is failure, it's bad. But no, we're going to learn from it and everything, but we need to be able to do that faster and learn from it. Startup mentality, lean, being lean, being more innovative, yeah. >> I want to go work there. (laughs) >> Yeah, right? It's an exciting time. >> This is great. >> Well, Chris and Michael, thank you so much for coming on theCube, a really fun conversation. >> Well, good, good. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Good to be here. >> These are great questions, appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here in Las Vegas coming up in just a little bit.

>> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another CUBE Conversation from our studios in Palo Alto, California. Today we're joined by Michael Liebow, who's the global managing director of Accenture Cloud, brings a great perspective on what is happening as customers try to move to the cloud, in part because you helped direct Accenture's move to the cloud. Welcome to theCUBE, Michael. >> Thank you, great to be here, Peter. >> So Michael, tell us a little bit about yourself and what Accenture's global cloud business unit does. >> We've been at this for a long time now. I've personally been with Accenture for five years and we've been driving this transformation, not just in our industry, but for Accenture, as we pivot to cloud and cloud-enabled technologies and essentially creating, rotating, to the new. And that is our focus. So how do you do that? Cloud is an enabler, it is a vehicle, it helps to create agility. We researched a whole bunch of enterprise customers not too long ago and found that every organization, like 90-odd percent, had a cloud strategy. A very few had a cloud strategy that was aligned to a business outcome. And so what I would posture is that where you have cloud aligned with business, you have cloud. Otherwise, you just have a paper exercise. >> Or just a new set of technologies that could fail as easy as anything else you might have. >> Well, in a lab somewhere, as a science experiment. And not real business impact, where you're saving money or you're innovating or you're creating the next, you're disrupting your industry. So where people are actually using cloud to change their business, that's where it gets exciting. And there are lots of industries across the globe where that's happening. Countries are adopting cloud. We are adopting cloud. We're now just declared 90% in the public cloud. And that's been a three, four-year journey and we figured, how do you sell this stuff if you don't use this stuff? >> No, I think it's a great point, Michael. I want to use a metaphor to try to tease some of that out. So a legal scholar would say that there's constitutional and statutory law. Statutory law guides day-to-day activities, so it's not unlike how you provision this or how you optimize that. And then there's constitutional law, which is basically the laws or how you change the laws. What we're talking about is two shifts going on at once within a lot of companies, and that's driving a significant amount of complexity and uncertainty. They are changing statutory law as they think about moving to the cloud, but they're also changing the constitutional law, or they're applying constitutional law, the rules of how they think about workloads, how they think about their businesses changing. So let's start with some of the constitutional principles, if you will, of moving to the cloud. What did Accenture learn about the rules for changing the rules as you went to the cloud, and how are you using the historical discipline that Accenture brings to those kinds of questions and applying it to helping customers? >> So one of the things you learn very quickly is that your old policies, your rules, whatever regulations, laws, were drafted for a bygone era, for legacy. And in the cloud, things are different. And so if you take those policies and how you think about how you do things and you apply it to the cloud, then you're treating the cloud as just another data center. So right there, five years of learning, that's a huge mistake. >> So number one is, don't treat the cloud as another data center. >> Yes. >> As kind of that high level metalogue, then. >> Right, 'cause if you look at your policies and your security models, an organization would take the cloud and they would put it... The access to the cloud in a bunker in a basement with no windows and no doors, and so you wouldn't have cloud. Cloud is democracy. It's about allowing all. So constitutionally, all people have access to the cloud and all the innovation is in the cloud. All the investment in the industry is in the cloud. We're looking at an unprecedented build-out of cloud capacity across the globe. They're opening new regions, new availability zones all the time in new places. >> Peter: These are the big cloud providers. >> Yes, 'cause I mean, they're spending in aggregate $30 billion a year. No organization can match that. >> And that's just the top three. That's just Google-- >> That's just the hyper three. >> Yeah, and that doesn't include what Alibaba's doing and some of the other players elsewhere in the world. >> But they're not spending at the rate that the hyper three are. >> Got it. >> The hyper three are spending about 10 billion a year each, a little bit more, a little bit less. Anybody else? They're down around the single digit. One, two, maybe three. Alibaba's I think about three or four, but everybody else is in that ones or twos. >> So rule number one is don't treat it as a data center. Rule number two is recognize that one of the beauties of the cloud model is that it gives you access to everybody. >> Michael: Yes. >> And you just have to determine how you want to provide that access as opposed to just the resources inside your network or inside your organization. >> So early days, about the whole notion of service orientation was to publish services that could be consumed. So you want to abstract these services and you want to make them available, broadly. And so people talk about platforms. What's a platform? A platform is nothing without community. So you're now able to do things that we've been talking about for decades, and that is huge. That's where all the innovation occurs. So now you're providing a level of access, level of capability. Broadly speaking, it's like the next revolution from the early days of the internet. And it's changing enterprise and it's changing it dramatically. It's not just the change, it's a disruption. So now IT needs to think differently. It's probably the biggest shift, paradigm shift that we've seen ever. And so your existing vendor stable and those relationships that you've built up over the years may not be helpful to you right now in terms of how much things are changing and how fast things are changing. Do you have a cloud strategy? Is it aligned with business outcomes? And it's not just cost saving. It's about agility, it's about speed, it's about creating an innovative culture. Do you have the right talent? These are all things that come into play, in terms of your law analogy, that change the game. So now I need new laws. I need new ways to think about my new enterprise and how I'm going to operate. One of the things, not only if you think about cloud as an underpinning, so we're now 90% in the cloud, but if you look at our financials, we've rotated to the new. So digital cloud security are now well over 50% of our revenues. We're taking our legacy business or our core business, it's shrinking, and we've rotated. And now we're starting to think about the new new, which are things like machine learning and applied intelligence and whatnot, you know, block chain. New capabilities that you could do because now you have a cloud underpinning that helps you get there. >> I think it's a really important point, 'cause we've always argued at Wikibon that cloud really, in many respects, is that network application development world that we've talked about. SOA, all these other things, still presume that you had a whole bunch of individual pieces and it was about bringing them together. Cloud really provides a whole notion of network or internet-scale computing, and how you developed that really is what you're getting when you move to the cloud. Is that accurate? >> No, I mean, it's absolutely, because the notion then became about orchestration, standardization, self or shared services. Automation. When I think about what cloud is, those are the words, the underpinning, for why cloud. You get all of that. And so now I have shared services that I can publish out, people can consume. I can orchestrate these services. I can create a standard. Even for GSIs, global system integrators, that's a big change. Because I used to just bespoke stuff on your premise. Now I can assemble stuff, alright, and make it available to you and I can change your business model overnight. And so that's the kind of things that we're seeing. We're bringing our best people, landing them at a client, and saying, "How do we transform?" It's not just about the cloud, it's not about selecting a provider, it's about a transformation of operating model. It's about change. How do I educate, reskill your people, retrain them, refocus them? And it's about, really, just the technology platform for the future. >> So I want to build on something you just said. Accenture has moved 90% of the cloud, maybe you have some more, I'm sure you have some more to go, and maybe that last 10% is going to be especially tricky. We'll see. But clearly you mentioned the global system integrators. You said that Accenture, your market, the way you're servicing your customers is changing. How overall is the role of the GSI evolving as companies move to the cloud? Because are you getting there once, you're getting in there once and they do everything themselves? Is there some sort of approach you're taking to help them sustain that? Because the diffusion of knowledge about the cloud and how to get to the cloud is not evenly spread across the industry. How is the role of the GSI changing in the midst of this transformation? >> I can speak to Accenture and not the industry per se. We embarked on something that we packaged as, we call it to Journey to Cloud, J to C, is our internal acronym, and Journey to Cloud has different components. It has a strategy and assessment focus. It has a migration focus and a run. And that's your journey. And so we've basically codified, invested in, and hardened a set of assets and capabilities, skills, people, around those three key elements so that any organization, if you just want a strategy or if you want us to take you through strategy to migration, get you to the cloud, and then run that operation for you, we can do any and all. And so that really is the motion, and one of the good things about Accenture, per se, I think we're probably number one in cloud, cloud services. But the point here is that we never did your mess for less. We never bought your assets, rebatched your people. There were other organizations that did that. So we weren't encumbered. One of the things I liked about coming to Accenture is that it didn't have certain encumbrances that would skew, just in culture. So the way we used to do things is not necessarily the way we will be doing things. >> You don't have a bunch of assets that you bought that you now have to service and that's going to impact your strategy? >> It's going to slow you down, right, and it's going to cause whatever internal friction between the old and the new. So you have those types of issues that go on in a lot of organizations. I mean, people love their data centers. They love the blinking lights. They like their vendors. I mean, that's inertia. And so in order to move, you have to free yourself of some of these encumbrances and think differently about your new operating environment. >> We've said that the difference between business and digital business is that a digital business acknowledges