(upbeat music) >> Hi, everybody. We're wrapping up day two of AWS Re:Inforce 2022. This is theCUBE, my name is Dave Vellante. And one of the folks that we featured, one of the companies that we featured in the AWS startup showcase season two, episode four, was Illumio. And of course their here at the security theme event. PJ Kerner is CTO and Co-Founder of Illumio. Great to see you, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> I always like to ask co-founders, people with co-founder in their titles, like go back to why you started the company. Let's go back to 2013. Why'd you start the company? >> Absolutely. Because back in 2013, one of the things that we sort of saw as technology trends, and it was mostly AWS was, there were really three things. One was dynamic workloads. People were putting workloads into production faster and faster. You talk about auto scale groups and now you talk about containers. Like things were getting faster and faster in terms of compute. Second thing was applications were getting more connected, right? The Netflix architecture is one define that kind of extreme example of hyper connectivity, but applications were, we'd call it the API economy or whatever, they were getting more connected. And the third problem back in 2013 was the problems around lateral movement. And at that point it was more around nation state actors and APTs that were in those environments for a lot of those customers. So those three trends were kind of, what do we need to do in security differently? And that's how Illumio started. >> So, okay, you say nation state that's obviously changed in the ROI of for hackers has become pretty good. And I guess your job is to reduce the ROI, but so what's the relationship PJ between the API economy, you talked about in that lateral movement? Are they kind of go hand in hand? >> They do. I think one thing that we have as a mission is, and I think it's really important to understand is to prevent breaches from becoming cyber disasters, right? And I use this metaphor around kind the submarine. And if you think about how submarines are built, submarines are built with water tight compartments inside the submarine. So when there is a physical breach, right, what happens? Like you get a torpedo or whatever, and it comes through the hall, you close off that compartment, there are redundant systems in place, but you close off that compartment, that one small thing you've lost, but the whole ship hasn't gone down and you sort of have survived. That's physical kind of resiliency and those same kind of techniques in terms of segmentation, compartmentalization inside your environments, is what makes good cyber resiliency. So prevent it from becoming a disaster. >> So you bring that micro segmentation analogy, the submarine analogy with micro segmentation to logical security, correct? >> Absolutely, yes. >> So that was your idea in 2013. Now we fast forward to 2022. It's no longer just nation states, things like ransomware are top of mind. I mean, everybody's like worried about what happened with solar winds and Log4j and on and on and on. So what's the mindset of the CISO today? >> I think you said it right. So ransomware, because if you think about the CIA triangle, confidentiality, integrity, availability, what does ransomware really does? It really attacks the availability problem, right? If you lock up all your laptops and can't actually do business anymore, you have an availability problem, right. They might not have stole your data, but they locked it up, but you can't do business, maybe you restore from backups. So that availability problem has made it more visible to CEOs and board level, like people. And so they've been talking about ransomware as a problem. And so that has given the CISO either more dollars, more authority to sort of attack that problem. And lateral movement is the primary way that ransomware gets around and becomes a disaster, as opposed to just locking up one machine when you lock up your entire environment, and thus some of the fear around colonial pipeline came in, that's when the disaster comes into play and you want to be avoiding that. >> Describe in more detail what you mean by lateral movement. I think it's implied, but you enter into a point and then instead of going, you're saying necessarily directly for the asset that you're going after, you're traversing the network, you're traversing other assets. Maybe you could describe that. >> Yeah, I mean, so often what happens is there's an initial point of breach. Like someone has a password or somebody clicked on a phishing link or something, and you have compromise into that environment, right? And then you might be compromised into a low level place that doesn't have a lot of data or is not worthwhile. Then you have to get from that place to data that is actually valuable, and that's where lateral movement comes into place. But also, I mean, you bring up a good point is like lateral movement prevention tools. Like, one way we've done some research around if you like, segmentation is, imagine putting up a maze inside your data center or cloud, right. So that, like how the attacker has to get from that initial breach to the crown jewels takes a lot longer when you have, a segmented environment, as opposed to, if you have a very flat network, it is just go from there to go find that asset. >> Hence, you just increase the denominator in the ROI equation and that just lowers the value for the hacker. They go elsewhere. >> It is an economic, you're right, it's all about economics. It's a time to target is what some our research like. So if you're a quick time to target, you're much easier to sort of get that value for the hacker. If it's a long time, they're going to get frustrated, they're going to stop and might not be economically viable. It's like the, you only have to run faster than the-- >> The two people with the bear chasing you, right. (laughs) Let's talk about zero trust. So it's a topic that prior to the pandemic, I think a lot of people thought it was a buzzword. I have said actually, it's become a mandate. Having said that others, I mean, AWS in particular kind of rolled their eyes and said, ah, we've always been zero trust. They were sort of forced into the discussion. What's your point of view on zero trust? Is it a buzzword? Does it have meaning, what is that meaning to Illumio? >> Well, for me there's actually two, there's two really important concepts. I mean, zero trust is a security philosophy. And so one is the idea of least privilege. And that's not a new idea. So when AWS says they've done it, they have embraced these privileges, a lot of good systems that have been built from scratch do, but not everybody has least privilege kind of controls everywhere. Secondly, least privilege is not about a one time thing. It is about a continuously monitoring. If you sort of take, people leave the company, applications get shut down. Like you need to shut down that access to actually continuously achieve that kind of least privilege stance. The other part that I think is really important that has come more recently is the assume breach mentality, right? And assume breach is something where you assume the attacker is, they've already clicked on, like stop trying to prevent. Well, I mean, you always still should probably prevent the people from clicking on the bad links, but from a security practitioner point of view, assume this has already happened, right. They're already inside. And then what do you have to do? Like back to what I was saying about setting up that maze ahead of time, right. To increase that time to target, that's something you have to do if you kind of assume breach and don't think, oh, a harder shell on my submarine is going to be the way I'm going to survive, right. So that mentality is, I will say is new and really important part of a zero trust philosophy. >> Yeah, so this is interesting because I mean, you kind of the old days, I don't know, decade plus ago, failure meant you get fired, breach meant you get fired. So we want to talk about it. And then of course that mentality had to change 'cause everybody's getting breached and this idea of least privilege. So in other words, if someone's not explicitly or a machine is not explicitly authorized to access an asset, they are not allowed, it's denied. So it's like Frank Slootman would say, if there's doubt, there's no doubt. And so is that right? >> It is. I mean, and if you think about it back to the disaster versus the breach, imagine they did get into an application. I mean, lamps stacks will have vulnerabilities from now to the end of time and people will get in. But what if you got in through a low value asset, 'cause these are some of the stories, you got in through a low value asset and you were sort of contained and you had access to that low value data. Let's say you even locked it up or you stole it all. Like it's not that important to the customer. That's different than when you pivot from that low value asset now into high value assets where it becomes much more catastrophic for those customers. So that kind of prevention, it is important. >> What do you make of this... Couple things, we've heard a lot about encrypt everything. It seems like these days again, in the old days, you'd love to encrypt everything, but there was always a performance hit, but we're hearing encrypt everything, John asked me the day John Furrier is like, okay, we're hearing about encrypting data at rest. What about data in motion? Now you hear about confidential computing and nitro and they're actually encrypting data in the flow. What do you make of that whole confidential computing down at the semiconductor level that they're actually doing things like enclaves and the arm architecture, how much of the problem does that address? How much does it still leave open? >> That's a hard question to answer-- >> But you're a CTO. So that's why I can ask you these questions. >> But I think it's the age old adage of defense in depth. I mean, I do think equivalent to what we're kind of doing from the networking point of view to do network segmentation. This is another layer of that compartmentalization and we'll sort of provide similar containment of breach. And that's really what we're looking for now, rather than prevention of the breach and rather than just detection of the breach, containment of that breach. >> Well, so it's actually similar philosophy brought to the wider network. >> Absolutely. And it needs to be brought at all levels. I think that's the, no one level is going to solve the problem. It's across all those levels is where you have to. >> What are the organizational implications of, it feels like the cloud is now becoming... I don't want to say the first layer of defense because it is if you're all in the cloud, but it's not, if you're a hybrid, but it's still, it's becoming increasingly a more important layer of defense. And then I feel like the CISO and the development team is like the next layer maybe audit is the third layer of defense. How are you seeing organizations sort of respond to that? The organizational roles changing, the CISO role changing. >> Well there's two good questions in there. So one is, there's one interesting thing that we are seeing about people. Like a lot of our customers are hybrid in their environment. They have a cloud, they have an on-prem environment and these two things need to work together. And in that case, I mean, the massive compute that you can be doing in the AWS actually increases the attack surface on that hybrid environment. So there's some challenges there and yes, you're absolutely right. The cloud brings some new tools to play, to sort of decrease that. But it's an interesting place we see where there's a attack surface that occurs between different infrastructure types, between AWS and on-prem of our environment. Now, the second part of your question was really around how the developers play into this. And I'm a big proponent of, I mean, security is kind of a team sport. And one of the things that we've done in some of our products is help people... So we all know the developers, like they know they're part of the security story, right? But they're not security professionals. They don't have all of the tools and all of the experience. And all of the red teaming time to sort of know where some of their mistakes might be made. So I am optimistic. They do their best, right. But what the security team needs is a way to not just tell them, like slap on the knuckles, like developer you're doing the wrong thing, but they really need a way to sort of say, okay, yes, you could do better. And here's some concrete ways that you can do better. So a lot of our systems kind of look at data, understand the data, analyze the data, and provide concrete recommendations. And there's a virtual cycle there. As long as you play the team sport, right. It's not a us versus them. It's like, how can we both win there? >> So this is a really interesting conversation because the developer all of a sudden is increasingly responsible for security. They got to worry about they're using containers. Now they got to worry about containers security. They got to worry about the run time. They got to worry about the platform. And to your point, it's like, okay, this burden is now on them. Not only do they have to be productive and produce awesome code, they got to make sure it's secure. So that role is changing. So are they up for the task? I mean, I got to believe that a lot of developers are like, oh, something else I have to worry about. So how are your customers resolving that? >> So I think they're up for the task. I think what is needed though, is a CISO and a security team again, who knows it's a team sport. Like some technologies adopted from the top down, like the CIO can say, here's what we're doing and then everybody has to do it. Some technologies adopted from the bottom up, right. It's where this individual team says, oh, we're using this thing and we're using these tools. Oh yeah, we're using containers and we're using this flavor of containers. And this other group uses Lambda services and so on. And the security team has to react because they can't mandate. They have to sort of work with those teams. So I see the best groups of people is where you have security teams who know they have to enable the developers and the developers who actually want to work with the security team. So it's the right kind of person, the right kind of CISO, right kind of security teams. It doesn't treat it as adversarial. And it works when they both work together. And that's where, your question is, how ingrained is that in the industry, that I can't say, but I know that does work. And I know that's the direction people are going. >> And I understand it's a spectrum, but I hear what you're saying. That is the best practice, the right organizational model, I guess it's cultural. I mean, it's not like there's some magic tool to make it all, the security team and the dev team collaboration tool, maybe there is, I don't know, but I think the mindset and the culture has to really be the starting point. >> Well, there is. I just talk about this idea. So however you sort of feel about DevOps and DevSecOps and so on, one core principle I see is really kind of empathy between like the developers and the operations folks, so the developers and the security team. And one way I actually, and we act like this at Illumio but one thing we do is like, you have to truly have empathy. You kind have to do somebody else's job, right. Not just like, think about it or talk about it, like do it. So there are places where the security team gets embedded deep in the organization where some of the developers get embedded in the operations work and that empathy. I know whether they go back to do what they were doing, what they learned about how the other side has to work. Some of the challenges, what they see is really valuable in sort of building that collaboration. >> So it's not job swapping, but it's embedding, is maybe how they gain that empathy. >> Exactly. And they're not experts in all those things, but do them take on those summer responsibilities, be accountable for some of those things. Now, not just do it on the side and go over somebody's shoulder, but like be accountable for something. >> That's interesting, not just observational, but actually say, okay, this is on you for some period of time. >> That is where you actually feel the pain of the other person, which is what is valuable. And so that's how you can build one of those cultures. I mean, you do need support all the way from the top, right. To be able to do that. >> For sure. And of course there are lightweight