(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to what is sure to be an insightful conversation about getting business results with cloud transformation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with James Miller, Chief Technologist for Cloud and Infrastructure Services and Jay Dowling, America's Sales Lead for cloud and infrastructure services both with DXC Technology. Gentlemen, thanks for your time today. Welcome to the Cube. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you Dave. Appreciate it. >> So let's get right into it. You know, I've talked to a lot of practitioners who've said, look, if you really want to drop zeros, like a lot of zeros to the bottom line, you can't just lift and shift. You really got to think about modernizing the application portfolio, you got to think about your business model and really think about transforming your business particularly the operating model. So my first question Jim is what role does the cloud play in modernization? >> Well, there are really three aspects that the cloud plays in modernization. You mentioned multiple zeros. One is cost optimization and that can be achieved through business operations, through environmental, social and governance. Also being more efficient with your IT investments. But that's not the only aspect. There's also agility and innovation and that can be achieved through automation and productivity, speed to market for new features and functions, improvements in the customer experience and the capability to metabolize a great deal more data in your environment which the end result is an improvement in releasing of new things to the field. And finally, there's resilience and I'm not really talking about IT resilience, but more of business resilience. To be able to handle operational risk, improve your securities and controls, deal with some of the talent gap that's in the industry and also protect your brand reputation. So modernization is really about balancing these three aspects, cost optimization, agility and innovation and resilience. >> So, thank you for that. So Jay, I got to ask you, in the current climate everybody's sort of concerned and there's not great visibility on the macro. So Jim mentioned cost optimization. That seems to be one of the top areas that customers are focused on. The two I hear a lot are consolidating redundant vendors and optimizing cloud costs. So that's, you know, top of mind today. I think everybody really, you know understands the innovation and agility piece at least at a high level, maybe realizing it is different. And then the business resilience piece is really interesting because, you know, prior to the pandemic people you know, they had a DR strategy, but they realized, wow, my business might not be that resilient. So Jay, my question to you is what are you hearing when you talk to customers? What's the priority today? >> You know, priority is often an overused term in digital transformation, you know people want to get ready for next generation environments, customer experience, making sure they're improving, you know, how they engage with their clients and what their branding is. And what we find is a lot of clients don't have the underlying infrastructure in place today to get to where they want to get to. So cloud becomes an important element of that. But, you know, with DXC'S philosophy not everything necessarily needs to go to cloud to be cost optimized for instance, in many cases you can run applications, you know in your own data center or on-prem or in other environments in a hybrid environment or multi-cloud environment and still be very optimized from a cost spend standpoint, and also put yourself in position for modernization and for be able to do the bring the things to the business that the clients are you know, that their clients are looking for like the CMO and the CFO, et cetera, trying to use IT as a lever to drive business and to drive, you know business acceleration and drive profitability, frankly. So there's a lot of dependency on infrastructure, but there's a lot of elements to it. And we advocate for, you know there's not a single answer to that. We'd like to evaluate clients' environments and work with them to get them to an optimal target operating model you know, so that they can really deliver on what the promises are for their departments. >> So let's talk about some of the barriers to realizing value in a context of modernization. We talked about cost optimization, agility and resilience. But there's a business angle and there's a technical angle here. We always talk about people process and technology, technology oftentimes CIOs will tell us, well, that's the easy part, We'll figure that out whether it's true or not but I agree, people and process are sometimes the tough ones. So Jay, why don't you start, what do you see as the barriers, particularly from a business standpoint? >> Well, I think people need to let their guard down and be open to the ideas that are out there in the market from, you know, the standards that are being built by, you know best in class models, and there's many people that have gone on, you know cloud journeys and been very successful with it. There's others that have set high expectations with their business leaders that haven't necessarily met the goals that they need to meet or maybe haven't met them as quickly as they promised. So there's a, you know, there's a change management aspect that you'd need to look at with the, you know, with the environments, there's a, you know, there's a skillset environment that they need to be prepared for. Do they have the people, you know, to deliver with the, you know, with the tools and the skills and the models that they're putting themselves in place for in the future versus where they are now? There's just a lot of, you know there's a lot of different elements. It's not just a this price is better or this can operate better than one environment over the other. I think we like to try to look at things holistically and make sure that, you know, we're being, you know as much of a consultative advocate for the client, for, you know, where they want to go, what their destiny is, and based on what we've learned with other clients, you know and we can bring those best practices forward because we've worked, you know across such a broad spectrum of clients versus them being somewhat contained and sometimes can't see outside of their own, you know their own challenges if you would. So they need advocacy to help, you know bring them to the next level. And we like to translate that through you know, technology advances, which, you know Jim's really good at doing for us. >> Yeah. Jim, is the big barrier a skills issue, you know, bench strength? Are there other considerations from your perspective? >> Well, we've identified a number of factors that inhibit success of customers. One is, thinking it's only a technology change in moving to cloud when it's much broader than that. There are changes in governance, changes in process that need to take place. The other is evaluating the cloud providers on their current pricing structure and performance. And we see pricing and structure changing dramatically every few months between the various cloud providers. And you have to be flexible enough to determine which providers you want, and it may not be feasible to just have a single cloud provider in this world. The other thing is a big bang approach to transformation. I want to move everything and I want to move it all at once. That's not necessarily the best approach. A well thought out cloud journey and strategy and timing your investments, are really important to get maximizing your business return on a journey to the cloud. And finally, not engaging stakeholders early and continuously. You have to manage expectations in moving to cloud on what business factors will get affected, how you will achieve your cost savings and how you will achieve the business impact over the journey and reporting out on that with very strict metrics to all of the stakeholders. >> You know, mentioned multi-cloud just then we had in January 17th we had our Supercloud two event and Supercloud is basically, it's really what multi-cloud should have been, I'd like to say. So it's just creating a common experience across clouds, and you guys were talking about, you know there's different governance, there's different security there's different pricing. So, and one of the takeaways from this event, in talking to customers and practitioners and technologists is you can't go it alone. So I wonder if you could talk about your partnership strategy, what do partners bring to the table and what is DXC's, you know, unique value? >> I'd be happy to lead with that if you'd like. >> Great. >> I, you know, we've got a vast partner ecosystem at DXC given the size and the history of the company. I can use several examples. One of the larger partners in my particular space is Dell technology, right? They're a great, you know, partner for us across many different areas of the business. It's not just a storage and compute play anymore. They're, on the edge. They're, you know, they've got intelligence in their networking devices now and they've really brought, you know a lot of value to us as a partner. And, you know, there's somebody who could look at Dell technology as somebody that might, you know have a victim, you know, effect because of all the hyperscaler activity and all the cloud activity. But they've really taken an outstanding attitude with this and said, listen, not all things are destined for cloud or not all things would operate better in a cloud environment, and they'd like to be part of those discussions to see how they can, you know how we can bring a multi-cloud environment, you know both private and public, you know to clients and let's look at the applications and the infrastructure and, and what's, you know what's the best optimal running environment, you know for us to be able to bring, you know the greatest value to the business with speed, with security, with, you know, and, you know the things that they want to keep closest to the business are often things that you want to kind of you know, keep on your premise or keep in your own data center. So they're an ideal model of somebody that's resourced us well, partners with us well in the market and we continue to grow that relationship day in and day out with those guys. And we really appreciate, you know their support of our strategy and we like to also compliment their strategy and work, you know work together hand in hand in front of our clients. >> Yeah. You know, Jim, Matt Baker, who's the Head of Strategic Planning at Dell talks about it's not a zero sum game. And I think, you know, you're right Jay, I think initially people felt like, oh wow, it is a zero sum game, but it's clearly not. And this idea of whether you call it super cloud or Uber cloud or multi-cloud, clearly Dell is headed in that direction and I've, you know, look at some of their future projects, their narrative. I'm curious from a technology standpoint, Jim, what your role is. Is it to make it all work? Is it to, you know, end to end? I wonder if you could help, you know, us understand that. >> Help us figure this out Jim (all laughing) >> Glad to expand on that. One of my key roles is developing our product roadmap for DXC offerings. And we do that roadmap in conjunction with our partners where we can leverage the innovation that our partners bring to the table, and we often utilize engineering resources from our partners to help us jointly build those offerings that adapt to changes in the market and also adapt to many of our customers changing needs over time. So my primary role is to look at the market, talk to our customers, and work with our partners, to develop a product roadmap for delivering DXC products and services to our clients so that they can get the return on investment on their technology journeys. >> You know, we've been working with these two firms for a while now. Even predates, you know, the name DXC and that transformation. I'm curious as to what's, how you would respond to what's unique. You know, you hear a lot about partnerships, you guys got a lot of competition, Dell has a lot of competition. What's specifically unique about this combination? >> I would say our unique approach, we call it cloud right. And that approach is making the right investments at the right time and on the right platforms. And our partners play a key role in that. So we encourage our customers to not necessarily have a cloud first approach but a cloud right approach, where they place the workloads in the environment that is best suited from a technology perspective, a business perspective and even a security and governance perspective. And the right approach might include mainframe, it might include an on-premises infrastructure, it could include private cloud, public cloud and SaaS components all integrated together to deliver that value. >> Yeah, Jay, please. It's a complicated situation for a lot of customers, but chime in here. >> And now if you were speaking still specifically to Dell here, like they also walk the talk, right? They invest in DXC as a partnership they put people on the ground that their only purpose in life is to help DXC succeed with Dell in, you know, arm in arm in front of clients. And it's not, you know, it's not a winner take all thing at all. It's really true partnership. They've brought solution resources. We have an account CTO, we've got executive sponsorship, we do regular QBR meetings, we have regular executive touchpoint meetings. It's really important that you keep a high level of intimacy with the client with the partners, you know, in the GSI community. And I've been with several GSI's and this is an exceptional example of true partnership and commitment to success with Dell technology. I'm really extremely impressed on the engagement level that we've had there and, you know, continue to show a lot of support, you know, both for them, you know there's other OEM partners of course in the market there's always going to be other technology solutions for certain clients but this has been a particularly strong element for us in our partnership and our go-to-market strategy. >> Well, I think too, just my observation is a lot of it is about trust. You guys have both earned the trust, kind of over the years, taking your arrows, you know, over decades, and you know, that just doesn't happen overnight. So guys, I appreciate it. Thanks for your time. It's all about getting cloud right, isn't it? >> That's right. Thank you Dave. Appreciate it very much. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you on. Keep it right there for more action on the cube right back. (upbeat music)

>> Hello and welcome to what is sure to be an insightful conversation about getting business results with cloud Transformation. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with James Miller, Chief Technologist for cloud and Infrastructure Services and Jay Dowling, America's Sales Lead for cloud and Infrastructure Services, both with DXC Technology. Gentlemen, thanks for your time today, welcome to The Cube. >> Great, thanks for having us. >> Thank you, Dave, appreciate it. >> So let's get right into it. You know, I've talked to a lot of practitioners who've said, look, if you really want to drop zeros, like a lot of zeroes to the bottom line, you can't just lift and shift. You really got to think about modernizing, the application portfolio, you got to think about your business model, and really think about transforming your business, particularly the operating model. So my first question, Jim, is what role does the cloud play in modernization? >> Well there are really 3 aspects that the cloud plays in modernization. You mentioned multiple zeroes. One is cost optimization. And that can be achieved through business operations, through environmental, social, in governance. Also being more efficient with your IT investments. But that's not the only aspect. There's also agility and innovation. And that can be achieved through automation and productivity, speed to market for new features and functions, improvements in the customer experience, and the capability to metabolize a great deal more data in your environment. Which, the end result is an improvement in releasing of new things to the field. And finally, there's resilience. And I'm not really talking about IT resilience, but more of business resilience. To be able to handle operational risk, improve your securities and controls, deal with some of the talent gap that's in the industry, and also protect your brand reputation. So modernization is really about balancing these 3 aspects. Cost optimization, agility and innovation, and resilience. >> So, thank you for that, so, Jay, I got to ask you, the current climate, ever body's sort of concerned, and there's not great visibility on the macro. So, Jim mentioned cost optimization, that seems to be one of the top areas that customers are focused on. The two I hear a lot are, consolidating redundant vendors, and optimizing cloud costs. So that's, you know, top of mine today. I think everybody really, you know, understands the innovation and agility piece. At least at a high level, maybe realizing it is different. >> Sure >> And then the business resilience piece is really interesting, because, you know, prior to the pandemic, people, you know, they had a DR strategy, but they realized, wow my business may not be that resilient. So, Jay, my question to you is, what are you hearing when you talk to customers, what's the priority today? >> You know, the priority is an often overused term of digital transformation. You know, people want to get ready for next generation environments, customer experience, making sure they're improving, you know, how they engage with their clients, and what their branding is. What we find is a lot of clients don't have the underlying infrastructure in place today to get to where they want to get to. So cloud becomes an important element of that, but, you know, with DXC's philosophy, not everything necessarily needs to go to cloud to be cost optimized, for instance. In many cases you can run applications, you know, in your own data center, or on Pram or, in other environments, in the hybrid environment or multi cloud environment, and still be very optimized from a cost/spend standpoint. And also put yourself in position for modernization and be able to bring the things to the business that the clients are, you know their clients are looking for like the CMO and the CFO etc. trying to use IT as a leverage to drive business and to drive business acceleration and to drive profitability, frankly. So there's a lot of dependency on infrastructure, but there's a lot of elements to it and we advocate for, you know, there's not a single answer to that. We like to evaluate clients, environments, and work with them to get them to an optimal target operating model so that they can really deliver on what the promises are for their departments. >> So, lets talk about some of the barriers to realizing value in the context of modernization. We talked about cost optimization, agility, and resilience. But there's a business angle and there's a technical angle here. We already talked about people, process, and technology. Technology oftentimes CIO's will tell us 'Well that's the easy part. We'll figure that out.' Whether it's true or not; but I agree. People and process is sometimes the tough one. So Jay, why don't you start. What do you see as the barriers particularly from a business standpoint? I think people need to let their guard down and be open to the ideas that are out there in the market from the standards that are being built by Best in Class models. And there's many people who that have got on cloud juries have been very successful with it. There's others that have set high expectations with their business leaders that haven't necessarily met the goals that they need to meet, or maybe haven't met them as quickly as they promised. So there's a change management aspect that you need to look at with the environments. There's a skillset environment that they need to be prepared for. Do they have the people to deliver with the tools and the skills and the models that they're putting themselves in place for in the future versus where they are now. There's just a lot of different elements. It's not just that this price is better or this can operate better than one environment over the other. I think we like to try and look at things holistically and make sure that we're being as much of a consultative advocate for the client for where they want to go, what their destiny is and based on what we've learned with other clients and we can bring those best practices forward because we've worked across such a broad spectrum of clients versus them being somewhat contained and sometimes can't see outside of their own challenges, if you would. So they need advocacy to help bring them to the next level. And we like to translate that through technology advances which Jim is really good at doing for us. >> Yeah Jim, is the big barrier a skills issue? You know, bench strength? Are their other considerations from your perspective? >> We've identified a number of factors that inhibit success of customers. One is thinking it's only a technology change; in moving to cloud. When it's much broader than that. There are changes in governance, changes in process that need to take place. The other is evaluating the other cloud providers on their current pricing structure and performance. And we see pricing and structure changing dramatically every few months between the various cloud providers. And you have to be flexible enough to determine which providers you want; and it may not be feasible to just have a single cloud provider in this world. The other thing is a big bang approach to transformation. I want to move everything and I want to move it all at once. That's not necessarily the best approach. A well thought out cloud journey and strategy, and timing your investments are really important to maximizing your business return on the journey to the cloud. And finally, not engaging stakeholders early and continuously. You have to manage expectations in moving to cloud on what business factors will get affected, how you will achieve your costs savings, and how you will achieve the business impact over the journey and reporting out on that with very strict metrics to all of the stakeholders. >> You mentioned multi-cloud just then. On January 17th we had our Super Cloud 2 event. And Super Cloud is basically what multi-cloud should have been I like to say. So it's creating a common experience across clouds. You guys were talking about you know, there's different governance, different securities, different pricing. So, and one of the takeaways from this event and talking to customers and practitioners and technologists is you can't go it alone. So I wonder if you'd talk about your partnership strategy? What do partners bring to the table? What is DXC's unique value? >> I'd be happy to lead with that if you'd like. >> Great >> We've got a vast partner ecosystem at DXC, given the size and the history of the company. I use several examples. One of the larger partners in my particular space is Dell Technology. They're a great partner for us across many different areas of the business. It's not just storage and compute play anymore. They're on the edge. They've got intelligence in their networking devices now. And they've really brought a lot of value to us as a partner. You can look at Dell Technology as somebody that might have a victim effect because of all of the hyper-scaling activity and all of the cloud activity but they've really taken an outstanding attitude with this and said listen not all things are destined for cloud or not all things would operate better in a cloud environment. And they like to be apart of those discussions to see how they can, how we can bring a multi-cloud environment, both private and public to clients and let's look at the applications and the infrastructure and what's the best optimal running environment for us to be able to bring the greatest value to the business with speed, with security and the the things that they want to keep close to the business are often things that you want to keep on your premise or keep in your own data centers. So they're an ideal model of somebody that's resourced this well, partnered in this well in the market and we continue to grow that relationship day in and day out with those guys. And we really appreciate their support of our strategy and we like to also compliment their strategy and work together hand in hand in front of our clients. >> Yeah you know Jim, Matt Baker who's the Head of Strategic Planning at Dell talks about it's not zero-sum game and I think you're right Jay. I think initially people felt like oh wow, it is a zero-sum game but it's clearly not. And this idea of whether you call it Super Cloud or Uber Cloud or Multi Cloud, clearly Dell is headed in that direction. Look at some of their future projects, their narrative. I'm curious from a technology standpoint Jim, what your role is. Is it to make it all work? Is it to end to end? Wondering if you could help us understand that. >> Help us figure it out Jim, here. >> Glad to expand on that. Well, one of my key roles is developing our product roadmap for DXC offerings. And we do that roadmap in conjunction with our partners where we can leverage the innovation that our partners bring to the table and we often utilize engineering resources from our partners to help us jointly build those offerings that adapt to changes in the market and also adapt to many of our customer's changing needs overtime. So my primary role is to look at the market, talk to our customers, and work with our partners to develop a product roadmap for delivering DXC products and services to our clients so that they can get the return on investment on their technology journeys. >> You know, we've been working with these two firms for a while now; pre-dates the name DXC and that transformation. I'm curious as to what's, how you would respond to what's unique. You know you hear a lot about partnerships, you guys got a lot of competition. Dell has a lot of competition. What's specifically unique about this combination? >> I think- go ahead Jim >> I would say our unique approach is, we call it cloud right. And that approach is making the right investments, at the right time, and on the right platforms. And our partners play a key role in that. So we encourage our customers to not necessarily have a cloud first approach, but a cloud right approach where they place the workloads in the environment that is best suited from a technology perspective, a business perspective, and even a security and governance perspective. And the right approach might include main frame, it might include and on-premises infrastructure it could include private cloud, public cloud and SAS components all integrated together to deliver that value. >> Yeah Jay please. Let me tell you, this is a complicated situation for a lot of customers. But, chime in here. >> Yeah if you're speaking specifically to Dell here like, they also walk the talk right. They invest in DXC as a partnership. They put people on the ground. Their only purpose in life is to help DXC succeed with Dell, arm in arm, in front of clients. And it's not a winner take all thing at all. It's really a true partnership. They've brought solution resources. We have an account CTO, we've got executive sponsorship. We do regular QVR meetings. We have regular executive touch-point meetings. It's really important that you keep high level of intimacy with the clients, with the partners in the GSI community. And I've been with several GSI's and this is an exceptional example of true partnership and commitment to success with Dell Technology. I'm really extremely impressed on the engagement level that we've had there, and continue to show a lot of support both for them. And there's other OEM partners of course in the market. There's always going to be other technology solutions for certain clients, but this has been a particularly strong element for us and our partnership and our go-to-market strategy. >> Well I think too, just my observation is a lot of it is about trust. You guys have both earned the trust over the years. Ticking your arrows over decades, and that just doesn't happen overnight. Guys I appreciate it. Thanks for your time. It's all about getting Cloud Right, isn't it? >> That's right. Thank you Dave. Appreciate it very much. >> Thank you >> Jay, great to have you on. Keep it right there for more action on The CUBE. We'll be right back.