and explicitly acknowledges the role that data plays in their business, data as an asset. And that you can measure a digital business transformation based on the degree to which a business has reinstitutionalized work and organized work and organized its resources around data as an asset. It sounds as though your suggestion can do the same type of thing thinking about cloud, where the migration to the cloud or the transition to the cloud or transformation to the cloud is, how deeply have you really reinstitutionalized your work around that new operating model the cloud suggests? Is that accurate? >> Yeah, no, there was new roles and new capabilities that have to be thought through. There's new workflows, so your service model, your security model, your operating model, your execution model, they're all new. And you have to embrace that, think through that, and then have a change program to get you from where you are to this new place. People have said bimodal, right? There's this old mode and this new mode. Whatever, right? But the fact of the matter is that there's a gap between the old and the new. And so how do you bridge that gap? Now, I run a platform, and so we acknowledge the legacy, so our goal is to get you from legacy to cloud. We have to manage the policies, the security model, the governance, between the old and the new. How do you do that? Well, it's, yes, an abstraction, but it's a control plane. And so you have to tool for it. You have to tool for the change management and for the transformation, and then you have to have an underpinning that allows you to move from legacy through virtual, private maybe, to public, and that's your spectrum. We've invested significantly in creating that platform so that we can help organizations. Not everything is fully automated end to end. That would be kind of foolish. But you have to be able to think through how your legacy IT operations approach and your new cloud operations approach, how they connect. >> Well, as you said, you could assess, migrate, and run, and the migration is not just migrating hardware or data or workloads, it's migrating the operating model, how you think about what your business is, how your business is going to operate in a digital context as part of the run process. So two quick questions, and then, well, two quick questions. Number one is that... That there is this hump. This migrate is a hump. It's a hump from a risk standpoint, it's a hump from a cost standpoint, it's a hump from a management standpoint, some of the dislocations that might be required. I'm going to ask you to take us through that a little bit, how it worked at Accenture and how you think it's going to work elsewhere, and then finally you've kind of described what the one relationship would be with a company like Accenture, but I want to be a little bit more explicit about that. But let's start with that hump. What is a client going to face when they look at that hump? That migration hump? >> No, no, the word you used, and it's the right word, is risk. How do you re-risk the risk? How do you approach this so that you understand one, your cost model? A lot of organizations don't have-- >> Peter: From a technology standpoint. >> They don't have a clear line of sight to what that cost model is. They might have bits and pieces, but they haven't really pulled it all together into a common view, 'cause they haven't had to. If you think about where the cost was centered, it wasn't at a project level or an application, it was at a senior level, and they bought a data center. And then they depreciated it. So now, and they didn't do showback. Forget about chargeback. So now you're trying to give you in that assessment phase as to what your costs are, and if you decommissioned, exited data centers, what would the savings be, 'cause that underwrites your migration. So we can bring clarity to that, number one. Number two, we do migration at scale, so we have factories and we have runbooks and we have tooling end to end. So we can discover what's not in your CMBD and we can take you from your current situation to the cloud and we can do it quickly, 'cause speed is everything. Give me a year, give me a month. I've taken people out of data centers in a month. We can do that because we've hardened these processes and we've built the factories in order to be able to scale them. And then once we get you there, because you looked at the business case, but you're not just moving to an environment of continuous integration or continuous improvement or continuous deployment, you're looking at a new environment of continuous optimization. You have to structure the operating model so that you know at any given moment, we're moving to the ability to build by the day. You're buying assets by the second. This is a whole-- >> Or resources. >> Yes. Well, I think of them as assets. But you're right. It's about resource management and you're consuming these resources literally by the second. You know, for cloud native companies, they can wipe the slate clean every day, every night, and the next morning spin up a whole new set of resources. They've just refreshed their entire estate overnight. Other organizations are sitting there with assets depreciating on cement and they're refreshing every seven years. So it's a whole new kind of environment to be able to think through that. They have DR facilities that are sitting there idle that are sucking tons of cash out of the balance sheet. What do you do with that? If you free that up, and think about, not just DR in the cloud, but active active implementations of applications that are scaling up and down so you're not buying to the peak, you're not buying to a valley. Your whole operating style: dramatically different. And the optimization, if I'm looking at your cost profile, I'm looking at it daily, I can see you used to overprovision machines because you weren't ever sure you were going to get another one so you'd buy big. Now you buy small and you just kind of-- >> Or rent. >> To me, the language changed. Yeah, I'm buying for the moment. I mean, if I spot-buy them, I could buy 10,000 instances for an hour and then get rid of it. The whole construct here in terms of how you think about consumption is dramatically different. >> Alright, so last question: as you think about a client's relationship after this during the run phase, very quickly, what is the difference in their relationship with an Accenture versus what was their relationship with an Accenture 10 years ago? How is it different? How is Accenture a cloud company? >> 10 years ago, it's kind of hard, 'cause I think about traditional outsourcing, and Accenture never really got into that market. It was never your mess for less. And people were locked in, they weren't happy with the level of service. It took six months to provision new hardware. That was 10 years ago. Today you take a process, provision whatever you need... >> But Accenture has a management platform that sustains that relationship. >> Well... What Accenture wanted to do was to figure out how do we add value in this new world? So we created a management plane above multiple clouds. We said, it's highly likely that there will be more than one single provider. There will be three. And we bet it was three a long time ago. And then we built fidelity around those three and we said, "How do we add value around that?" Well, multi-cloud, so I just got a patent, my first patent of many, on multi-cloud tagging. It allows us to tag resources across clouds. Okay, now what does that do for you? Well, that allows you to enforce policy. Policy's not paper. Policy is dynamic. So now I can govern how people use things and I can tag resources across different providers, and what does that allow me to do? Well, not only can I govern that, I can analyze that. So it's not data as an asset, it's data as a service. So now I have insight into what people are doing, how these tagged resources, how they're using them. Are they consistent with policy? I can scan my entire environment every 10 minutes and I can ensure a level of compliance. So now I'm more secure, I'm more confident, that not only are we governing the usage of these resources, but they're being used within policy and they're secure. And then the last thing is cost. I can look at cost. You just spun up a whole bunch of resources. Were you allowed to do that? Is that within budget? >> So in many respects, Accenture participates in the governance process of resources as part of the ongoing relationship. >> Securely and within cost. To provide those controls. But it's a level of freedom because you as a developer, I want you to go native. I want to coexist. I'll discover what you're doing, but you go straight to that console, 'cause that's the most robust. They just launched 1,000 new services, whomever. Use them. Leverage them. >> Well, that's part of the whole, the cloud gives you access to more than you had before. >> Right, and 10 years ago, it was contained. It was a separated from. You issued a ticket or service request. It took whatever latency, whatever process, to get that service request approved. And this new age, you need to be able to move fast. You need to be able to respond to whatever market demand, and so you need to enable this community to leverage those things, not go around you, but for you to support them, but ensure that it's within policy, that it's secure, and that it's cost-managed. >> And within that whole construct, Accenture hopes to be able to help sustain those relationships to keep the transaction costs low so that all the riches of the cloud can be brought to bear in a company's business. >> Very well put. >> Alright, so Michael Liebow, global director, or global manager-- >> Managing director. Global managing director of Accenture's cloud platform, thank you very much for being theCUBE, Michael. Great conversation. >> Thank you. Yeah, terrific. >> Once again, this is Peter Burris, you've been watching a CUBE Conversation. 'Til next time.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this special cloud virtual event, theCUBE on cloud. This is our continuing editorial series of the most important stories in cloud. We're going to explore the cutting edge most relevant technologies and companies that will impact business and society. We have special guests from Jeff Barr, Michael Liebow, Jerry Chen, Ben Haynes, Michael skulk, Mike Feinstein from AWS all today are presenting the top startups in the AWS ecosystem. This is the AWS showcase of startups. I'm showing with Dave Vellante. Dave great to see you. >> Hey John. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So awesome day today. We're going to feature a 10 grade companies amplitude, auto grid, big ID, cordial Dremio Kong, multicloud, Reltio stardog wire wheel, companies that we've talked to. We've researched. And they're going to present today from 10 for the rest of the day. What's your thoughts? >> Well, John, a lot of these companies were just sort of last decade, they really, were keyer kicker mode, experimentation mode. Now they're well on their way to hitting escape velocity which is very exciting. And they're hitting tens of millions dollars of ARR, many are planning IPO's and it's just it's really great to see what the cloud has enabled and we're going to dig into that very deeply today. So I'm super excited. >> Before we jump into the keynote (mumbles) our non Huff from AWS up on stage Jeremy is the brains behind this program that we're doing. We're going to do this quarterly. Jeremy great to see you, you're in the global startups program at AWS. Your job is to keep the crops growing, keep the startups going and keep the flow of innovation. Thanks for joining us. >> Yeah. Made it to startup showcase day. I'm super excited. And as you mentioned my team the global startup program team, we kind of provide white glove service for VC backed startups and help them with go to market activities. Co-selling with AWS and we've been looking for ways to highlight all the great work they're doing and partnering with you guys has been tremendous. You guys really know how to bring their stories to life. So super excited about all the partner sessions today. >> Well, I really appreciate the vision and working with Amazon this is like truly a bar raiser from theCUBE virtual perspective, using the virtual we can get more content, more flow and great to have you on and bring that the top hot startups around data, data ops. Certainly the most important story in tech is cloud scale with data. You you can't look around and seeing more innovation happening. So I really appreciate the work. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, and don't forget, we're making this a quarterly series. So the next one we've already been working on it. The next one is Wednesday, June 16th. So mark your calendars, but super excited to continue doing these showcases with you guys in the future. >> Thanks for coming on Jeremy. I really appreciate it,. Dave so I want to just quick quickly before we get Jeff up here, Jeff Barr who's a luminary guests for us this week who has been in the industry has been there from the beginning of AWS the role of data, and what's happened in cloud. And we've been watching the evolution of Amazon web services from the beginning, from the startup market to dominate in the enterprise. If you look at the top 10 enterprise companies Amazon wasn't on that list in 2010 they weren't even bringing the top 10 Andy Jassy's keynote at reinvent this past year. Highlighted that fact, I think they were number five or four as vendor in just AWS. So interesting to see that you've been reporting and doing a lot of analysis on the role of data. What's your analysis for these startups and as businesses need to embrace the new technologies and be on the right side of history not part of that old guard, incumbent failed model. >> Well, I think again, if you look back on the early days of cloud, it was really about storage and networking and compute infrastructure. And then we collected all this data and now you're seeing the next generation of innovation and value. We're going to talk to Michael Liebow about this is really if you look at all the value points in the leavers, it's all around data and data is going through a massive change in the way that we think about it, that we talk about it. And you hear that a lot. Obviously you talk about the volumes, the giant volumes but there's something else going on as AWS brings the cloud to the edge. And of course it looks at the data centers, just another edge device, data is getting highly decentralized. And what we're seeing is data getting into the hands of business owners and data product builders. I think we're going to see a new parlance emerge and that's where you're seeing the competitive advantage. And if you look at all the real winners these days in the marketplace especially in the digital with COVID, it all comes back to the data. And we're going to talk about that a lot today. >> One of the things that's coming up in all of our cube interviews, certainly we've seen, I mean we've had a great observation space across all the ecosystems, but the clear thing that's coming out of COVID is speed, agility, scale, and data. If you don't have that data you are going to be a non-player. And I think I heard some industry people talking about the future of how the stock market's going to work and that if you're not truly in market with an AI or machine learning data value play you probably will be shorted on the stock market or delisted. I think people are looking at that as a table stakes competitive advantage item, where if you don't have some sort of data competitive strategy you're going to be either delisted or sold short. And that's, I don't think delisted but the point is this table-stakes Dave. >> Well, I think too, I think the whole language the lingua franca of data is changing. We talk about data as an asset all the time, but you think about it now, what do we do with assets? We protect it, we hide it. And we kind of we don't share it. But then on the other hand, everybody talks about sharing the data and that is a huge trend in the marketplace. And so I think that everybody is really starting to rethink the whole concept of data, what it is, its value and how we think about it, talk about it, share it make it accessible, and at the same time, protect it and make it governed. And I think you're seeing, computational governance and automation really hidden. Couldn't do this without the cloud. I mean, that's the bottom line. >> Well, I'm super excited to have Jeff Barr here from AWS as our special keynote guests. I've been following Jeff's career for a long, long time. He's a luminaries, he's a technical, he's in the industry. He's part of the community, he's been there from the beginning AWS just celebrate its 15th birthday as he was blogging hard. He's been a hardcore blogger. I think Jeff, you had one of the original ping service. If I remember correctly, you were part of the web services foundational kind of present at creation. No better guests to have you Jeff thanks for coming up on our stage. >> John and Dave really happy to be here. >> So I got to ask you, you've been blogging hard for the past decade or so, going hard and your job has evolved from blogging about what's new with Amazon. A couple of building blocks a few services to last reinvent them. You must have put out I don't know how many blog posts did you put out last year at every event? I mean, it must have been a zillion. >> Not quite a zillion. I think I personally wrote somewhere between 20 and 25 including quite a few that I did in the month or so run up to reinvent and it's always intense, but it's always really, really fun. >> So I've got to ask you in the past couple of years, I mean I quoted Andy Jassy's keynote where we highlight in 2010 Amazon wasn't even on the top 10 enterprise players. Now in the top five, you've seen the evolution. What is the big takeaway from your standpoint as you look at the enterprise going from Amazon really dominating the start of a year startups today, you're in the cloud, you're born in the cloud. There's advantage to that. Now enterprises are kind of being reborn in the cloud at the same time, they're building these new use cases rejuvenating themselves and having innovation strategy. What's your takeaway? >> So I love to work with our customers and one of the things that I hear over and over again and especially the last year or two is really the value that they're placing on building a workforce that has really strong cloud skills. They're investing in education. They're focusing on this neat phrase that I learned in Australia called upskilling and saying let's take our set of employees and improve their skill base. I hear companies really saying we're going to go cloud first. We're going to be cloud native. We're going to really embrace it, adopt the full set of cloud services and APIs. And I also see that they're really looking at cloud as part of often a bigger picture. They often use the phrase digital transformation, in Amazon terms we'd say they're thinking big. They're really looking beyond where they are and who they are to what they could be and what they could grow into. Really putting a lot of energy and creativity into thinking forward in that way. >> I wonder Jeff, if you could talk about sort of how people are thinking about the future of cloud if you look at where the spending action is obviously you see it in cloud computing. We've seen that as the move to digital, serverless Lambda is huge. If you look at the data it's off the charts, machine learning and AI also up there containers and of course, automation, AWS leads in all of those. And they portend a different sort of programming model a different way of thinking about how to deploy workloads and applications maybe different than the early days of cloud. What's driving that generally and I'm interested in serverless specifically. And how do you see the next several years folding out? >> Well, they always say that the future is the hardest thing to predict but when I talked to our enterprise customers the two really big things that I see is there's this focus that says we need to really, we're not simply like hosting the website or running the MRP. I'm working with one customer in particular where they say, well, we're going to start on the factory floor all the way up to the boardroom effectively from IOT and sensors on the factory floor to feed all the data into machine learning. So they understand that the factory is running really well to actually doing planning and inventory maintenance to putting it on the website to drive the analytics, to then saying, okay, well how do we know that we're building the right product mix? How do we know that we're getting it out through the right channels? How are our customers doing? So they're really saying there's so many different services available to us in the cloud and they're relatively easy and straightforward to deploy. They really don't think in the old days as we talked about earlier that the old days where these multi-year planning and deployment cycles, now it's much more straightforward. It's like let's see what we can do today. And this week and this month, and from idea to some initial results is a much, much shorter turnaround. So they can iterate a lot more quickly which is just always known to produce better results. >> Well, Jeff and the spirit of the 15th birthday of AWS a lot of services have been built from the original three. I believe it was the core building blocks and there's been a lot of history and it's kind of like there was a key decoupling of compute from storage, those innovations what's the most important architectural change if any has happened or built upon those building blocks with AWS that you could share with companies out there as many people are coming into the cloud not just lifting and shifting and having that innovation but really building cloud native and now hybrid full cloud operations, day two operations. However you want to look at it. That's a big thing. What architecturally has changed that's been innovative from those original building blocks? >> Well, I think that the basic architecture has proven to be very, very resilient. When I wrote about the 15 year birthday of Amazon S3 a couple of weeks ago one thing that I thought was really incredible was the fact that the same APIs that you could have used 15 years ago they all still work. The put, the get, the list, the delete, the permissions management, every last one of those were chosen with extreme care. And so they all still work. So one of the things you think about when you put APIs out there is in Amazon terms we always talk about going through a one-way door and a one way door says, once you do it you're committed for the indefinite future. And so you we're very happy to do that but we take those steps with extreme care. And so those basic building blocks so the original S3 APIs, the original EC2 APIs and the model, all those things really worked. But now they're running at this just insane scale. One thing that blows me away I routinely hear my colleagues talking about petabytes and exabytes, and we throw around trillions and quadrillions like they're pennies. It's kind of amazing. Sometimes when you hear the scale of requests per day or request per month, and the orders of magnitude are you can't map them back to reality anymore. They're simply like literally astronomical. >> If I can just jump in real quick Dave before you ask Jeff, I was watching the Jeff Bezos interview in 1999 that's been going around on LinkedIn in a 60 minutes interview. The interviewer says you are reporting that you can store a gigabyte of customer data from all their purchases. What are you going to do with that? He basically nailed the answer. This is in 99. We're going to use that data to create, that was only a gig. >> Well