versions of that. Maybe if you don't have the stomach for... Lena Smart was on this morning, CISO of Mongo. And she was saying, she pairs like the security pros that can walk on water with the regular employees and they get to ask all these Colombo questions of the experts and the experts get to hear it and say, oh, I have to now explain this like I'm explaining it to a 10 year old, or maybe not a 10 year old, but a teenager, actually teenager's probably well ahead of us, but you know what I'm saying? And so that kind of cross correlation, and then essentially the folks that aren't security experts, they absorb enough and they can pass it on throughout the organization. And that's how she was saying she emphasizes culture building. >> And I will say, I think, Steve Smith, the CISO of AWS, like I've heard him talk a number of times and like, they do that here at like, they have some of the spirit and they've built it in and it's all the way from the top, right. And that's where if you have security over and a little silo off to the side, you're never going to do that. When the CEO supports the security professionals as a part of the business, that's when you can do the right thing. >> So you remember around the time that you and you guys started Illumio, the conversation was, security must be a board level topic. Yes, it should be, is it really, it was becoming that way. It wasn't there yet. It clearly is now, there's no question about it. >> No, ransomware. >> Right, of course. >> Let's thank ransomware. >> Right. Thank you. Maybe that's a silver lining. Now, the conversation is around, is it a organizational wide issue? And it needs to be, it needs to be, but it really isn't fully. I mean, how many organizations actually do that type of training, certainly large organizations do. It's part of the onboarding process, but even small companies are starting to do that now saying, okay, as part of the onboarding process, you got to watch this training video and sure that you've done it. And maybe that's not enough, but it's a start. >> Well, and I do think that's where, if we get back to zero trust, I mean, zero trust being a philosophy that you can adopt. I mean, we apply that kind of least privilege model to everything. And when people know that people know that this is something we do, right. That you only get access to things 'cause least privileges, you get access to absolutely to the things you need to do your job, but nothing more. And that applies to everybody in the organization. And when people sort of know this is the culture and they sort of work by that, like zero trust being that philosophy sort of helps infuse it into the organization. >> I agree with that, but I think the hard part of that in terms of implementing it for organizations is, companies like AWS, they have the tools, the people, the practitioners that can bring that to bear, many organizations don't. So it becomes an important prioritization exercise. So they have to say, okay, where do we want to apply that least privilege and apply that technology? 'Cause we don't have the resources to do it across the entire portfolio. >> And I'll give you a simple example of where it'll fail. So let's say, oh, we're least privilege, right. And so you asked for something to do your job and it takes four weeks for you to get that access. Guess what? Zero trust out the door at that organization. If you don't have again, the tools, right. To be able to walk that walk. And so it is something where you can't just say it, right. You do have to do it. >> So I feel like it's pyramid. It's got to start. I think it's got to be top down. Maybe not, I mean certainly bottom up from the developer mindset. No question about that. But in terms of where you start. Whether it's financial data or other confidential data, great. We're going to apply that here and we're not going to necessarily, it's a balance, where's the risk? Go hard on those places where there's the biggest risk. Maybe not create organizational friction where there's less risk and then over time, bring that in. >> And I think, I'll say one of the failure modes that we sort of seen around zero trust, if you go too big, too early, right. You actually have to find small wins in your organization and you pointed out some good ones. So focus on like, if you know where critical assets are, that's a good place to sort of start. Building it into the business as usual. So for example, one thing we recommend is people start in the developing zero trust segmentation policy during the development, or at least the test phase of rolling out a new application as you sort of work your way into production, as opposed to having to retro segment everything. So get it into the culture, either high value assets or work like that, or just pick something small. We've actually seen customers use our software to sort of like lock down RDP like back to ransomware, loves RDP lateral movement. So why can we go everywhere to everywhere with RDP? Well, you need it to sort of solve some problems, but just focus on that one little slice of your environment, one application and lock that down. That's a way to get started and that sort of attacks the ransomware problem. So there's lots of ways, but you got to make some demonstrable first steps and build that momentum over time to sort of get to that ultimate end goal. >> PJ Illumio has always been a thought leader in security generally in this topic specifically. So thanks for coming back on theCUBE. It's always great to have you guys. >> All right. Thanks, been great. >> All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Inforce 2022 from Boston. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto and Boston, this is an episode in the Remote Works Citrix Virtual Series. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special conversation talking about back to work. Of course, the COVID global pandemic impacting everyone working from home and what's happening as these productivity changes. So, really happy to welcome to the program two of our Cube alumni. First of all, we have PJ Hough. He is the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer of the Citrix. And also joining us, Maribel Lopez, she is the Founder and Principal Analyst at Lopez Research. PJ and Maribel, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks Stu. >> Alright, so let's talk. You know, we've been in this pandemic now for, you know, a good chunk of time, many months. Some of us are back in the office. Some, we are talking a lot about, Maribel I think you talked about hybrid work in some of the readings and writings that you've done. So, I'd love to hear, you know, you're thinking right now, what you're hearing from your customers, and how should we be thinking about that workforce both today and really for kind of the next six to 12 months? PJ, maybe we'll start with you and how Citrix is helping and Maribel would love you to chime in with what you're hearing from customers and in your research. >> Yeah, I think it's a very interesting time for our customers right now. First of all, I have to say, generally impressed I am with the way that businesses have managed to transition from, you know, working in the office to working in this almost 100% remote environment for many of our customers. And that they've made that transition, you know, many of them using our technology. But using very much every technique available to them and maybe even bending some of the previous rules that they had about what their strategies would be with regard to particular technologies or solutions. But it's been really very impressive to see everyone move from that, you know, state where they had to leave their offices, many at relatively short notice, all the way to, you know, where we are today. And of course, as you mentioned Stu, we now have a subset of those customers who are actually either beginning to move back or preparing to move back. But, I still think that's a journey that's ahead of most of the customers that I deal with on a daily basis. >> So for me, you know, I feel that there are really several things happening, right? We have new profiles that we're looking at. So in the back to office, some people will go back to the office and be full time there. Many people will be remote work. In fact, you might even hire some people, and never physically have them come into the office to meet with anybody. It might all be done by a video as an example. And then there'll be nomadic workers, where some people will come in more for this concept of collaboration, and then they'll go back and work from home. So, those three profiles, I think we talked about them in the past, but really, there were very few people that thought there was going to be a large percentage of remote work. And nomadic work was more something that was thought I'm traveling. It wasn't thought that I might work at home and really use the office as more a collaborative engagement space. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch many of the large technology enterprise companies that I work with, have been giving their employees the option. It is, you know, okay, hey, when things open up, do you want to stay fully remote? You know, it's going to be, you know, the ripple effect on real estate. Maribel as you were saying, you know, how we think about where they live and work compared to what they had before. PJ, I want to come to you. The discussion we've had for many years in the industry is, you know, customer experience is so important, but of course, it's the employee experience that is going to be a big piece of how customer experience and we create that delight. Of course, as you mentioned, Citrix has been helping customers, you know, really change how they think about where employees work, how employees work. So, you know, is this just accelerating what we've seen before? What does that, you know, employee experience look like in today's environment? >> Well, I think this is a really important area for, I think, organizations to focus on at a time like this. Obviously, there's been a lot of attention in the last decade on the customer experience, and I would say the digital customer experience. And maybe even a little bit ahead of some of the investments that have been made in the employee experience that has needed to keep up with that. And so, you know, we've been doing some research, some of it was done earlier in the year in fact, that shows a very high correlation between the performance of companies and the response from employees who claim that they have very good to excellent digital tools to help them do their job. And I think one of the areas where companies have either, I will say succeeded or maybe felt a little bit of stress in the system, in this movement of employees from the office to the home, is whether or not the experience they were able to deliver was consistent with what the employees had previously been leveraging when they were in the office. We've all built up a set of technologies and capabilities over many years in our offices, and now we somehow, you know, came home with a laptop or a Chromebook. And the reality was, you know, did that really reflect the best power of the tools and the capabilities that the employees previously had access to in the office? And it's certainly been an area of focus for us at Citrix. It's really matching that set of capabilities so that no matter where the employee is, they get full access to the set of applications and services with the security and the control that you need to protect all the assets of the enterprise. >> You know PJ, I think this is actually really important, this concept. I'm calling it a right time experience, you know, right information to the right person at the right time. So how do you get your applications and services to them on whatever device they might have had during the pandemic? Because a lot of people didn't actually have laptops at home. Maybe they were in an environment where they were using desktops. So that application delivery was really important. The security wrapped around that is super important because now we're in a scenario where basically the crown jewels of an organization, their data, is in homes and other places distributed around the world. So, we have to make sure that A, that that's accessible and that B, that that's secured. And I think that this is a new imperative that we've talked about for some time, but how you deliver it in this new world is very different. And I think that the employee experience had always lagged the customer experience. And now we're trying to close that gap and hopefully take it to the next level. >> It could great point out. I was just kind of laughing. I think back if you dial back the clock, you know, say 15 years, the discussion was all about the consumerization of IT. The experience that I had at home when I was using devices or using technology was better than what I had at the office. Now of course, you know, not only do I see people taking laptops home, they have their big screen monitors. They need to make sure that they have access to the right data. We need to make sure that things are secure. So PJ, help us understand a little bit what are some of those services? It's not, you know, the VDI conversation that we were having a decade ago. So, you know, what is it that IT has either been delivering or scrambling to make sure that we can be as productive at home as we were sitting in the office? >> Well, I can certainly tell you that for our customers, the critical pieces of technology that they've been leveraging, start with the workspace experience. We deliver a workspace experience that includes VDI. It includes virtualized applications and desktops, and for many organizations, they still are, you know, critical applications. But the application portfolio that the employees use today is much broader than that, and includes, you know, web applications and SaaS applications, homegrown service based applications, et-cetera, as well as there are mobile applications. And so really wrapping all that in a single workspace, that's the journey that we've been on as a company. And it's really being put to the test right now, by our customers who are really trying to give employees access, not just maybe to the one or two core applications, they needed to do their job. But remember, in the six months that's gone by, most of the employees have had to, you know, fill out an expense report, or maybe use the HR system for some process or maybe take some time off that they wanted to record. So in addition to the core applications, they needed access to that full suite of applications that they use on a daily basis. And so that's certainly one set of technologies that our customers have been leveraging. They're using it both for the experience, but also for the security because we provide that same control over those applications inside the workspace experience no matter what type of application it is. And then I'd say the second area where our technology has been heavily leveraged is in our networking products providing the access and the control back to the enterprise resources that employees have to get access to on a daily basis. >> I think one of the things that you brought up PJ. Sorry, sorry Stu, is really important. And that's sort of that acceleration layer to make sure that you have a good experience, and that you have that secure connection. The other thing I think is really interesting is we're actually rethinking what that experience means for the employee. It used to be that when you were trying to create an experience, it was sort of one device, one universal look and feel for everything, one set of applications. I actually think that organizations are being much more thoughtful now when they're creating what PJ referred to as a workspace. You know, the workspace for Maribel might look very different than it does for Stu than it does for PJ, and it might be a combination of different style technologies. I mean, it could be that, you know, I'm in the contact center and I want to VDI experience dropped on me where I don't have to manage anything. I don't do anything. I just open up the device, and everything comes down to me. And then it all goes away when I'm done with my workday, because that's what needs to happen. You can't have private information on, you know, personal identifiable information on someone's home device. So, I think we're really going to be sophisticated about what a workspace means. >> Yeah. Maribel I was just commenting PJ made a comment. There's this thing he said, talked about taking a day off. I didn't realize that was still a thing in 2020. But, Maribel I'm curious, you know, as many