hi everybody welcome back to re invent 2022. this is thecube's exclusive coverage we're here at the satellite set it's up on the fifth floor of the Venetian Conference Center and this is part of the global startup program the AWS startup showcase series that we've been running all through last year and and into this year with AWS and featuring some of its its Global Partners Ed wallson series the CEO of chaos search many times Cube Alum and Kevin Miller there's also a cube Alum vice president GM of S3 at AWS guys good to see you again yeah great to see you Dave hi Kevin this is we call this our Super Bowl so this must be like your I don't know uh World Cup it's a pretty big event yeah it's the World Cup for sure yeah so a lot of S3 talk you know I mean that's what got us all started in 2006 so absolutely what's new in S3 yeah it's been a great show we've had a number of really interesting launches over the last few weeks and a few at the show as well so you know we've been really focused on helping customers that are running Mass scale data Lakes including you know whether it's structured or unstructured data we actually announced just a few just an hour ago I think it was a new capability to give customers cross-account access points for sharing data securely with other parts of the organization and that's something that we'd heard from customers is as they are growing and have more data sets and they're looking to to get more out of their data they are increasingly looking to enable multiple teams across their businesses to access those data sets securely and that's what we provide with cross-count access points we also launched yesterday our multi-region access point failover capabilities and so again this is where customers have data sets and they're using multiple regions for certain critical workloads they're now able to to use that to fail to control the failover between different regions in AWS and then one other launch I would just highlight is some improvements we made to storage lens which is our really a very novel and you need capability to help customers really understand what storage they have where who's accessing it when it's being accessed and we added a bunch of new metrics storage lens has been pretty exciting for a lot of customers in fact we looked at the data and saw that customers who have adopted storage lens typically within six months they saved more than six times what they had invested in turning storage lens on and certainly in this environment right now we have a lot of customers who are it's pretty top of mind they're looking for ways to optimize their their costs in the cloud and take some of those savings and be able to reinvest them in new innovation so pretty exciting with the storage lens launch I think what's interesting about S3 is that you know pre-cloud Object Store was this kind of a niche right and then of course you guys announced you know S3 in 2006 as I said and okay great you know cheap and deep storage simple get put now the conversations about how to enable value from from data absolutely analytics and it's just a whole new world and Ed you've talked many times I love the term yeah we built chaos search on the on the shoulders of giants right and so the under underlying that is S3 but the value that you can build on top of that has been key and I don't think we've talked about his shoulders and Giants but we've talked about how we literally you know we have a big Vision right so hard to kind of solve the challenge to analytics at scale we really focus on the you know the you know Big Data coming environment get analytics so we talk about the on the shoulders Giants obviously Isaac Newton's you know metaphor of I learned from everything before and we layer on top so really when you talk about all the things come from S3 like I just smile because like we picked it up naturally we went all in an S3 and this is where I think you're going Dave but everyone is so let's just cut the chase like so any of the data platforms you're using S3 is what you're building but we did it a little bit differently so at first people using a cold storage like you said and then they ETL it up into a different platforms for analytics of different sorts now people are using it closer they're doing caching layers and cashing out and they're that's where but that's where the attributes of a scale or reliability are what we did is we actually make S3 a database so literally we have no persistence outside that three and that kind of comes in so it's working really well with clients because most of the thing is we pick up all these attributes of scale reliability and it shows up in the clients environments and so when you launch all these new scalable things we just see it like our clients constantly comment like one of our biggest customers fintech in uh Europe they go to Black Friday again black Friday's not one days and they lose scale from what is it 58 terabytes a day and they're going up to 187 terabytes a day and we don't Flinch they say how do you do that well we built our platform on S3 as long as you can stream it to S3 so they're saying I can't overrun S3 and it's a natural play so it's it's really nice that but we take out those attributes but same thing that's why we're able to you know help clients get you know really you know Equifax is a good example maybe they're able to consolidate 12 their divisions on one platform we couldn't have done that without the scale and the performance of what you can get S3 but also they saved 90 I'm able to do that but that's really because the only persistence is S3 and what you guys are delivering but and then we really for focus on shoulders Giants we're doing on top of that innovating on top of your platforms and bringing that out so things like you know we have a unique data representation that makes it easy to ingest this data because it's kind of coming at you four v's of big data we allow you to do that make it performant on s3h so now you're doing hot analytics on S3 as if it's just a native database in memory but there's no memory SSC caching and then multi-model once you get it there don't move it leverage it in place so you know elasticsearch access you know Cabana grafana access or SQL access with your tools so we're seeing that constantly but we always talk about on the shoulders of giants but even this week I get comments from our customers like how did you do that and most of it is because we built on top of what you guys provided so it's really working out pretty well and you know we talk a lot about digital transformation of course we had the pleasure sitting down with Adam solipski prior John Furrier flew to Seattle sits down his annual one-on-one with the AWS CEO which is kind of cool yeah it was it's good it's like study for the test you know and uh and so but but one of the interesting things he said was you know we're one of our challenges going forward is is how do we go Beyond digital transformation into business transformation like okay well that's that's interesting I was talking to a customer today AWS customer and obviously others because they're 100 year old company and they're basically their business was they call them like the Uber for for servicing appliances when your Appliance breaks you got to get a person to serve it a service if it's out of warranty you know these guys do that so they got to basically have a you know a network of technicians yeah and they gotta deal with the customers no phone right so they had a completely you know that was a business transformation right they're becoming you know everybody says they're coming a software company but they're building it of course yeah right on the cloud so wonder if you guys could each talk about what's what you're seeing in terms of changing not only in the sort of I.T and the digital transformation but also the business transformation yeah I know I I 100 agree that I think business transformation is probably that one of the top themes I'm hearing from customers of all sizes right now even in this environment I think customers are looking for what can I do to drive top line or you know improve bottom line or just improve my customer experience and really you know sort of have that effect where I'm helping customers get more done and you know it is it is very tricky because to do that successfully the customers that are doing that successfully I think are really getting into the lines of businesses and figuring out you know it's probably a different skill set possibly a different culture different norms and practices and process and so it's it's a lot more than just a like you said a lot more than just the technology involved but when it you know we sort of liquidate it down into the data that's where absolutely we see that as a critical function for lines of businesses to become more comfortable first off knowing what data sets they have what data they they could access but possibly aren't today and then starting to tap into those data sources and then as as that progresses figuring out how to share and collaborate with data sets across a company to you know to correlate across those data sets and and drive more insights and then as all that's being done of course it's important to measure the results and be able to really see is this what what effect is this having and proving that effect and certainly I've seen plenty of customers be able to show you know this is a percentage increase in top or bottom line and uh so that pattern is playing out a lot and actually a lot of how we think about where we're going with S3 is related to how do we make it easier for customers to to do everything that I just described to have to understand what data they have to make it accessible and you know it's great to have such a great ecosystem of partners that are then building on top of that and innovating to help customers connect really directly with the businesses that they're running and driving those insights well and customers are hours today one of the things I loved that Adam said he said where Amazon is strategically very very patient but tactically we're really impatient and the customers out there like how are you going to help me increase Revenue how are you going to help me cut costs you know we were talking about how off off camera how you know software can actually help do that yeah it's deflationary I love the quote right so software's deflationary as costs come up how do you go drive it also free up the team and you nail it it's like okay everyone wants to save money but they're not putting off these projects in fact the digital transformation or the business it's actually moving forward but they're getting a little bit bigger but everyone's looking for creative ways to look at their architecture and it becomes larger larger we talked about a couple of those examples but like even like uh things like observability they want to give this tool set this data to all the developers all their sres same data to all the security team and then to do that they need to find a way an architect should do that scale and save money simultaneously so we see constantly people who are pairing us up with some of these larger firms like uh or like keep your data dog keep your Splunk use us to reduce the cost that one and one is actually cheaper than what you have but then they use it either to save money we're saving 50 to 80 hard dollars but more importantly to free up your team from the toil and then they they turn around and make that budget neutral and then allowed to get the same tools to more people across the org because they're sometimes constrained of getting the access to everyone explain that a little bit more let's say I got a Splunk or data dog I'm sifting through you know logs how exactly do you help so it's pretty simple I'll use dad dog example so let's say using data dog preservability so it's just your developers your sres managing environments all these platforms are really good at being a monitoring alerting type of tool what they're not necessarily great at is keeping the data for longer periods like the log data the bigger data that's where we're strong what you see is like a data dog let's say you're using it for a minister for to keep 30 days of logs which is not enough like let's say you're running environment you're finding that performance issue you kind of want to look to last quarter in last month in or maybe last Black Friday so 30 days is not enough but will charge you two eighty two dollars and eighty cents a gigabyte don't focus on just 280 and then if you just turn the knob and keep seven days but keep two years of data on us which is on S3 it goes down to 22 cents plus our list price of 80 cents goes to a dollar two compared to 280. so here's the thing what they're able to do is just turn a knob get more data we do an integration so you can go right from data dog or grafana directly into our platform so the user doesn't see it but they save money A lot of times they don't just save the money now they use that to go fund and get data dog to a lot more people make sense so it's a creativity they're looking at it and they're looking at tools we see the same thing with a grafana if you look at the whole grafana play which is hey you can't put it in one place but put Prometheus for metrics or traces we fit well with logs but they're using that to bring down their costs because a lot of this data just really bogs down these applications the alerting monitoring are good at small data they're not good at the big data which is what we're really good at and then the one and one is actually less than you paid for the one so it and it works pretty well so things are really unpredictable right now in the economy you know during the pandemic we've sort of lockdown and then the stock market went crazy we're like okay it's going to end it's going to end and then it looked like it was going to end and then it you know but last year it reinvented just just in that sweet spot before Omicron so we we tucked it in which which was awesome right it was a great great event we really really missed one physical reinvent you know which was very rare so that's cool but I've called it the slingshot economy it feels like you know you're driving down the highway and you got to hit the brakes and then all of a sudden you're going okay we're through it Oh no you're gonna hit the brakes again yeah so it's very very hard to predict and I was listening to jassy this morning he was talking about yeah consumers they're still spending but what they're doing is they're they're shopping for more features they might be you know buying a TV that's less expensive you know more value for the money so okay so hopefully the consumer spending will get us out of this but you don't really know you know and I don't yeah you know we don't seem to have the algorithms we've never been through something like this before so what are you guys seeing in terms of customer Behavior given that uncertainty well one thing I would highlight that I think particularly going back to what we were just talking about as far as business and digital transformation I think some customers are still appreciating the fact that where you know yesterday you may have had to to buy some Capital put out some capital and commit to something for a large upfront expenditure is that you know today the value of being able to experiment and scale up and then most importantly scale down and dynamically based on is the experiment working out am I seeing real value from it and doing that on a time scale of a day or a week or a few months that is so important right now because again it gets to I am looking for a ways to innovate and to drive Top Line growth but I I can't commit to a multi-year sort of uh set of costs to to do that so and I think plenty of customers are finding that even a few months of experimentation gives them some really valuable insight as far as is this going to be successful or not and so I think that again just of course with S3 and storage from day one we've been elastic pay for what you use if you're not using the storage you don't get charged for it and I think that particularly right now having the applications and the rest of the ecosystem around the storage and the data be able to scale up and scale down is is just ever more important and when people see that like typically they're looking to do more with it so if they find you usually find these little Department projects but they see a way to actually move faster and save money I think it is a mix of those two they're looking to expand it which can be a nightmare for sales Cycles because they take longer but people are looking well why don't you leverage this and go across division so we do see people trying to leverage it because they're still I don't think digital transformation is slowing down but a lot more to be honest a lot more approvals at this point for everything it is you know Adam and another great quote in his in his keynote he said if you want to save money the Cloud's a place to do it absolutely and I read an article recently and I was looking through and I said this is the first time you know AWS has ever seen a downturn because the cloud was too early back then I'm like you weren't paying attention in 2008 because that was the first major inflection point for cloud adoption where CFO said okay stop the capex we're going to Opex and you saw the cloud take off and then 2010 started this you know amazing cycle that we really haven't seen anything like it where they were doubling down in Investments and they were real hardcore investment it wasn't like 1998 99 was all just going out the door for no clear reason yeah so that Foundation is now in place and I think it makes a lot of sense and it could be here for for a while where people are saying Hey I want to optimize and I'm going to do that on the cloud yeah no I mean I've obviously I certainly agree with Adam's quote I think really that's been in aws's DNA from from day one right is that ability to scale costs with with the actual consumption and paying for what you use and I think that you know certainly moments like now are ones that can really motivate change in an organization in a way that might not have been as palatable when it just it didn't feel like it was as necessary yeah all right we got to go give you a last word uh I think it's been a great event I love all your announcements I think this is wonderful uh it's been a great show I love uh in fact how many people are here at reinvent north of 50 000. yeah I mean I feel like it was it's as big if not bigger than 2019. people have said ah 2019 was a record when you count out all the professors I don't know it feels it feels as big if not bigger so there's great energy yeah it's quite amazing and uh and we're thrilled to be part of it guys thanks for coming on thecube again really appreciate it face to face all right thank you for watching this is Dave vellante for the cube your leader in Enterprise and emerging Tech coverage we'll be right back foreign

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Chicago. The Cube is excited to be live on day two of Ansible Fest, 2022. Lisa Martin and John Fur. You're here having some great conversations, a lot of cube alumni, a lot of wisdom from the Ansible community coming at you on this program this week. You know, John, we've been, we've been hearing stories about the power and the capabilities and the collective wisdom of the Ansible community. You can feel it here. Yeah, there's no doubt about that. It's, Ansible is nothing, as Stephanie Chair said yesterday, if not a community and the significant contributions that it makes over and over again, or it's fuel. >>I mean the power of the community is what drives Ansible is gonna drive the future of, I think, cloud in our next generation modern application environment. And it's collective intelligence. It's a production system at the end of the day. And I think these guys have harnessed it. So it should be a really great segment to talk about all the contributor work that's been done. So I'm looking forward to it. >>We've got two great alumni here to talk about the contributor work, how you can get involved. Please welcome back to the cube. Carol Chen, principal community architect at Red Hat. Adam Miller joins us as well, fresh from the keynote stage senior principal software engineer at Red Hat. Guys, great to have you on the cube. Great to be here. Yeah, thank you. So we, we talked, we enjoyed your keynotes, Adam, and what you were talking about on stage, the Ansible contributor summit. That's, you guys have been doing what, this is the seven you've had seven so far in just a couple of years. >>Well, we had seven virtual contributor summits. >>Seven virtual. This is the first Monday was the first in person in. >>First in person since the pandemic and actually the 15th contributor summit overall >>15th overall. Talk about the contributor summits, what the contributors are able to do and the influence that it's having on Ansible Red Hat and what people are able to do with cloud. At the Edge automation. Yeah. >>So our community contributors have always had ways to influence and contribute to the project. But the contributor Summit is really a place where we can get people together, preferably in the same place so that we can, you know, have a really great dynamic conversations and interactions. But we also want to make sure that we don't leave out people who have been constantly online joining us. So this year we are so happy to be here in Chicago in person. We've had about 60 to 70 here joining us. And at first I thought maybe we'll have one third of the attendees joining online because about 30 to 40 people signed up to join online. But in the end, we have more than 100 per people watching our live stream. So that's more than half of the attendees overall, were joining us online. So that really shows where, you know, the contributors are interested in participating for >>Develop. Right. Yeah, it's been, it's been interesting. It's been since 2019, since the in-person Ansible Fest in Atlanta. Now we're in Chicago, we had the pandemic. Couple interesting observations from our side that I wanna get your reaction to Adam Carol. And that is one Ansible's relevance has grown significantly since then. Just from a cloud growth standpoint, developer open source standpoint, and how people work and collaborate has changed. So your contributor based in your community is getting more powerful in scope, in my opinion. Like in, as they become, have the keys to the kingdom in the, in their respective worlds as it gets bigger and larger. So the personas are changing, the makeup of the community's changing and also how you guys collaborate is changing. Can you share your, what's going on with those two dynamics? Cause I think that power dynamic is, is looking really good. How are you guys handling >>That? Yeah, so I mean, I, I had the opportunity to represent the community on stage yesterday as part of the keynote and talk to this point specifically is one of the things that we've seen is the project has had the opportunity to kind of grow and evolve. There's been certain elements that have had to kind of decompose from a technology perspective. We actually had to kind of break it apart and change the architecture a little bit and move things into what are called Ansible collections, which, you know, folks here are very familiar with No One Love. And we've seen a lot of community work in the form of working groups coalesce around those organically. However, they've done so in kind of different ways. They, they pick tools and collaboration platforms that are popular to their subject matter expertise audience and things like that. So we find ourselves in a place where kind of the, the community itself had more or less segmented naturally in a way. And we needed to find ways to, you know, kind of ke that >>Fragmentation by demographics or by expertise or both as >>A Mostly, mostly expertise. Yeah. And so there was a open source technology called Matrix. It is a open source, standardized, federated messaging platform that we're able to use to start to bridge back some of those communities that have kind of broken off and, and made their their own home elsewhere on the internet. So now we're able to, for example, the right, the docs organization, they had a, a group of people who was very interested in contributing to the Ansible documentation, but they'd already self-organized on Discord. And what was interesting there is the existing team for the Ansible documentation, they were already on internet Relay Chat, also known as irc. And Matrix allowed us to actually bring those two together and bridge that into the other matrix cha chat channels that we had. So now we're able to have people from all over the world in different areas and different platforms, coalesce and, and cross. It's like a festival cross pollinate. Yeah. >>And you're meeting the contributors exactly where they are and where they want to be, where they're comfortable. >>Yes. Yeah, we always say we, we reach out to where they are. So, >>And, and, and much in the way that Ansible has the capability to reach out to things in their own way, Right. And allow that subject matter expertise to, you know, cause the technology has the potential and possibility and capability to talk to anything over any protocol. We're able to do, you know, kind of the same thing with Matrix, allowing us to bridge into any chat platform that it has support for bridging and, and we're able to bring a lot of people >>Together. Yeah. And how's that, how's the feedback been on that so far? >>I, I think it has been very positive. For example, I want to highlight that the technical writers that we have contributing via Discord is actually a group from Nigeria. And Dave also participated in the contributor summit online virtually joining us in, in, you know, on the matrix platform. So that, that bridge that really helps to bring together people from different geographical regions and also different topics and arenas like that. >>So what were some of the outcomes of the contributor summit? The, the first in person in a while, great. That you guys were able to do seven virtually during the pandemic. That's hard. It's hard to get people together. You, there's so much greatness and innovation that comes when we're all together in person that just can't replicate by video. You can do a lot. Right. But talk about some of the outcomes from Monday. What were some of the feedback? What were some of the contributions that you think are really going to impact the community? >>I think for a lot of us, myself included, the fact that we are in person and meeting people face to face, it helps to really build the connections. And when we do talk about contribution, the connection is so important that you understand, well this person a little bit about their background, what they've done for the SPO project and or just generally what, what they're interested in that builds the rapport and connection that helps, you know, further, further collaboration in the future. Because maybe on that day we did not have any, you know, co contributions or anything, but the fact that we had a chance to sit together in the same place to discuss things and share new ideas, roadmaps is really the, the kind of a big step to the future for our community. Yes, >>Yes. And in a lot of ways we often online the project has various elements that are able to function asynchronously. So we work very well globally across many time zones. And now we were able to get a lot of people in the same place at the same time, synchronously in the same time zone. And then we had breakout sessions where the subject matter, you know, working groups were able to kind of go and focus on things that maybe have been taking a little while to discuss in, in that asynchronous form of communication and do it synchronously and, you know, be in the same room and work on things. It's been, it's been fantastic >>Developers there, like they, they take to asynchronous like fish to water. It's not a problem. But I do want to ask if there's any observations that you guys have had now that we're kind of coming out of that one way, but the pandemic, but the world's changed. It's hybrid, hybrid work environment, steady state. So we see that. Any observations on your end on what's new that you observed that people are gravitating to? Is there a pattern of styles is or same old self-governing, or what's new? What do you see that's coming out of the pandemic that might be a norm? >>I I think that even though people are excited to get back in person, there are, things have changed, like you said, and we have to be more aware of, there are people who think that not be in person, it's okay. And that's how they want to do it. And we have to make sure that they, they are included. So we, we did want to make a high priority for online participation in this event. And like I said, even though only 4 30, 40 people signed up to join us online initially, so that it was what we were expecting, but in the end, more than 100 people were watching us and, and joining participation in >>Actually on demand consumption be good too, >>Right? Yeah. So, you know, I think going forward that is probably the trend. And as, as much as we, we love being in person, we, we want this to continue that we, we take care of people who are, has been constantly participating online and contributing you >>Meaning again, meaning folks where they are, but also allowing the, the, those members that want to get together to, to collaborate in person. I can only imagine the innovation that's gonna come even from having part of the back, Right. >>And, and not to continue to harp on the matrix point, but it, it's been very cool because Matrix has the ability to do live video sessions using open source another to open source technology called jy. So we're able to actually use the same place that we normally find ourselves, you know, congregating and collaborating for the project itself in an asynchronous and, you know, somewhat synchronous way to also host these types of things that are, are now hybrid that used to be, you know, all one way or all the other. Yeah. And it's been, it's >>Been incredible. Integration is, the integration is have been fascinating to watch how you guys do that. And also, you know, with q we've been virtual too. It's like, it's like people don't want another microsite, but they want a more of a festival vibe, a hub, right? Like a place to kind of check in and have choice, not get absolutely jammed into a, you know, forum or, you know, or whatever. Hey, if you wanna be on Discord, be on Discord, right? Why >>Not? And we still, you know, we do still have our asynchronous forms of >>Work through >>Our get GitHub. We have our projects, we have our issues, we have our, you know, wiki, we have various elements there that everybody can continue to collaborate on. And it's all been, it's all been very good. >>Speaking of festivals, octoberfest that's going on, not to be confused with Octoberfest, that was last month. Talk about how the Ansible project and the Ansible community is involved in Octoberfest. Give us the dates, Carol. So >>YesTo Fest is a annual thing in October. So October Octoberfest, I think it's organized by Digital Ocean for the past eight or nine years. And it's really a, a way to kind of encourage people to contribute to open source projects. So it's not anal specific, but we as an Ansible project encourage people to take this opportunity to, you know, a lot of them doing their first contributions during this event. And when, when we first announced, we're participating in Octoberfest within the first four days of October, which is over a weekend actually. We've had 24 contributions, it, 24 issues fixed, which is like amazing, like, you know, just the interest and the, the momentum that we had. And so far until I just checked with my teammates this morning that we've had about 35 contributions so far during the month, which is, and I'm sorry, I forgot to mention this is only for Ansible documentation. So yeah, specifically. And, and that's also one thing we want to highlight, that contributions don't just come in code in, you know, kind of software side, but really there's many ways to contribute and documentation is such a, a great way for first time users, first time contributors to get involved. So it's really amazing to see these contributions from all over the world. And also partly thanks to the technical writers in Nigeria kind of promoting and sharing this initiative. And it's just great to see the, the results from that. Can >>You double click on the different ways of contribution? You mentioned a couple documentation being one, code being the other, but what is the breadth of opportunities that the contributors have to contribute to the project? >>Oh, there's, there's so many. So I actually take care more of outreach efforts in the community. So I helped to organize events and meetups from around the world. And now that we're slowly coming out of the pandemic, I've seen more and more in person meetups. I was just talking to someone from Minneapolis, they're trying to get, get people back together again. They have people in Singapore, in Netherlands from pretty much, you know, all corners of the globe wanting to form not just for the Ansible project, but the local kind of connection with the re people in the region, sometimes in their own language, in their local languages to really work together on the project and just, >>You know, you to create a global Yeah. Network, right? I mean it's like Ansible Global. >>Exactly. >>Create local subnets not to get all networking, >>Right? >>Yeah. >>Yeah. One, one quick thing I want to touch on Theto Fest. I think it's a great opportunity for existing contributors to mentor cause many people like to help bring in new contributors and this is kind of a focal point to be able to focus on that. And then to, to the the other point we, you know, it, it's been, it's been extremely powerful to see as we return these sub communities pop up and, and kind of work with themselves, so on different ways to contribute. So code is kind of the one that gets the most attention. I think documentation I think is a unsung hero, highly important, great way. The logistical component, which is invaluable because it allows us to continue with our adoption and evangelization and things like that. So specifically adoption and evangelize. Evangelization is another place that contributors can join and actually spawn a local meetup and then connect in with the existing community and try to, you know, help increase the network, create a new subject. Yeah. >>Yeah. Network affects huge. And I think the thing that you brought up about reuse is, is part of that whole things get documented properly. The leverage that comes out of that just feeds into the system that flywheel. Absolutely. I mean it's, that's how communities are supposed to work, right? Yep. Yes. >>That's what I was just gonna comment on is the flywheel effect that it's clearly present and very palpable. Thank you so much for joining John, me on the program, talking about the contributors summit, the ways of contribution, the impacts that are being made so far, what Octoberfest is already delivering. And we're, we still have about 10 days or so left in October, so there's still more time for contributors to get involved. We thank you so much for your insights and your time. Thank >>You. Thank you so much for having us. >>Our pleasure. For our guests and John Purer, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, day two of our coverage of Red Hat Ansible Summit 22. We will see you right n after this short break with our next guest.