one of the things that is interesting to me guys, is if you look at again, the early days of cloud, of course I always talked about that in small companies like ours John could have now access to information technology that only big companies could get access to. And now you've seen we just going to talk about it today. All these startups rise up and reach viability. But at the same time, Jeff you've seen big companies get the aha moment on cloud and competition drives urgency and that drives innovation. And so now you see everybody is doing cloud, it's a mandate. And so the expectation is a lot more innovation, experimentation and speed from all ends. It's really exciting to see. >> I know this sounds hackneyed and overused but it really, really still feels just like day one. We're 15 plus years into this. I still wake up every morning, like, wow what is the coolest thing that I'm going to get to learn about and write about today? We have the most amazing customers, one of the things that is great when you're so well connected to your customers, they keep telling you about their dreams, their aspirations, their use cases. And we can just take that and say we can actually build awesome things to help you address those use cases from the ground on up, from building custom hardware things like the nitro system, the graviton to the machine learning inferencing and training chips where we have such insight into customer use cases because we have these awesome customers that we can make these incredible pieces of hardware and software to really address those use cases. >> I'm glad you brought that up. This is another big change, right? You're getting the early days of cloud like, oh, Amazon they're just using off the shelf components. They're not buying these big refrigerator sized disc drives. And now you're developing all this custom Silicon and vertical integration in certain aspects of your business. And that's because workload is demanding. You've got to get more specialized in a lot of cases. >> Indeed they do. And if you watch Peter DeSantis' keynote at re-invent he talked about the fact that we're researching ways to make better cement that actually produces less carbon dioxide. So we're now literally at the from the ground on up level of construction. >> Jeff, I want to get a question from the crowd here. We got, (mumbles) who's a good friend of theCUBE cloud Arate from the beginning. He asked you, he wants to know if you'd like to share Amazon's edge aspirations. He says, he goes, I mean, roadmaps. I go, first of all, he's not going to talk about the roadmaps, but what can you share? I mean, obviously the edge is key. Outpost has been all in the news. You obviously at CloudOps is not a boundary. It's a distributed network. What's your response to-- >> Well, the funny thing is we don't generally have technology roadmaps inside the company. The roadmap is always listen really well to customers not just where they are, but the customers are just so great at saying, this is where we'd like to go. And when we hear edge, the customers don't generally come to us and say edge, they say we need as low latency as possible between where the action happens within our factory floors and our own offices and where we might be able to compute, analyze, store make decisions. And so that's resulted in things like outposts where we can put outposts in their own data center or their own field office, wavelength, where we're working with 5G telecom providers to put computing storage in the carrier hubs of the various 5G providers. Again, with reducing latency, we've been doing things like local zones, where we put zones in an increasing number of cities across the country with the goal of just reducing the average latency between the vast majority of customers and AWS resources. So instead of thinking edge, we really think in terms of how do we make sure that our customers can realize their dreams. >> Staying on the flywheel that AWS has built on ship stuff faster, make things faster, smaller, cheaper, great mission. I want to ask you about the working backwards document. I know it's been getting a lot of public awareness. I've been, that's all I've learned in interviewing Amazon folks. They always work backwards. I always mentioned the customer and all the interviews. So you've got a couple of customer references in there check the box there for you. But working backwards has become kind of a guiding principles, almost like a Harvard Business School case study approach to management. As you guys look at this working backwards and ex Amazonians have written books about it now so people can go look at, it's a really good methodology. Take us back to how you guys work back from the customers because here we're featuring 10 startups. So companies that are out there and Andy has been preaching this to customers. You should think about working backwards because it's so fast. These companies are going into this enterprise market your ecosystem of startups to provide value. What things are you seeing that customers need to think about to work backwards from their customer? How do you see that? 'Cause you've been on the community side, you see the tech side customers have to move fast and work backwards. What are the things that they need to focus on? What's your observation? >> So there's actually a brand new book called "Working Backwards," which I actually learned a lot about our own company from simply reading the book. And I think to me, a principal part of learning backward it's really about humility and being able to be a great listener. So you don't walk into a customer meeting ready to just broadcast the latest and greatest that we've been working on. You walk in and say, I'm here from AWS and I simply want to learn more about who you are, what you're doing. And most importantly, what do you want to do that we're not able to help you with right now? And then once we hear those kinds of things we don't simply write down kind of a bullet item of AWS needs to improve. It's this very active listening process. Tell me a little bit more about this challenge and if we solve it in this way or this way which one's a better fit for your needs. And then a typical AWS launch, we might talk to between 50 and 100 customers in depth to make sure that we have that detailed understanding of what they would like to do. We can't always meet all the needs of these customers but the idea is let's see what is the common base that we can address first. And then once we get that first iteration out there, let's keep listening, let's keep making it better and better and better as quickly. >> A lot of people might poopoo that John but I got to tell you, John, you will remember this the first time we ever met Andy Jassy face-to-face. I was in the room, you were on the speaker phone. We were building an app on AWS at the time. And he was asking you John, for feedback. And he was probing and he pulled out his notebook. He was writing down and he wasn't just superficial questions. He was like, well, why'd you do it that way? And he really wanted to dig. So this is cultural. >> Yeah. I mean, that's the classic Amazon. And that's the best thing about it is that you can go from zero startups zero stage startup to traction. And that was the premise of the cloud. Jeff, I want to get your thoughts and commentary on this love to get your opinion. You've seen this grow from the beginning. And I remember 'cause I've been playing with AWS since the beginning as well. And it says as an entrepreneur I remember my first EC2 instance that didn't even have custom domain support. It was the long URL. You seen the startups and now that we've been 15 years in, you see Dropbox was it just a startup back in the day. I remember these startups that when they were coming they were all born on Amazon, right? These big now unicorns, you were there when these guys were just developers and these gals. So what's it like, I mean, you see just the growth like here's a couple of people with them ideas rubbing nickels together, making magic happen who knows what's going to turn into, you've been there. What's it been like? >> It's been a really unique journey. And to me like the privilege of a lifetime, honestly I've like, you always want to be part of something amazing and you aspire to it and you study hard and you work hard and you always think, okay, somewhere in this universe something really cool is about to happen. And if you're really, really lucky and just a million great pieces of luck like lineup in series, sometimes it actually all works out and you get to be part of something like this when it does you don't always fully appreciate just how awesome it is from the inside, because you're just there just like feeding the machine and you are just doing your job just as fast as you possibly can. And in my case, it was listening to teams and writing blog posts about their launches and sharing them on social media, going out and speaking, you do it, you do it as quickly as possible. You're kind of running your whole life as you're doing that as well. And suddenly you just take a little step back and say, wow we did this kind of amazing thing, but we don't tend to like relax and say, okay, we've done it at Amazon. We get to a certain point. We recognize it. And five minutes later, we're like, okay, let's do the next amazingly good thing. But it's been this just unique privilege and something that I never thought I'd be fortunate enough to be a part of. >> Well, then the last few minutes we have Jeff I really appreciate you taking the time to spend with us for this inaugural launch of theCUBE on cloud startup showcase. We are showcasing 10 startups here from your ecosystem. And a lot of people who know AWS for the folks that don't you guys pride yourself on community and ecosystem the global startups program that Jeremy and his team are running. You guys nurture these startups. You want them to be successful. They're vectoring out into the marketplace with growth strategy, helping customers. What's your take on this ecosystem? As customers are out there listening to this what's your advice to them? How should they engage? Why is these sets of start-ups so important? >> Well, I totally love startups and I've spent time in several startups. I've spent other time consulting with them. And I think we're in this incredible time now wheres, it's so easy and straightforward to get those basic resources, to get your compute, to get your storage, to get your databases, to get your machine learning and to take that and to really focus on your customers and to build what you want. And we see this actual exponential growth. And we see these startups that find something to do. They listen to one of their customers, they build that solution. And they're just that feedback cycle gets started. It's really incredible. And I love to see the energy of these startups. I love to hear from them. And at any point if we've got an AWS powered startup and they build something awesome and want to share it with me, I'm all ears. I love to hear about them. Emails, Twitter mentions, whatever I'll just love to hear about all this energy all those great success with our startups. >> Jeff Barr, thank you for coming on. And congratulations, please pass on to Andy Jassy who's going to take over for Jeff Bezos and I saw the big news that he's picking a successor an Amazonian coming back into the fold, Adam. So congratulations on that. >> I will definitely pass on your congratulations to Andy and I worked with Adam in the past when AWS was just getting started and really looking forward to seeing him again, welcoming back and working with him. >> All right, Jeff Barr with AWS guys check out his Twitter and all the social coordinates. He is pumping out all the resources you need to know about if you're a developer or you're an enterprise looking to go to the next level, next generation, modern infrastructure. Thanks Jeff for coming on. Really appreciate