people felt that this was okay. It was a short time. I'm going to have a couple of months and then we're just going to go back to the office. I think we understand now that however, things have fundamentally changed. And therefore, this isn't okay, hey, temporarily I can do this, and have to worry about my kids and myself and the space and the internet and all of these pieces. What do companies need to do to kind of make sure that we've set up our employees for success? You know, what are some of the challenges that you hear out there? That people are saying, Oh, geez, you know, I'm ready for it. And I think you laid out very well. There's a big difference between, you know, you might be a developer, in which case, you're probably used to working distributed with people all around the globe and asynchronously, versus somebody that was like, hey, wait, you know, everyday I can have a stand up meeting with my entire team and look across the table at them. >> Well, there's a lot going on. Some of it is cultural. Some of it is technical. And some of it's actually surprising on the technology side. I think the first thing that when we started with COVID, we realized that not everybody has the right portfolio of devices and while that might sound a bit insignificant, if you do not have the say right PC with the right performance to do video, that's difficult. Now we're talking about all the environmental elements. Right? Do you have the right lighting? Do you have the right audio capability? Can I actually see you with that webcam? Is the webcam in the right place? So, the environmental things are sort of the first stage. We just talked a bit about the security that people are struggling with now, making sure that they have people with the right security for the data they have. The education and training around that also hasn't been done. You know, we had a certain set of people that were trained on how to work remotely, but then we sent everyone home, and they're clicking on links that they shouldn't be clicking on and compromising devices. So, there's a lot of challenges still with the education and training that we're seeing. And then as I mentioned earlier, I think that organizations are trying to figure out what's the right portfolio services and do I have the right portfolio services. I actually purchased something to deal with COVID, but is that the right thing? You know, and now we're moving from what I'm calling remote light to remote right. Where we're really being very thoughtful about who needs what style of services, how scalable are those services? And then culturally, I mean, I think we have issues like, how do you deal with multiple time zones? You have to find a time zone that works for, say, Europe and Asia for everybody to be on the call. Is that really feasible? How do we think about that collaborative environment moving forward? So, a lot of interesting challenges ahead. >> Yeah. Actually, I see customers really struggling or at least planning on all three fronts right now. The first being the people processes that we use. And think about the number of employees that have been hired since this has started, who've had an onboarding experience that's been, let's say, at least unorthodox. And maybe very much not what they were expecting or their colleagues either. I have certainly many colleagues now that I've never met face to face for the duration of their careers at Citrix. And hopefully that will change at some point in the future. But I know in the meantime, we're going to onboard quite a few more employees who have that same experience. So, I think your people processes, starting with onboarding, but all the way through to, you know, training and everything else, especially for managers, I think is really important. Then you think about the processes that we have as companies, and how we conduct our own business on a day to day basis. And many of our processes were highly optimized for face to face communication, as you pointed out, Stu. Being in the same conference room across the table from each other. So how do we, I would say, lean down maybe a little bit our processes, make them a little leaner, make them easier to operate for people who are operating remotely? And then that last part is, of course, what's the technology that we bring to burry these solutions? Both I will say the technology that we enable people to have access to when they're remotely working, working from home, and then how do we reconfigure shared space, office spaces so that they make even more sense, when we're back in the office? Personally, I don't see myself going back to the office to do solo work. I see myself going back to the office to communicate with other employees, to collaborate with other people and to connect to my team. And I'll probably find other ways to get my work done. But I leverage the office more as a shared collaboration space than I'd previously thought about in the past. >> PJ, I liked what Maribel talked about setting up, you know, remote work right. You know, the promise has been, we've talked about for a lot of years, like I remember working in the telecom industry back in the 90s. It was going to be well, you know, we should have ubiquitous video and access to everything, wherever we are. You know, 5G, come on we're going to have enough bandwidth to be able to solve all these things, right? So, help us understand, you know, how do we deploy something today that gives people the flexibility? So that as you said, you can be remote when you're doing solo work, you can go to the office. And, you know, are we getting to the point that companies have that elasticity and agility of technology to enable that? >> Well, I certainly think while the problem may have gotten more complicated, I think the array of solutions that's available to customers is staggering right now. Let's start with just the cloud infrastructure that's available to organizations. It truly is elastic capacity, if you've built a cloud footprint for your organization. And we've seen many of our customers take advantage of moving what had been a small group of employees who may have been working remote to having to support everybody, and just extending that cloud infrastructure capacity. Clearly something that you can do in a very different way than if you're trying to build out data center capacity, for example, on-premises in order to deal with it. So I think that's one thing that's changed. The second thing you hinted at, which is just the quality of network infrastructure. Clearly not perfect, and those of us that are working from home and remote locations, occasionally experience the glitches that we probably didn't experience quite so much in the office. But on average, I would say that technology has proven to be a, you know, highly scalable and worthy of all of the investment that we've made in it as countries and as industry. So, that's the second one that I think is really, you know, really quite different. And the third one is, I think the nature of the solutions that have been built on top. Not just, you know, the technologies from Citrix. But you look at many of the other applications, whether it's modern video conferencing software, or collaboration tools, many of them are designed with the cloud in mind and with connectivity as a core principle. And so many of these things that we previously had as a personal computing devices, there are no shared computing resources accessing vast quantities of capability that's cloud based over networks that have really evolved quite rapidly. And while all of these will continue to require investment. Once again, I would have to say how impressed I've been with the way that the infrastructure and the technology has scaled to meet what was really unprecedented demand in the last six months. >> I guess one of the things I want to pick up on that PJ said, is I've been starting to talk to clients about this concept of moving from a network of buildings to the network of one. So, when we think of employee experience, you know, my experience is a summation of like, the devices, the bandwidth, the service quality of the services that we're buying. And really, instead of us looking at managing just a few, you know, this floor, the WiFi on this floor, this building. We're now starting to say, okay, if we've got 10,000 people, then we have, you know, 10,000 networks of one, so to speak, that we're looking at monitoring, managing, making sure that we've optimized that experience, so that if we all want to have a call like this, that we can actually have a high quality video experience together. That's not a trivial task for organization. So I think that's another thing that they have to think about. And I'm actually really happy about this workspace concept and moving to this workspace concept. Because the great thing about a workspace is it's yours and it can be delivered wherever you are, on whatever devices are available. So, if you want to go to the office and use a shared device, you can log in and it's Maribel's experience. If I want to be at home, it's my experience at home. If I want to be in a coffee shop someday or hotel someday, hopefully, it's that experience as well. So, that I think is extremely powerful in a different way to think about what we're trying to achieve. >> Maribel I want to come back to you. It's companies have really had to make decisions very fast this year. Talk about how this whole discussion we have about where people work fits into the broader discussions of their cloud strategy and their security strategy which we've touched on a little bit. >> Well, one of the things I think is fascinating is pre-COVID. The type of discussions we're having with people is, I don't know if I can go to the cloud, or only this type of data can go to the cloud. And I really have to figure out how to parse it and do governance on it. And we going to need a managed, you know, three to five year transition plan. And I plan on having X percent of my apps this year and Y percent of my apps. Well, hey, that all went out the window, if you really wanted to get work done, you basically ramped up your cloud efforts very quickly. So, many of the sacred cows have actually gone away, which I'm really excited about. Because now I think we can truly take that digital transformation concept to the next level, where we're saying, okay, we're not recreating everything that we had in the past. We're now starting to think about, well, what types of new processes and services make sense? How do we actually do business process transformation? Not just technology transformation. So, very big change within six months. Now, I think a lot of organizations had to do it quick and dirty. And now they're going back and they're saying, okay, you know, part of that remote light or remote right concept it's just in general. Did I buy the right things? Should I buy something different? What is the set of SaaS services, cloud infrastructure I need? So, they're going full guns, like digital transformation has happened for many organizations now. Now, how do we get it to the next level? >> I think Maribel one of the important things that you highlighted is in this transition to new platforms like moving to the cloud, that organizations go through. Step one often is to effectively recreate what they had in that new environment. But the reality is that the cloud and the capability of the cloud opens up a whole vast new array of potential and possibilities. And certainly already in our Citrix portfolio, there are many examples of places where we've built services and capabilities in the cloud that would have been, you know, frankly either unimaginable or impossible to build, when we were thinking about customers running all of the software themselves in their own data centers. And as that transition occurs more and more, the customers who have made the leap to the cloud, not only do they get the elasticity of the capacity and the scale and the global footprint that cloud providers give them, but they also get access to new services and capabilities that they can use to power experiences inside their enterprise, either for their customers, or for their employees. And so, if you think about it in generational terms, you know, I've probably witnessed less than a handful of what I think of as significant transitions in our industry. Whether it was mainframe to PC or PC to mobile or mobile to internet, and now this transition, which I think is really, I think in, you know, progress is the transition to cloud. That's that next big platform, that next big opportunity that I think is going to transform the way not only we deliver capabilities to employees, but the way we think about what technology can actually do for us as organizations. >> Yeah PJ, we've absolutely seen just such a huge acceleration. I've talked to some companies. They were dipping their toe in, and now they've jumped full in because they have to. As you both pointed out, though, security is something we need to really make sure that it's not, okay, I've jumped in and of course, everything's going to be fine. We understand shared responsibility model when we're talking about cloud. PJ, are there tips that you have for companies as to here's what you absolutely should do. And hey, maybe as you're expanding your remote workforce, maybe there's certain things that it's time to retire or rethink of the way you think about security in this aspect. >> I think, you know, the area where I think customers are really starting to focus right now is securing the experience and the devices that they have their employees working on on a day to day basis. That's really where the biggest shift has occurred in their infrastructure. If your applications were in your data center, they probably still are. If they were in the cloud, or from a SaaS vendor, they probably still are. It's the employees and their device that's really moved to a location that requires a rethink around security. And I think there's several approaches that we see customers take. One is, of course, if you own and manage the device that you've given to the employee, you can clearly secure the endpoint. And then from there, you can manage and secure the traffic. And you can secure access to the applications on the back end. In fact, in some ways, that's the, I'd said either the brute force way or the, I think, easiest way for an enterprise to achieve this. The reality is, though, that many enterprises have relied on, employees either leveraging personally owned devices or issuing them with devices that previously they hadn't thought about required that they needed management in the organization. And so this is where some of the technologies that we have at Citrix, where we've moved the security boundary from the physical device, to the workspace itself to the experience. Really allows you to migrate that same security profile across multiple platforms, across multiple endpoints, and still deliver that same experience to the employees. I think that's one from an experience point of view. And then the second one is, we've seen a lot of customers rely very heavily on VPN as an access mechanism to get to corporate resources. And again, I think it's a unfortunately one size doesn't fit all but VPN is is effectively a one size solution. And it is the keys to the kingdom. Once you have access to VPN inside an organization, you have access to everything that an employee I had access to. And so what we see is customers taking maybe a more granular view of how they implement security at the application level, so that they can grant me access to the apps that I need inside the data center infrastructure inside the enterprise infrastructure, but not necessarily all the applications and all the data and all the content. And so I think there are, you know, real technologies that are, you know, in the market today that are available to customers, to really come back and look at maybe some of those brute force solutions that they initially deployed. And now start to layer on maybe more granular and more sophisticated solutions on top of that. That really minimize the security risk, and narrow the exposure to literally just the data that's absolutely required and the applications that are absolutely required. >> You know, I actually want to pick up on this. 