(upbeat music) >> We're here on theCube covering AWS Storage Day 2022. Kevin Miller joins us. He's the vice president and general manager of Amazon S3. Hello, Kevin, good to see you again. >> Hey Dave, it's great to see you as always. >> It seems like just yesterday we were celebrating the 15th anniversary of S3, and of course the launch of the modern public cloud, which started there. You know, when you think back Kevin, over the past year, what are some of the trends that you're seeing and hearing from customers? What do they want to see AWS focus more on? What's the direction that you're setting? >> Yeah, well Dave, really I think there's probably three trends that we're seeing really pop this year. I think one just given the kind of macroeconomic situation right now is cost optimization. That's not a surprise. Everyone's just taking a closer look at what they're using, and where they might be able to pair back. And you know, I think that's a place that obviously S3 has a long history of helping customers save money. Whether it's through our new storage classes, things like our Glacier Instant Retrieval, storage class that we launched to reinvent last year. Or things like our S3 storage lens capability to really dig in and help customers identify where their costs are are being spent. But so certainly every, you know, a lot of customers are focused on that right now, and for obvious reasons. I think the second thing that we're seeing is, just a real focus on simplicity. And it kind of goes hand in hand with cost optimization, because what a lot of customers are looking for is, how do I take the staff that I have, and do more this year. Right, continue to innovate, continue to bring new applications or top line generating revenue applications to the market, but not have to add a lot of extra headcount to do that. And so, what they're looking for is management and simplicity. How do I have all of this IT infrastructure, and not have to have people spending a lot of their time going into kind of routine maintenance and operations. And so that's an area that we're spending a lot of time. We think we have a lot of capability today, but looking at ways that we can continue to simplify, make it easier for customers to manage their infrastructure. Things like our S3 intelligent tiering storage class, which just automatically gives cost savings for data that's not routinely accessed. And so that's a big focus for us this year as well. And then I think the last and probably third thing I would highlight is an emerging theme or it's been a theme, but really continuing to increase in volume, is all around sustainability. And you know, our customers are looking for us to give them the data and the assurances for them, for their own reports and their own understanding of how sustainable is my infrastructure. And so within AWS, of course, you know we're on a path towards operating with 100% renewable energy by 2025. As well as helping the overall Amazon goal of achieving net zero carbon by 2040. So those are some big lofty goals. We've been giving customers greater insights with our carbon footprint tool. And we think that, you know the cloud continues to be just a great place to run and reduce customer's carbon footprint for the similar you know, storage capacity or similar compute capacity. But that's just going to continue to be a trend and a theme that we're looking at ways that we can continue to help customers do more to aggressively drive down their carbon footprint. >> I mean, it makes sense. It's like you're partnering up with the cloud, you know, you did same thing on security, you know, there's that shared responsibility model, same thing now with ESG. And on the macro it's interesting Kevin, this is the first time I can remember where, you know it used to be, if there's a downturn it's cost optimization, you go to simplicity. But at the same time with digital, you know, the rush to digital, people still are thinking about, okay how do I invest in the future? So but let's focus on cost for a moment then we'll come back to sort of the data value. Can you tell us how AWS helps customers save on storage, you know, beyond just the price per terabyte actions that you could take. I mean I love that, you guys should keep doing that. >> Absolutely. >> But what other knobs are you turning? >> Yeah, right and we've had obviously something like 15 cost reductions or price reductions over the years, and we're just going to continue to use that lever where we can, but it's things like the launch of our Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class that we did last year at Reinvent, where that's now you know, 4/10ths of a cent per gigabyte month. For data that customers access pretty infrequently maybe a few times a year, but they can now access that data immediately and just pay a small retrieval fee when they access that data. And so that's an example of a new capability that reduces customer's total cost of ownership, but is not just a straight up price reduction. I mentioned S3 Intelligent-Tiering, that's another case where, you know, when we launch Glacier Instant Retrieval, we integrated that with Intelligent-Tiering as well. So we have the archive instant access tier within Intelligent-Tiering. And so now data that's not accessed for 90 days is just automatically put into AIA and and then results in a reduced storage cost to customers. So again, leaning into this idea that customers are telling us, "Just do, you know what should be done "for my data to help me reduce cost, can you just do it, "and sort of give me the right defaults." And that's what we're trying to do with things like Intelligent-Tiering. We've also, you know, outside of the S3 part of our portfolio, we've been adding similar kinds of capabilities within some of our file services. So things like our, you know elastic file service launched a one zone storage class as well as an intelligent tiering capability to just automatically help customers save money. I think in some cases up to 92% on their their EFS storage costs with this automatic intelligent tiering capability. And then the last thing I would say is that we also are just continuing to help customers in other ways, like I said, our storage lens is a great way for customers to really dig in and figure out. 'Cause you know, often customers will find that they may have, you know, certain data sets that someone's forgotten about or, they're capturing more data than they expected perhaps in a logging application or something that ends up generating a lot more data than they expected. And so storage lens helps them really zoom in very quickly on, you know this is the data, here's how frequently it's being accessed and then they can make decisions about use that data I keep, how long do I keep it? Maybe that's good candidates to move down into one of our very cold storage classes like Glacier Deep Archive, where they they still have the data, but they don't expect to need to actively retrieve it on a regular basis. >> SDL bromide, if you can measure it, you can manage it. So if I can see it, visualize it, that I can take actions. When you think about S3- >> That's right. it's always been great for archival workloads but you made some updates to Glacier that changed the way that we maybe think about archive data. Can you talk about those changes specifically, what it means for how customers should leverage AWS services going forward? >> Yeah, and actually, you know, Glacier's coming up on its 10 year anniversary in August, so we're pretty excited about that. And you know, but there's just been a real increase in the pace of innovation, I think over the last three or four years there. So we launched the Glacier Deep Archive capability in 2019, 2018, I guess it was. And then we launched Glacier Instant Retrieval of course last year. So really what we're seeing is we now have three storage classes that cover are part of the Glacier family. So everything from millisecond retrieval for that data, that needs to be accessed quickly when it is accessed, but isn't being accessed, you know, regularly. So maybe a few times a year. And there's a lot of use cases that we're seeing really quickly emerge for that. Everything from, you know, user generated content like photos and videos, to big broadcaster archives and particularly in media and entertainment segment. Seeing a lot of interest in Glaciers Instant Retrieval because that data is pretty cold on a regular basis. But when they want to access it, they want a huge amount of data, petabytes of data potentially back within seconds, and that's the capability we can provide with Glacier Instant Retrieval. And then on the other end of the spectrum, with Glacier Deep Archive, again we have customers that have huge archives of data that they be looking to have that 3-AZ durability that we provide with Glacier, and make sure that data is protected. But really, you know expect to access it once a year if ever. Now it could be a backup copy of data or secondary or tertiary copy of data, could be data that they just don't have an active use for it. And I think that's one of the things we're starting to see grow a lot, is customers that have shared data sets where they may not need that data right now but they do want to keep it because as they think about, again these like new applications that can drive top line growth, they're finding that they may go back to that data six months or nine months from now and start to really actively use it. So if they want that option value to keep that data so they can use it down the road, Glacier Deep Archive, or Glacier Flexible Retrieval, which is kind of our storage class right in the middle of the road. Those are great options for customers to keep the data, keep it safe and secure, but then have it, you know pretty accessible when they're ready to get it back. >> Got it, thank you for that. So, okay, so customers have choices. I want to get into some of the competitive differentiators. And of course we were talking earlier about cost optimization, which is obviously an important topic given the macro environment you know, but there's more. And so help us understand what's different about AWS in terms of helping customers get value from their data, cost reduction as a component of value, part of the TCO, for sure. But just beyond being a cloud bit bucket, you know just a storage container in the cloud, what are some of the differentiators that you can talk to? >> Yeah, well Dave, I mean, I think that when it comes to value, I think there's tremendous benefits in AWS, well beyond just cost reduction. I think, you know, part of it is S3 now has built, I think, an earned reputation for being resilient, for storing, you know, at massive scale giving customers that confidence that they will be able to scale up. You know, we store more than 200 trillion objects. We regularly peak at over 100 million requests per second. So customers can build on S3 and Glacier with the confidence that we're going to be there to help their applications grow and scale over time. And then I think that in all of the applications both first party and third party, the customers can use, and services that they can use to build modern applications is an incredible benefit. So whether it's all of our serverless offerings, things like Lambda or containers and everything we have to manage that. Or whether it's the deep analytics and machine learning capabilities we have to help really extract, you know value and insight from data in near real time. You know, we're just seeing an incredible number of customers build those kinds of applications where they're processing data and feeding their results right back into their business right away. So I'm just going to briefly mention a couple, like, you know one example is ADP that really helps their customers measure, compare and sort of analyze their workforce. They have a couple petabytes of data, something like 25 billion individual data points and they're just processing that data continuously through their analytics and machine learning applications to then again, give those insights back to their customers. Another good example is AstraZeneca. You know, they are processing petabytes and petabytes of genomic sequencing data. And they have a goal to analyze 2 million genomes over the next four years. And so they're just really scaling up on AWS, both from a pure storage point of view, but more importantly, from all of the compute and analytics capability on top that is really critical to achieving that goal. And then, you know, beyond the first party services we have as I mentioned, it's really our third party, right? The AWS partner network provides customers an incredible range of choice in off the shelf applications that they can quickly provision and make use of the data to drive those business insights. And I think today the APN has something like 100,000 partners over in 150 countries. And we specifically have a storage competency partner where customers can go to get those applications that directly work, you know, on top of their data. And really, like I said, drive some of that insight. So, you know, I think it's that overall benefit of being able to really do a lot more with their data than just have it sit idle. You know, that's where I think we see a lot of customers interested in driving additional value. >> I'm glad you mentioned the ecosystem, and I'm glad you mentioned the storage competency as well. So there are other storage partners that you have, even though you're a head of a big storage division. And then I think there's some other under the cover things too. I've recently wrote, actually have written about this a lot. Things like nitro and rethinking virtualization and how to do, you know offloads. The security that comes, you know fundamentally as part of the platform is, I think architecturally is something that leads the way in the industry for sure. So there's a lot we could unpack, but you've fundamentally changed the storage market over the last 16 years. And again, I've written about this extensively. We used to think about storage in blocks or you got, you know, somebody who's really good in files, there were companies that dominated each space with legacy on-prem storage. You know, when you think about object storage Kevin, it was a niche, right? It was something used for archival, it was known for its simple, get put syntax, great for cheap and deep storage, and S3 changed that. Why do you think that's happened and S3 has evolved, the object has evolved the way it has, and what's the future hold for S3? >> Yeah I mean, you know, Dave, I think that probably the biggest overall trend there is that customers are looking to build cloud native applications. Where as much of that application is managed as they can have. They don't want to have to spend time managing the underlying infrastructure, the compute and storage and everything that goes around it. And so a fully managed service like S3, where there's no provisioning storage capacity, there's, you know we provide the resiliency and the durability that just really resonates with customers. And I think that increasingly, customers are seeing that they want to innovate across the entire range of business. So it's not about a central IT team anymore, it's about engineers that are embedded within lines of business, innovating around what is critical to achieve their business results. So, you know, if they're in a manufacturing segment, how can we pull data from sensors and other instrumentation off of our equipment and then make better decisions about when we need to do predictive maintenance, how quickly we can run our manufacturing line, looking for inefficiencies. And so we've developed around our managed offerings like S3, we've just developed, you know, customers who are investing and executing on plans and you know transformations. That really give them, you know put digital technology directly into the line of business that they're looking for. And I think that trend is just going to continue. People sometimes ask me, well "I mean, 16 years, you know, isn't S3 done?" And I would say, "By no stretcher are we done." We have plenty of feedback from customers on ways that we can continue to simplify, reduce the kinds of things they need to do, when they're looking for example and rolling out new security policies and parameters across their entire organization. So raising the bar there, finding, you know, raising the bar on how they can efficiently manage their storage and reduce costs. So I think we have plenty of innovation ahead of us to continue to help customers provide that fully managed capability. >> Yeah I often say Kevin, the next 10 years ain't going to be like the last in cloud. So I really thank you for coming on theCube and sharing your insights, really appreciate it. >> Absolutely Dave, thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. Okay keep it right there for more coverage of AWS Storage Day 2022 in theCube. (calm bright music)

>>Everyone welcome back from the cubes coverage here in Las Vegas for Aus re Mars. It's one of the re shows, as we know, reinvent is the big show. Now they have focus, shows reinforces coming up that security Remar is here. Machine learning, automation, robotics, and space. I'm John for your host, Michael Mike Miller here, director of machine learning thought leadership with AWS. Great to see you again. Yeah. Give alumni welcome back here. Back every time we got deep racer, always to talk >>About, Hey John, thanks for having me once again. It's great to be here. I appreciate it. >>So I want to get into the deep racer in context here, but first re Mars is a show. That's getting a lot of buzz, a lot of press. Um, not a lot of news, cuz it's not a newsy show. It's more of a builder kind of a convergence show, but a lot is happening here. It's almost a, a moment in time that I think's gonna be one of those timeless moments where we're gonna look back and saying that year at re Mars was an inflection point. It just seems like everything's pumping machine learning, scaling robotics is hot. It's now transforming fast. Just like the back office data center did years ago. Yeah. And so like a surge is coming. >>Yeah. >>What, what's your take of this show? >>Yeah. And all of these three or four components are all coming together. Right. And they're intersecting rather than just being in silos. Right. So we're seeing machine learning, enabled perception sort of on robots, um, applied to space and sort of these, uh, extra sort of application initiatives. Um, and that's, what's really exciting about this show is seeing all these things come together and all the industry-wide examples, um, of amazing perception and robotics kind of landing together. So, >>So the people out there that aren't yet inside the ropes of the show, what does it mean to them? This show? What, what, what they're gonna be what's in it for me, what's all this show. What does it mean? >>Yeah. It's just a glimpse into where things are headed. Right. And it's sort of the tip of the iceberg. It's sort of the beginning of the wave of, um, you know, these sort of advanced capabilities that we're gonna see imbued in applications, um, across all different industries. >>Awesome. Well, great to have you in the cube. Every time we have an event we wanna bring you on because deep racers become a, the hottest, I won't say cult following because it's no longer cult following. It's become massive following. Um, and which started out as an IOT, I think raspberry pie first time was like a, like >>A, we did a little camera initially camera >>And it was just a kind of a fun, little clever, I won't say hack, but just having a project that just took on a life OFS own, where are we? What's the update with racer you're here with the track. Yeah, >>Possibly >>You got the track and competing with the big dogs, literally dog, you got spot over there. Boston dynamics. >>Well we'll, we'll invite them over to the track later. Yeah. So deep razor, you know, is the fastest way to get hands on with machine learning. You know, we designed it as, uh, a way for developers to have fun while learning about this particular machine learning technique called reinforcement learning, which is all about using, uh, a simulation, uh, to teach the robot how to learn via trial and error. So deep racer includes a 3d racing simulator where you can train your model via trial and error. It includes the physical car. So you can take, uh, the model that you trained in the cloud, download it to this one 18th scale, um, kind of RC car. That's been imbued with an extra sensor. So we have a camera on the front. We've got an extra, uh, Intel, X, 86 processor inside here. Um, and this thing will drive itself, autonomously around the track. And of course what's a track and uh, some cars driving around it without a little competition. So we've got the deep racer league that sort of sits on top of this and adds a little spice to the whole thing. It's >>It's, it's like formula one for nerds. It really is. It's so good because a lot of people will have to readjust their models cuz they go off the track and I see people and it's oh my, then they gotta reset. This has turned into quite the phenomenon and it's fun to watch and every year it gets more competitive. I know you guys have a cut list that reinvent, it's almost like a, a super score gets you up. Yeah. Take, take us through the reinvents coming up. Sure. What's going on with the track there and then we'll get into some of the new adoption in terms of the people. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, you know, we have monthly online races where we have a new track every month that challenges our, our developers to retrain their model or sort of tweak the existing model that they've trained to adapt for those new courses. Then at physical events like here at re Mars and at our AWS summits around the world, we have physical, uh, races. Um, and we crown a champion at each one of those races. You may have heard some cheering a minute ago. Yeah. That was our finals over there. We've got some really fast cars, fast models racing today. Um, so we take the winners from each of those two circuits, the virtual and the physical and they, the top ones of them come together at reinvent every year in November, December. Um, and we have a set of knockout rounds, championship rounds where these guys get the field gets narrowed to 10 racers and then those 10 racers, uh, race to hold up the championship cup and, um, earn, earn, uh, you know, a whole set of prizes, either cash or, or, you know, scholarships or, you know, tuition funds, whatever the, uh, the developer is most interested >>In. You know, I ask you this question every time you come on the cube because I I'm smiling. That's, it's so much fun. I mean, if I had not been with the cube anyway, I'd love to do this. Um, would you ever imagine when you first started this, that it would be such so popular and at the rise of eSports? So, you know, discord is booming. Yeah. The QB has a discord channel now. Sure, sure. Not that good on it yet, but we'll get there, but just the gaming culture, the nerd culture, the robotics clubs, the young people, just nerds who wanna compete. You never thought that would be this big. We, >>We were so surprised by a couple key things after we launched deep racer, you know, we envisioned this as a way for, you know, developers who had already graduated from school. They were in a company they wanted to grow their machine learning skills. Individuals could adopt this. What we saw was individuals were taking these devices and these concepts back to their companies. And they're saying, this is really fun. Like we should do something around this. And we saw companies like JPMC and Accenture and Morningstar into it and national Australia bank all adopting deep racer as a way to engage, excite their employees, but then also create some fun collaboration opportunities. Um, the second thing that was surprising was the interest from students. And it was actually really difficult for students to use deep racer because you needed an AWS account. You had to have a credit card. You might, you might get billed. There was a free tier involved. Um, so what we did this past year was we launched the deep racer student league, um, which caters to students 16 or over in high school or in college, uh, deep Razer student includes 10 hours a month of free training, um, so that they can train their models in the cloud. And of course the same series of virtual monthly events for them to race against each other and win, win prizes. >>So they don't have to go onto the dark web hack someone's credit card, get a proton email account just to get a deep Razer that's right. They can now come in on their own. >>That's right. That's right. They can log into that virtual the virtual environment, um, and get access. And, and one of the other things that we realized, um, and, and that's a common kind of, uh, realization across the industry is both the need for the democratization of machine learning. But also how can we address the skills gap for future ML learners? Um, and this applies to the, the, the world of students kind of engaging. And we said, Hey, you know, um, the world's gonna see the most successful and innovative ideas come from the widest possible range of participants. And so we knew that there were some issues with, um, you know, underserved and underrepresented minorities accessing this technology and getting the ML education to be successful. So we partnered with Intel and Udacity and launched the AI and ML scholarship program this past year. And it's also built on top of deep Bracer student. So now students, um, can register and opt into the scholarship program and we're gonna give out, uh, Udacity scholarships to 2000 students, um, at the end of this year who compete in AWS deep racer student racers, and also go through all of the learning modules online. >>Okay. Hold on, lets back up. Cuz it sounds, this sounds pretty cool. All right. So we kind went fast on that a little bit slow today at the end of the day. So if they sign up for the student account, which is lowered the batteries for, and they Intel and a desk, this is a courseware for the machine learning that's right. So in order to participate, you gotta take some courseware, check the boxes and, and, and Intel is paying for this or you get rewarded with the scholarship after the fact. >>So Intel's a partner of ours in, in putting this on. So it's both, um, helping kind of fund the scholarships for students, but also participating. So for the students who, um, get qualified for the scholarship and, and win one of those 2000 Udacity Nanodegree scholarships, uh, they also will get mentoring opportunities. So AWS and Intel, um, professionals will help mentor these students, uh, give them career advice, give them technical advice. C >>They'll they're getting smarter. Absolutely. So I'm just gonna get to data here. So is it money or credits for the, for the training? >>That's the scholarship or both? Yes. So, so the, the student training is free for students. Yep. They get 10 hours a month, no credits they need to redeem or anything. It's just, you log in and you get your account. Um, then the 2000, uh, Udacity scholarships, those are just scholarships that are awarded to, to the winners of the student, um, scholarship program. It's a four month long, uh, class on Python programming for >>AI so's real education. Yeah. It's like real, real, so ones here's 10 hours. Here's check the box. Here's here's the manual. Yep. >>Everybody gets access to that. That's >>Free. >>Yep. >>To the student over 16. Yes. Free. So that probably gonna increase the numbers. What kind of numbers are you looking at now? Yeah. In terms of scope to scale here for me. Yeah. Scope it >>Out. What's the numbers we've, we've been, uh, pleasantly surprised. We've got over 55,000 students from over 180 countries around the world that have signed up for the deep racer student program and of those over 30,000 have opted into that scholarship program. So we're seeing huge interest, um, from across the globe in, in this virtual students, um, opportunity, you know, and students are taking advantage of those 20 hours of learning. They're taking advantage of the fun, deep racer kind of hands on racing. Um, and obviously a large number of them are also interested in this scholarship opportunity >>Or how many people are in the AWS deep racer, um, group. Now, because now someone's gotta work on this stuff. It's went from a side hustle to like a full initiative. Well, >>You know, we're pretty efficient with what we, you know, we're pretty efficient. You've probably read about the two pizza teams at Amazon. So we keep ourselves pretty streamlined, but we're really proud of, um, what we've been able to bring to the table. And, you know, over those pandemic years, we really focused on that virtual experience in viewing it with those gaming kind of gamification sort of elements. You know, one of the things we did for the students is just like you guys, we have a discord channel, so not only can the students get hands on, but they also have this built in community of other students now to help support them bounce ideas off of and, you know, improve their learning. >>Awesome. So what's next, take us through after this event and what's going on for you more competitions. >>Yeah. So we're gonna be at the remainder of the AWS summits around the world. So places like Mexico city, you know, uh, this week we were in Milan, um, you know, we've got some AWS public sector, um, activities that are happening. Some of those are focused on students. So we've had student events in, um, Ottawa in Canada. We've had a student event in Japan. We've had a student event in, um, Australia, New Zealand. And so we've got events, both for students as well as for the professionals who wanna compete in the league happening around the world. And again, culminating at reinvent. So we'll be back here in Vegas, um, at the beginning of December where our champions will, uh, compete to ho to come. >>So you guys are going to all the summits, absolutely. Most of the summits or >>All of them, anytime there's a physical summit, we'll be there with a track and cars and give developers the opportunity to >>The track is always open. >>Absolutely. All >>Right. Well, thanks for coming on the cube with the update. Appreciate it, >>Mike. Thanks, John. It was great to be >>Here. Pleasure to know you appreciate it. Love that program. All right. Cube coverage here. Deep race are always the hit. It's a fixture at all the events, more exciting than the cube. Some say, but uh, almost great to have you on Mike. Uh, great success. Check it out free to students. The barrier's been lower to get in every robotics club. Every math club, every science club should be signing up for this. Uh, it's a lot of fun and it's cool. And of course you learn machine learning. I mean, come on. There's one to learn that. All right. Cube coverage. Coming back after this short break.