it. Our next guests want to bring up stage Michael Liebow from McKinsey cube alumni, who is a great guest who is very timely in his McKinsey role with a paper he and his colleagues put out called cloud's trillion dollar prize up for grabs. Michael, thank you for coming up on stage with Dave and I. >> Hey, great to be here, John. Thank you. >> One of the things I loved about this and why I wanted you to come on was not only is the report awesome. And Dave has got a zillion questions, he want us to drill into. But in 2015, we wrote a story called Andy Jassy trillion dollar baby on Forbes, and then on medium and silken angle where we were the first ones to profile Andy Jassy and talk about this trillion dollar term. And Dave came up with the calculation and people thought we were crazy. What are you talking about trillion dollar opportunity. That was in 2015. You guys have put this together with a serious research report with methodology and you left a lot on the table. I noticed in the report you didn't even have a whole section quantified. So I think just scratching the surface trillion. I'd be a little light, Dave, so let's dig into it, Michael thanks for coming on. >> Well, and I got to say, Michael that John's a trillion dollar baby was revenue. Yours is EBITDA. So we're talking about seven to X, seven to eight X. What we were talking back then, but great job on the report. Fantastic work. >> Thank you. >> So tell us about the report gives a quick lowdown. I got some questions. You guys are unlocking the value drivers but give us a quick overview of this report that people can get for free. So everyone who's registered will get a copy but give us a quick rundown. >> Great. Well the question I think that has bothered all of us for a long time is what's the business value of cloud and how do you quantify it? How do you specify it? Because a lot of people talk around the infrastructure or technical value of cloud but that actually is a big problem because it just scratches the surface of the potential of what cloud can mean. And we focus around the fortune 500. So we had to box us in somewhat. And so focusing on the fortune 500 and fast forwarding to 2030, we put out this number that there's over a trillion dollars worth of value. And we did a lot of analysis using research from a variety of partners, using third-party research, primary research in order to come up with this view. So the business value is two X the technical value of cloud. And as you just pointed out, there is a whole unlock of additional value where organizations can pioneer on some of the newest technologies. And so AWS and others are creating platforms in order to do not just machine learning and analytics and IOT, but also for quantum or mixed reality for blockchain. And so organizations specific around the fortune 500 that aren't leveraging these capabilities today are going to get left behind. And that's the message we were trying to deliver that if you're not doing this and doing this with purpose and with great execution, that others, whether it's others in your industry or upstarts who were motioning into your industry, because as you say cloud democratizes compute, it provides these capabilities and small companies with talent. And that's what the skills can leverage these capabilities ahead of slow moving incumbents. And I think that was the critical component. So that gives you the framework. We can deep dive based on your questions. >> Well before we get into the deep dive, I want to ask you we have startups being showcased here as part of the, it will showcase, they're coming out of the ecosystem. They have a lot of certification from Amazon and they're secure, which is a big issue. Enterprises that you guys talk to McKinsey speaks directly to I call the boardroom CXOs, the top executives. Are they realizing that the scale and timing of this agility window? I mean, you want to go through these key areas that you would break out but as startups become more relevant the boardrooms that are making these big decisions realize that their businesses are up for grabs. Do they realize that all this wealth is shifting? And do they see the role of startups helping them? How did you guys come out of them and report on that piece? >> Well in terms of the whole notion, we came up with this framework which looked at the opportunity. We talked about it in terms of three dimensions, rejuvenate, innovate and pioneer. And so from the standpoint of a board they're more than focused on not just efficiency and cost reduction basically tied to nation, but innovation tied to analytics tied to machine learning, tied to IOT, tied to two key attributes of cloud speed and scale. And one of the things that we did in the paper was leverage case examples from across industry, across-region there's 17 different case examples. My three favorite is one is Moderna. So software for life couldn't have delivered the vaccine as fast as they did without cloud. My second example was Goldman Sachs got into consumer banking is the platform behind the Apple card couldn't have done it without leveraging cloud. And the third example, particularly in early days of the pandemic was Zoom that added five to 6,000 servers a night in order to scale to meet the demand. And so all three of those examples, plus the other 14 just indicate in business terms what the potential is and to convince boards and the C-suite that if you're not doing this, and we have some recommendations in terms of what CEOs should do in order to leverage this but to really take advantage of those capabilities. >> Michael, I think it's important to point out the approach at sometimes it gets a little wonky on the methodology but having done a lot of these types of studies and observed there's a lot of superficial studies out there, a lot of times people will do, they'll go I'll talk to a customer. What kind of ROI did you get? And boom, that's the value study. You took a different approach. You have benchmark data, you talked to a lot of companies. You obviously have a lot of financial data. You use some third-party data, you built models, you bounded it. And ultimately when you do these things you have to ascribe a value contribution to the cloud component because fortunate 500 companies are going to grow even if there were no cloud. And the way you did that is again, you talk to people you model things, and it's a very detailed study. And I think it's worth pointing out that this was not just hey what'd you get from going to cloud before and after. This was a very detailed deep dive with really a lot of good background work going into it. >> Yeah, we're very fortunate to have the McKinsey Global Institute which has done extensive studies in these areas. So there was a base of knowledge that we could leverage. In fact, we looked at over 700 use cases across 19 industries in order to unpack the value that cloud contributed to those use cases. And so getting down to that level of specificity really, I think helps build it from the bottom up and then using cloud measures or KPIs that indicate the value like how much faster you can deploy, how much faster you can develop. So these are things that help to kind of inform the overall model. >> Yeah. Again, having done hundreds, if not thousands of these types of things, when you start talking to people the patterns emerge, I want to ask you there's an exhibit tool in here, which is right on those use cases, retail, healthcare, high-tech oil and gas banking, and a lot of examples. And I went through them all and virtually every single one of them from a value contribution standpoint the unlocking value came down to data large data sets, document analysis, converting sentiment analysis, analytics. I mean, it really does come down to the data. And I wonder if you could comment on that and why is it that cloud is enabled that? >> Well, it goes back to scale. And I think the word that I would use would be data gravity because we're talking about massive amounts of data. So as you go through those kind of three dimensions in terms of rejuvenation one of the things you can do as you optimize and clarify and build better resiliency the thing that comes into play I think is to have clean data and data that's available in multiple places that you can create an underlying platform in order to leverage the services, the capabilities around, building out that structure. >> And then if I may, so you had this again I want to stress as EBITDA. It's not a revenue and it's the EBITDA potential as a result of leveraging cloud. And you listed a number of industries. And I wonder if you could comment on the patterns that you saw. I mean, it doesn't seem to be as simple as Negroponte bits versus Adam's in terms of your ability to unlock value. What are the patterns that you saw there and why are the ones that have so much potential why are they at the top of the list? >> Well, I mean, they're ranked based on impact. So the five greatest industries and again, aligned by the fortune 500. So it's interesting when you start to unpack it that way high-tech oil, gas, retail, healthcare, insurance and banking, right? Top. And so we did look at the different solutions that were in that, tried to decipher what was fully unlocked by cloud, what was accelerated by cloud and what was perhaps in this timeframe remaining on premise. And so we kind of step by step, expert by expert, use case by use case deciphered of the 700, how that applied. >> So how should practitioners within organizations business but how should they use this data? What would you recommend, in terms of how they think about it, how they apply it to their business, how they communicate? >> Well, I think clearly what came out was a set of best practices for what organizations that were leveraging cloud and getting the kind of business return, three things stood out, execution, experience and excellence. And so for under execution it's not just the transaction, you're not just buying cloud you're changing their operating model. And so if the organization isn't kind of retooling the model, the processes, the workflows in order to support creating the roles then they aren't going to be able, they aren't going to be successful. In terms of experience, that's all about hands-on. And so you have to dive in, you have to start you have to apply yourself, you have to gain that applied knowledge. And so if you're not gaining that experience, you're not going to move forward. And then in terms of excellence, and it was mentioned earlier by Jeff re-skilling, up-skilling, if you're not committed to your workforce and pushing certification, pushing training in order to really evolve your workforce or your ways of working you're not going to leverage cloud. So those three best practices really came up on top in terms of what a mature cloud adopter looks like. >> That's awesome. Michael, thank you for coming on. Really appreciate it. Last question I have for you as we wrap up this trillion dollar segment upon intended is the cloud mindset. You mentioned partnering and scaling up. The role of the enterprise and business is to partner with the technologists, not just the technologies but the companies talk about this cloud native mindset because it's not just lift and shift and run apps. And I have an IT optimization issue. It's about innovating next gen solutions and you're seeing it in public sector. You're seeing it in the commercial sector, all areas where the relationship with partners and companies and startups in particular, this is the startup showcase. These are startups are more relevant than ever as the tide is shifting to a new generation of companies. >> Yeah, so a lot of think about an engine. A lot of things have to work in order to produce the kind of results that we're talking about. Brad, you're more than fair share or unfair share of trillion dollars. And so CEOs need to lead this in bold fashion. Number one, they need to craft the moonshot or the Marshot. They have to set that goal, that aspiration. And it has to be a stretch goal for the organization because cloud is the only way to enable that achievement of that aspiration that's number one, number two, they really need a hardheaded economic case. It has to be defined in terms of what the expectation is going to be. So it's not loose. It's very, very well and defined. And in some respects time box what can we do here? I would say the cloud data, your organization has to move in an agile fashion training DevOps, and the fourth thing, and this is where the startups come in is the cloud platform. There has to be an underlying platform that supports those aspirations. It's an art, it's not just an architecture. It's a living, breathing live service with integrations, with standardization, with self service that enables this whole program. >> Awesome, Michael, thank you for coming on and sharing the McKinsey perspective. The report, the clouds trillion dollar prize is up for grabs. Everyone who's registered for this event will get a copy. We will appreciate it's also on the website. We'll make sure everyone gets a copy. Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. Thank you. >> Thanks, Michael. >> Okay, Dave, big discussion there. Trillion dollar baby. That's the cloud. That's Jassy. Now he's going to be the CEO of AWS. They have a new CEO they announced. So that's going to be good for Amazon's kind of got clarity on the succession to Jassy, trusted soldier. The ecosystem is big for Amazon. Unlike Microsoft, they have the different view, right? They have some apps, but they're cultivating as many startups and enterprises as possible in the cloud. And no better reason to change gears here and get a venture capitalist in here. And a friend of theCUBE, Jerry Chen let's bring them up on stage. Jerry Chen, great to see you partner at Greylock making all the big investments. Good to see you >> John hey, Dave it's great to be here with you guys. Happy marks.Can you see that? >> Hey Jerry, good to see you man >> So Jerry, our first inaugural AWS startup showcase we'll be doing these quarterly and we're going to be featuring the best of the best, you're investing in all the hot startups. We've been tracking your careers from the beginning. You're a good friend of theCUBE. Always got great commentary. Why are startups more important than ever before? Because in the old days we've talked about theCUBE before startups had to go through certain certifications and you've got tire kicking, you got to go through IT. It's like going through security at the airport, take your shoes off, put your belt on thing. I mean, all kinds of things now different. The world has changed. What's your take? >> I think startups have always been a great way for experimentation, right? It's either new technologies, new business models, new markets they can move faster, the experiment, and a lot of startups don't work, unfortunately, but a lot of them turned to be multi-billion dollar companies. I thing startup is more important because as we come out COVID and economy is recovery is a great way for individuals, engineers, for companies for different markets to try different things out. And I think startups are running multiple experiments at the same time across the globe trying to figure how to do things better, faster, cheaper. >> And McKinsey points out this use case of rejuvenate, which is essentially retool pivot essentially get your costs down or and the next innovation here where there's Tam there's trillion dollars on unlock value and where the bulk of it is is the innovation, the new use cases and existing new use cases. This is where the enterprises really have an opportunity. Could you share your thoughts as you invest in the startups to attack these new waves these new areas where it may not look the same as before, what's your assessment of this kind of innovation, these new use cases? >> I think we talked last time about kind of changing the COVID the past year and there's been acceleration of things like how we work, education, medicine all these things are going online. So I think that's very clear. The first wave of innovation is like, hey things we didn't think we could be possible, like working remotely, e-commerce everywhere, telemedicine, tele-education, that's happening. I think the second order of fact now is okay as enterprises realize that this is the new reality everything is digital, everything is in the cloud and everything's going to be more kind of electronic relation with the customers. I think that we're rethinking what does it mean to be a business? What does it mean to be a bank? What does it mean to be a car company or an energy company? What does it mean to be a retailer? Right? So I think the rethinking that brands are now global, brands are all online. And they now have relationships with the customers directly. So I think if you are a business now, you have to re experiment or rethink about your business model. If you thought you were a Nike selling shoes to the retailers, like half of Nike's revenue is now digital right all online. So instead of selling sneakers through stores they're now a direct to consumer brand. And so I think every business is going to rethink about what the AR. Airbnb is like are they in the travel business or the experience business, right? Airlines, what business are they in? >> Yeah, theCUBE we're direct to consumer virtual totally opened up our business model. Dave, the cloud premise is interesting now. I mean, let's reset this where we are, right? Andy Jassy always talks about the old guard, new guard. Okay we've been there done that, even though they still have a lot of Oracle inside AWS which we were joking the other day, but this new modern era coming out of COVID Jerry brings this up. These startups are going to be relevant take territory down in the enterprises as new things develop. What's your premise of the cloud and AWS prospect? >> Well, so Jerry, I want to to ask you. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> The other night, last Thursday, I think we were in Clubhouse. Ben Horowitz was on and Martine Casado was laying out this sort of premise about cloud startups saying basically at some point they're going to have to repatriate because of the Amazon VIG. I mean, I'm paraphrasing and I guess the premise was that there's this variable cost that grows as you scale but I kind of shook my head and I went back. You saw, I put it out on Twitter a clip that we had the a couple of years ago and I don't think, I certainly didn't see it that way. Maybe I'm getting it wrong but what's your take on that? I just don't see a snowflake ever saying, okay we're going to go build our own data center or we're going to repatriate 'cause they're going to end up like service now and have this high cost infrastructure. What do you think? >> Yeah, look, I think Martin is an old friend from VMware and he's brilliant. He has placed a lot of insights. There is some insights around, at some point a scale, use of startup can probably run things more cost-effectively in your own data center, right? But I think that's fewer companies more the vast majority, right? At some point, but number two, to your point, Dave going on premise versus your own data center are two different things. So on premise in a customer's environment versus your own data center are two different worlds. So at some point some scale, a lot of the large SaaS companies run their own data centers that makes sense, Facebook and Google they're at scale, they run their own data centers, going on premise or customer's environment like a fortune 100 bank or something like that. That's a different story. There are reasons to do that around compliance or data gravity, Dave, but Amazon's costs, I don't think is a legitimate reason. Like if price is an issue that could be solved much faster than architectural decisions or tech stacks, right? Once you're on the cloud I think the thesis, the conversation we had like a year ago was the way you build apps are very different in the cloud and the way built apps on premise, right? You have assume storage, networking and compute elasticity that's independent each other. You don't really get that in a customer's data center or their own environment even with all the new technologies. So you can't really go from cloud back to on-premise because the way you build your apps look very, very different. So I would say for sure at some scale run your own data center that's why the hyperscale guys do that. On-premise for customers, data gravity, compliance governance, great reasons to go on premise but for vast majority of startups and vast majority of customers, the network effects you get for being in the cloud, the network effects you get from having everything in this alas cloud service I think outweighs any of the costs. >> I couldn't agree more and that's where the data is, at the way I look at it is your technology spend is going to be some percentage of revenue and it's going to be generally flat over time and you're going to have to manage it whether it's in the cloud or it's on prem John. >> Yeah, we had a quote on theCUBE on the conscious that had Jerry I want to get your reaction to this. The executive said, if you don't have an AI strategy built into your value proposition you will be shorted as a stock on wall street. And I even went further. So you'll probably be delisted cause you won't be performing with a tongue in cheek comment. But the reality is that that's indicating that everyone has to have AI in their thing. Mainly as a reality, what's your take on that? I know you've got a lot of investments in this area as AI becomes beyond fashion and becomes table stakes. Where are we on that spectrum? And how does that impact business and society as that becomes a key part of the stack and application stack? >> Yeah, I think John you've seen AI machine learning turn out to be some kind of novelty thing that a bunch of CS professors working on years ago to a funnel piece of every application. So I would say the statement of the sentiment's directionally correct that 20 years ago if you didn't have a web strategy or a website as a company, your company be sure it, right? If you didn't have kind of a internet website, you weren't real company. Likewise, if you don't use AI now to power your applications or machine learning in some form or fashion for sure you'd be at a competitive disadvantage to everyone else. And just like if you're not using software intelligently or the cloud intelligently your stock as a company is going to underperform the rest of the market. And the cloud guys on the startups that we're backing are making AI so accessible and so easy for developers today that it's really easy to use some level of machine learning, any applications, if you're not doing that it's like not having a website in 1999. >> Yeah. So let's get into that whole operation side. So what would you be your advice to the enterprises that are watching and people who are making decisions on architecture and how they roll out their business model or value proposition? How should they look at AI and operations? I mean big theme is day two operations. You've got IT service management, all these things are being disrupted. What's the operational impact to this? What's your view on that? >> So I think two things, one thing that you and Dave both talked about operation is the key, I mean, operations is not just the guts of the business but the actual people running the business, right? And so we forget that one of the values are going to cloud, one of the values of giving these services is you not only have a different technology stack, all the bits, you have a different human stack meaning the people running your cloud, running your data center are now effectively outsource to Amazon, Google or Azure, right? Which I think a big part of the Amazon VIG as Dave said, is so eloquently on Twitter per se, right? You're really paying for