'Cause I think this is such a critical point for organizations and this VPN point is a good one. When I was talking about moving from remote light to remote right. VPN isn't enough, if you've given somebody access to the kingdom, what if they happen to be on a compromised device? Well, then you basically just opened, as PJ said, yourself up for bad actors to enter your organization. So, security continues to be a layer cake. It's always been a layer cake. Some people call it a Jenga Tower, same concept. But basically, you have to secure every layer of the stack. You have to secure at the device layer. You have to secure at the application layer, the network transit layer in the cloud. And I think that organizations that are really serious about this, are spending more time and energy trying to figure out where to plug those different gaps. But you can start as an organization, everything from what computing hardware do you buy. You know, does it have a secure route of trust on it? So, that's one thing if you're thinking about buying new equipment. And then you start to layer things like workspace technologies, device management technologies, and all those provide different layers of security up the stack. And sadly, as PJ said, you know, there is no silver bullet. But, we have gotten to a part where it could be easier where you can buy fewer things, but it's still a coordinated effort of tools to make that whole stack secure. >> Alright, the last technology area I want to poke at, is we haven't talked about data yet. You know, there's the opportunity for analytics. You know, and it's a little bit, you know, Maribel maybe start with you. There's the opportunity to really understand, you know, are people leveraging things? Are there problems that maybe they might not report that the system can let me? But you also want to make sure that it's not big brother looking over what we're doing, and there's concern about that. So, what are you seeing out there? Any, you know, emerging trends as to how that work remote right that you talk about can leverage analytics and data? >> So the first thing I think is really important is the fact that you should be looking for technology providers that do collect and provide a certain amount of analytics for you. And then the question is, how detailed do you want that analytics? Do you want that analytics down to a user level? Well, if it turns out to be network performance, that's great. If it turns out to be, you know, every application they've entered, and how much is in, and how much time they spent on that application. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe you want it to be a little more lightweight. You know, maybe it's something that says, if this application hasn't been used in any period of time, because that's an issue around licensing. Do you need that licensing? But do you need to know if I've been spending, you know, 30 hours a week in Outlook. There's a bit of a privacy dance that we need to do there. There's just because you can doesn't mean you should. But what you really should be talking to your vendors about is, you know, how can I see what the experience is that my employees are having with your service? You know, is it operational? Is it being used? Should it be be optimized in some way? Are there analytics that you can provide me that prevent issues? You know, if there is a slowdown in the network, I need to know that that's going to impact users. If there's an outage in a service, I need to know what the impact is to that user and then maybe be able to predict some of those things before it happens so that we can manage and control that experience. So I think analytics are important. I think you have to really say, okay, what are we trying to achieve with those analytics? And balance the privacy and experience. >> So maybe a couple of comments. We've been investing in our analytics platform before this pandemic struck. And so we've seen quite a significant shift in the use cases that customers are applying those analytics to address. The first one really is for remote workers. The point that Maribel alluded to is, you know, have I delivered as secure an experience as I previously had delivered to my employees who (indistinct) the office, and how do I measure myself against that? And certainly we have the security analytics capability to help organizations understand anomalies in the system. Whether or not they're occurring, you know, inside the data center or on the endpoint device that the employee is using. And so that's one that I think customers are finding very valuable. The secondary is to do with actually the quality of that experience, the performance of that individual experience. And so we're again tracking at the user level, what their experience is like. And we're allowing organizations to have visibility into whether or not, they've actually delivered a usable, you know, high quality experience to all of their employees. Something that I frequently saw IT do by walking into offices and looking over your shoulder as you use an application and saying that's pretty good performance. And now of course, they're relying on remote response from remote employees with, you know, networks that they don't manage. So really, can you get a handle on what that experience is like. So both of those are actually analytic services that are aimed at helping IT deliver a high quality, reliable, secure service. The other area where we are exploring and beginning to see some usage for analytics is actually sharing the insight of usage and patterns of usage with the employee themselves. So while it might not be advisable to record how many hours I spend in a given application and shared that with IT, it might be useful information to share back with the employee themselves, about their pattern of usage of applications. Maybe recommending applications that other people in their team or their work group are using. Maybe recommending content, documents, insights, reports that other people have access to. And so if you start to take a broader look at how that analytics, then understanding of user behavior can get used. You can see that it can not only inform the security posture understanding of the organization, but it can also augment the employees on experience inside the workspace. And personally, that's where I'm most excited about the use of analytics is not so much on the IT side, which I think is quite expected. I think it is the novel and innovative use of analytics to really drive new experiences inside the workspace. >> I think this contextual concept is great, right? So, understanding how you use your services, understanding what your team uses, providing that extra bit of analytics that tries to help you figure out what you should be doing next, how can you optimize your own personal performance and productivity. That's where we start to see the analytics sing and do something different that we didn't do before. So, it learns about me. It predicts things but it also creates, helps me create new new, better employees experiences. >> Yeah, I think my phone is keeps asking me if I want to uninstaller the entire folder of travel apps, because it's been a long time since I've touched those. Look, it's been a really great discussion. If there's one thing we've learned this year is that you need to be open to the new data, and listening to everyone and being able to adjust fast. As we said early on in this whole pandemic, (indistinct) the companies that have gone through digital transformation, they're lucky because the agility that they built into their processes is going to allow them to do that. But as we've seen, many other companies are moving fast. And I think Satya Nadella is the one who said, you know, we did two years worth of, you know, transformation in two months. So, I want to just give you both a final word, you know, final advice for companies as they look at that challenge in front of them as to back to work that we set up at the beginning. PJ, we'll start with you. >> Well, thank you, Stu. I mean be the first thing I'd say is once again how, you know, I've been impressed by the organizations that we work with our customers, and their ability to move quickly to address the immediate problems. I think the good news is that this was a roadmap and a journey that many of their suppliers and vendors, including Citrix, we were on the path to help deliver solutions that are very much aligned with what these organizations are experiencing. So I think it's a great time to engage with organizations like ours and others that are providing these technologies to understand what that roadmap actually looks like. And to really pick the best of what's out there to help organizations, I think, make them more thoughtful and considered and probably long term decisions that they've got to make over the next, you know, six to 12 months that really set them up for success here in the future. I'm very excited because in many ways, I feel like that experience that organizations had of accelerating their two year project through, you know, two months or two weeks. That's a journey that we've been on with those customers. And we are excited by the fact that they've come through that first phase. Lots of people have a lot of things, still to figure out ahead of them. And we're delighted and honored to be engaged with those customers to help them through that. >> So for me, when I talk to customers, I say this is an amazing time to reimagine your business and really focus on what you think your technology and strategic advantage of your business is. Use technology for that. You can build versus buy. Build for the things that are going to create strategic advantage, buy for everything else. >> Maribel and PJ, thank you so much for joining me. Great discussion, lots things for people to think about. And looking forward to watching everybody as they go through their journey in the next steps going back to work. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman. As always, thank you for watching "theCUBE". (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special conversation talking about back to work. Of course, the COVID global pandemic impacting everyone working from home and what's happening as these productivity changes. So, really happy to welcome to the program two of our Cube alumni. First of all, we have PJ Hough. He is the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer of the Citrix. And also joining us, Maribel Lopez, she is the Founder and Principal Analyst at Lopez Research. PJ and Maribel, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks Stu. >> Alright, so let's talk. You know, we've been in this pandemic now for, you know, a good chunk of time, many months. Some of us are back in the office. Some, we are talking a lot about, Maribel I think you talked about hybrid work in some of the readings and writings that you've done. So, I'd love to hear, you know, you're thinking right now, what you're hearing from your customers, and how should we be thinking about that workforce both today and really for kind of the next six to 12 months? PJ, maybe we'll start with you and how Citrix is helping and Maribel would love you to chime in with what you're hearing from customers and in your research. >> Yeah, I think it's a very interesting time for our customers right now. First of all, I have to say, generally impressed I am with the way that businesses have managed to transition from, you know, working in the office to working in this almost 100% remote environment for many of our customers. And that they've made that transition, you know, many of them using our technology. But using very much every technique available to them and maybe even bending some of the previous rules that they had about what their strategies would be with regard to particular technologies or solutions. But it's been really very impressive to see everyone move from that, you know, state where they had to leave their offices, many at relatively short notice, all the way to, you know, where we are today. And of course, as you mentioned Stu, we now have a subset of those customers who are actually either beginning to move back or preparing to move back. But, I still think that's a journey that's ahead of most of the customers that I deal with on a daily basis. >> So for me, you know, I feel that there are really several things happening, right? We have new profiles that we're looking at. So in the back to office, some people will go back to the office and be full time there. Many people will be remote work. In fact, you might even hire some people, and never physically have them come into the office to meet with anybody. It might all be done by a video as an example. And then there'll be nomadic workers, where some people will come in more for this concept of collaboration, and then they'll go back and work from home. So, those three profiles, I think we talked about them in the past, but really, there were very few people that thought there was going to be a large percentage of remote work. And nomadic work was more something that was thought I'm traveling. It wasn't thought that I might work at home and really use the office as more a collaborative engagement space. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch many of the large technology enterprise companies that I work with, have been giving their employees the option. It is, you know, okay, hey, when things open up, do you want to stay fully remote? You know, it's going to be, you know, the ripple effect on real estate. Maribel as you were saying, you know, how we think about where they live and work compared to what they had before. PJ, I want to come to you. The discussion we've had for many years in the industry is, you know, customer experience is so important, but of course, it's the employee experience that is going to be a big piece of how customer experience and we create that delight. Of course, as you mentioned, Citrix has been helping customers, you know, really change how they think about where employees work, how employees work. So, you know, is this just accelerating what we've seen before? What does that, you know, employee experience look like in today's environment? >> Well, I think this is a really important area for, I think, organizations to focus on at a time like this. Obviously, there's been a lot of attention in the last decade on the customer experience, and I would say the digital customer experience. And maybe even a little bit ahead of some of the investments that have been made in the employee experience that has needed to keep up with that. And so, you know, we've been doing some research, some of it was done earlier in the year in fact, that shows a very high correlation between the performance of companies and the response from employees who claim that they have very good to excellent digital tools to help them do their job. And I think one of the areas where companies have either, I will say succeeded or maybe felt a little bit of stress in the system, in this movement of employees from the office to the home, is whether or not the experience they were able to deliver was consistent with what the employees had previously been leveraging when they were in the office. We've all built up a set of technologies and capabilities over many years in our offices, and now we somehow, you know, came home with a laptop or a Chromebook. And the reality was, you know, did that really reflect the best power of the tools and the capabilities that the employees previously had access to in the office? And it's certainly been an area of focus for us at Citrix. It's really matching that set of capabilities so that no matter where the employee is, they get full access to the set of applications and services with the security and the control that you need to protect all the assets of the enterprise. >> You know PJ, I think this is actually really important, this concept. I'm calling it a right time experience, you know, right information to the right person at the right time. So how do you get your applications and services to them on whatever device they might have had during the pandemic? Because a lot of people didn't actually have laptops at home. Maybe they were in an environment where they were using desktops. So that application delivery was really important. The security wrapped around that is super important because now we're in a scenario where basically the crown jewels of an organization, their data, is in homes and other places distributed around the world. So, we have to make sure that A, that that's accessible and that B, that that's secured. And I think that this is a new imperative that we've talked about for some time, but how you deliver it in this new world is very different. And I think that the employee experience had always lagged the customer experience. And now we're trying to close that gap and hopefully take it to the next level. >> It could great point out. I was just kind of laughing. I think back if you dial back the clock, you know, say 15 years, the discussion was all about the consumerization