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. To the cubes coverage of AWS summit, 2022 in San Francisco, California. We're here, live on the floor at the Mosconi south events are back. I'm John fur, your host. Remember AWS summit 2022 in New York city is coming this summer. We'll be there with the live cube there as well. Look for us there, but of course, we're back in action with the cloud and AWS. Our next guest Garrett Miller is the general manager of navigation at Mapbox. I mean, it's been a Amazon customer for a long time, Garrett. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Yeah. Thanks for having us, John. >>So you guys are in the middle of, I love the whole location base slash we developer integration. We've had many conversations on the cube around how engineers and developers are becoming embedded into the application, whether it's from a security standpoint, biometrics, all kinds of stuff, being built into the app and, and location navigation. That's right. Is huge from cars. Everyone knows their car, car map. That's right. GPS satellites, some space it's complicated. It sounds like it sounds easy, but I know it's hard. Yeah. You, you get the keynote going on today. Give us a quick update on Mapbox and we'll then we'll talk about the keynote. >>Yeah. You bet John that's right. So as you were saying, you know, it really is. It's all about location intelligence. And how does that get embedded into the applications? And to the point you made vehicles that are out there on the roads to today. So we target developers. Those are our key customers, and we've got over three and a half million registered on the platform today. They consume the modules that we build with APIs, SDKs, data sets, and more and more applications to accomplish whatever those location needs might be. >>Why we appreciate you coming on. You are featured keynote by presenter here at summit, which means Amazon thinks you're super important to share. I'll say your customer. So you, I know you've been a customer for a long time as a company, but what was your keynote about what was the main theme? The developers were all here. You got the builders. What was your content? What did you present this morning on the keynote? Yeah, >>Well, this morning we really talked a lot about logistics and the, this story that we told was know in the logistics industry, there is a massive movement to shorter and shorter delivery windows. And so the, the, the story that we told is really around a 10 minute delivery. Now, have you ever wondered how you get a 10 minute delivery? You, you place an order on your phone and all of a sudden somebody shows up at your front doorstep. You ever wonder about that? >><laugh> >>Some shows supply >>Chain. Someone's waiting in the wings from my call. >>Yeah. >>Yeah. Well, that's right. >>John's about to order sometime soon. That's right. You ready? That's right. Do all these assets. That's >>Right. They're all ready for you. But there's actually a tremendous amount that actually goes into that. And so it really starts with designing the right distribution system up front. And so we've got tools and, and applications and, and APIs that support that. And really it, every single step of the way, location is a critical aspect to making that delivery happen and getting it to a customer's doorstep in 10 minutes or less. And so how are you understanding the real time road graph that underlies a, a, a driver going from perhaps a dark store, dark kitchen to getting in, excuse me, in front of a customer in 10 minutes with hot food. >>I mean, this is a big point. I was just joking about waiting for me, you know, that, but the point is, is that it's not obvious, but it sounds really hard. I know it's hard because to have that delivery, a lot of things have to happen. It's not just knowing location. >>That's exactly >>Right. So can you just UN pull appeal back the covers on that? What's going on there? >>Yeah. So imagine this is, is, it really starts, as I was saying with designing that distribution system and it's putting in place where you might not expect it, it's actually putting in place a retail store, but these aren't any retail stores, right? These are dark stores. These are dark kitchens that are strategically placed as close as possible, the customer density, so that you can actually shorten that window as much as possible to get you whatever that order might be. But from there, it actually goes quite a bit further when an order actually comes in, you've gotta be able to understand how do I sign an, a driver to get that order to the customer in that, in that very short period of time, more often than not, it's getting it to the driver that can get there the fastest, once you've got the right driver identified, how are you actually then going to enable them to get from point a to B to get that order. >>And then perhaps from B to C to get to your front door, being able to do turn by turn navigation that reflects everything. That's how happening in the real world to be able to get there on a timely way is critical. And then wrapping around that actually the, the, the end customer's experience your experience with how are you placing that order? Yeah. How are you using Mapbox services to do that? How are you being able to track on your application and say, well, you know, great, I expect 10 minutes and they're five minutes away. Are you gonna show up our APIs and SDKs power? That experience, >>I wanna get into the product in a second, but you brought up something I think's important to highlight. One is dark kitchens, dark stores. That's right. Okay. Term people may or may not have heard of, we all have experience in COVID going to our favorite restaurant, which has been kind of downsized because of the COVID and we're waiting for our food. And someone comes in from another delivery ever standing in line next was just pick something up. I mean, they're going through the front door. That's like the, the, the branded store. So, so is it right to say that dark kitchens are essentially replicas of the store to minimize that traffic, but, but also to be efficient for something else that's right. >>It actually even goes further than that. There are many restaurant brands. Now, it only exists as a brand. They don't have a restaurant that you can go to and sit down and have that meal. They actually only operate dark kitchens to, to serve that demand of people wanting to order up, Hey, I want my food. I want it. Now, those brands exist to serve that need. >>All right. So great for the definition, we just define dark kitchens, dark stores, but also brings, I wanna get your reaction to this before we get into the product, cuz this is a trend that's right. This is not like a one off thing. That's right. It's not a pulled forward TA a market that was COVID enabled. This is actually a user experience inflection point. That's >>Right. >>Can you share your vision on what this means? Because there's mobile ordering, there's the dynamics of the kitchens as a supplier of something in stores. So that's content or a product that's being delivered to a consumer via of the web. So now there's gotta be a whole nother reef factoring of the operating environment. Now that's what's happening is that might get that >>Right? No, that's exactly right. And even if you step back, even further and you, you think about the, the journey that the logistics industry has been on, it used to be that two days was that really exciting delivery time. Right. And everybody got it super excited. Then it became next day. Then it became same day and now it's become 10 minutes. And even some companies are out there offering seven minute deliveries, right. And in order to do that, you've gotta completely retool your business. So you can think the logistics and industry really existing on two continuums, you've got pre-planned deliveries on one hand and on-demand deliveries on the other. And there are two parallel distribution systems and ecosystems and industries really springing up to serve those different types of demand. >>So you've been on Amazon web services customer for how many years, >>Since 2013 in our founding. And you know, actually we're really proud to say that we were born on Amazon and we have scaled on Amazon. >>How are they helping you scale? What are they doing to help you? >>Well, I'd say just about everything. And if you think about their, the, the services that Amazon provides for us, they power every single step of our business along the way. And so I'll give you an example. We can walk through that with some of the tech technology. I, if you think about again, how do you get 10 minutes? You gotta have a pretty precise understanding of what's going on in the real world. And so to do that, it, for us, it all starts with collecting billions and billions of data points from sensors that are out there in the world. We stream that into our technology stack, starting at the very beginning with Amazon ESIS. And so that's just the start. But then that feeds into our entire technology stack that all runs on site on top of AWS, to where we're running our own AI models that we use Amazon SageMaker to make, and then stream it back out to our AP, through our APIs, to our se Ks and applications that sit on the edge again, all leveraging Amazon technology. >>Well, I think this is a great use case and I'll get back into the, the Mapbox a second, but Amazon, you guys are executing what I call the super cloud vision, which is snowflake you guys building on their CapX leverage. You're building a super cloud on your own. It's your app, it's your cloud. >>That's right. That's right. So if you, again, if you think about it, you know, and actually just stepping back for a moment, tell about Mapbox for a second is what, what Mapbox can do is provide the most accurate digital representation of the physical world. Think about the Mapbox technology, delivering the most accurate digital twin of mother earth, right? That's what we do. And the way that we do that is to consume, as I said earlier, vast amounts of data, we've got powerful AI that structures that data, and then really robust and scalable infrastructure that underpins all of that. Now the benefit of working with a company like AWS is that they take care of that third point. Yeah. Which means we get to go focus on the first two, which is how we differentiate and build our >>Business. And that's exactly the model of how you win in the cloud. In my opinion, that's the go big piece, the go and there's tools that fit in white spaces. But that's the, I think that's the right formula. Let's get back to Mac boxer. I know you've got news. You got the, the, uh, Mapbox fleet SDK. You announced, I wanna hold on that we'll get to in a second, let's get back to what you got are providing that example as you have this new operating environment of how delivery and, and supply chain and that's example, I want to know how tech your technology is making all that work. Because I was just talking to someone last night about this web van was web 1.0 and crash never was successful. Instacart is kind of hurting. So maybe they're optimized. You could save them. I mean, cuz the economics gotta work. If you don't have the underlying system built, that might fail. So there'll be probably the third version that gets it. Right. Maybe at Mapbox again, I'm speculating, but I'll let you talk. Yeah. How does Mapbox solve the, that problem? >>You know, it's interesting if you come back to that, that, that analogy we're using with AWS and how do you use AWS to win in the cloud? It's the same story for Mapbox of how do you win in the location industry? And what we do is provide those same tool sets of APIs and SDKs, the thing go power, those logistics companies like an Instacart, who's a great customer of ours to run in their logistics business on top of it again, it's all about how do you provide technology that allows your customers yeah. To focus on what matters from a differentiation perspective as they focus on building their >>Business and you think your economics is gonna enable these people to be successful >>100%. That's >>The goal >>100%. >>All right. So another thing that I wanna bring up is the fleet SDK, what was the, that you announced they can, you just quickly share the news on what this >>Is? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I appreciate that, John. Yeah. So today on the Eve of earth day, we're very excited to announce Mapbox fleet going into, uh, our beta launch and what Mapbox fleet is, is, uh, a set of tools and application that allows our customers to more efficiently route their vehicles, which means lowering their fuel consumption. And at the same time, more efficiently dispatching those vehicles, which means that you can get more done with fewer assets, essentially. How do you get more packages onto a single vehicle to get those to the customers? Now you may be watching the news and understanding, yeah, there's a tremendous explosion of delivery going. Yeah. And that's fantastic. Right? That's great business for our logistics customers. Good business for us too. What's happening though, is that as those volumes are ballooning, everybody's all of a sudden, really looking at their cost structures and trying to understand how do I manage this? >>Right. I have efficiency targets as a business. Maybe I've been really focused on customer acquisition. Now it's time to flip the model and really understand in the economics of profitable growth. We help with that, with that focus on efficiency, but the double edged sword with growth and, and you know, running a logistics business is that you actually have a tremendous amount of carbon emissions that are associated with that. Yeah. For a car to show up or a truck to show up, to deliver something to your house, their emissions associated with that. So what we find is that we're able to not only drive dollar savings for our customers, but also as part of that, with the efficiency angle, really help to drive down the overall carbon impact in the carbon footprint of what they do. And >>How do you do that? >>Well, it's the efficiency lens, right? So if somebody is driving 20%, fewer miles, they're going to emit 20% fewer. Okay. >>Gotcha. So it's a numbers game across the board with actual measurement. That's exactly right. Built in and say optimization paths, all kinds of navigation. >>That's exactly right. So embedded within Mapbox fleet application are those optimization algorithm. >>So you got a platform that's setting up for the next level delivery system slash new way to connect people to goods and services and other things getting from point a to point B, you got the sustainability check you're in the cloud, born in the cloud cloud scale. I gotta a, I can't go without asking if you're on Amazon, you do all this cool stuff. There's gotta be a machine learning an AI angle. So what is that? Yeah, absolutely. >>Absolutely. AB yeah. You know, <laugh> guilty as charged. >>I would say >>John. Uh, so look, I >>Think, I mean AI and, and sustainability are gonna be, I think filings in my, in the future we be talking about on the cube, if you're not an AI company or, and doing force for good stuff, I think there's gonna be mandatory requirements on those. >>I couldn't three more. I think the ESG agenda is an incredibly important one. One that's core to Mapbox has been since the founding of the company back in 2013. Uh, but if you look at how does AI and ML fit into Mapbox, it does that in a number of different ways. And really when we come back to this idea of Mapbox creating a digital twin of the earth, the way that we do that, it is through ingesting a tremendous amount of sensor data. Right? You can imagine, uh, Mapbox customers on any given week drive, billions of miles, we're capturing all of that telemetry data to understand and make sense of what does that mean for, for, for the world that allows us to push in any given day 700,000 updates to our underly, your location technology stack, and at the same time provide insights as to exactly what's happening. Are there roadside incidents? Are there, are there issues with traffic? So by collecting all of that data, we run incredibly powerful AI models on top of it that allow us to create the, the real world representation of what's happening. That's exactly how >>It works. What, what, as they say in the, um, big data AI world is you guys have a tremendous observation space. You're looking at a lot of surface area data that's exactly right. Across multiple workloads and apps. That's >>Exactly >>Right. You can connect those dots with the right AI. >>That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And I think I, you know, coming back to your point around sustainability, I do think that the AI and ML capabilities that are being delivered are going to be paramount to that. It being such a fundamental aspect to what am, to what Mapbox does as a business allows us to launch these game changing solutions like Mapbox fleet and staying on that, that kind of environmental and sustainable kick for a second. Just last week, we launched our, our EV routing API that powers the next generation of EVs. So AI ML sustainability. If it's not core business today, it's gotta very quickly become core. >>It's really interesting. I really think what we're teasing out here and it's fun to talk about it now because we'll look back at it later 10 years or more and say, wow, this is completely refactored the industry and lives and the planet ultimately. Right. So this is a, a kind of got force for good built into the system natively. That's >>Right. That's >>That's interesting, Garrett, thanks so much for sharing the story. Give you the last word, share with the audience, what you guys are up to, what you're promoting, what you're looking for. Are you hiring, uh, is there a call to action? You wanna share? Give the plug for the company? Yeah, >>Absolutely hiring like crazy come join Mapbox and BU build the future of geolocation and intelligent location services with us. Uh, the, thanks so much for the time, >>John. Thanks for coming on cube coverage here in San Francisco, California Mosconi center back at live events. I'm John for host cube stayed with us as day two wraps down. Remember New York city. This summer will be there as well. Cube coverage of more cloud coverage events are back. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone, Cube coverage live on the floor in the Moscone center in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier host of the Cube. AWS summit 2022 is here in San Francisco, we're back in live events. Of course, Amazon summit in New York city is coming, Amazon summit this summer we'll be there as well. We've got a great guest Mike Miller, GN of AI devices at AWS always one of my favorite interviews. We've got a little prop here, we got the car, DeepRacer, very popular at the events. Mike, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. >> Hey John, thank you for having me. It's really exciting to be back and chat with you a little bit about DeepRacer. >> Well I want to get into the prop in a second, not the prop, the product. >> Yeah. >> So DeepRacer program, you got the race track here. Just explain what it is real quick, we'll get that out of the way. >> Absolutely so, well, you know that AI, AWS is passionate about making AI and ML more accessible to developers of all skill levels. So DeepRacer is one of our tools to do that. So DeepRacer is a 3D cloud-based racing simulator, a 1/18th scale autonomously driven car and a league to add a little spicy competition into it. So developers can start with the cloud-based simulator where they're introduced to reinforcement learning which basically teaches the, our car to drive around a track through trial and error and of course you're in a virtual simulator so it's easy for it to make mistakes and restart. Then once that model is trained, it's downloaded to the car which then can drive around a track autonomously, kind of making its own way and of course we track lap time and your successful lap completions and all of that data feeds into our league to try to top the leaderboard and win prizes. >> This is the ultimate gamification tool. (chuckles) >> Absolutely >> Making it fun to learn about machine learning. All right, let's get into the car, let's get into the showcase of the car. show everyone what's going on. >> Absolutely. So this is our 1/18th scale autonomously driven car. It's built off of a monster truck chassis so you can see it's got four wheel drive, it's got steering in the front, we've got a camera on the front. So the camera is the, does the sensing to the compute board that's driven by an Intel atom a processor on the, on the vehicle, that allows it to make sense of the in front of it and then decide where it wants to drive. So you take the car, you download your trained model to it and then it races around the track. >> So the front is the camera. >> The front is the camera, that's correct. >> Okay, So... >> So it's a little bit awkward but we needed to give it plenty of room here so that I can actually see the track in front of it. >> John: It needs eyes. >> Yep. That's exactly right. >> Awesome. >> Yes. >> And so I got to buy that if I'm a developer. >> So, developers can start in two ways, they can use our virtual racing experience and so there's no hardware cost for that, but once you want the experience, the hands on racing, then the car is needed but if you come to one of our AWS summits, like here in San Francisco or anywhere else around the world we have one or more tracks set up and you can get hands on, you can bring the model that you trained at home download it to a car and see it race around the track. >> So use a car here. You guys are not renting cars, but you're letting people use the cars. >> Absolutely. >> Can I build my own car or does it have to be assembled by AWS? >> Yeah, we, we sell it as a, as a kit that's already assembled because we've got the specific compute board in there, that Intel processor and all of the software that's already built on there that knows how to drive around the track. >> That's awesome, so talk about the results. What's going on? What's the feedback from developers? Obviously it's a nerd dream, people like race cars, people love formula one now, all the racing there. IOT is always an IOT opportunity as well. >> Absolutely, and as you said, gamification, right? And so what we found and what we thought we would find was that adding in those sort of ease of learning so we make it the on-ramp to machine learning very easy. So developers of all skill levels can take advantage of this, but we also make it fun by kind of gamifying it. We have different challenges every month, we have a leader board so you can see how you rank against your peers and actually we have split our league into two, there's an open division which is more designed for novices so you'll get rewarded for just participating and then we have a pro league. So if you're one of the top performers in the open league each month, you graduate and you get to race against the big boys in the pro leagues. >> What's the purse? >> Oh, the, (John laughing) we definitely have cash and prizes that happen, both every month. We have prizes cause we do races every month and those winners of those races all get qualified to race at the championship, which of course happens in Las Vegas at re:Invent. So we bring all the winners to re:Invent and they all race against each other for the grand prize the big trophy and the, and the, and the cash prize. >> Well, you know, I'm a big fan of what you guys are doing so I'm kind of obviously biased on this whole program but you got to look at trend of what's going on in eSports and the online engagement is off the charts, are there plans to kind of make this more official and bigger? Is there traction there or is this just all part of the Amazon goodness, love that you guys give back? I mean, obviously it's got traction. >> Yeah. I mean, the thing that's interesting about eSports is the number of young people who are getting into it and what we saw over the last couple years is that, there were a lot of students who were adopting DeepRacer but there were some hurdles, you know, it wasn't really designed for them. So what we did was we made some changes and at the beginning of this year we launched a student focused DeepRacer program. So they get both free training every month, they get free educational materials and their own private league so they know students can race against other students, as part of that league. >> John: Yeah. >> So that was really our first step in kind of thinking about those users and what do we need to do to cater to their kind of unique needs? >> Tell about some of the power dynamics or the, or not power dynamics, the group dynamics around teams and individuals, can I play as an individual? Do I, do I have to be on a team? Can I do teams? How does that look? How do you think about those things? >> Yeah, absolutely. Great, great question. The primary way to compete is individually. Now we do have an offering that allows companies to use DeepRacer to excite and engage their own employees and this is where operating as a team and collaborating with your coworkers comes into play so, if, if I may there's, you know, Accenture and JPMC are a couple big customers of ours, really strong partners. >> John: Yeah. >> Who've been able to take advantage of DeepRacer to educate their workforce. So Accenture ran a 24 hour round the, round the globe race a couple years ago, encouraging their employees to collaborate and form teams to race and then this past year JPMC, had over 3000 of their builders participate over a three month period where they ran a private league and they went on to win the top two spots, first place and second place. >> John: Yeah. >> At reinvent last year. >> It reminds me the NASCAR and all these like competitions, the owners have multiple cars on the race. Do you guys at re:Invent have to start cutting people like, only two submissions or is it free for all? >> Well, you have to qualify to get to the races at re:invent so it's very, it's very cutthroat leading up to that point. We've got winners of our monthly virtual contests, the winners like of the summit races will also get invited. So it's interesting, this dynamic, you'll have some people who won virtual races, some people who won physical races, all competing together. >> And do you guys have a name for the final cup or is it like what's the, what's the final, how do you guys talk about the prizes and the... >> It's, it's the DeepRacer Championship Cup of course. >> John: Of course. (laughter) >> Big silver cup, you get to hoist it and... >> Are the names inscribed in it, is it like the Stanley cup or is it just one. >> It's a unique one, so you get to hold onto it each year. The champion gets their own version of the cup. >> It's a lot of fun. I think it's really kind of cool. What's the benefits for a student? Talk about the student ones. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> So I'm a student I'm learning machine learning, what's in it for me is a career path and the fund's obvious, I see that. >> Yeah absolutely. You know, the, for students, it's a hands on way that's a very easy on-ramp to machine learning and you know, one of the things, as I mentioned we're passionate about making it accessible to all. Well, when we mean all we were really do mean all. So, we've got a couple partners who are passionate about the same thing, right? Which is how do we, if, if AI and ML is going to transform our world and solve our most challenging problems, how can we get the right minds from all walks of life and all backgrounds to learn machine learning and get engaged? So with two of our partners, so with Udacity and with Intel we launched a $10 million AWS, AI and ML scholarship program and we built it around DeepRacer. So not only can students who are college and high school students, age 16 and over can use DeepRacer, can learn about machine learning and then get qualified to win one of several thousand scholarships. >> Any other promotions going on that people should know about? >> Yeah, one, one final one is, so we talked about enterprises like JPMC and Accenture, so we've got a promotion that we just started yesterday. So if you are an enterprise and you want to host a DeepRacer event at your company to excite your employees and get 'em collaborating more, if you have over 50 employees participating, we're going to give you up to a hundred thousand dollars in AWS credits, to offset the costs of running your DeepRacer event at your, at your company so >> That's real money. >> Yeah. Real, real, real exciting I think for companies now to pick up DeepRacer. >> So, I mean, honestly, I know Andy Jassy, I have many sports car conversations with him. He's a sports guy, he's now the CEO of Amazon, gets to go all the sporting events, NFL. I wish I could bring the Cube there but, we'll stick with with cloud for now. You got to look at the purse kind of thing. I'm interested in like the whole economic point of cause I mean, forget the learning for side for a second which is by the way awesome. This is great competition. You got leader boards, you got regional activities, you got a funneling system laddering up to the final output. >> And we've really done a decent job and, and of adding capabilities into that user experience to make it more engaging. You can see the countries that the different competitors are from, you can see how the lap times change over time, you know, we give awards as I mentioned, the two divisions now. So if you're not super competitive, we'll reward you for just participating in that open league but if you want to get competitive, we'll even better rewards monthly in the Pro League. >> Do you guys have any conversations internally like, this is getting too big, we might have to outsource it or you keep it in inside the fold? (laughter) >> We, we love DeepRacer and it's so much fun running this, >> You see where I'm going with this. You see where I'm going with this right? The Cube might want to take this over. >> Hey. >> And you know >> We're always looking for partners and sponsors who can help us make it bigger so, absolutely. >> It's a good business opportunity. I just love it. Congratulations, great stuff. What's the big learning in this, you know, as a as an executive, you look back you got GM, AI super important and, and I think it is great community, communal activity as well. What's the learning, what have you learned from this over the years besides that it's working but like what's the big takeaway? >> Yeah, I mean. We've got such a wide range of developers and builders who are customers that we need to provide a variety of opportunities for people to get hands on and there's no better way to learn a complex technology like AI and ML than getting hands on and seeing, you know, physically the result of the AI and I think that's been the biggest learning, is that just having the hands on and the sort of element of watching what it does, just light bulbs go off. When, when developers look at this and they start piecing the, the puzzle pieces together, how they can benefit. >> So I have to ask the question that might be on other peoples minds, maybe it's not, maybe I'm just thinking really dark here but gamers love to hack and they love cheat codes, they love to get, you know, get into the system, any attempts to do a little hacking to win the, the the game, have you guys, is there, you know? >> Well, well, you know, last year we, we we released an open source version of the vehicle so that people could start using it as a platform to explore and do that kind of hacking and give them an opportunity build on top of it. >> So using mods, mods modules, we can mod out on this thing. >> Yeah, absolutely. If you go to deepracer.com, we have sort of extensions page there, and you can see, somebody mounted a Nerf cannon onto the top of this, somebody built a computer vision model that could recognize you know, rodents and this thing would kind of drive to scare 'em, all kinds of fun topics. >> So it's a feature, not a bug. >> Absolutely. >> Open it up. >> Yeah. >> And also on transparency, if you have the source code out there you guys can have some review. >> Yeah. The whole idea is like, let's see what developers, >> It's really not hackable. It's not hackable. >> Yeah, I mean, for the, if you think about it when we do the races, we bring the cars ourselves, the only way a developer interacts is by giving us their trained models so... >> And you, do you guys review the models? Nothing to review, right? >> Yeah. There's nothing really to review. It's all about, you know, there, there was a model that we saw one time where the car went backwards and then went forwards across the finish line but we, we, we gently told them, well that's really not a valid way to race. >> That was kind of a hack, not really a hack. That was a hack hack. (laughter) That was just a growth hack. >> Exactly, but everybody just has a lot of fun with it across the board. >> Mike, great, thanks for coming on. Love the prop. Thanks for bringing the car on, looks great. Success every year. I want to see the purse, you know, big up to $1,000,000 you know, the masters, you know, tournament. >> Someday. (John chuckles) >> You guys.. >> Thank you for having me John. >> DeepRacer again, Fun Start has a great way to train people on machine learning, IOT device, turns into a league of its own. Great stuff for people to learn, especially students and people in companies, but the competitive juices flowing. That's what it's all about, having fun, learning. It's the Cube here in San Francisco. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (gentle music)