those folks like carry pagers. Now take that to the next level. Operations is human beings, people intelligently trying to figure out how my business can run better, right? And that's either accelerate revenue or decrease costs, improve my margin. So if you want to use machine learning, I would say there's two areas to think about. One is how I think about customers, right? So we both talked about the amount of data being generated around enterprise individuals. So intelligently use machine learning how to serve my customers better, then number two AI and machine learning internally how to run my business better, right? Can I take cost out? Can I optimize supply chain? Can I use my warehouses more efficiently my logistics more efficiently? So one is how do I use AI learning to be a more familiar more customer oriented and number two, how can I take cost out be more efficient as a company, by writing AI internally from finance ops, et cetera. >> So, Jerry, I wonder if I could ask you a little different subject but a question on tactical valuations how coupled or decoupled are private company valuations from the public markets. You're seeing the public markets everybody's freaking out 'cause interest rates are going to go up. So the future value of cash flows are lower. Does that trickle in quickly into the private markets? Or is it a whole different dynamic? >> If I could weigh in poly for some private markets Dave I would have a different job than I do today. I think the reality is in the long run it doesn't matter as much as long as you're investing early. Now that's an easy answer say, boats have to fall away. Yes, interest rates will probably go up because they're hard to go lower, right? They're effectively almost zero to negative right now in most of the developed world, but at the end of the day, I'm not going to trade my Twilio shares or Salesforce shares for like a 1% yield bond, right? I'm going to hold the high growth tech stocks because regardless of what interest rates you're giving me 1%, 2%, 3%, I'm still going to beat that with a top tech performers, Snowflake, Twilio Hashi Corp, bunch of the private companies out there I think are elastic. They're going to have a great 10, 15 year run. And in the Greylock portfolio like the things we're investing in, I'm super bullish on from Roxanne to Kronos fear, to true era in the AI space. I think in the long run, next 10 years these things will outperform the market that said, right valuation prices have gone up and down and they will in our careers, they have. In the careers we've been covering tech. So I do believe that they're high now they'll come down for sure. Will they go back up again? Definitely, right? But as long as you're betting these macro waves I think we're all be good. >> Great answer as usual. Would you trade them for NFTs Jerry? >> That $69 million people piece of artwork look, I mean, I'm a longterm believer in kind of IP and property rights in the blockchain, right? And I'm waiting for theCUBE to mint this video as the NFT, when we do this guys, we'll mint this video's NFT and see how much people pay for the original Dave, John, Jerry (mumbles). >> Hey, you know what? We can probably get some good bang for that. Hey it's all about this next Jerry. Jerry, great to have you on, final question as we got this one minute left what's your advice to the people out there that either engaging with these innovative startups, we're going to feature startups every quarter from the in the Amazon ecosystem, they are going to be adding value. What's the advice to the enterprises that are engaging startups, the approach, posture, what's your advice. >> Yeah, when I talk to CIOs and large enterprises, they often are wary like, hey, when do I engage a startup? How, what businesses, and is it risky or low risk? Now I say, just like any career managing, just like any investment you're making in a big, small company you should have a budget or set of projects. And then I want to say to a CIO, Hey, every priority on your wish list, go use the startup, right? I mean, that would be 10 for 10 projects, 10 startups. Probably too much risk for a lot of tech companies. But we would say to most CIOs and executives, look, there are strategic initiatives in your business that you want to accelerate. And I would take the time to invest in one or two startups each quarter selectively, right? Use the time, focus on fewer startups, go deep with them because we can actually be game changers in terms of inflecting your business. And what I mean by that is don't pick too many startups because you can't devote the time, but don't pick zero startups because you're going to be left behind, right? It'd be shorted as a stock by the John, Dave and Jerry hedge fund apparently but pick a handful of startups in your strategic areas, in your top tier three things. These really, these could be accelerators for your career. >> I have to ask you real quick while you're here. We've got a couple minutes left on startups that are building apps. I've seen DevOps and the infrastructure as code movement has gone full mainstream. That's really what we're living right now. That kind of first-generation commercialization of DevOps. Now DevSecOps, what are the trends that you've seen that's different from say a couple of years ago now that we're in COVID around how apps are being built? Is it security? Is it the data integration? What can you share as a key app stack impact (mumbles)? >> Yeah, I think there're two things one is security is always been a top priority. I think that was the only going forward period, right? Security for sure. That's why you said that DevOps, DevSecOps like security is often overlooked but I think increasingly could be more important. The second thing is I think we talked about Dave mentioned earlier just the data around customers, the data on premise or the cloud, and there's a ton of data out there. We keep saying this over and over again like data's new oil, et cetera. It's evolving and not changing because the way we're using data finding data is changing in terms of sources of data we're using and discovering and also speed of data, right? In terms of going from Basser real-time is changing. The speed of business has changed to go faster. So I think these are all things that we're thinking about. So both security and how you use your data faster and better. >> Yeah you were in theCUBE a number of years ago and I remember either John or I asked you about you think Amazon is going to go up the stack and start developing applications and your answer was you know what I think no, I think they're going to enable a new set of disruptors to come in and disrupt the SaaS world. And I think that's largely playing out. And one of the interesting things about Adam Selipsky appointment to the CEO, he comes from Tableau. He really helped Tableau go from that sort of old guard model to an ARR model obviously executed a great exit to Salesforce. And now I see companies like Salesforce and service now and Workday is potential for your scenario to really play out. They've got in my view anyway, outdated pricing models. You look at what's how Snowflake's pricing and the consumption basis, same with Datadog same with Stripe and new startups seem to really be a leading into the consumption-based pricing model. So how do you, what are your thoughts on that? And maybe thoughts on Adam and thoughts on SaaS disruption? >> I think my thesis still holds that. I don't think Selipsky Adam is going to go into the app space aggressively. I think Amazon wants to enable next generation apps and seeing some of the new service that they're doing is they're kind of deconstructing apps, right? They're deconstructing the parts of CRM or e-commerce and they're offering them as services. So I think you're going to see Amazon continue to say, hey we're the core parts of an app like payments or custom prediction or some machine learning things around applications you want to buy bacon, they're going to turn those things to the API and sell those services, right? So you look at things like Stripe, Twilio which are two of the biggest companies out there. They're not apps themselves, they're the components of the app, right? Either e-commerce or messaging communications. So I can see Amazon going down that path. I think Adam is a great choice, right? He was a longterm early AWS exact from the early days latent to your point Dave really helped take Tableau into kind of a cloud business acquired by Salesforce work there for a few years under Benioff the guy who created quote unquote cloud and now him coming home again and back to Amazon. So I think it'll be exciting to see how Adam runs the business. >> And John I think he's the perfect choice because he's got operations chops and he knows how to... He can help the startups disrupt. >> Yeah, and he's been a trusted soldier of Jassy from the beginning, he knows the DNA. He's got some CEO outside experience. I think that was the key he knows. And he's not going to give up Amazon speed, but this is baby, right? So he's got him in charge and he's a trusted lieutenant. >> You think. Yeah, you think he's going to hold the mic? >> Yeah. We got to go. Jerry Chen thank you very much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on our inaugural cube on cloud AWS startup event. Now for the 10 startups, enjoy the sessions at 12:30 Pacific, we're going to have the closing keynote. I'm John Ferry for Dave Vellante and our special guests, thanks for watching and enjoy the rest of the day and the 10 startups. (upbeat music)

>> Hello everyone, welcome to the special Cube conversation. I'm John foray with Dave Volante. We're known as theCube guys. We're doing a lot of Cube events over the past year with COVID in a virtual format and we really miss being onsite and being at the events extracting the signal from the noise. Dave, we've got some big news, we're announcing our Cube On Cloud series of virtual events. We're going to do in combination to the hybrid format of theCube when it comes back to, when theCube is coming back which we look like (indistinct), we'll be implementing theCube virtual format. And so Dave, Cube On Cloud Startups is our first inaugural event coming up this month. >> Well, I'm really excited John, because of course as you well know, in the early days of Cloud, we really doubled down on our content focus. And I think if you're a customer, firmly I believe CIO, CTOs, you have to have a portion of your portfolio that is really driven toward innovation and that really comes from startups. And that's really what we're going to feature today. We're talking about startups from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of ARR. I think if you're an investor, there's some great opportunities here. If you're a technologist, you might be trying to figure out, okay, "where's the next great place that I want to work?" And I think really it's all enabled by the Cloud and the Cloud is changing John, right? It's evolving from what was just core infrastructure storage servers, networking to really now driving transformative business value. And that's what this event is going to be all about. >> And what's exciting Dave, I want to share with the folks out there, you see theCube. you've seen us on all the channels, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, all over the internet. Now with the virtual, we going to bring that together. And every quarter we're going to do a quarterly startup hot Cuban Cloud Startup event every quarter, four times a year. So, join us, we want to be part of our community. Be part of the conversation, theCube 365 virtual format is interactive, it's engaging. It's our own clubhouse, it's our own place to engage with you. If you want to engage with us, this is the time to do it. Or if you want to sit back and consume some of the great content, do that. Our first event on the 24th is with aWS and their sponsored showcase startups. We're going to be featuring 