of IT. The experience that I had at home when I was using devices or using technology was better than what I had at the office. Now of course, you know, not only do I see people taking laptops home, they have their big screen monitors. They need to make sure that they have access to the right data. We need to make sure that things are secure. So PJ, help us understand a little bit what are some of those services? It's not, you know, the VDI conversation that we were having a decade ago. So, you know, what is it that IT has either been delivering or scrambling to make sure that we can be as productive at home as we were sitting in the office? >> Well, I can certainly tell you that for our customers, the critical pieces of technology that they've been leveraging, start with the workspace experience. We deliver a workspace experience that includes VDI. It includes virtualized applications and desktops, and for many organizations, they still are, you know, critical applications. But the application portfolio that the employees use today is much broader than that, and includes, you know, web applications and SaaS applications, homegrown service based applications, et-cetera, as well as there are mobile applications. And so really wrapping all that in a single workspace, that's the journey that we've been on as a company. And it's really being put to the test right now, by our customers who are really trying to give employees access, not just maybe to the one or two core applications, they needed to do their job. But remember, in the six months that's gone by, most of the employees have had to, you know, fill out an expense report, or maybe use the HR system for some process or maybe take some time off that they wanted to record. So in addition to the core applications, they needed access to that full suite of applications that they use on a daily basis. And so that's certainly one set of technologies that our customers have been leveraging. They're using it both for the experience, but also for the security because we provide that same control over those applications inside the workspace experience no matter what type of application it is. And then I'd say the second area where our technology has been heavily leveraged is in our networking products providing the access and the control back to the enterprise resources that employees have to get access to on a daily basis. >> I think one of the things that you brought up PJ. Sorry, sorry Stu, is really important. And that's sort of that acceleration layer to make sure that you have a good experience, and that you have that secure connection. The other thing I think is really interesting is we're actually rethinking what that experience means for the employee. It used to be that when you were trying to create an experience, it was sort of one device, one universal look and feel for everything, one set of applications. I actually think that organizations are being much more thoughtful now when they're creating what PJ referred to as a workspace. You know, the workspace for Maribel might look very different than it does for Stu than it does for PJ, and it might be a combination of different style technologies. I mean, it could be that, you know, I'm in the contact center and I want to VDI experience dropped on me where I don't have to manage anything. I don't do anything. I just open up the device, and everything comes down to me. And then it all goes away when I'm done with my workday, because that's what needs to happen. You can't have private information on, you know, personal identifiable information on someone's home device. So, I think we're really going to be sophisticated about what a workspace means. >> Yeah. Maribel I was just commenting PJ made a comment. There's this thing he said, talked about taking a day off. I didn't realize that was still a thing in 2020. But, Maribel I'm curious, you know, as many people felt that this was okay. It was a short time. I'm going to have a couple of months and then we're just going to go back to the office. I think we understand now that however, things have fundamentally changed. And therefore, this isn't okay, hey, temporarily I can do this, and have to worry about my kids and myself and the space and the internet and all of these pieces. What do companies need to do to kind of make sure that we've set up our employees for success? You know, what are some of the challenges that you hear out there? That people are saying, Oh, geez, you know, I'm ready for it. And I think you laid out very well. There's a big difference between, you know, you might be a developer, in which case, you're probably used to working distributed with people all around the globe and asynchronously, versus somebody that was like, hey, wait, you know, everyday I can have a stand up meeting with my entire team and look across the table at them. >> Well, there's a lot going on. Some of it is cultural. Some of it is technical. And some of it's actually surprising on the technology side. I think the first thing that when we started with COVID, we realized that not everybody has the right portfolio of devices and while that might sound a bit insignificant, if you do not have the say right PC with the right performance to do video, that's difficult. Now we're talking about all the environmental elements. Right? Do you have the right lighting? Do you have the right audio capability? Can I actually see you with that webcam? Is the webcam in the right place? So, the environmental things are sort of the first stage. We just talked a bit about the security that people are struggling with now, making sure that they have people with the right security for the data they have. The education and training around that also hasn't been done. You know, we had a certain set of people that were trained on how to work remotely, but then we sent everyone home, and they're clicking on links that they shouldn't be clicking on and compromising devices. So, there's a lot of challenges still with the education and training that we're seeing. And then as I mentioned earlier, I think that organizations are trying to figure out what's the right portfolio services and do I have the right portfolio services. I actually purchased something to deal with COVID, but is that the right thing? You know, and now we're moving from what I'm calling remote light to remote right. Where we're really being very thoughtful about who needs what style of services, how scalable are those services? And then culturally, I mean, I think we have issues like, how do you deal with multiple time zones? You have to find a time zone that works for, say, Europe and Asia for everybody to be on the call. Is that really feasible? How do we think about that collaborative environment moving forward? So, a lot of interesting challenges ahead. >> Yeah. Actually, I see customers really struggling or at least planning on all three fronts right now. The first being the people processes that we use. And think about the number of employees that have been hired since this has started, who've had an onboarding experience that's been, let's say, at least unorthodox. And maybe very much not what they were expecting or their colleagues either. I have certainly many colleagues now that I've never met face to face for the duration of their careers at Citrix. And hopefully that will change at some point in the future. But I know in the meantime, we're going to onboard quite a few more employees who have that same experience. So, I think your people processes, starting with onboarding, but all the way through to, you know, training and everything else, especially for managers, I think is really important. Then you think about the processes that we have as companies, and how we conduct our own business on a day to day basis. And many of our processes were highly optimized for face to face communication, as you pointed out, Stu. Being in the same conference room across the table from each other. So how do we, I would say, lean down maybe a little bit our processes, make them a little leaner, make them easier to operate for people who are operating remotely? And then that last part is, of course, what's the technology that we bring to burry these solutions? Both I will say the technology that we enable people to have access to when they're remotely working, working from home, and then how do we reconfigure shared space, office spaces so that they make even more sense, when we're back in the office? Personally, I don't see myself going back to the office to do solo work. I see myself going back to the office to communicate with other employees, to collaborate with other people and to connect to my team. And I'll probably find other ways to get my work done. But I leverage the office more as a shared collaboration space than I'd previously thought about in the past. >> PJ, I liked what Maribel talked about setting up, you know, remote work right. You know, the promise has been, we've talked about for a lot of years, like I remember working in the telecom industry back in the 90s. It was going to be well, you know, we should have ubiquitous video and access to everything, wherever we are. You know, 5G, come on we're going to have enough bandwidth to be able to solve all these things, right? So, help us understand, you know, how do we deploy something today that gives people the flexibility? So that as you said, you can be remote when you're doing solo work, you can go to the office. And, you know, are we getting to the point that companies have that elasticity and agility of technology to enable that? >> Well, I certainly think while the problem may have gotten more complicated, I think the array of solutions that's available to customers is staggering right now. Let's start with just the cloud infrastructure that's available to organizations. It truly is elastic capacity, if you've built a cloud footprint for your organization. And we've seen many of our customers take advantage of moving what had been a small group of employees who may have been working remote to having to support everybody, and just extending that cloud infrastructure capacity. Clearly something that you can do in a very different way than if you're trying to build out data center capacity, for example, on-premises in order to deal with it. So I think that's one thing that's changed. The second thing you hinted at, which is just the quality of network infrastructure. Clearly not perfect, and those of us that are working from home and remote locations, occasionally experience the glitches that we probably didn't experience quite so much in the office. But on average, I would say that technology has proven to be a, you know, highly scalable and worthy of all of the investment that we've made in it as countries and as industry. So, that's the second one that I think is really, you know, really quite different. And the third one is, I think the nature of the solutions that have been built on top. Not just, you know, the technologies from Citrix. But you look at many of the other applications, whether it's modern video conferencing software, or collaboration tools, many of them are designed with the cloud in mind and with connectivity as a core principle. And so many of these things that we previously had as a personal computing devices, there are no shared computing resources accessing vast quantities of capability that's cloud based over networks that have really evolved quite rapidly. And while all of these will continue to require investment. Once again, I would have to say how impressed I've been with the way that the infrastructure and the technology has scaled to meet what was really unprecedented demand in the last six months. >> I guess one of the things I want to pick up on that PJ said, is I've been starting to talk to clients about this concept of moving from a network of buildings to the network of one. So, when we think of employee experience, you know, my experience is a summation of like, the devices, the bandwidth, the service quality of the services that we're buying. And really, instead of us looking at managing just a few, you know, this floor, the WiFi on this floor, this building. We're now starting to say, okay, if we've got 10,000 people, then we have, you know, 10,000 networks of one, so to speak, that we're looking at monitoring, managing, making sure that we've optimized that experience, so that if we all want to have a call like this, that we can actually have a high quality video experience together. That's not a trivial task for organization. So I think that's another thing that they have to think about. And I'm actually really happy about this workspace concept and moving to this workspace concept. Because the great thing about a workspace is it's yours and it can be delivered wherever you are, on whatever devices are available. So, if you want to go to the office and use a shared device, you can log in and it's Maribel's experience. If I want to be at home, it's my experience at home. If I want to be in a coffee shop someday or hotel someday, hopefully, it's that experience as well. So, that I think is extremely powerful in a different way to think about what we're trying to achieve. >> Maribel I want to come back to you. It's companies have really had to make decisions very fast this year. Talk about how this whole discussion we have about where people work fits into the broader discussions of their cloud strategy and their security strategy which we've touched on a little bit. >> Well, one of the things I think is fascinating is pre-COVID. The type of discussions we're having with people is, I don't know if I can go to the cloud, or only this type of data can go to the cloud. And I really have to figure out how to parse it and do governance on it. And we going to need a managed, you know, three to five year transition plan. And I plan on having X percent of my apps this year and Y percent of my apps. Well, hey, that all went out the window, if you really wanted to get work done, you basically ramped up your cloud efforts very quickly. So, many of the sacred cows have actually gone away, which I'm really excited about. Because now I think we can truly take that digital transformation concept to the next level, where we're saying, okay, we're not recreating everything that we had in the past. We're now starting to think about, well, what types of new processes and services make sense? How do we actually do business process transformation? Not just technology transformation. So, very big change within six months. Now, I think a lot of organizations had to do it quick and dirty. And now they're going back and they're saying, okay, you know, part of that remote light or remote right concept it's just in general. Did I buy the right things? Should I buy something different? What is the set of SaaS services, cloud infrastructure I need? So, they're going full guns, like digital transformation has happened for many organizations now. Now, how do we get it to the next level? >> I think Maribel one of the important things that you highlighted is in this transition to new platforms like moving to the cloud, that organizations go through. Step one often is to effectively recreate what they had in that new environment. But the reality is that the cloud and the capability of the cloud opens up a whole vast new array of potential and possibilities. And certainly already in our Citrix portfolio, there are many examples of places where we've built services and capabilities in the cloud that would have been, you know, frankly either unimaginable or impossible to build, when we were thinking about customers running all of the software themselves in their own data centers. And as that transition occurs more and more, the customers who have made the leap to the cloud, not only do they get the elasticity of the capacity and the scale and the global footprint that cloud providers give them, but they also get access to new services and capabilities that they can use to power experiences inside their enterprise, either for their customers, or for their employees. And so, if you think about it in generational terms, you know, I've probably witnessed less than a handful of what I think of as significant transitions in our industry. Whether it was mainframe to PC or PC to mobile or mobile to internet, and now this transition, which I think is really, I think in, you know, progress is the transition to cloud. That's that next big platform, that next big opportunity that I think is going to transform the way not only we deliver capabilities to employees, but the way we think about what technology can actually do for us as organizations. >> Yeah PJ, we've absolutely seen just such a huge acceleration. I've