(gentle music) >> Okay. We're back at AWS re:Invent. You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage. This is day four. Think it's the first time, at re:Invent, we've done four days. This is our ninth year covering re:Invent. Tom Miller is here. He's the senior vice president of alliances. And he's joined by Ankur Jain, who's the global cloud practice lead at Merkle. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Good to see you. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Tom, tell us about Merkel, for those who might not be familiar with you. >> Yeah. So, Merkle is a customer experience management company that is under the dentsu umbrella. Dentsu is a global media agency. We represent one of the pillars, which is customer experience management. And they also have media and creative. And what Merkle does is provide that technology to help bring that creative and media together. >> So you're a tech company? >> Yes. >> Right? Okay. So there's some big tailwinds, changes, trends going on in the market. Obviously, the pandemic, the forced march to digital, there's regulation. What are some of the big waves that you guys are seeing, that you're trying to ride? >> So what we're seeing is, as a start, we've got a lot of existing databases with clients that are on-prem, that we manage today, within a SQL environment or so forth. And they need to move that to a cloud environment. To be more flexible, more agile, provide them with more data, be able to follow that customer experience that they want with their clients, that they're all realizing they need, to be in a digital environment. And so, that's a big push for us working with AWS and helping move our clients into that cloud environment. >> And you're relatively you new to the AWS world, right? Maybe you can talk about that, Ankur. >> Well, actually, as a partner, we may be new. But Merkle has been working with AWS for over five years. >> Dave Vellante: As a customer? >> As a customer. >> Yeah. >> So what we did was, last year, we formalized the relationship with AWS to be an advanced partner now. So we are part of the re:Stack program, basically, which is a pool of very select partners. And Merkel comes in with the specialization of marketing. So, as Tom said, you know, we are part of a dentsu umbrella. Our core focus is on customer experience transformation. And how we do that customer experience transformation is through digital transformation, data transformation. And that's where we see AWS being a very good partner to us, to modernize the solutions that Merkle can take to the market. >> So, I mean, your on-prem databases, there's probably a lot of diversity on-prem. (laughs) A lot of tech... When the cloud, you know, more agility, infinite resources. Do you have a tech stack? Are you more of an integrator? Right tool for the right job? Maybe you could describe your technical philosophy. >> Yeah, I could take that. What Tom just described... So let me give you some perspective on what these databases are. These databases are, essentially, Merkle helping big brands, Fortune 100, Fortune 500 brands to modernize their marketing ecosystem. Especially, MarTech ecosystem. So these databases, they house customer touchpoints, customer data from disparate sources. And they, basically, integrate that data in one central place. And then bolt-on analytics, data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, on top of it. Helping them with those email campaigns or direct mail campaigns, social campaigns. So that's what these databases are all about. And these databases, currently, sit on-prem, on Merkle's own data center. And we have a huge opportunity to kind of take those databases and modernize them. Give all these AI, ML type of capabilities, advanced analytic capabilities, to our customers by using AWS as the platform to kind of migrate that. >> Dave Vellante: And you do that as a service? >> We do that as a service. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> Strategically, >> Yes. >> you're sort of transforming your business- >> Yes. >> to help your customers transform their business. >> Right. >> Right? Take away, it's classic. I mean, it's happening. This theme of, you know, AWS started with taking away the undifferentiated heavy lifting for infrastructure. Now you're seeing Nasdaq, Goldman Sachs, you guys in the media world, essentially building your own clouds, right? That's the strategy. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> Right? >> Absolutely. >> Superclouds, we call 'em. >> Superclouds, yeah. (Dave laughs) It's about helping our clients understand what is it they're trying to accomplish. And, for the most part, they're trying to understand the customer journey, where that customer is, how they're driving that experience with them, and understanding that experience through the journey. And doing that in the cloud makes it tremendously easier and more economical for 'em. >> Yeah, I was listening to the Snowflake earnings call from last night. And they were talking about, you know, a couple of big verticals, one being media. And all they keep talking about was direct-to-consumer, right? You're hearing that a lot. >> Ankur Jain: Yes. >> Media companies want to interact and build community directly. They don't want to necessarily, I mean, you don't want to go through a third-party anymore, if you don't have to. Technology's enabling that, right? Is that, kind of, the play here? >> Yes. Direct-to-consumer is a huge play. Companies which were traditionally brick-and-mortar-based, or relied on a supply chain of dealers and distributors, are now, basically, transforming themselves to be direct-to-consumer. They want to sell directly to the consumer. Personalization becomes a big theme, especially in D2C type of environment. Because, now, those customers are expecting brands to know what's their like, what's their dislike, which products, which services are they interested in. So that's all kind of advanced analytics, machine learning powered solutions. These are big data problems, that all these brands are kind of trying to solve. That's where Merkle is partnering with AWS, to bring all those technologies, and build those next generation solutions for our customers. >> So what kind of initiatives are you working on with AWS? >> So, there are, like, three, four areas that we are working very closely with AWS. Number one, I would say, think about our marketer's friend. You know, and they have a transformation like direct-to-consumer, omnichannel, e-commerce, these type of capabilities in mind. But they don't know where to start. What tools, what technologies will be part of that ecosystem. So that's where Merkle provides consulting services. To give them a roadmap, give them recommendations on how to structure these big, large strategic initiatives. That's number one, we are doing in partnership with AWS. To reach out to our joint customers and help them transform those ecosystems. Number two, as Tom mentioned, migrations. You know, helping chief data officers, chief technology officers, chief marketing officers modernize their environment, by migrating them to cloud. Number three, Merkle has a solution called Merkury, which is essentially all about customer identity. How do we identify a customer across multiple channels? We are modernizing all that solution, making that available on AWS Marketplace for customers to, actually, easily use that solution. And number four, I would say is, helping them set up data foundation. That's through intelligent marketing data lake. You know, leveraging AWS technologies like Glue, Redshift, and actually modernize their data platforms. And number four is more around clean rooms. Which is, bring on your first-party data, join it with Amazon data, to see how those customers are behaving when they are making a purchase on Amazon.com. Which gives insight to these brands, to reshape their marketing strategy to those customers. So those are, like, four, five focus areas. >> No, it's good. So, I was going to ask you about the data and the data strategy. Like, who owns the data? You're kind of alchemists, that... Your clients have first-party data. >> Ankur Jain: Yes. >> And then you might recommend bringing in other data sources. >> Yes. >> And then you're sort of creating this new cocktail. Who owns the data? >> Well, ultimately, client owns the data, because that's their customer's data. To your point on, we help them enrich that data by bringing in third-party data, which is what we call as... So Merkle has a service called DataSource, which is essentially a collection of data that we acquire about customers. Their likes, their dislikes, their buying power, their interests. So we monetize all that data. And the idea is, to take those data assets and make them available on AWS Data Exchange. So that it becomes very easy for brands to use their first-party data, take this third-party data from Merkle, and then, segment their customers much more intelligently. >> And the CMO is your sort of ideal customer profile? >> Yeah. CMO is our main customer profile. And we'll work with the chief data officer, or we'll work with the chief technology officer. We bridge both sides. We can go technology and marketing, and bring them both together. So you have a CMO who's trying to solve for some type of issue. And you have a chief technology officer who wants to improve their infrastructure. And we know how to bring them together into a conversation and help both parties get what they want. >> And I suppose the chief digital officer fits in there too? >> Tom Miller: Yeah, he fits in there too. >> CGO, chief dig. officer, CMO. Sometimes, they're one in the same. Other times, they're mixed. >> Yep. Yep. >> I've seen CIOs and CDOs together. >> Yes. >> Sure. >> It's all data. >> It's all data. (Dave laughs) >> Yeah. Some of the roles that come into play, as Tom mentioned, and you mentioned, CIO, CTO, chief information officer, chief technology officer, chief data officer, more from the IT side. And then we have the CMOs, chief digital officers, from the marketing side. So the secret sauce that Merkle brings to the table is that we know the language, what IT speaks and what business speaks. So when we talked about the business initiatives, like direct-to-consumer, omnichannel, e-commerce, those are more business-driven initiatives. That's where Merkle comes in, to kind of help them with our expertise over the last 30 years, on how to run these strategic initiatives. And then, at the same time, how do we translate those strategic initiatives into IT transformation? Because it does require a lot of IT transformation to happen underneath. That's where AWS also helps us. So we kind of span across both sides of the horizon. >> So you've got data, you've got tools, you've got software, you've got expertise, that now, you're making that available as a service. Is that right? >> That's right. Yes. >> Yes. >> How far are you into that journey, of saasfying your business? >> Well, the cloud journey started almost, I would say, five to seven years ago at Merkle. >> Yeah. Where you began leveraging the cloud? >> That's right. >> Dave Vellante: And then the light bulb went off and- >> So cloud, again, we use cloud in multiple aspects. From general computing perspective, leveraging, you know, fully managed services that AWS offers. So that's one aspect, which is to bring in data from disparate sources, house it, analyze it, and derive intelligence. The second piece, on the cloud side, is SaaS offering, Software as a Service offerings, like Adobe, Salesforce, and other CDP platforms. So Merkle covers a huge spectrum, when it comes to cloud. >> And you got a combination, you have a consulting business, and also- >> So Merkle has multiple service lines. Consulting business is one of them. Where we can help them on how to approach these transformational initiatives, and give them blueprints and roadmaps and strategy. Then we can also help them understand what the customer strategy should be, so that they can market very intelligently to their end customers. Then we have a technology business, which is all about leveraging cloud and advanced analytics. Then we have a data business, the data assets that I was talking about, that we monetize. We have promotions and loyalty, we have media. So we cover multiple services. >> Dave Vellante: Quite a portfolio. >> Yes. >> You mentioned analytics a couple of times, how do you tie that back to the sales function? I would imagine your clients are increasingly asking for analytics, so they can manage their dashboards and make sure they're above the line. How is that evolving? >> Yeah. So that's a very important line. Because, you know, data is data, right? You bring in the data, but what you do with the data, how you ask questions and how you derive intelligence from it, because that's the actionable part. So, few areas. I'll give you one or two examples on how those analytics kind of come into picture. Let's imagine a brand which is trying to sell a particular product or a particular service to a set of customers. Now, who those set of customers are, you know, where they should target this, who their target customers are, what their demographics are, that's all done through analytics. And what I gave you is a very simple example. There are so many advanced examples, you know, that come into artificial intelligence, machine learning, those type of aspects as well. So analytics definitely play a huge role on how these brands need to sell, and personalize the offerings that they want to offer to the customers. >> Used to be, really, pure art, right? It's really becoming- >> Not any more, it's all data driven companies. (Tom laughs) >> It's "Moneyball." >> Yes. Exactly. (Dave laughs) >> Tom Miller: Exactly. >> There's, maybe, still a little bit of art in there, right? It doesn't hurt to have a little creative flair, still. >> Yes. >> But you got to go with the data. >> And that's where the expertise comes in, right? That's where the experience comes in. And how you take that science and combine it with the art, to present it to a end customer, that's exactly, you know, it's a combination. >> And we also take the time to educate our clients on how we're doing it. So it's not done in a black box, so they can learn and grow themselves. Where they may end up developing their own group to handle it, as opposed to outsourcing with Merkle. >> You got to teach 'em how to fish. Last question. Where do you see this in two to three years? Where do you want to take? >> I think future is cloud, AWS being the market leader. I think AWS has a huge role to play. We are very excited to be partners with AWS, I think it's a match made in heaven. AWS sales in, majority of the sales happen in IT. Our focus is marketing. I think if we can bring both the worlds together, I think that will be a very powerful story for us to tell. >> Yeah, that's good news for AWS. If a little of your DNA could rub off on them, it'd be good. >> Tom Miller: Yeah. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Thanks, Dave. >> It was great to see you. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Appreciate it. >> All right. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante, for theCUBE. Day four, AWS re:Invent. We're theCUBE, the global leader in high-tech coverage. Be right back. (gentle music)

>>Okay, We're back at AWS Re. Invent. You're watching the >>cubes. Continuous coverage >>coverage. This is Day four. I think it's the first time it reinvent. We've done four days. This is our ninth year covering Reinvent. Tom Miller is here is the senior vice president of Alliances. And he's joined by Anchor Jane. Who's the global cloud? Practically practise lead at Merkel. Guys, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Tom. Tell us about Merkel. For those who might not be familiar with you. >>So Merkel is a customer experience management company. That is, um, under the Dentsu umbrella. Dense. Who is a global media agency? We represent one of the pillars which is global, our customer experience management. And they also have media and creative. And what Merkel does is provide that technology to help bring that creative and media together. They're a tech company. Yes. >>Okay, so there's some big big tail winds, changes, trends going on in the market. Obviously the pandemic. You know, the force marched to digital. Uh, there's regulation. What are some of the big waves that you guys are seeing that you're trying to ride? >>So what we're seeing is, uh we've got, uh, as a start. We've got a lot of existing databases with clients that are on Prem that we manage today within a sequel environment or so forth. And they need to move that to a cloud environment to be more flexible, more agile, provide them with more data to be able to follow that customer experience that they want with their clients, that they're all realising they need to be in a digital environment. And so that's a big push for us working with AWS and helping move our clients into that cloud environments. >>And you're relatively new to the ws world, right? Maybe you can talk >>about that anchor actually, as a partner. We may be new, but Merkel works with AWS has been working with AWS for over five years as a customer as a customer. So what we did was last year we formalise the relationship with us to be, uh, an advanced partner now. So we were part of the restock programme, basically which is a pool of very select partners. And Merkel comes in with the specialisation of marketing. So as Tom said, you know, we're part of, uh Dentsu umbrella are our core focuses on customer experience, transformation and how we do that Customer experience. Transformation is through digital transformation, data transformation. And that's where we see AWS being a very good partner to us to modernise the solutions that Martin can take to the market. >>So your on Prem databases is probably a lot of diversity on a lot of technical that when the cloud more agility, infinite resources do you have a tech stack? Are you more of an integrator? Right tool for the right job? Maybe you could describe >>your I can take that what time just described. So let me give you some perspective on what these databases are. These databases are essentially Markle, helping big brands 1400 Fortune 500 brands to organise their marketing ecosystem, especially Martek ecosystem. So these databases, they house customer touchpoints customer customer data from disparate sources, and they basically integrate that data in one central place and then bolt on analytics, data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning on top of it, helping them with those email campaigns or direct mail campaigns, social campaigns. So that's what these databases are all about, and and these databases currently set on Prem on Merkel's own data centre. And we have a huge opportunity to kind of take those databases and modernise them. Give all these ai ml type of capabilities advanced analytic capabilities to our customers by using AWS is the platform to kind of migrate. And you do that as a service. We do that as a service. >>Strategically, you're sort of transforming your business to help your customers transform their business right? Take away. It's it's classic. I mean, you really it's happening. This theme of, you know a W started with taking away the undifferentiated heavy lifting for infrastructure. Now you're seeing NASDAQ. Goldman Sachs. You guys in the media world essentially building your own clouds, right? That's the strategy. Yes, super clouds. We call >>them Super Cloud. Yeah, it's about helping our clients understand What is it they're trying to accomplish? And for the most part, they're trying to understand the customer journey where the customer is, how they're driving that experience with them and understanding that experience through the journey and doing that in the cloud makes it tremendously easier and more economical form. >>I was listening to the, uh, snowflake earnings call from last night and they were talking about, you know, a couple of big verticals, one being media and all. I keep talking about direct direct to consumer, right? You're hearing that a lot of media companies want to interact and build community directly. They don't want to necessarily. I mean, you don't want to go through a third party anymore if you don't have to, Technology is enabling that is that kind of the play here? >>Yes, Director Consumer is a huge player. Companies which were traditionally brick and mortar based or relied on a supply chain of dealers and distributors are now basically transforming themselves to be direct to consumer. They want to sell directly to the consumer. Personalisation comes becomes a big theme, especially indeed to see type of environment, because now those customers are expecting brands to know what's there like. What's their dislike? Which products which services are they interested in? So that's that's all kind of advanced analytics machine learning powered solutions. These are big data problems that all these brands are kind of trying to solve. That's where Merkel is partnering with AWS to bring all those technologies and and build those next generation solutions for access. So what kind >>of initiatives are you working >>on? So there are, like, 34 areas that we are working very closely with AWS number one. I would say Think about our marketers friend, you know, and they have a transformation like direct to consumer on the channel e commerce, these types of capabilities in mind. But they don't know where to start. What tools? What technologies will be part of that ecosystem. That's where Merkel provides consulting services to to give them a road map, give them recommendations on how to structure these big, large strategic initiatives. That's number one we are doing in partnership with AWS to reach out to our joint customers and help them transform those ecosystems. Number two as Tom mentioned migrations, helping chief data officers, chief technology officers, chief marketing officers modernise their environment by migrating them to cloud number three. Merkel has a solution called mercury, which is essentially all about customer identity. How do we identify a customer across multiple channels? We are Modernising all that solution of making that available on AWS marketplace for customers to actually easily use that solution. And number four, I would say, is helping them set up data foundation. That's through intelligent marketing Data Lake leveraging AWS technologies like blue, red shift and and actually modernise their data platforms. And number four is more around clean rooms, which is bring on your first party data. Join it with Amazon data to see how those customers are behaving when they are making a purchase on amazon dot com, which gives insights to these brands to reshape their marketing strategy to those customers. So those are like four or five focus areas. So I was >>gonna ask you about the data and the data strategy like, who owns the data? You're kind of alchemists that your clients have first party data and you might recommend bringing in other data sources. And you're sort of creating this new cocktail. Who owns the data? >>Well, ultimately, client also data because that that's their customers' data. Uh, to your point on, we helped them enrich that data by bringing in third party data, which is what we call is. So Merkel has a service called data source, which is essentially a collection of data that we acquire about customers. Their likes, their dislikes, their buying power, their interests so we monetise all that data. And the idea is to take those data assets and make them available on AWS data exchange so that it becomes very easy for brands to use their first party data. Take this third party data from Merkel and then, uh, segment their customers much more intelligently. >>And the CMO is your sort of ideal customer profile. >>Yeah, CMO is our main customer profile and we'll work with the chief data officer Will work with the chief technology officer. We kind of we bridge both sides. We can go technology and marketing and bring them both together. So you have a CMO who's trying to solve for some type of issue. And you have a chief technology officer who wants to improve their infrastructure. And we know how to bring them together into a conversation and help both parties get both get what they want. >>And I suppose the chief digital officer fits in there too. Yeah, he fits in their CDOs. Chief Digital officer CMO. Sometimes they're all they're one and the same. Other times they're mixed. I've seen see IOS and and CDOs together. Sure, you sort of. It's all data. It's all >>day. >>Yeah, some of the roles that come into play, as as Tom mentioned. And you mentioned C I o c T. O s chief information officer, chief technology officer, chief data officer, more from the side. And then we have the CMOS chief digital officers from the marketing side. So the secret sauce that Merkel brings to the table is that we know the language, what I t speaks and what business speaks. So when we talk about the business initiatives like direct to consumer Omni Channel E commerce, those are more business driven initiatives. That's where Merkel comes in to kind of help them with our expertise over the last 30 years on on how to run these strategic initiatives. And then at the same time, how do we translate translate those strategic initiatives into it transformation because it does require a lot of idea transformation to happen underneath. That's where AWS also helps us. So we kind of span across both sides of the horizon. >>So you got data. You've got tools, you've got software. You've got expertise that now you're making that available as a as a service. That's right. How far are you into that? journey of satisfying your business. >>Well, the cloud journey started almost, I would say, 5 to 7 years ago at Merkel, >>where you started, where you began leveraging the cloud. That's right. And then the light bulb went off >>the cloud again. We use clouds in multiple aspects, from general computing perspective, leveraging fully managed services that AWS offers. So that's one aspect, which is to bring in data from disparate sources, house it, analyse it and and derive intelligence. The second piece on the cloud side is, uh, SAS, offering software as a service offerings like Adobe Salesforce and other CDP platforms. So Merkel covers a huge spectrum. When it comes to cloud and you got >>a combination, you have a consulting business and also >>so Merkel has multiple service lines. Consulting business is one of them where we can help them on how to approach these transformational initiatives and give them blueprints and roadmaps and strategy. Then we can also help them understand what the customer strategy should be, so that they can market very intelligently to their end customers. Then we have a technology business, which is all about leveraging cloud and advanced analytics. Then we have data business that data assets that I was talking about, that we monetise. We have promotions and loyalty. We have media, so we recover multiple services portfolio. >>How do you mentioned analytics a couple times? How do you tie that? Back to the to the to the sales function. I would imagine your your clients are increasingly asking for analytics so they can manage their dashboards and and make sure they're above the line. How is that evolving? Yes, >>So that's a very important line because, you know, data is data, right? You bring in the data, but what you do with the data, how you know, how you ask questions and how you derive intelligence from it? Because that's the actionable part. So a few areas I'll give you one or two examples on how those analytics kind of come into picture. Let's imagine a brand which is trying to sell a particular product or a particular service to the to a set of customers Now who those set of customers are, You know where they should target this, who their target customers are, what the demographics are that's all done through and analytics and what I gave you is a very simple example. There are so many advanced examples, you know, that come into artificial intelligence machine learning those type of aspects as well. So analytics definitely play a huge role on how these brands need to sell and personalised the offerings that they're going to offer to. The customers >>used to be really pure art, right? It's really >>not anymore. It's all data driven. Moneyball. Moneyball? >>Yes, exactly. Exactly. Maybe still a little bit of hard in there, right? It doesn't hurt. It doesn't hurt to have a little creative flair still, but you've got to go with the data. >>That's where the expertise comes in, right? That's where the experience comes in and how you take that science and combine it with the art to present it to the end customer. That's exactly you know. It's a combination, >>and we also take the time to educate our clients on how we're doing it. So it's not done in a black box, so they can learn and grow themselves where they may end up developing their own group to handle it, as opposed to outsourcing with Merkel, >>teach them how to fish. Last question. Where do you see this in 2 to 3 years. Where do you want to take it? >>I think future is Cloud AWS being the market leader. I think aws has a huge role to play. Um, we are very excited to be partners with AWS. I think it's a match made in heaven. AWS cells in, uh, majority of the sales happen in our focus is marketing. I think if we can bring both the worlds together, I think that would be a very powerful story for us to be >>good news for AWS. They little your DNA can rub off on them would be good, guys. Thanks so much for coming to the Cube. Thank you. All right. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube Day four aws re invent. Were the Cube the global leader in high tech coverage? Right back. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.