10 of the hottest Cloud startups obviously all around data and machine learning. And we're going to feature those 10, we're going to introduce the world to them, unpack them, talk to the founders and this top management of teams and understand their secret sauce, their competitive advantage and how they're going to be successful in the enterprise in Cloud. But we've also got a great keynote program to kick it off. We're going to have Jeff Barr who's legendary in the developer and Cloud community. He's with aWS. He does a lot of their developer. He writes all the blog posts announcing all the great products at aWS. If you're in the Cloud, visit, you know who Jeff Barr is. He's a legend. We got Jerry chin, Cube alumni. He's a partner at Greylock, tier one venture capital firm, and Michael Liebow who's a partner at McKinsey. And McKinsey is talking to all the C-suites Dave, they're the ones setting the table. And just recently came out with a Cloud report called, "Trillion Dollar Market Opportunity." Of course, we wrote Trillion Dollar Baby Cloud Ambition for Andy Jassy in 2015. We're going to tie that together. And of course, when you come to the event and join us, you get a free copy of that report. So, Dave-- >> And Don't forget Ben Haynes. He's going to bring the practitioner perspective which we're really excited about. And I'm glad you made that shout out to the Cube community because as you know, it's not just coming to the event and doing some chat. Do that, lay down your knowledge because the next show we're going to have you on live interview, you that's what we're all about. Bringing our community together, bringing you in and interacting with you, not just on chat or email or whatever but actually making you part of the program. >> Yeah, it's not a webinar Dave, these aren't webinars, webinars are old they're dying. Webinars are great for sales tools. You do those every day if you're a sales person or a company. This is different. We're talking about making it an immersive and interactive, engaging, virtually. This is going to be a great compliment. Certainly when the events come back and we're looking forward to it. I can't tell you Dave how many times people want to chat with me on Twitter, I'm not available, time zone around the world. Now, you can come to our events and engage directly with us and consume, but also we'll call you up. We're going to have sessions, maybe have some Ad hoc femoral conversations, set up your own little clubhouse with us and share your knowledge on the Cube. The Cube going virtual. Virtualization Dave, as we were joking during the pandemic is one of the upsides for what happened this year. And I got to say, I'm really, really excited because this brings a new format for us to bring to people. So, I'm really looking forward to it. >> Yeah, me too, John. So give us the details. Date, time, we've got a, I think we've got a screenshot but we'll pull that up and show people. So, there's a site. What's the dates again, John? >> This is on going to happen on March 24th, >> 9: 00 AM Pacific to 1:00 PM, it's a morning program. Again, it's a featured conference with the hot stars. We're going to feature, We're going to do a keynote session and then we're going to have the breakouts with all the startups. So, it can jump into the rooms find the startups you like and talk to them. And then a closing fireside chat with Ben Haynes who's a practitioner, CIO Perspectives, CXL Perspective as well as executives in the industry. So, we're going to wrap that up at the end of the day. So, great program. Good keynote on what ways are happening? What's the top trends and then ending fireside chats. Should be a great day, very cool. And of course it's virtual. So, you can do a fly by, you can come hang out with us and also come back. it's always going to be on 24/7, 365. So, that is the Cube On Cloud startups, March 24th. Join us and join our community, thank you.

>> Hello and welcome to this special CUBE update conversation, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with my partner, Dave Vellante, co-host of theCUBE. Dave, lots of people are asking us what's going on with theCUBE what's happening. Obviously COVID people know that we go out to events to extract the signal from the noise. Number one leading in enterprise tech events, there's been no events. People want to know what's going on with theCUBE, theCUBE virtual. And they want to know when the events are going to come back and when it does what's theCUBE going to look like. >> Well, as you know, for a decade we were on premises at events, tech events, our great sponsors would have us there and let us do our thing. And we'd have editorial there, which is nice and have our own on discussions. But it was always at the host venue, or largely was, we've done some of our own shows but now with the virtual occurring we're driving a lot of our own events, We've got now the time to do that, and here's what I think, John, I really do believe that there's no question that in the second half of the year we're going to start to see some kind of hybrid emerge where you might see VIP's, almost like the Golden Globes, if you saw that, there may be 15, 20 people socially distant, comfortable, maybe a VIP event, 10, 20 CIO's in a room, and I think there's going to be a digital overlay to that, the virtual overlay to get greater reach. And then even in 2022, when physical comes back in a big way, I think virtual is here to stay. People are learning so much. They're learning the value of that long tail, that host event consumption that we've seen in our data and that's going to continue. And people are really learning how to fine tune that playbook. >> You know, I want to get your thoughts on this because I was explaining to someone about our CUBE virtual opportunity and events coming back. And as you know I've been an avid clubhouse user since December 30th and I've been noticing that the engagement is so high in these apps where people are collaborating. So, I want you to explain the dynamics as, as we have these cube virtual, our first event is March 24th, we've got Jerry Chen from Greylock, Michael Liebow from McKinsey, Jeff Barr from AWS, three big names, big individuals in terms of talent and start up power. But the names of the companies, McKinsey, Greylock, AWS, and me and you, you starting to see virtual as a format, Dave, where our community can come together to compliment theCUBE physical events and bring a new venue, a new format to engaging and creating content together. Can you explain what this means for audiences, our community and our sponsors? >> Well, I think a lot of companies are looking at just events in very narrow sense, we do an event, maybe it's a webinar, we're going to do an event, maybe it's small, mid-size, maybe even a large event. And then we're going onto the next one, onto the next one, so it's all about this sort of event cadence. And I think there's a much bigger picture here. And it's really about the content, the arc of content, the community, engaging with that community, over a long period of time, it's not a one-shot deal or they're not disposable, sort of events are kind of disposable in that regard. I think our philosophy is different. We really try to connect, build that community out. And then also bring that community back in, those who want to participate, it's almost like a reward system. If you participate in an event, a community event, the next one you're actually going to be featured, you're going to come on theCUBE, you're going to be participating in the program directly. And I think, John, for sponsors, it really means, we've seen that a lot of the value that the sponsors are getting really has not been replicated from the physical events. And so what we're trying to do here is give those many, many sponsors a platform in order to have their voices heard so that they can engage with broader communities and tap in to other communities. >> Dave, you know, we were just talking the other day about all these event platforms that are out there and we're a media platform and that there's a new dynamic out there where it's not about the number of events that you participated in, it's the audiences that you engage with and create content value together and sponsors that you enable, we enable, can enable to go direct to the consumer. And this is a big trend that we're seeing. Media as a service or direct to the consumer. You seeing companies like Tesla do it, Apple, even venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz going direct to the audience and cutting the middlemen out of being disintermediated. This is an interesting opportunity. Can you share your thoughts, because if a customer, our sponsor, is going to try to do that, they need to have media capabilities, not just event software. An event is a moment in time, media is ongoing for engaging. They're two different things but they have to work together. Can you explain what this means in basic terms to customers and audience? Why is this so important this new trend? >> I think it's really simple. The bottom line is that every company has to be in some way, shape or form a media company they're producing content, and everybody wants to control the narrative, control of the audience, except the way you do that is to produce great authentic content. And I will tell you most companies, certainly most companies in the tech business aren't really that good at it. There are a couple of standouts. You mentioned some big names like Tesla, so you see some VC firms doing it, but people are learning, and they're going to get better and better at it. But our basic premise and I think it's right on is that every company has to be a content company, a content producer. So what we want to do is help them do that. Give them tools, give them platforms, give them methodologies to really be able to in an agile fashion, produce high quality content and distribute it through a workflow and then iterate >> Agile Media, that's our opportunity and that's what we're going to try to do. And I think what I'm most excited about Dave is we can help our sponsors with a product that helps them go direct to their customer while we can at the same time increase our serving our audiences with high quality content so that they can work with us, consume or create with us. And I think that's a power dynamic that is a flywheel of innovation. This is kind of what media should be, and this is what we're trynna do. >> Well, that's a mega trend. And the other thing that I think people forget about sometime is that data, there's a data fabric that connects all these different events, all the different webinars, all the content initiatives, the content programs, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that data fabric flows in a distributed way throughout the year, throughout the network, throughout the community. And it's got to be a two-way street and it's fundamentally you have to put data at the core of those initiatives. >> And Dave, one of the exciting things we're doing that I'll share is on March 24th, 9:00 Pacific, we're doing theCUBE On Cloud Startups, our virtual event in conjunction with AWS, Amazon Web Services, startup showcase. We're going to showcase 10 of the hottest startups in the Amazon cloud ecosystem around data, data ops, and pre-public, the next UNICORE, the next deca-core, And these are the hottest companies that are going to be hitting the enterprise and emerging technology markets in the next year. We're going to showcase them in our format, this is theCUBE virtual, so check it out, join us, be part of our community. If you want to engage with us, definitely get on the roster. We're going to do these four times a year, and again, we do a lot more of them. And then you'll see us back in person, when the events come back, post pandemic. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, thank you for your time and we'll see you on the 24th, or at our events, thank you.