talked to some companies. They were dipping their toe in, and now they've jumped full in because they have to. As you both pointed out, though, security is something we need to really make sure that it's not, okay, I've jumped in and of course, everything's going to be fine. We understand shared responsibility model when we're talking about cloud. PJ, are there tips that you have for companies as to here's what you absolutely should do. And hey, maybe as you're expanding your remote workforce, maybe there's certain things that it's time to retire or rethink of the way you think about security in this aspect. >> I think, you know, the area where I think customers are really starting to focus right now is securing the experience and the devices that they have their employees working on on a day to day basis. That's really where the biggest shift has occurred in their infrastructure. If your applications were in your data center, they probably still are. If they were in the cloud, or from a SaaS vendor, they probably still are. It's the employees and their device that's really moved to a location that requires a rethink around security. And I think there's several approaches that we see customers take. One is, of course, if you own and manage the device that you've given to the employee, you can clearly secure the endpoint. And then from there, you can manage and secure the traffic. And you can secure access to the applications on the back end. In fact, in some ways, that's the, I'd said either the brute force way or the, I think, easiest way for an enterprise to achieve this. The reality is, though, that many enterprises have relied on, employees either leveraging personally owned devices or issuing them with devices that previously they hadn't thought about required that they needed management in the organization. And so this is where some of the technologies that we have at Citrix, where we've moved the security boundary from the physical device, to the workspace itself to the experience. Really allows you to migrate that same security profile across multiple platforms, across multiple endpoints, and still deliver that same experience to the employees. I think that's one from an experience point of view. And then the second one is, we've seen a lot of customers rely very heavily on VPN as an access mechanism to get to corporate resources. And again, I think it's a unfortunately one size doesn't fit all but VPN is is effectively a one size solution. And it is the keys to the kingdom. Once you have access to VPN inside an organization, you have access to everything that an employee I had access to. And so what we see is customers taking maybe a more granular view of how they implement security at the application level, so that they can grant me access to the apps that I need inside the data center infrastructure inside the enterprise infrastructure, but not necessarily all the applications and all the data and all the content. And so I think there are, you know, real technologies that are, you know, in the market today that are available to customers, to really come back and look at maybe some of those brute force solutions that they initially deployed. And now start to layer on maybe more granular and more sophisticated solutions on top of that. That really minimize the security risk, and narrow the exposure to literally just the data that's absolutely required and the applications that are absolutely required. >> You know, I actually want to pick up on this. 'Cause I think this is such a critical point for organizations and this VPN point is a good one. When I was talking about moving from remote light to remote right. VPN isn't enough, if you've given somebody access to the kingdom, what if they happen to be on a compromised device? Well, then you basically just opened, as PJ said, yourself up for bad actors to enter your organization. So, security continues to be a layer cake. It's always been a layer cake. Some people call it a Jenga Tower, same concept. But basically, you have to secure every layer of the stack. You have to secure at the device layer. You have to secure at the application layer, the network transit layer in the cloud. And I think that organizations that are really serious about this, are spending more time and energy trying to figure out where to plug those different gaps. But you can start as an organization, everything from what computing hardware do you buy. You know, does it have a secure route of trust on it? So, that's one thing if you're thinking about buying new equipment. And then you start to layer things like workspace technologies, device management technologies, and all those provide different layers of security up the stack. And sadly, as PJ said, you know, there is no silver bullet. But, we have gotten to a part where it could be easier where you can buy fewer things, but it's still a coordinated effort of tools to make that whole stack secure. >> Alright, the last technology area I want to poke at, is we haven't talked about data yet. You know, there's the opportunity for analytics. You know, and it's a little bit, you know, Maribel maybe start with you. There's the opportunity to really understand, you know, are people leveraging things? Are there problems that maybe they might not report that the system can let me? But you also want to make sure that it's not big brother looking over what we're doing, and there's concern about that. So, what are you seeing out there? Any, you know, emerging trends as to how that work remote right that you talk about can leverage analytics and data? >> So the first thing I think is really important is the fact that you should be looking for technology providers that do collect and provide a certain amount of analytics for you. And then the question is, how detailed do you want that analytics? Do you want that analytics down to a user level? Well, if it turns out to be network performance, that's great. If it turns out to be, you know, every application they've entered, and how much is in, and how much time they spent on that application. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe you want it to be a little more lightweight. You know, maybe it's something that says, if this application hasn't been used in any period of time, because that's an issue around licensing. Do you need that licensing? But do you need to know if I've been spending, you know, 30 hours a week in Outlook. There's a bit of a privacy dance that we need to do there. There's just because you can doesn't mean you should. But what you really should be talking to your vendors about is, you know, how can I see what the experience is that my employees are having with your service? You know, is it operational? Is it being used? Should it be be optimized in some way? Are there analytics that you can provide me that prevent issues? You know, if there is a slowdown in the network, I need to know that that's going to impact users. If there's an outage in a service, I need to know what the impact is to that user and then maybe be able to predict some of those things before it happens so that we can manage and control that experience. So I think analytics are important. I think you have to really say, okay, what are we trying to achieve with those analytics? And balance the privacy and experience. >> So maybe a couple of comments. We've been investing in our analytics platform before this pandemic struck. And so we've seen quite a significant shift in the use cases that customers are applying those analytics to address. The first one really is for remote workers. The point that Maribel alluded to is, you know, have I delivered as secure an experience as I previously had delivered to my employees who (indistinct) the office, and how do I measure myself against that? And certainly we have the security analytics capability to help organizations understand anomalies in the system. Whether or not they're occurring, you know, inside the data center or on the endpoint device that the employee is using. And so that's one that I think customers are finding very valuable. The secondary is to do with actually the quality of that experience, the performance of that individual experience. And so we're again tracking at the user level, what their experience is like. And we're allowing organizations to have visibility into whether or not, they've actually delivered a usable, you know, high quality experience to all of their employees. Something that I frequently saw IT do by walking into offices and looking over your shoulder as you use an application and saying that's pretty good performance. And now of course, they're relying on remote response from remote employees with, you know, networks that they don't manage. So really, can you get a handle on what that experience is like. So both of those are actually analytic services that are aimed at helping IT deliver a high quality, reliable, secure service. The other area where we are exploring and beginning to see some usage for analytics is actually sharing the insight of usage and patterns of usage with the employee themselves. So while it might not be advisable to record how many hours I spend in a given application and shared that with IT, it might be useful information to share back with the employee themselves, about their pattern of usage of applications. Maybe recommending applications that other people in their team or their work group are using. Maybe recommending content, documents, insights, reports that other people have access to. And so if you start to take a broader look at how that analytics, then understanding of user behavior can get used. You can see that it can not only inform the security posture understanding of the organization, but it can also augment the employees on experience inside the workspace. And personally, that's where I'm most excited about the use of analytics is not so much on the IT side, which I think is quite expected. I think it is the novel and innovative use of analytics to really drive new experiences inside the workspace. >> I think this contextual concept is great, right? So, understanding how you use your services, understanding what your team uses, providing that extra bit of analytics that tries to help you figure out what you should be doing next, how can you optimize your own personal performance and productivity. That's where we start to see the analytics sing and do something different that we didn't do before. So, it learns about me. It predicts things but it also creates, helps me create new new, better employees experiences. >> Yeah, I think my phone is keeps asking me if I want to uninstaller the entire folder of travel apps, because it's been a long time since I've touched those. Look, it's been a really great discussion. If there's one thing we've learned this year is that you need to be open to the new data, and listening to everyone and being able to adjust fast. As we said early on in this whole pandemic, (indistinct) the companies that have gone through digital transformation, they're lucky because the agility that they built into their processes is going to allow them to do that. But as we've seen, many other companies are moving fast. And I think Satya Nadella is the one who said, you know, we did two years worth of, you know, transformation in two months. So, I want to just give you both a final word, you know, final advice for companies as they look at that challenge in front of them as to back to work that we set up at the beginning. PJ, we'll start with you. >> Well, thank you, Stu. I mean be the first thing I'd say is once again how, you know, I've been impressed by the organizations that we work with our customers, and their ability to move quickly to address the immediate problems. I think the good news is that this was a roadmap and a journey that many of their suppliers and vendors, including Citrix, we were on the path to help deliver solutions that are very much aligned with what these organizations are experiencing. So I think it's a great time to engage with organizations like ours and others that are providing these technologies to understand what that roadmap actually looks like. And to really pick the best of what's out there to help organizations, I think, make them more thoughtful and considered and probably long term decisions that they've got to make over the next, you know, six to 12 months that really set them up for success here in the future. I'm very excited because in many ways, I feel like that experience that organizations had of accelerating their two year project through, you know, two months or two weeks. That's a journey that we've been on with those customers. And we are excited by the fact that they've come through that first phase. Lots of people have a lot of things, still to figure out ahead of them. And we're delighted and honored to be engaged with those customers to help them through that. >> So for me, when I talk to customers, I say this is an amazing time to reimagine your business and really focus on what you think your technology and strategic advantage of your business is. Use technology for that. You can build versus buy. Build for the things that are going to create strategic advantage, buy for everything else. >> Maribel and PJ, thank you so much for joining me. Great discussion, lots things for people to think about. And looking forward to watching everybody as they go through their journey in the next steps going back to work. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman. As always, thank you for watching "theCUBE". (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special conversation talking about back to work. Of course, the COVID global pandemic impacting everyone working from home and what's happening as these productivity changes. So, really happy to welcome to the program two of our Cube alumni. First of all, we have PJ Hough. He is the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer of the Citrix. And also joining us, Maribel Lopez, she is the Founder and Principal Analyst at Lopez Research. PJ and Maribel, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks Stu. >> Alright, so let's talk. You know, we've been in this pandemic now for, you know, a good chunk of time, many months. Some of us are back in the office. Some, we are talking a lot about, Maribel I think you talked about hybrid work in some of the readings and writings that you've done. So, I'd love to hear, you know, you're thinking right now, what you're hearing from your customers, and how should we be thinking about that workforce both today and really for kind of the next six to 12 months? PJ, maybe we'll start with you and how Citrix is helping and Maribel would love you to chime in with what you're hearing from customers and in your research. >> Yeah, I think it's a very interesting time for our customers right now. First of all, I have to say, generally impressed I am with the way that businesses have managed to transition from, you know, working in the office to working in this almost 100% remote environment for many of our customers. And that they've made that transition, you know, many of them using our technology. But using very much every technique available to them and maybe even bending some of the previous rules that they had about what their strategies would be with regard to particular technologies or solutions. But it's been really very impressive to see everyone move from that, you know, state where they had to leave their offices, many at relatively short notice, all the way to, you know, where we are today. And of course, as you mentioned Stu, we now have a subset of those customers who are actually either beginning to move back or preparing to move back. But, I still think that's a journey that's ahead of most of the customers that I deal with on a daily basis. >> So for me, you know, I feel that there are really several things happening, right? We have new profiles that we're looking at. So in the back to office, some people will go back to the office and be full time there. Many people will be remote work. In fact, you might even hire some people, and never physically have them come into the office to meet with anybody. It might all be done by a video as an example. And then there'll be nomadic workers, where some people will come in more for this concept of collaboration, and then they'll go back and work from home. So, those three profiles, I think we talked about them in the past, but really, there were very few people that thought there was going to be a large percentage of remote work. And nomadic work was more something that was thought I'm traveling. It wasn't thought that I might work at home and really use the office as more a collaborative