(uplifting music) >> The data lake we see is evolving and ChaosSearch has built some pretty cool tech to enable customers to get more value out of data that's in lakes so that it doesn't become stagnant. Time to dig deeper, dive deeper into the water. We're here with Kevin Miller, who's the vice president and general manager of S3 at Amazon Web Services. We're going to talk about activating S3 for analytics. Kevin, welcome. Good to see you again. >> Yeah, thanks, Dave. It's great to be here again. >> So S3 was the very first service offered by AWS 15 years ago. We covered that out in Seattle. It was a great event you guys had. It has become the most prominent and popular example of object storage in the marketplace. And for years, customers use S3 as simple, cheap data storage, but because there's so much data now stored in S3, customers are looking to do more with the platform. So, Kevin, as we look ahead to reinvent this year, we're super excited about that, what's new? What's got you excited when it comes to the AWS flagship storage offering? >> Yeah, Dave. Well, that's right. And we're definitely looking forward to reinvent. We have some fun things that we're planning to announce there, so stay tuned on those. But, I'd say that one of the things that's most exciting for me as customers do more with their data and look to store more, to capture more of the data that they're generating every day, is our storage class that we had an announce a few years ago. But we actually just announced some improvements to the S3, intelligent-tiering storage class. And this is really our storage class, the only one in the cloud at this point that delivers automatic storage cost savings for customers where the data access patterns change. And that can happen, for example, as customers have some data that they're collecting and then a team spins up and decides to try to do something more with that data, and that data that was very cool and sitting sort of idle is now being actively used. And so with intelligent tiering, we're automatically monitoring data. And then, for customers there's no retrieval costs and no tiering charges. We're automatically moving the data into an access tier that reduces their costs, though, when that that data is not being accessed. So we've announced some improvements to that just a few months ago. And I'll just say, I look forward to some more announcements at reinvent, that will continue to extend what we have in our intelligent-tiering storage class. >> That's cool, Kevin. I mean, you've seen, you know, that technology, that tiering concept had been around, you know. But since back in the mainframe days the problem was it was always inside a box. So you didn't have the scale of the cloud and you didn't have that automation. So, I want to ask you, as the leader of S3, that business, when you meet with customers, Kevin, what do they tell you that they're facing as challenges when they want to do more, get better insights out of all that data that they've moved into S3? >> Well, I think that's just it, Dave. I think that most customers I speak with, of course they have the things that they want to do with their storage costs, you know: reducing storage costs and just making sure they have capacity available. But increasingly I think the real emphasis is around business transformation. What can I do with this data, that's very unique and different that unlike, you know, prior optimizations where it would just reduce the bottom line, they're saying, what can I do that will actually drive my top line more by either, you know, generating new product ideas, allowing for faster closed-loop process for acquiring customers? And so it's really that business transformation and everything around it that I think is really exciting. And for a lot of customers, that's a pretty long journey. And helping them get started on that, including transforming their workforce, and up-skilling, you know, parts of their workforce to be more agile and more oriented around software development, developing new products using software. >> So when I first met the folks at ChaosSearch, Thomas took me through sort of the architecture with Ed as well. They had me at "you don't have to move your data." That was the grabber for me. And there are a number of public customers, Digital River, Blackboard, or Klarna, we're going to get the customer perspective little later on, and others, that use both AWS S3 and ChaosSearch. And they're trying to get more out of their S3 data and execute analytics at scale. So, wonder if you could share with us, Kevin, what types of activities and opportunities do you see for customers like these that are making the move to put their enterprise data in S3, in terms of capabilities and outcomes that they are trying to achieve and are able to achieve beyond using S3 as just a bit bucket? >> Right. Well, Dave, I think you hit the nail on the head when you talk about outcomes. 'Cause that, I think, is key here. Customers want to reduce the time it takes to get to a tangible result that affects their business, that improves their business. And so that's one of the things that excites me about what ChaosSearch is doing here, specifically is that automatic indexing. Being able to take the data, as it is, in their bucket, index it and keep that index fresh and then allow for the customers to innovate on top of that and to try to experiment with a new capability, see why it works and then double down on the things that really do work to drive that business. And so, I just think that that capability reduces the amount of what I might call undifferentiated heavy-lifting the work to just sort of index and organize and catalog data. And instead allow customers to really focus on here's the idea, let's try to get this into production or into a test environment as quickly as possible to see if this can really drive some value for our business. >> Yeah, so you're seeing that sort of value that you've mentioned, the non-differentiated heavy-lifting, moving up the stack, right? It used to just be provisioning and managing the storage. Now it's all the layers above that. And we're going beyond that. So my question to you, Kevin, is, how do you see the evolution of all this data at scale? I'm especially interested as it pertains to data that's, of course, in S3, which is your swim lane. When you talk to customers who want to do more with their data and analytics, and, by the way, even beyond analytics, you know, where it's having conversations now in the community about building data products and creating new value. But how do you respond and how do you see ChaosSearch fitting in to those outcomes? >> Well, I think that's it, Dave. It's about kind of going up the stack and instead of spending time organizing and cataloging data, particularly as the data volumes get much larger. When modern customers and modern data lakes that we're seeing, quickly go from a few petabytes to tens, to hundreds of petabytes or more. And, when you're reaching that kind of scale of data, a single person can't reasonably kind of wrap their head around all that data, you need tools. S3 provides a number of first party tools. And, you know, we're investing in things like our S3 batch operations to really help give the end users of that data, the business owners that leverage to manage their data at scale and apply their new ideas to the data and generate, you know, pilots and production work that really drives their business forward. And so I think that, you know, ChaosSearch, again, I would just say is a good example of, you know, the kind of software that I think helps go upstack, automate some of that data management, and just help customers focus really specifically on the things that they want to accomplish for their business. >> So this is really important. I mean, we've talked for well over a decade, how to get more value out of data, and it's been challenging for a lot of organizations. But we're seeing themes of scale, automation, fine-grain tooling ecosystem participating on top of that data and then extracting that data value. Kevin, I'm really excited to see you face to face at Reinventing, and learn more about some of the announcements that you're going to make. We'll see you there. >> Yeah. Stay tuned. Looking forward to seeing you in person. Absolutely. >> All right. Great to have Kevin on. Keep it right there because in a moment we're going to get the customer perspective on how a leading practitioner is applying ChaosSearch on top of S3 to create business value from data. You're watching The Cube, your leader at digital high-tech coverage. (uplifting music)

>>Welcome back. I really liked the drill down a data lakes with ed Walsh and Thomas Hazel. They building some cool stuff over there. The data lake we see it's evolving and chaos search has built some pretty cool tech to enable customers to get more value out of data that's in lakes so that it doesn't become stagnant. Time to dig, dig deeper, dive deeper into the water. We're here with Kevin Miller. Who's the vice president and general manager of S3 at Amazon web services. We're going to talk about activating S3 for analytics. Kevin, welcome. Good to see you again. >>Yeah, thanks Dan. It's great to be here again. So >>S3 was the very first service offered by AWS 15 years ago. We covered that out in Seattle. It was a great event you guys had, it has become the most prominent and popular example of object storage in the marketplace. And for years, customers use S3 is simple, cheap data storage, but because there's so much data now stored in S3 customers are looking to do more with the platform. So Kevin, as we look ahead to reinvent this year, we're super excited about that. What's new. What's got you excited when it comes to the AWS flagship storage offering. >>Yeah. Dan, well, that's right. And we're definitely looking forward to reinvent. We have some fun things that we're planning to announce there. So stay tuned on those, but I'd say that one of the things that's most exciting for me as customers do more with their data and look to store more, to capture more of the data that they're generating every day is our storage class that we had an announced a few years ago, but we, we actually just announced some improvements to the S3 intelligent tiering storage class. And this is really our storage class. The only one in the cloud at this point that delivers automatic storage cost savings for customers where the data access patterns change. And that can happen. For example, as customers have some data that they're collecting and then a team spins up and decides to try to do something more with that data and that data that was very cool and sitting sort of idle is now being actively used. And so with intelligent tiering, we're automatically monitoring data. And then there's for customers. There's no retrieval costs and no tiering charges. We're automatically moving the data into an access tier that reduces their costs though. And that data is not being accessed. So we've announced some improvements to that just a few months ago. And I'll just say, I look forward to some more announcements at reinvent that will extend, continue to extend what we have in our intelligent tiering storage class. >>That's cool, Kevin. I mean, you've seen, you know, that technology, that tiering concept had been around, you know, but since back in the mainframe days, the problem was, it was always inside a box. So you, you didn't have the scale of the cloud and you didn't have that automation. So I want to ask you as the leader of that business, when you meet with customers, Kevin, what do they tell you that they're there they're facing as challenges when they want to do more, get better insights out of all that data that they've moved into S3? >>Well, I think that's just it, Dave. I think that most customers I speak with they, of course they have the things that they want to do with their storage costs and reducing storage costs and just making sure they have capacity available. But increasingly I think the real emphasis is around business transformation. What can I do with this data? That's very unique and different than either that unlike, you know, prior optimizations where it would just reduce the bottom line, they're saying, what can I do that will actually drive my top line more by either, you know, generating new product ideas, um, allowing for faster, you know, close, closed loop process for acquiring customers. And so it's really that business transformation and all, everything around it that I think is really exciting. And for a lot of customers, that's a pretty long journey and, and helping them get started on that, including transforming their workforce and up-skilling, you know, parts of their workforce to be more agile and more oriented around software development, developing new products using software. >>So w when I first met the folks at, at chaos search, you know, Thomas took me through sort of the architecture w with ed as well. They had me at, you don't have to move your data. That was saying that was the grabber for me. And there are a number of public customers that digital river, uh, Blackboard or Klarna, we're going to get the customer perspective little later on and others that use both AWS S3 and chaos search. And they're trying to get more out of their, their S3 data and execute analytics at scale. So wonder if you could share with us Kevin, what types of activities and opportunities do you see for customers like these that are making the move to put their enterprise data in S3 in terms of capabilities and outcomes that they are trying to achieve and are able to achieve beyond using S3 is just a Bitbucket, >>Right? Well, Dan, I think you hit the nail on the head when you talk about outcomes. Cause that I think is, is key here. Customers want to reduce the time it takes to get to a tangible result that it affects the business that improves their business. And so that's one of the things that I excites me about what CAS search is doing here specifically is that automatic indexing, being able to take the data as it is in their bucket, index it and keep that index fresh and then allow for the customers to innovate on top of that and to try to experiment with a new capability, see, see what works and then double down on the things that really do work to drive that business. And so I just think that that capability reduces the amount of what I might call undifferentiated, heavy, lifting the work to just sort of index and organize and catalog data. And instead allow customers to really focus on here's the idea. Let's try to get this into production or into a test environment as quickly as possible to see if this can really drive some value for our business. >>Yeah. So you're seeing that sort of value that you've mentioned the non-differentiated heavy lifting, moving up the stack, right. It used to just be provisioning and managing the, now it's all the layers above that and it would go and beyond that. So my question to you, Kevin, is how do you see the evolution of this, all this data at scale I'm especially interested in, as it pertains to data that's of course, an S3, which is your swim lane. When you talk to customers who want to do more with their data and analytics, and by the way, even beyond analytics, you know, where it's having conversations now in the community about, about building data products and creating new value, but how do you respond and how do you see chaos search fitting in to those outcomes? >>Well, I think that's, that's it Dave, it's about kind of going up the stack and instead of spending time organizing and cataloging data, particularly as the data volumes give much larger when the modern customers and modern data lakes that we're seeing quickly go from a few petabytes to tens, to hundreds of petabytes or more. And when you reaching that kind of scale of data, it's a single person can reasonably kind of wrap their head around all that data. You need tools as three provides a number of first party tools and, you know, we're investing in things like our S3 batch operations to really help give the end users of that data, the business owners that leverage to manage their data at scale and apply their new ideas to the data and generate, you know, pilots and production work that really drives their business forward. And so I think that, you know, cast search again, I would just say as a good example of, you know, the kind of software that I think helps go, upstack automate some of that data management and just help customers focus really specifically on the things that they want to accomplish for their, their business. >>So this is, >>I mean, we've talked for well over a decade, how to get more value out of data. And it's been challenging for a lot of organizations, but we're seeing, we're seeing themes of scale automation, fine-grain tooling ecosystem participating, uh, on top of that data and then extracting that, that data value who Kevin, I'm really excited to see you face to face at re-inventing and learn more about some of the announcements that you're going to make. We'll see you there. >>Yeah. Stay tuned. Looking forward to seeing in person absolutely >>Have Kevin on, keep it right there because in a moment we're going to get the customer perspective on how a leading practitioner is applying chaos search on top of S3 to create a business value from data you're watching the cube, your leader, digital high tech coverage.

(bright music) >> Welcome to this next session of AWS Storage Day. I'm your host, Dave Vellante of theCUBE. And right now we're going to explore how to simplify and evolve your data lake backup disaster recovery and analytics in the cloud. And we're joined by Kevin Miller who's the general manager of Amazon S3. Kevin, welcome. >> Thanks Dave. Great to see you again. >> Good to see you too. So listen, S3 started as like a small ripple in the pond and over the last 15 years, I mean, it's fundamentally changed the storage market. We used to think about storage as, you know, a box of disc drives that either store data in blocks or file formats and then object storage at the time it was, kind of used in archival storage, it needed specialized application interfaces, S3 changed all that. Why do you think that happened? >> Well, I think first and foremost, it's really just, the customers appreciated the value of S3 and being fully managed where, you know, we manage capacity. Capacity is always available for our customers to bring new data into S3 and really therefore to remove a lot of the constraints around building their applications and deploying new workloads and testing new workloads where they know that if something works great, it can scale up by a 100x or a 1000x. And if it doesn't work, they can remove the data and move on to the next application or next experiment they want to try. And so, you know, really, it's exciting to me. Really exciting when I see businesses across essentially every industry, every geography, you know, innovate and really use data in new and really interesting ways within their business to really drive actual business results. So it's not just about building data, having data to build a report and have a human look at a report, but actually really drive the day-to-day operations of their business. So that can include things like personalization or doing deeper analytics in industrial and manufacturing. A customer like Georgia-Pacific for example, I think is one of the great examples where they use a big data lake and collect a lot of sensor data, IoT sensor data off of their paper manufacturing machines. So they can run them at just the right speed to avoid tearing the paper as it's going through, which really just keeps their machines running more and therefore, you know, just reduce their downtime and costs associated with it. So you know, it's just that transformation again, across many industries, almost every industry that I can think of. That's really what's been exciting to see and continue to see. I think we're still in the really early days of what we're going to see as far as that innovation goes. >> Yeah, I got to agree. I mean, it's been pretty remarkable. Maybe you could talk about the pace of innovation for S3. I mean, if anything, it seems to be accelerating. How Kevin, does AWS, how has it thought about innovation over the past decade plus and where do you see it headed? >> Yeah, that's a great question Dave, really innovation is at our core as part of our core DNA. S3 launched more than 15 years ago, almost 16 years old. We're going to get a learner's permit for it next year. But, you know, as it's grown to exabytes of storage and trillions of objects, we've seen almost every use case you can imagine. I'm sure there's a new one coming that we haven't seen yet, but we've learned a lot from those use cases. And every year we just think about what can we do next to further simplify. And so you've seen that as we've launched over the last few years, things like S3 Intelligent Tiering, which was really the clouds first storage class to automatically optimize and reduce customer's costs for storage, for data that they were storing for a long time. And based on, you know, variable access patterns. We launched S3 Access Points to provide a simpler way to have different applications operating on shared data sets. And we launched earlier this year S3 Object Lambda, which really is, I think, cool technology. We're just starting to see how it can be applied to simplify serverless application development. Really the next wave, I think, of application development that doesn't need, not only is the storage fully managed, but the compute is fully managed as well. Really just simplify that whole end to end application development. >> Okay, so we heard this morning in the keynote, some exciting news. What can you tell us, Kevin? >> Yeah, so this morning we launched S3 Multi-Region Access Points and these are access points that give you a single global endpoint to access data sets that can span multiple S3 buckets in different AWS regions around the world. And so this allows you to build these multi-region applications and multi-region architectures with, you know, with the same approach that you use in a single region and then run these applications anywhere around the world. >> Okay. So if I interpret this correctly, it's a good fit for organizations with clients or operations around the globe. So for instance, gaming, news outlets, think of content delivery types of customers. Should we think about this as multi-region storage and why is that so important in your view? >> Absolutely. Yeah, that is multi-region storage. And what we're hearing is seeing as customers grow and we have multinational customers who have operations all around the world. And so as they've grown and their data needs grow around the world, they need to be using multiple AWS regions to store and access that data. Sometimes it's for low latency so that it can be closer to their end users or their customers, other times it's for regions where they just have a particular need to have data in a particular geography. But this is really a simple way of having one endpoint in front of data, across multiple buckets. So for applications it's quite easy, they just have that one end point and then the data, the requests are automatically routed to the nearest region. >> Now earlier this year, S3 turned 15. What makes S3 different, Kevin in your view? >> Yeah, it turned 15. It'll be 16 soon, you know, S3 really, I think part of the difference is it just operates at really an unprecedented scale with, you know, more than a hundred trillion objects and regularly peaking to tens of millions of requests per second. But it's really about the resiliency and availability and durability that are our responsibility and we focus every single day on protecting those characteristics for customers so that they don't have to. So that they can focus on building the businesses and applications that they need to really run their business and not worry about the details of running highly available storage. And so I think that's really one of the key differences with S3. >> You know, I first heard the term data lake, it was early last decade. I think it was around 2011, 2012 and obviously the phrase has stuck. How are S3 and data lakes simpatico, and how have data lakes on S3 changed or evolved over the years? >> Yeah. You know, the idea of data lakes, obviously, as you say, came around nine or 10 years ago, but I actually still think it's really early days for data lakes. And just from the standpoint of, you know, originally nine or 10 years ago, when we talked about data lakes, we were looking at maybe tens of terabytes, hundreds of terabytes, or a low number of petabytes and for a lot of data lakes, we're still seeing that that's the kind of scale that currently they're operating at, but I'm also seeing a class of data lakes where you're talking about tens or hundreds of petabytes or even more, and really just being used to drive critical aspects of customer's businesses. And so I really think S3, it's been a great place to run data lakes and continues to be. We've added a lot of capability over the last several years, you know, specifically for that data lake use case. And we're going to continue to do that and grow the feature set for data lakes, you know, over the next many years as well. But really, it goes back to the fundamentals of S3 providing that 11 9s of durability, the resiliency of having three independent data centers within regions. So the customers can use that storage knowing their data is protected. And again, just focus on the applications on top of that data lake and also run multiple applications, right? The idea of a data lake is you're not limited to one access pattern or one set of applications. If you want to try out a new machine learning application or something, do some advanced analytics, that's all possible while running the in-flight operational tools that you also have against that data. So it allows for that experimentation and for transforming businesses through new ideas. >> Yeah. I mean, to your point, if you go back to the early days of cloud, we were talking about storing, you know, gigabytes, maybe tens of terabytes that was big. Today, we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of terabytes, petabytes. And so you've got huge amount of information customers that are of that size and that scale, they have to optimize costs. Really that's top of mind, how are you helping customers save on storage costs? >> Absolutely. Dave, I mean, cost optimization is one of the key things we look at every single year to help customers reduce their costs for storage. And so that led to things like the introduction of S3 Intelligent Tiering, 10 years ago. And that's really the only cloud storage class that just delivers the automatic storage cost savings, as data access patterns change. And, you know, we deliver this without performance impact or any kind of operational overhead. It's really intended to be, you know, intelligent where customers put the data in. And then we optimize the storage cost. Or for example, last year we launched S3 Storage Lens, which is really the first and only service in the cloud that provides organization-wide visibility into where customers are storing their data, what the request rates are and so forth against their storage. So when you talk about these data lakes of hundreds of petabytes or even smaller, these tools are just really invaluable to help customers reduce their storage costs year after year. And actually, Dave I'm pleased, you know, today we're also announcing the launch of some improvements to S3 Intelligent Tiering, to actually further automate the cost savings. And what we're doing is we're actually removing the minimum storage duration. Previously, Intelligent Tiering had a 30 day minimum storage duration, and we're also eliminating our monitoring and automation charge for small objects. So previously there was that monitoring and automation charge applied to all objects independent of size. And now any object less than 120 kilobytes is not charged at that charge. So, and I think some pretty critical innovations on Intelligent Tiering that will help customers use that for an even wider set of data lake and other applications. >> That's three, it's ubiquitous. The innovation continues. You can learn more by attending the Storage Day S3 deep dive right after this interview. Thank you, Kevin Miller. Great to have you on the program. >> Yeah, Dave, thanks for having me. Great to see you. >> You're welcome, this is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of AWS Storage Day. Keep it right there. (bright music)

>>from around the >>globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Yeah, >>Hi. We are the Cube live covering AWS reinvent 2020. I'm Lisa Martin, and I've got one of our cube alumni back with me. Mike Miller is here. General manager of A W s AI Devices at AWS. Mike, welcome back to the Cube. >>Hi, Lisa. Thank you so much for having me. It's really great to join you all again at this virtual reinvent. >>Yes, I think last year you were on set. We have always had to. That's at reinvent. And you you had the deep race, your car, and so we're obviously socially distance here. But talk to me about deepracer. What's going on? Some of the things that have gone on the last year that you're excited >>about. Yeah, I'd love to tell. Tell you a little bit about what's been happening. We've had a tremendous year. Obviously, Cove. It has restricted our ability to have our in person races. Eso we've really gone gone gangbusters with our virtual league. So we have monthly races for competitors that culminate in the championship. Um, at reinvent. So this year we've got over 100 competitors who have qualified and who are racing virtually with us this year at reinvent. They're participating in a series of knockout rounds that are being broadcast live on twitch over the next week. That will whittle the group down to AH Group of 32 which will have a Siris of single elimination brackets leading to eight finalists who will race Grand Prix style five laps, eight cars on the track at the same time and will crown the champion at the closing keynote on December 15th this year. >>Exciting? So you're bringing a reinforcement, learning together with with sports that so many of us have been missing during the pandemic. We talked to me a little bit about some of the things that air that you've improved with Deep Racer and some of the things that are coming next year. Yeah, >>absolutely so, First of all, Deep Racer not only has been interesting for individuals to participate in the league, but we continue to see great traction and adoption amongst big customers on dare, using Deep Racer for hands on learning for machine learning, and many of them are turning to Deep Racer to train their workforce in machine learning. So over 150 customers from the likes of Capital One Moody's, Accenture, DBS Bank, JPMorgan Chase, BMW and Toyota have held Deep Racer events for their workforces. And in fact, three of those customers Accenture, DBS Bank and J. P. Morgan Chase have each trained over 1000 employees in their organization because they're just super excited. And they find that deep racers away to drive that excitement and engagement across their customers. We even have Capital one expanded this to their families, so Capital One ran a deep raise. Their Kids Cup, a family friendly virtual competition this past year were over. 250 Children and 200 families got to get hands on with machine learning. >>So I envisioned some. You know, this being a big facilitator during the pandemic when there's been this massive shift to remote work has have you seen an uptick in it for companies that talking about training need to be ableto higher? Many, many more people remotely but also train them? Is deep Racer facilitator of that? Yeah, >>absolutely. Deep Racer has ah core component of the experience, which is all virtualized. So we have, ah, console and integration with other AWS services so that racers can participate using a three d racing simulator. They can actually see their car driving around a track in a three D world simulation. Um, we're also selling the physical devices. So you know, if participants want to get the one of those devices and translate what they've done in the virtual world to the real world, they can start doing that. And in fact, just this past year, we made our deep race or car available for purchase internationally through the Amazon Com website to help facilitate that. >>So how maney deep racers air out there? I'm just curious. >>Oh, thousands. Um, you know, And there what? What we've seen is some companies will purchase you, know them in bulk and use them for their internal leagues. Just like you know, JP Morgan Chase on DBS Bank. These folks have their own kind of tracks and racers that they'll use to facilitate both in person as well as the virtual racing. >>I'm curious with this shift to remote that we mentioned a minute ago. How are you seeing deepracer as a facilitator of engagement. You mentioned engagement. And that's one of the biggest challenges that so Maney teams develops. Processes have without being co located with each other deep Brister help with that. I mean, from an engagement perspective, I think >>so. What we've seen is that Deep Racer is just fun to get your hands on. And we really lower the learning curve for machine learning. And in particular, this branch called reinforcement Learning, which is where you train this agent through trial and error toe, learn how to do a new, complex task. Um, and what we've seen is that customers who have introduced Deep Racer, um, as an event for their employees have seen ah, very wide variety of employees. Skill sets, um, kind of get engaged. So you've got not just the hardcore deep data scientists or the M L engineers. You've got Web front end programmers. You even have some non technical folks who want to get their hands dirty. Onda learn about machine learning and Deep Racer really is a nice, gradual introduction to doing that. You can get engaged with it with very little kind of coding knowledge at all. >>So talk to me about some of the new services. And let's look at some specific use case customer use cases with each service. Yeah, >>absolutely. So just to set the context. You know, Amazon's got hundreds. A ws has hundreds of thousands of customers doing machine learning on AWS. No customers of all sizes are embedding machine learning into their no core business processes. And one of the things that we always do it Amazon is We're listening to customers. You know, 90 to 95% of our road maps are driven by customer feedback. And so, as we've been talking to these industrial manufacturing customers, they've been telling us, Hey, we've got data. We've got these processes that are happening in our industrial sites. Um, and we just need some help connecting the dots like, how do we really most effectively use machine learning to improve our processes in these industrial and manufacturing sites? And so we've come up with these five services. They're focused on industrial manufacturing customers, uh, two of the services air focused around, um, predictive maintenance and, uh, the other three services air focused on computer vision. Um, and so let's start with the predictive maintenance side. So we announced Amazon Monitor On and Amazon look out for equipment. So these services both enable predictive maintenance powered by machine learning in a way that doesn't require the customer to have any machine learning expertise. So Mono Tron is an end to end machine learning system with sensors, gateway and an ML service that can detect anomalies and predict when industrial equipment will require maintenance. I've actually got a couple examples here of the sensors in the gateway, so this is Amazon monitor on these little sensors. This little guy is a vibration and temperature sensor that's battery operated, and wireless connects to the gateway, which then transfers the data up to the M L Service in the cloud. And what happens is, um, the sensors can be connected to any rotating machinery like pump. Pour a fan or a compressor, and they will send data up to the machine learning cloud service, which will detect anomalies or sort of irregular kind of sensor readings and then alert via a mobile app. Just a tech or a maintenance technician at an industrial site to go have a look at their equipment and do some preventative maintenance. So um, it's super extreme line to end to end and easy for, you know, a company that has no machine learning expertise to take advantage of >>really helping them get on board quite quickly. Yeah, >>absolutely. It's simple tea set up. There's really very little configuration. It's just a matter of placing the sensors, pairing them up with the mobile app and you're off and running. >>Excellent. I like easy. So some of the other use cases? Yeah, absolutely. >>So So we've seen. So Amazon fulfillment centers actually have, um, enormous amounts of equipment you can imagine, you know, the size of an Amazon fulfillment center. 28 football fields, long miles of conveyor belts and Amazon fulfillment centers have started to use Amazon monitor on, uh, to monitor some of their conveyor belts. And we've got a filament center in Germany that has started using these 1000 sensors, and they've already been able to, you know, do predictive maintenance and prevent downtime, which is super costly, you know, for businesses, we've also got customers like Fender, you know, who makes guitars and amplifiers and musical equipment. Here in the US, they're adopting Amazon monitor on for their industrial machinery, um, to help prevent downtime, which again can cost them a great deal as they kind of hand manufacture these high end guitars. Then there's Amazon. Look out for equipment, which is one step further from Amazon monitor on Amazon. Look out for equipment. Um provides a way for customers to send their own sensor data to AWS in order to build and train a model that returns predictions for detecting abnormal equipment behavior. So here we have a customer, for example, like GP uh, E P s in South Korea, or I'm sorry, g S E P s in South Korea there in industrial conglomerate, and they've been collecting their own data. So they have their own sensors from industrial equipment for a decade. And they've been using just kind of rule basic rules based systems to try to gain insight into that data. Well, now they're using Amazon, look out for equipment to take all of their existing sensor data, have Amazon for equipment, automatically generate machine learning models on, then process the sensor data to know when they're abnormalities or when some predictive maintenance needs to occur. >>So you've got the capabilities of working with with customers and industry that that don't have any ML training to those that do have been using sensors. So really, everybody has an opportunity here to leverage this new Amazon technology, not only for predicted, but one of the things I'm hearing is contact list, being able to understand what's going on without having to have someone physically there unless there is an issue in contact. This is not one of the words of 2020 but I think it probably should be. >>Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, that that was some of the genesis of some of the next industrial services that we announced that are based on computer vision. What we saw on what we heard when talking to these customers is they have what we call human inspection processes or manual inspection processes that are required today for everything from, you know, monitoring you like workplace safety, too, you know, quality of goods coming off of a machinery line or monitoring their yard and sort of their, you know, truck entry and exit on their looking for computer vision toe automate a lot of these tasks. And so we just announced a couple new services that use computer vision to do that to automate these once previously manual inspection tasks. So let's start with a W A. W s Panorama uses computer vision toe improve those operations and workplace safety. AWS Panorama is, uh, comes in two flavors. There's an appliance, which is, ah, box like this. Um, it basically can go get installed on your network, and it will automatically discover and start processing the video feeds from existing cameras. So there's no additional capital expense to take a W s panorama and have it apply computer vision to the cameras that you've already got deployed, you know, So customers are are seeing that, um, you know, computer vision is valuable, but the reason they want to do this at the edge and put this computer vision on site is because sometimes they need to make very low Leighton see decisions where if you have, like a fast moving industrial process, you can use computer vision. But I don't really want to incur the cost of sending data to the cloud and back. I need to make a split second decision, so we need machine learning that happens on premise. Sometimes they don't want to stream high bandwidth video. Or they just don't have the bandwidth to get this video back to the cloud and sometimes their data governance or privacy restrictions that restrict the company's ability to send images or video from their site, um, off site to the cloud. And so this is why Panorama takes this machine learning and makes it happen right here on the edge for customers. So we've got customers like Cargill who uses or who is going to use Panorama to improve their yard management. They wanna use computer vision to detect the size of trucks that drive into their granaries and then automatically assign them to an appropriately sized loading dock. You've got a customer like Siemens Mobility who you know, works with municipalities on, you know, traffic on by other transport solutions. They're going to use AWS Panorama to take advantage of those existing kind of traffic cameras and build machine learning models that can, you know, improve congestion, allocate curbside space, optimize parking. We've also got retail customers. For instance, Parkland is a Canadian fuel station, um, and retailer, you know, like a little quick stop, and they want to use Panorama to do things like count the people coming in and out of their stores and do heat maps like, Where are people visiting my store so I can optimize retail promotions and product placement? >>That's fantastic. The number of use cases is just, I imagine if we had more time like you could keep going and going. But thank you so much for not only sharing what's going on with Deep Racer and the innovations, but also for show until even though we weren't in person at reinvent this year, Great to have you back on the Cube. Mike. We appreciate your time. Yeah, thanks, Lisa, for having me. I appreciate it for Mike Miller. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes Live coverage of aws reinvent 2020.

>> (soft upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of Ansible Fest 2020, brought to you by RedHat. >> Hello, welcome to the cubes coverage of Ansible Fest 2020. We're not in person, we're virtual. I'm John Furrier , your host of theCube. We've got a great power panel here of RedHat engineers. We have Brad Thorton, Senior Principle Software Engineer for Ansible networking. Adam Miller, Senior Principle Software Engineer for Security and Jill Rouleau, who's the Senior Software Engineer for Ansible Cloud. Thanks for joining me today. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks. >> Good to be here. >> We're not in person this year because of COVID, a lot going on but still a lot of great news coming out of Ansible Fest this year. Last year, you guys launched a lot since last year. It's been awesome. Launched the new platform. The automation platform, grown the collections, certified collections community from five supported platforms to over 50, launched a lot of automation services catalog. Brad let's start with you. Why are customers successful with Ansible in networking? >> Why are customers successful with Ansible in networking? Well, let's take a step back to a bit of classic network engineering, right? Lots of CLI interaction with the terminal, a real opportunity for human error there. Managing thousands of devices from the CLI becomes very difficult. I think one of the reasons why Ansible has done well in the networking space and why a lot of network engineers find it very easy to use is because you can still see an attack at the CLI. But what we have the ability to do is pull information from the same COI that you were using manually, and showed that as structured data and then let you return that structured data and push it back to the configuration. So what you get when you're using Ansible is a way to programmatically interface and do configuration management across your entire fleet. It brings consistency and stability, and speed really to network configuration management. >> You know, one of the big hottest areas is, you know, I always ask the folks in the cloud what's next after cloud and pretty much unanimously it's edge, and edge is super important around automation, Brad. What's your thoughts on, as people start thinking about, okay, I need to have edge devices. How does automation play into that? And cause networking, edge it's kind of hand in hand there. So what's your thought on that? >> Yeah, for sure. It really depends on what infrastructure you have at the edge. You might be deploying servers at the edge. You may be administering IOT devices and really how you're directing that traffic either into edge compute or back to your data center. I think one of the places Ansible is going to be really critical is administering the network devices along that path from the edge, from IOT back to the data center, or to the cloud. >> Jill, when you have a Cloud, what's your thoughts on that? Because when you think about Cloud and Multicloud, that's coming around the horizon, you're looking at kind of the operational model. We talked about this a lot last year around having Cloud ops on premises and in the Cloud. What should customers think about when they look at the engineering challenges and the development challenges around Cloud? >> So cloud gets used for a lot of different things, right? But if we step back Cloud just means any sort of distributed applications, whether it's on prem in your own data center, on the edge, in a public hosted environment, and automation is critical for making those things work, when you have these complex applications that are distributed across, whether it's a rack, a data center or globally. You need a tool that can help you make sense of all of that. You've got to... We can't manage things just with, Oh, everything is on one box anymore. Cloud really just means that things have been exploded out and broken up into a bunch of different pieces. And there's now a lot more architectural complexity, no matter where you're running that. And so I think if you step back and look at it from that perspective, you can actually apply a lot of the same approaches and philosophies to these new challenges as they come up without having to reinvent the wheel of how you think about these applications. Just because you're putting them in a new environment, like at the edge or in a public Cloud or on a new, private on premise solution. >> It's interesting, you know, I've been really loving the cloud native action lately, especially with COVID, we're seeing a lot of more modern apps come out of that. If I could follow up there, how do you guys look at tools like Terraform and how does Ansible compare to that? Because you guys are very popular in the cloud configuration, you look at cloud native, Jill, your thoughts. >> Yeah. So Terraform and tools like that. Things like cloud formation or heat in the OpenStack world, they do really, really great at things like deploying your apps and setting up your stack and getting them out there. And they're really focused on that problem space, which is a hard problem space that they do a fantastic job with where Ansible tends to come in and a tool like Ansible is what do you do on day two with that application? How do you run an update? How do you manage it in the longterm of something like 60% of the workloads or cloud spend at least on AWS is still just EC2 instances. What do you do with all of those EC2 instances once you've deployed them, once they're in a stack, whether you're managing it, whatever tool you're managing it with, Ansible is a phenomenal way of getting in there and saying, okay, I have these instances, I know about them, but maybe I just need to connect out and run an update or add a package or reconfigure a service that's running on there. And I think you can glue these things together and use Ansible with these other stack deployment based tools really, really effectively. >> Real quick, just a quick followup on that. what's the big pain point for developers right now when they're looking at these tools? Because they see the path, what are some of the pain points that they're living right now that they're trying to overcome? >> I think one of the problems kind of coincidentally is we have so many tools. We're in kind of a tool explosion in the cloud space, right now. You could piece together as as many tools to manage your stack, as you have components in your stack and just making sense of what that landscape looks like right now and figuring out what are the right tools for the job I'm trying to do, that can be flexible and that are not going to box me into having to spend half of my engineering time, just managing my tools and making sense of all of that is a significant effort and job on its own. >> Yes, too many may add, would choke in years ago in the big data search, the tools, the tool train, one we call the tool shed, after a while, you don't know what's in the back, what you're using every day. People get comfortable with the right tools, but the platform becomes a big part of that thinking holistically as a system. And Adam, this comes back to security. There's more tools in the security space than ever before. Talking about tool challenges, security is the biggest tool shed everyone's got tools they'd buy everything, but you got to look at, what a platform looks like and developers just want to have the truth. And when you look at the configuration management piece of it, security is critical. What's your thoughts on the source of truth when it comes into play for these security appliances? >> So these are... Source of truth piece is kind of an interesting one because this is going to be very dependent on the organization. What type of brownfield environment they've developed, what type of things that they rely on, and what types of data they store there. So we have the ability for various sources of truth to come in for your inventory source and the types of information you store with that. This could be tagged information on a series of cloud instances or series about resources. This could be something you store in a network management tool or a CMDB. This could even be something that you put into a privilege access management system, such as, CyberArk or hashivault. Like those are the things and because of Ansible flexibility and because of the way that everything is put together in a pluggable nature, we have the capability to actually bring in all of these components from anywhere in a brownfield environment, in a preexisting infrastructure, as well as new decisions that are being made for the enterprise as I move forward. And, and we can bring all that together and be that infrastructure glue, be that automation component that can tie all these disjoint loosely coupled, or complete disc couple pieces, together. And that's kind of part of that, that security posture, remediation various levels of introspection into your environment, these types of things, as we go forward, and that's kind of what we're focusing on doing with this. >> What kind of data is stored in the source of truth? >> I mean... So what type of data? This could be credential. It could be single use credential access. This could be your inventory data for your systems, what target systems you're trying to do. It could be, various attributes of different systems to be able to classify them ,and codify them in different ways. It's kind of kind of depending, be configuration data. You know, we have the ability with some of the work that Brad and his team are doing to actually take unstructured data, make it structured, bullet into whatever your chosen source of truth is, store it, and then utilize that to, kind of decompose it into different vendors, specific syntax representations and those types of things. So we have a lot of different capability there as well. >> Brad, you were mentioned, do you have a talk on parsing, can you elaborate on that? And why should network operators care about that? >> Yeah, welcome to 2020. We're still parsing network configuration and operational state. This is an interesting one. If you had asked me years ago, did I think that we would be investing development time into parsing with Ansible network configurations? I would have said, "Well, I certainly hope not. "I hope programmability of network devices and the vendors "really have their API's in order." But I think what we're seeing is network containers are still comfortable with the command line. They're still very familiar with the command line and when it comes time to do operational state assessment and health assessment of your network, engineers are comfortable going to the command line and running show commands. So really what we're trying to do in the parsing space is not author brand new parking and parsing engine ourselves, but really leverage a lot of the open source tools that are already out there bringing them into Ansible, so network engineers can now harvest the critical information from usher operational state commands on their network devices. And then once they've gotten to the structure data, things get really interesting because now you can do entrance criteria checks prior to doing configuration changes, right? So if you want to ensure a network device has a very particular operational state, all the BGP neighbors are, for example before pushing configuration changes, what we have the ability to do now is actually parse the command that you would have run from the command line. Use that within a decision tree in your Ansible playbook, and only move forward when the configuration changes. If the box is healthy. And then once the configuration changes are made at the end, you run those same health checks to ensure that you're in a speck can do a steady state and are production ready. So parsing is the mechanism. It's the data that you get from the parsing that's so critical. >> If I had to ask you real quick, just while it's on my mind. You know, people want to know about automation. It's top of mind use case. What are some of these things around automation and configuration parsing, whether it's parsing to other configuration manager, what are the big challenges around automation? Because it's the Holy grail. Everyone wants it now. What are the couches? where's the hotspots that needs to be jumped on and managed carefully? Or the easiest low hanging fruit? >> Well, there's really two pieces to it, right? There's the technology. And then there's the culture. And, and we talk really about a culture of automation, bringing the team with you as you move into automation, ensuring that everybody has the tools and they're familiar with how automation is going to work and how their day job is going to change because of automation. So I think once the organization embraces automation and the culture is in place. On the technology side, low hanging fruit automation can be as simple as just using Ansible to push the commands that you would have previously pushed to the device. And then as your organization matures, and you mature along this kind of path of network automation, you're dealing with larger pieces, larger sections of the configuration. And I think over time, network engineers will become data managers, right? Because they become less concerned about the network, the vendors specific configuration, and they're really managing the data that makes up the configuration. And I think once you hit that part, you've won at automation because you can move forward with Ansible resource modules. You're well positioned to do NETCONF for RESTCONF or... Right once you've kind of grown to that it's the data that we need to be concerned about and it could fit (indistinct) and the operational state management piece, you're going to go through a transformation on the networking side. >> So you mentioned-- >> And one thing to note there, if I may, I feel like a piece of this too, is you're able to actually bridge teams because of the capability of Ansible, the breadth of technologies that we've had integrations with and our ability to actually bridge that gap between different technologies, different teams. Once you have that culture of automation, you can start to realize these DevOps and DevSecOps workflow styles that are top of everybody's mind these days. And that's something that I think is very powerful. And I like to try to preach when I have the opportunity to talk to folks about what we can do, and the fact that we have so much capability and so many integrations across the entire industry. >> That's a great point. DevSecOps is totally a hop on. When you have software and hardware, it becomes interesting. There's a variety of different equipment, on the security automation. What kind of security appliances can you guys automate? >> As of today, we are able to do endpoint management systems, enterprise firewalls, security information, and event management systems. We're able to do security orchestration, automation, remediation systems, privileged access management systems. We're doing some threat intelligence platforms. And we've recently added to the I'm sorry, did I say intrusion detection? We have intrusion detection and prevention, and we recently added endpoint security management. >> Huge, huge value there. And I think everyone's wants that. Jill, I've got to ask you about the Cloud because the modules came up. What use cases do you see the Ansible modules in for the public cloud? Because you got a lot of cloud native folks in public cloud, you've got enterprises lifting and shifting, there's a hybrid and multicloud horizon here. What's some of the use cases where you see those Ansible modules fitting well with public level. >> The modules that we have in public cloud can work across all of those things, you know. In our public clouds, we have support for Amazon web services, Azure GCP, and they all support your main services. You can spin up a Lambda, you can deploy ECS clusters, build AMI, all of those things. And then once you get all of that up there, especially looking at AWS, which is where I spend the most time, you get all your EC2 instances up, you can now pull that back down into Ansible, build an inventory from that. And seamlessly then use Ansible to manage those instances, whether they're running Linux or windows or whatever distro you might have them running, we can go straight from having deployed all of those services and resources to managing them and going between your instances in your traditional operating system management or those instances and your cloud services. And if you've got multiple clouds or if you still have on prem, or if you need to, for some reason, add those remote cloud instances into some sort of on-prem hardware load balancer, security endpoint, we can go between all of those things and glue everything together, fairly seamlessly. You can put all of that into tower and have one kind of view of your cloud and your hardware and your on-prem and being able to move things between them. >> Just put some color commentary on what that means for the customer in terms of, is it pain reduction, time savings? How would you classify their value? >> I mean, both. Instead of having to go between a number of different tools and say, "Oh, well for my on-prem, I have to use this. "But as soon as I shift over to a cloud, "I have to use these tools. "And, Oh, I can't manage my Linux instances with this tool "that only knows how to speak to, the EC2 to API." You can use one