engagement space. >> Yeah, it's been fascinating to watch many of the large technology enterprise companies that I work with, have been giving their employees the option. It is, you know, okay, hey, when things open up, do you want to stay fully remote? You know, it's going to be, you know, the ripple effect on real estate. Maribel as you were saying, you know, how we think about where they live and work compared to what they had before. PJ, I want to come to you. The discussion we've had for many years in the industry is, you know, customer experience is so important, but of course, it's the employee experience that is going to be a big piece of how customer experience and we create that delight. Of course, as you mentioned, Citrix has been helping customers, you know, really change how they think about where employees work, how employees work. So, you know, is this just accelerating what we've seen before? What does that, you know, employee experience look like in today's environment? >> Well, I think this is a really important area for, I think, organizations to focus on at a time like this. Obviously, there's been a lot of attention in the last decade on the customer experience, and I would say the digital customer experience. And maybe even a little bit ahead of some of the investments that have been made in the employee experience that has needed to keep up with that. And so, you know, we've been doing some research, some of it was done earlier in the year in fact, that shows a very high correlation between the performance of companies and the response from employees who claim that they have very good to excellent digital tools to help them do their job. And I think one of the areas where companies have either, I will say succeeded or maybe felt a little bit of stress in the system, in this movement of employees from the office to the home, is whether or not the experience they were able to deliver was consistent with what the employees had previously been leveraging when they were in the office. We've all built up a set of technologies and capabilities over many years in our offices, and now we somehow, you know, came home with a laptop or a Chromebook. And the reality was, you know, did that really reflect the best power of the tools and the capabilities that the employees previously had access to in the office? And it's certainly been an area of focus for us at Citrix. It's really matching that set of capabilities so that no matter where the employee is, they get full access to the set of applications and services with the security and the control that you need to protect all the assets of the enterprise. >> You know PJ, I think this is actually really important, this concept. I'm calling it a right time experience, you know, right information to the right person at the right time. So how do you get your applications and services to them on whatever device they might have had during the pandemic? Because a lot of people didn't actually have laptops at home. Maybe they were in an environment where they were using desktops. So that application delivery was really important. The security wrapped around that is super important because now we're in a scenario where basically the crown jewels of an organization, their data, is in homes and other places distributed around the world. So, we have to make sure that A, that that's accessible and that B, that that's secured. And I think that this is a new imperative that we've talked about for some time, but how you deliver it in this new world is very different. And I think that the employee experience had always lagged the customer experience. And now we're trying to close that gap and hopefully take it to the next level. >> It could great point out. I was just kind of laughing. I think back if you dial back the clock, you know, say 15 years, the discussion was all about the consumerization of IT. The experience that I had at home when I was using devices or using technology was better than what I had at the office. Now of course, you know, not only do I see people taking laptops home, they have their big screen monitors. They need to make sure that they have access to the right data. We need to make sure that things are secure. So PJ, help us understand a little bit what are some of those services? It's not, you know, the VDI conversation that we were having a decade ago. So, you know, what is it that IT has either been delivering or scrambling to make sure that we can be as productive at home as we were sitting in the office? >> Well, I can certainly tell you that for our customers, the critical pieces of technology that they've been leveraging, start with the workspace experience. We deliver a workspace experience that includes VDI. It includes virtualized applications and desktops, and for many organizations, they still are, you know, critical applications. But the application portfolio that the employees use today is much broader than that, and includes, you know, web applications and SaaS applications, homegrown service based applications, et-cetera, as well as there are mobile applications. And so really wrapping all that in a single workspace, that's the journey that we've been on as a company. And it's really being put to the test right now, by our customers who are really trying to give employees access, not just maybe to the one or two core applications, they needed to do their job. But remember, in the six months that's gone by, most of the employees have had to, you know, fill out an expense report, or maybe use the HR system for some process or maybe take some time off that they wanted to record. So in addition to the core applications, they needed access to that full suite of applications that they use on a daily basis. And so that's certainly one set of technologies that our customers have been leveraging. They're using it both for the experience, but also for the security because we provide that same control over those applications inside the workspace experience no matter what type of application it is. And then I'd say the second area where our technology has been heavily leveraged is in our networking products providing the access and the control back to the enterprise resources that employees have to get access to on a daily basis. >> I think one of the things that you brought up PJ. Sorry, sorry Stu, is really important. And that's sort of that acceleration layer to make sure that you have a good experience, and that you have that secure connection. The other thing I think is really interesting is we're actually rethinking what that experience means for the employee. It used to be that when you were trying to create an experience, it was sort of one device, one universal look and feel for everything, one set of applications. I actually think that organizations are being much more thoughtful now when they're creating what PJ referred to as a workspace. You know, the workspace for Maribel might look very different than it does for Stu than it does for PJ, and it might be a combination of different style technologies. I mean, it could be that, you know, I'm in the contact center and I want to VDI experience dropped on me where I don't have to manage anything. I don't do anything. I just open up the device, and everything comes down to me. And then it all goes away when I'm done with my workday, because that's what needs to happen. You can't have private information on, you know, personal identifiable information on someone's home device. So, I think we're really going to be sophisticated about what a workspace means. >> Yeah. Maribel I was just commenting PJ made a comment. There's this thing he said, talked about taking a day off. I didn't realize that was still a thing in 2020. But, Maribel I'm curious, you know, as many people felt that this was okay. It was a short time. I'm going to have a couple of months and then we're just going to go back to the office. I think we understand now that however, things have fundamentally changed. And therefore, this isn't okay, hey, temporarily I can do this, and have to worry about my kids and myself and the space and the internet and all of these pieces. What do companies need to do to kind of make sure that we've set up our employees for success? You know, what are some of the challenges that you hear out there? That people are saying, Oh, geez, you know, I'm ready for it. And I think you laid out very well. There's a big difference between, you know, you might be a developer, in which case, you're probably used to working distributed with people all around the globe and asynchronously, versus somebody that was like, hey, wait, you know, everyday I can have a stand up meeting with my entire team and look across the table at them. >> Well, there's a lot going on. Some of it is cultural. Some of it is technical. And some of it's actually surprising on the technology side. I think the first thing that when we started with COVID, we realized that not everybody has the right portfolio of devices and while that might sound a bit insignificant, if you do not have the say right PC with the right performance to do video, that's difficult. Now we're talking about all the environmental elements. Right? Do you have the right lighting? Do you have the right audio capability? Can I actually see you with that webcam? Is the webcam in the right place? So, the environmental things are sort of the first stage. We just talked a bit about the security that people are struggling with now, making sure that they have people with the right security for the data they have. The education and training around that also hasn't been done. You know, we had a certain set of people that were trained on how to work remotely, but then we sent everyone home, and they're clicking on links that they shouldn't be clicking on and compromising devices. So, there's a lot of challenges still with the education and training that we're seeing. And then as I mentioned earlier, I think that organizations are trying to figure out what's the right portfolio services and do I have the right portfolio services. I actually purchased something to deal with COVID, but is that the right thing? You know, and now we're moving from what I'm calling remote light to remote right. Where we're really being very thoughtful about who needs what style of services, how scalable are those services? And then culturally, I mean, I think we have issues like, how do you deal with multiple time zones? You have to find a time zone that works for, say, Europe and Asia for everybody to be on the call. Is that really feasible? How do we think about that collaborative environment moving forward? So, a lot of interesting challenges ahead. >> Yeah. Actually, I see customers really struggling or at least planning on all three fronts right now. The first being the people processes that we use. And think about the number of employees that have been hired since this has started, who've had an onboarding experience that's been, let's say, at least unorthodox. And maybe very much not what they were expecting or their colleagues either. I have certainly many colleagues now that I've never met face to face for the duration of their careers at Citrix. And hopefully that will change at some point in the future. But I know in the meantime, we're going to onboard quite a few more employees who have that same experience. So, I think your people processes, starting with onboarding, but all the way through to, you know, training and everything else, especially for managers, I think is really important. Then you think about the processes that we have as companies, and how we conduct our own business on a day to day basis. And many of our processes were highly optimized for face to face communication, as you pointed out, Stu. Being in the same conference room across the table from each other. So how do we, I would say, lean down maybe a little bit our processes, make them a little leaner, make them easier to operate for people who are operating remotely? And then that last part is, of course, what's the technology that we bring to burry these solutions? Both I will say the technology that we enable people to have access to when they're remotely working, working from home, and then how do we reconfigure shared space, office spaces so that they make even more sense, when we're back in the office? Personally, I don't see myself going back to the office to do solo work. I see myself going back to the office to communicate with other employees, to collaborate with other people and to connect to my team. And I'll probably find other ways to get my work done. But I leverage the office more as a shared collaboration space than I'd previously thought about in the past. >> PJ, I liked what Maribel talked about setting up, you know, remote work right. You know, the promise has been, we've talked about for a lot of years, like I remember working in the telecom industry back in the 90s. It was going to be well, you know, we should have ubiquitous video and access to everything, wherever we are. You know, 5G, come on we're going to have enough bandwidth to be able to solve all these things, right? So, help us understand, you know, how do we deploy something today that gives people the flexibility? So that as you said, you can be remote when you're doing solo work, you can go to the office. And, you know, are we getting to the point that companies have that elasticity and agility of technology to enable that? >> Well, I certainly think while the problem may have gotten more complicated, I think the array of solutions that's available to customers is staggering right now. Let's start with just the cloud infrastructure that's available to organizations. It truly is elastic capacity, if you've built a cloud footprint for your organization. And we've seen many of our customers take advantage of moving what had been a small group of employees who may have been working remote to having to support everybody, and just extending that cloud infrastructure capacity. Clearly something that you can do in a very different way than if you're trying to build out data center capacity, for example, on-premises in order to deal with it. So I think that's one thing that's changed. The second thing you hinted at, which is just the quality of network infrastructure. Clearly not perfect, and those of us that are working from home and remote locations, occasionally experience the glitches that we probably didn't experience quite so much in the office. But on average, I would say that technology has proven to be a, you know, highly scalable and worthy of all of the investment that we've made in it as countries and as industry. So, that's the second one that I think is really, you know, really quite different. And the third one is, I think the nature of the solutions that have been built on top. Not just, you know, the technologies from Citrix. But you look at many of the other applications, whether it's modern video conferencing software, or collaboration tools, many of them are designed with the cloud in mind and with connectivity as a core principle. And so many of these things that we previously had as a personal computing devices, there are no shared computing resources accessing vast quantities of capability that's cloud based over networks that have really evolved quite rapidly. And while all of these will continue to require investment. Once again, I would have to say how impressed I've been with the way that the infrastructure and the technology has scaled to meet what was really unprecedented demand in the last six months. >> I guess one of the things I want to pick up on that PJ said, is I've been starting to talk to clients about this concept of moving from a network of buildings to the network of one. So, when we think of employee experience, you know, my experience is a summation of like, the devices, the bandwidth, the service quality of the services that we're buying. And really, instead of us looking at managing just a few, you know, this floor, the WiFi on this floor, this building. We're now starting to say, okay, if we've got 10,000 people, then we have, you know, 10,000 networks of one, so to speak, that we're looking at monitoring, managing, making sure that we've optimized that experience, so that if we all want to have a call like this, that we can actually have a high quality video experience together. That's not a trivial task for organization. So I think that's another thing that they have to think about. And I'm actually really happy about this workspace concept and moving to this workspace concept. Because the great thing about a workspace is it's yours and it can be delivered wherever you are, on whatever devices are available. So, if you