tool for all of these things. So like we were saying, bring all of your different teams together, give them one tool and one view for managing everything end to end. I think that's, that's pretty killer. >> All right. Now I get to the fun part. I want you guys to weigh in on the Kubernetes. Adam, if you can start with you, we'll start with you go in and tell us why is Kubernetes more important now? What does it mean? A lot of hype continues to be out there. What's the real meet around Kubernetes what's going on? >> I think the big thing is the modernization of the application development delivery. When you talk about Kubernetes and OpenShift and the capabilities we have there, and you talk about the architecture, you can build a lot of the tooling that you used to have to maintain, to be able to deliver sophisticated resilient architectures in your application stack, are now baked into the actual platform, so the container platform itself takes care of that for you and removes that complexity from your operations team, from your development team. And then they can actually start to use these primitives and kind of achieve what the cloud native compute foundation keeps calling cloud native applications and the ability to develop and do this in a way that you are able to take yourself out of some of the components you used to have to babysit a lot. And that becomes in also with the OpenShift operator framework that came out of originally Coral S, and if you go to operator hub, you're able to see these full lifecycle management stacks of infrastructure components that you don't... You no longer have to actually, maintain a large portion of what you start to do. And so the operator SDK itself, are actually developing these operators. Ansible is one of the automation capabilities. So there's currently three supported there's Ansible, there's one that you just have full access to the Golang API and then helm charts. So Ansible's specifically obviously being where we focus. We have our collection content for the... carries that core, and then also ReHat to OpenShift certified collection's coming out in, I think, a month or so. Don't hold me to the timeline. I'm shoving in trouble for that one, but we have those things going to come out. Those will be baked into the operator's decay that we fully supported by our customer base. And then we can actually start utilizing the Ansible expertise of your operations team to container native of the infrastructure components that you want to put into this new platform. And then Ansible itself is able to build that capability of automating the entire Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster in a way that allows you to go into a brownfield environment and automate your existing infrastructure, along with your more container native, futuristic next generation, net structure. >> Jill this brings up the question. Why don't you just use native public cloud resources versus Kubernetes and Ansible? What's the... What should people know about where you use that, those resources? >> Well, and it's kind of what Adam was saying with all of those brownfield deployments and to the same point, how many workloads are still running just in EC2 instances or VMs on the cloud. There's still a lot of tech out there that is not ready to be made fully cloud native or containerized or broken up. And with OpenShift, it's one more layer that lets you put everything into a kind of single environment instead of having to break things up and say, "Oh, well, this application has to go here. "And this application has to be in this environment.' You can do that across a public cloud and use a little of this component and a little of that component. But if you can bring everything together in OpenShift and manage it all with the same tools on the same platform, it simplifies the landscape of, I need to care about all of these things and look at all of these different things and keep track of these and are my tools all going to work together and are my tools secure? Anytime you can simplify that part of your infrastructure, I think is a big win. >> John: You know, I think about-- >> The one thing, if I may, Jill spoke to this, I think in the way that a architectural, infrastructure person would, but I want to try to really quick take the business analyst component of it as the hybrid component. If you're trying to address multiple footprints, both on prem, off prem, multiple public clouds, if you're running OpenShift across all of them, you have that single, consistent deployment and development footprint for everywhere. So I don't disagree with anything they said, I just wanted to focus specifically on... That piece is something that I find personally unique, as that was a problem for me in a past life. And that kind of speaks to me. >> Well, speaking of past lives-- >> Having me as an infrastructure person, thank you. >> Yeah. >> Well, speaking of past lives, OpenStack, you look at Jill with OpenStack, we've been covering the Cuba thing when OpenStack was rolling out back in the day, but you can also have private cloud. Where you used to... There's a lot of private cloud out there. How do you talk about that? How do people understand using public cloud versus the private cloud aspect of Ansible? >> Yeah, and I think there is still a lot of private cloud out there and I don't think that's a bad thing. I've kind of moved over onto the public cloud side of things, but there are still a lot of use cases that a lot of different industries and companies have that don't make sense for putting into public cloud. So you still have a lot of these on-prem open shift and on-prem OpenStack deployments that make a ton of sense and that are solving a bunch of problems for these folks. And I think they can all work together. We have Ansible that can support both of those. If you're a telco, you're not going to put your network function, virtualization on USC as to one in spot instances, right? When you call nine one one, you don't want that going through the public cloud. You want that to be on dedicated infrastructure, that's reliable and well-managed and engineered for that use case. So I think we're going to see a lot of ongoing OpenStack and on-prem OpenShift, especially with edge, enabling those types of use cases for a long time. And I think that's great. >> I totally agree with you. I think private cloud is not a bad thing at all. Things that are only going to accelerate my opinion. You look at the VM world, they talked about the telco cloud and you mentioned edge when five G comes out, you're going to have basically have private clouds everywhere, I guess, in my opinion. But anyway, speaking of VMware, could you talk about the Ansible VMware module real quick? >> Yeah, so we have a new collection that we'll be debuting at Ansible Fest this year bore the VMware REST API. So the existing VMware modules that we have usually SOAP API for VMware, and they rely on an external Python library that VMware provides, but with these fare 6.0 and especially in vSphere 6.5, VMware has stepped up with a REST API end point that we find is a lot more performance and offers a lot of options. So we built a new collection of VMware modules that will take advantage of that. That's brand new, it's a lighter way. It's much faster, we'll get better performance out of it. You know, reduced external requirements. You can install it and get started faster. And especially with these sphere seven, continuing to build on this REST API, we're going to see more and more interfaces being exposed so that we can take advantage. We plan to expand it as new interfaces are being exposed in that API, it's compatible with all of the existing modules. You can go back and forth, use your existing playbooks and start introducing these. But I think especially on the performance side, and especially as we get these larger clouds and more cloud deployments, edge clouds, where you have these private clouds and lots and lots of different places, the performance benefits of this new collection that we're trying to build is going to be really, really powerful for a lot of folks. >> Awesome. Brad, we didn't forget about you. We're going to bring you back in. Network automation has moved towards the resource modules. Why should people care about them? >> Yeah. Resource modules, excuse me. Probably I think having been a network engineer for so long, I think some of the most exciting work that has gone into Ansible network over the past year and a half, what the resource modules really do for you is they will reach out to network devices. They will pull back that network native, that vendor native configuration. While the resource module actually does the parsing for you. So there's none of that with the resource modules. And we returned structured data back to the user that represents the configuration. Going back to your question about source of truth. You can take that structure data, maybe for your interface CONFIG, your OSPF CONFIG, your access list CONFIG, and you can store that data in your source of truth under source of truth. And then where you are moving forward, is you really spend time as every engineer managing the data that makes up the configuration, and you can share that data across different platforms. So if you were to look at a lot of the resource modules, the data model that they support, it's fairly consistent between vendors. As an example, I can pull OSPF configuration from one vendor and with very small changes, push that OSPF configuration to a different vendor's platform. So really what we've tried to do with the resource modules is normalize the data model across vendors. It'll never be a hundred percent because there's functionality that exists in one platform that doesn't exist and that's exposed through the configuration, but where we could, we have normalized the data model. So I think it's really introducing the concept of network configuration management through data management and not through CLI commands anymore. >> Yeah, that's a great point. It just expands the network automation vision. And one of the things that's interesting here in this panel is you're talking about, cloud holistically, public multicloud, private hybrid security network automation as a platform, not just a tool, we're still going to have all kind of tools out there. And then the importance of automating the edge. I mean, that's a network game Brad. I mean, it's a data problem, right? I mean, we all know about networking, moving packets from here to there, but automating the data is critical and you give have bad data and you don't have... If you have misinformation, it sounds like our current politics, but you know, bad information is bad automation. I mean, what's your thoughts? How do you share that concept to developers out there? What should they be thinking about in terms of the data quality? >> I think that's the next thing we have to tackle as network engineers. It's not, do I have access to the data? You can get the data now for resource modules, you can get the data from NETCONF, from RESTCONF, you can get it from OpenConfig, you can get it from parsing. The question really is, how do you ensure the integrity and the quality of the data that is making up your configurations and the consistency of the data that you're using to look at operational state. And I think this is where the source of truth really becomes important. If you look at Git as a viable source of truth, you've got all the tools and the mechanisms within Git to use that as your source of truth for network configuration. So network engineers are actually becoming developers in the sense that they're using Git ops to worklow to manage configuration moving forward. It's just really exciting to see that transformation happen. >> Great panel. Thanks for everyone coming on, I appreciate it. We'll just end this by saying, if you guys could just quickly summarize Ansible fast 2020 virtual, what should people walk away with? What should your customers walk away with this year? What's the key points. Jill, we'll start with you. >> Hopefully folks will walk away with the idea that the Ansible community includes so many different folks from all over, solving lots of different, interesting problems, and that we can all come together and work together to solve those problems in a way that is much more effective than if we were all trying to solve them individually ourselves, by bringing those problems out into the open and working together, we get a lot done. >> Awesome, Brad? >> I'm going to go with collections, collections, collections. We introduced in last year. This year, they are real. Ansible2.10 that just came out is made up of collections. We've got certified collections on automation. We've got cloud collections, network collections. So they are here. They're the real thing. And I think it just gets better and deeper and more content moving forward. All right, Adam? >> Going last is difficult. Especially following these two. They covered a lot of ground and I don't really know that I have much to add beyond the fact that when you think about Ansible, don't think about it in a single context. It is a complete automation solution. The capability that we have is very extensible. It's very pluggable, which has a standing ovation to the collections and the solutions that we can come up with collectively. Thanks to ourselves. Everybody in the community is almost infinite. A few years ago, one of the core engineers did a keynote speech using Ansible to automate Philips hue light bulbs. Like this is what we're capable of. We can automate the fortune 500 data centers and telco networks. And then we can also automate random IOT devices around your house. Like we have a lot of capability here and what we can do with the platform is very unique and something special. And it's very much thanks to the community, the team, the open source development way. I just, yeah-- >> (Indistinct) the open source of truth, being collaborative all is what it makes up and DevOps and Sec all happening together. Thanks for the insight. Appreciate the time. Thank you. >> Thank you. I'm John Furrier, you're watching theCube here for Ansible Fest, 2020 virtual. Thanks for watching. (soft upbeat music)

From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of women transforming technology, brought to you by VMWare >> Hi, this is Lisa Martin covering the 5th annual women transforming technology event. But the first time this event has been completely digital. Coming to you from my home in San Jose, and I'm very pleased to welcome one of the event's speakers, the CEO of Be Leaderly, Jo Miller. Jo, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hi Lisa, a pleasure speaking with you today. >> Likewise. So I was looking up some information on you Jo you are quite impressive and I wanted to share that with our viewers. You have dedicated two decades to really helping women advance in their careers, into positions of influence. You've spoken with 100,000 plus women in that time and you've developed a roadmap that you published in 2019, a book. Tell us about that book and some of the really interesting things you've learned along the way. >> Thanks for asking! Well look the book was really born out of a conversation I had about 15 years ago with a woman, a software engineer, who told me that she felt like she was the best kept secret in her organization and of course, you know, being indispensable in your current role won't move your career forward and she had become indispensable for doing the type of work that was downplaying her potential and it started me on this journey of understanding how is it that we as women can end up being the best kept secrets in the organization, that invisible employee, so to speak. But also, speaking to hundreds of very successful, very seasoned women leaders to understand how did they advance in to the positions of influence that they're in today and so, uh, you've got the opportunity through a publisher to formalize those more than ten years of you know, speaking, and workshops, and all of the interviews that I've accumulated over time, all of that, expertise that I have learned from and put it together into my book with the nine steps that women can take to really thrive in advancing their careers and leave a leadership legacy. >> And what are, give me the first like three steps in the book is women of influence: nine steps to build your brand, establish your legacy, and thrive. Give me like the first three steps that we need to be able to do. >> Well, I think one of the most important ones is to realize that we are all already leaders whether we're in that high level executive leadership position or not, and so, a first step is just to understand all of the ways in which you're already a leader and to identify your own leadership strengths which you can do at any career phase quite frankly. From there, it's about understanding what do you bring to the table that could be a unique value proposition to your organization and matching your strengths to work that you are passionate about or care deeply about, in delivering something that your company or industry or customer base really needs and values and I call that your leadership superpower. So, from your strengths, identifying that niche or superpower and then up leveling that, so taking your personal brand and everything you have learned about your strengths and your value and turning that personal brand into a leadership brand so that people around you start to sit up and pay attention and notice the leader in you, but even more so I think so that you can see the leader in yourself. >> That's great advice, especially now with the COVID-19 crisis that is, regardless of what industry you are in, if you were someone that has worked from home before, it's completely different now, the uncertainty in everything whether it's job security or can I get Clorox wipes? It's a huge challenge. Do you find that those nine steps are still the same if not even more important in today's climate? >> I'll leverage what you said and say they're the same but possibly even more important, you know, if you think about how you were perceived say two months ago, and the value that people around you see in you, well that may have shifted dramatically now that our world has changed and frankly there's never been a time where there has been a greater need for people to step up and bring leadership to the table. And so I really encourage people right now, if you have the time in that busy work life and home life, that have become so mushed together, see if you can take a moment or two to step back and think about how has my world changed and what other really big problems that are emerging or what are the leadership gaps that I could be uniquely built to fill and start to just kind of reinvent and reimagine how you want to be perceived as a leader, like what's that you value proposition that you have to offer in this changed world that's going to continue changing. >> I like that. Reimagine and rethink because even though there is a lot of crisis and challenge going on right now, there are opportunities. So I like your advice of encouraging women and men to really reevaluate what it is that you can bring uniquely positioned, to help however your company is pivoting in this time because there is going to be a lot of change that is probably permanent as a result of this. So how, one of things that I love is talking about the difference between a mentor and a sponsor and you did a session at WT2 the other day, 90 minute interactive session digitally that's a challenge. So I am very impressed and excited to hear about that but you were talking to women about attracting the advocacy of influential sponsors. So, first off describe for our audience the difference between a mentor and a sponsor because I'll be honest with you, I didn't even really know there was a difference until a couple of years ago. >> I love this topic too Lisa and an article that really piqued my passion and interest in sponsorship is one that appeared in Harvard business review, again about a decade ago, and by the way the article was titled 'Why men still get more promotions than women.' and so that truly piqued my interest because I'm so fascinated by anything that can help women advance in their careers. But the article was some authors of a study saying that they'd found that high potential women were over mentored and under sponsored relative to their male peers and that that was one of the reasons that they weren't advancing as much in their organizations. And so I think that the key distinction between mentors and sponsors can be understood first by knowing that a sponsor is, like a mentor, someone that believes in you but they might see that potential that's unformed or untapped potential you might not even see in yourself and they're willing to place a bet on your talent and put their reputation on the line to advocate for you and put your name forward and publicly support you. And so, they're really putting themselves and their own political and social capital on the line. So compared to a mentor they do go beyond giving the feedback and the advice in order to bring their accumulated political and social and career capital to move your career forward within an organization. And so, look you know, whereas a mentor might help you skill up, a sponsor will help you move up and mentors will certainly talk to you but a sponsor is someone who will talk about you so if you can imagine, you know a mentor gives you advice on climbing the ropes, on uh on um, sorry a mentor will give you advice um, on uh, sorry just lost my train of thought there! >> Your advice on what, climbing the ladder. >> Yeah, yeah, that's right, yeah, I meant what shows you the ropes, there found it! A mentor shows you the ropes, whereas a sponsor is the one who helps you climb those ropes and so really what I meant, or what a sponsor is like is that rocket fuel for your career but in a good way. They can really alter your career trajectory and move you forward with new momentum. >> Can a sponsor be someone that you're currently working for? >> Yeah, absolutely. And of course not every manager or leader in your management chain will be a sponsor if you're lucky you'll have one but it might be a leader in a completely different area of the organization but I think one of the practical suggestions that I gave to the participants in my session was start to notice who the sponsors are in the organization around you like learn to spot the leaders who have the qualities that make a good sponsor. >> So if I'm out there doing that and I'm maybe going to write down, all right, who have been my mentors over the last few years, who do I think maybe from that category could become a sponsor, looking for sponsors what do we need to know about what a sponsor is going to expect of us. >> Well you know one of the really important distinctions to know about is that when you can go and ask someone to be your mentor, you really can't ask someone to be a sponsor in fact that might backfire, it might have the opposite effect and so sponsorships not something that you would you probably go and directly request, it's something that you earn instead. So, some of the things that sponsors will look to in you would be are you able to be committed and loyal to their goals and the goals of the organization and are you delivering outstanding performance that goes beyond what's being asked of you in your job description and role. But they're also looking for you to bring something truly unique and special to the table and that goes back to our earlier comments, our conversation about understanding what your strengths are, your technical and your leadership strengths and how you can apply them to bring something truly unique to the organization that differentiates you. So that's one of the things that we can do to start to attract sponsors which is to do that self-inventory of what can I bring to the table, what problems can I solve, what leadership gaps can I fill. >> So Jo let's talk about your 90 minute interactive session that you digitally for WT2 the other day. Given the gravity of the situation that COVID-19 is delivering tell me about some of the comments and the questions that you had, a woman going 'All right, in today's climate when we're not sure about even job certainty how do I up my chances of finding a sponsor?' >> Mhm, you know and I think it speaks to the timeliness of the topic. I think we had more than 300 people join the session and so one of the things that I love to do is to make it as interactive as I can by having some panelists join who spoke about examples of the sponsorship that they've gained in their career. But we also heard a lot from participants who are sending their comments in via the chat giving examples of the times when they had been sponsored, how it began, what the sponsors were able to do to help them move forward in their careers and then as we went further along in the session we spoke about the concept of micro sponsorship and how one of the most important ways to understand how sponsorship works is to sponsor someone else and so we saw just a wealth of examples and comments coming from participants about all the ways that they were declaring they were going to take action by sponsoring someone else in their organization. >> So a micro sponsorship that is an interesting concept, tell me a little bit more about that is that say, I'm a sponsor and I'm going to sponsor someone else or is it I have a sponsor and I'm going to get another sponsorship from that? >> Hmm, good question, so there's a couple of myths around sponsorship. One is that you do need to be a high level executive who's able to promote someone or create the perfect role for them or give them that high exposure assignment. And that's certainly one way that sponsorship can take place, the big gestures. But one of the executives I interviewed, Millette Granville said look you don't necessarily need to be an executive to be a sponsor but you do need to have influence and I think we all have influence, we just might not completely leverage it to the greatest extent we can. So we're leaving our influence on the table so if you can't sponsor someone in big ways think about looking for micro sponsorship moments in which you notice a colleague perhaps who's talent is going unseen or under leveraged and recommend that person, put them forward for an ideal opportunity or it might be something as simple as when you see someone share a great idea and no one notices, amplify that idea, attach the person's name to it, or when someone is being spoken over the top of, say 'let her finish' and so we can sponsor in large and in small ways. That's what I mean by micro sponsorship so notice the scope of your influence and use whatever influence you have to be speaking up and advocating for others. >> I love that. Thank you for that clarification. Were there concerns right now with all of the uncertainty, the volumes of people that have applied for unemployment. Were there any concerns from the audience in your session about if somebody else has a great idea will it just highlight that I don't? And will I be in you know a bright light a is she really delivering value if were having to cost cut, were there any concerns that the women brought up? >> Um, not that I noticed but by the way there were 300 people in the session so the chat log was going through so fast and if I was lucky I was able to pluck a few comments to read back to the audience. But I think you're right on target with that concern, I can only assume that a number of people have had that concern for themselves so one of the things that I talked about is the importance of making your value visible and how you don't want to speak up and amplify and promote every single thing that you do but be really strategic about amplifying the accomplishments that align with your aspirations. So, you know speak up and showcase and reveal and make known those high profile results that you are delivering that align with where you want to go in your career and of course that frees you up to be amplifying and promoting and making visible the achievements of others in the organization. In fact, I think if we care about having diverse and equitable workspaces we really need to be lifting others up. >> I love that. Focus on the visible. Last question, in the last few seconds that we have here, how does a company go about building a culture of sponsorship and how do you see that? >> Mhm, that's interesting because you know a lot of companies have a really fully-formed culture of mentorship and they have formalized mentorship programs. On the other hand there tends not to be so many companies that are having sponsorship initiatives but those that do typically will attach them to an existing talent or high potential or diversity initiative and so if you're in a position of influence and leadership and one thing of course to do is be open and transparent about what it would take for you to sponsor someone. But if you're already doing that take it a step further and champion having an open and diverse and equitable culture of sponsorship in the organization, talk to other leaders about what that looks like and get involved in those existing talent and diversity and high potential initiatives and champion the idea of adding a sponsorship component where participants are matched to leaders and the leaders have accountability to help produce results in that participant's career advancement. >> I love that, accountability. This is definitely a topic Jo that I love talking about mentors vs sponsors and it sounds like it's one that just needs more and more and more air cover so people really understand that there is tremendous value there. I wish we had more time, but it has been such a pleasure talking with you Jo I really appreciate that. We thank you for joining us on theCUBE and we appreciate the fact that you have been able to do this, remotely from Iowa, I am in San Jose, so for Jo, I am Lisa Martin and you are watching theCUBE's coverage of women transforming technology, the digital version, 2020. Thanks for watching. (outro music)