want to go to the office and use a shared device, you can log in and it's Maribel's experience. If I want to be at home, it's my experience at home. If I want to be in a coffee shop someday or hotel someday, hopefully, it's that experience as well. So, that I think is extremely powerful in a different way to think about what we're trying to achieve. >> Maribel I want to come back to you. It's companies have really had to make decisions very fast this year. Talk about how this whole discussion we have about where people work fits into the broader discussions of their cloud strategy and their security strategy which we've touched on a little bit. >> Well, one of the things I think is fascinating is pre-COVID. The type of discussions we're having with people is, I don't know if I can go to the cloud, or only this type of data can go to the cloud. And I really have to figure out how to parse it and do governance on it. And we going to need a managed, you know, three to five year transition plan. And I plan on having X percent of my apps this year and Y percent of my apps. Well, hey, that all went out the window, if you really wanted to get work done, you basically ramped up your cloud efforts very quickly. So, many of the sacred cows have actually gone away, which I'm really excited about. Because now I think we can truly take that digital transformation concept to the next level, where we're saying, okay, we're not recreating everything that we had in the past. We're now starting to think about, well, what types of new processes and services make sense? How do we actually do business process transformation? Not just technology transformation. So, very big change within six months. Now, I think a lot of organizations had to do it quick and dirty. And now they're going back and they're saying, okay, you know, part of that remote light or remote right concept it's just in general. Did I buy the right things? Should I buy something different? What is the set of SaaS services, cloud infrastructure I need? So, they're going full guns, like digital transformation has happened for many organizations now. Now, how do we get it to the next level? >> I think Maribel one of the important things that you highlighted is in this transition to new platforms like moving to the cloud, that organizations go through. Step one often is to effectively recreate what they had in that new environment. But the reality is that the cloud and the capability of the cloud opens up a whole vast new array of potential and possibilities. And certainly already in our Citrix portfolio, there are many examples of places where we've built services and capabilities in the cloud that would have been, you know, frankly either unimaginable or impossible to build, when we were thinking about customers running all of the software themselves in their own data centers. And as that transition occurs more and more, the customers who have made the leap to the cloud, not only do they get the elasticity of the capacity and the scale and the global footprint that cloud providers give them, but they also get access to new services and capabilities that they can use to power experiences inside their enterprise, either for their customers, or for their employees. And so, if you think about it in generational terms, you know, I've probably witnessed less than a handful of what I think of as significant transitions in our industry. Whether it was mainframe to PC or PC to mobile or mobile to internet, and now this transition, which I think is really, I think in, you know, progress is the transition to cloud. That's that next big platform, that next big opportunity that I think is going to transform the way not only we deliver capabilities to employees, but the way we think about what technology can actually do for us as organizations. >> Yeah PJ, we've absolutely seen just such a huge acceleration. I've talked to some companies. They were dipping their toe in, and now they've jumped full in because they have to. As you both pointed out, though, security is something we need to really make sure that it's not, okay, I've jumped in and of course, everything's going to be fine. We understand shared responsibility model when we're talking about cloud. PJ, are there tips that you have for companies as to here's what you absolutely should do. And hey, maybe as you're expanding your remote workforce, maybe there's certain things that it's time to retire or rethink of the way you think about security in this aspect. >> I think, you know, the area where I think customers are really starting to focus right now is securing the experience and the devices that they have their employees working on on a day to day basis. That's really where the biggest shift has occurred in their infrastructure. If your applications were in your data center, they probably still are. If they were in the cloud, or from a SaaS vendor, they probably still are. It's the employees and their device that's really moved to a location that requires a rethink around security. And I think there's several approaches that we see customers take. One is, of course, if you own and manage the device that you've given to the employee, you can clearly secure the endpoint. And then from there, you can manage and secure the traffic. And you can secure access to the applications on the back end. In fact, in some ways, that's the, I'd said either the brute force way or the, I think, easiest way for an enterprise to achieve this. The reality is, though, that many enterprises have relied on, employees either leveraging personally owned devices or issuing them with devices that previously they hadn't thought about required that they needed management in the organization. And so this is where some of the technologies that we have at Citrix, where we've moved the security boundary from the physical device, to the workspace itself to the experience. Really allows you to migrate that same security profile across multiple platforms, across multiple endpoints, and still deliver that same experience to the employees. I think that's one from an experience point of view. And then the second one is, we've seen a lot of customers rely very heavily on VPN as an access mechanism to get to corporate resources. And again, I think it's a unfortunately one size doesn't fit all but VPN is is effectively a one size solution. And it is the keys to the kingdom. Once you have access to VPN inside an organization, you have access to everything that an employee I had access to. And so what we see is customers taking maybe a more granular view of how they implement security at the application level, so that they can grant me access to the apps that I need inside the data center infrastructure inside the enterprise infrastructure, but not necessarily all the applications and all the data and all the content. And so I think there are, you know, real technologies that are, you know, in the market today that are available to customers, to really come back and look at maybe some of those brute force solutions that they initially deployed. And now start to layer on maybe more granular and more sophisticated solutions on top of that. That really minimize the security risk, and narrow the exposure to literally just the data that's absolutely required and the applications that are absolutely required. >> You know, I actually want to pick up on this. 'Cause I think this is such a critical point for organizations and this VPN point is a good one. When I was talking about moving from remote light to remote right. VPN isn't enough, if you've given somebody access to the kingdom, what if they happen to be on a compromised device? Well, then you basically just opened, as PJ said, yourself up for bad actors to enter your organization. So, security continues to be a layer cake. It's always been a layer cake. Some people call it a Jenga Tower, same concept. But basically, you have to secure every layer of the stack. You have to secure at the device layer. You have to secure at the application layer, the network transit layer in the cloud. And I think that organizations that are really serious about this, are spending more time and energy trying to figure out where to plug those different gaps. But you can start as an organization, everything from what computing hardware do you buy. You know, does it have a secure route of trust on it? So, that's one thing if you're thinking about buying new equipment. And then you start to layer things like workspace technologies, device management technologies, and all those provide different layers of security up the stack. And sadly, as PJ said, you know, there is no silver bullet. But, we have gotten to a part where it could be easier where you can buy fewer things, but it's still a coordinated effort of tools to make that whole stack secure. >> Alright, the last technology area I want to poke at, is we haven't talked about data yet. You know, there's the opportunity for analytics. You know, and it's a little bit, you know, Maribel maybe start with you. There's the opportunity to really understand, you know, are people leveraging things? Are there problems that maybe they might not report that the system can let me? But you also want to make sure that it's not big brother looking over what we're doing, and there's concern about that. So, what are you seeing out there? Any, you know, emerging trends as to how that work remote right that you talk about can leverage analytics and data? >> So the first thing I think is really important is the fact that you should be looking for technology providers that do collect and provide a certain amount of analytics for you. And then the question is, how detailed do you want that analytics? Do you want that analytics down to a user level? Well, if it turns out to be network performance, that's great. If it turns out to be, you know, every application they've entered, and how much is in, and how much time they spent on that application. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe you want it to be a little more lightweight. You know, maybe it's something that says, if this application hasn't been used in any period of time, because that's an issue around licensing. Do you need that licensing? But do you need to know if I've been spending, you know, 30 hours a week in Outlook. There's a bit of a privacy dance that we need to do there. There's just because you can doesn't mean you should. But what you really should be talking to your vendors about is, you know, how can I see what the experience is that my employees are having with your service? You know, is it operational? Is it being used? Should it be be optimized in some way? Are there analytics that you can provide me that prevent issues? You know, if there is a slowdown in the network, I need to know that that's going to impact users. If there's an outage in a service, I need to know what the impact is to that user and then maybe be able to predict some of those things before it happens so that we can manage and control that experience. So I think analytics are important. I think you have to really say, okay, what are we trying to achieve with those analytics? And balance the privacy and experience. >> So maybe a couple of comments. We've been investing in our analytics platform before this pandemic struck. And so we've seen quite a significant shift in the use cases that customers are applying those analytics to address. The first one really is for remote workers. The point that Maribel alluded to is, you know, have I delivered as secure an experience as I previously had delivered to my employees who (indistinct) the office, and how do I measure myself against that? And certainly we have the security analytics capability to help organizations understand anomalies in the system. Whether or not they're occurring, you know, inside the data center or on the endpoint device that the employee is using. And so that's one that I think customers are finding very valuable. The secondary is to do with actually the quality of that experience, the performance of that individual experience. And so we're again tracking at the user level, what their experience is like. And we're allowing organizations to have visibility into whether or not, they've actually delivered a usable, you know, high quality experience to all of their employees. Something that I frequently saw IT do by walking into offices and looking over your shoulder as you use an application and saying that's pretty good performance. And now of course, they're relying on remote response from remote employees with, you know, networks that they don't manage. So really, can you get a handle on what that experience is like. So both of those are actually analytic services that are aimed at helping IT deliver a high quality, reliable, secure service. The other area where we are exploring and beginning to see some usage for analytics is actually sharing the insight of usage and patterns of usage with the employee themselves. So while it might not be advisable to record how many hours I spend in a given application and shared that with IT, it might be useful information to share back with the employee themselves, about their pattern of usage of applications. Maybe recommending applications that other people in their team or their work group are using. Maybe recommending content, documents, insights, reports that other people have access to. And so if you start to take a broader look at how that analytics, then understanding of user behavior can get used. You can see that it can not only inform the security posture understanding of the organization, but it can also augment the employees on experience inside the workspace. And personally, that's where I'm most excited about the use of analytics is not so much on the IT side, which I think is quite expected. I think it is the novel and innovative use of analytics to really drive new experiences inside the workspace. >> I think this contextual concept is great, right? So, understanding how you use your services, understanding what your team uses, providing that extra bit of analytics that tries to help you figure out what you should be doing next, how can you optimize your own personal performance and productivity. That's where we start to see the analytics sing and do something different that we didn't do before. So, it learns about me. It predicts things but it also creates, helps me create new new, better employees experiences. >> Yeah, I think my phone is keeps asking me if I want to uninstaller the entire folder of travel apps, because it's been a long time since I've touched those. Look, it's been a really great discussion. If there's one thing we've learned this year is that you need to be open to the new data, and listening to everyone and being able to adjust fast. As we said early on in this whole pandemic, (indistinct) the companies that have gone through digital transformation, they're lucky because the agility that they built into their processes is going to allow them to do that. But as we've seen, many other companies are moving fast. And I think Satya Nadella is the one who said, you know, we did two years worth of, you know, transformation in two months. So, I want to just give you both a final word, you know, final advice for companies as they look at that challenge in front of them as to back to work that we set up at the beginning. PJ, we'll start with you. >> Well, thank you, Stu. I mean be the first thing I'd say is once again how, you know, I've been impressed by the organizations that we work with our customers, and their ability to move quickly to address the immediate problems. I think the good news is that this was a roadmap and a journey that many of their suppliers and vendors, including Citrix, we were on the path to help deliver solutions that are very much aligned with what these organizations are experiencing. So I think it's a great time to engage with organizations like ours and others that are providing these technologies to understand what that roadmap actually looks like. And to really pick the best of what's out there to help organizations, I think, make them more thoughtful and considered and probably long term decisions that they've got to make over the next, you know, six to 12 months that really set them up for success here in the future. I'm very excited because in many ways, I feel like that experience that organizations had of accelerating their two year project through, you know, two months or two weeks. That's a journey that we've been on with those customers. And we are excited by the fact that they've come through that first phase. Lots of people have a lot of things, still to figure out ahead of them. And we're delighted and honored to be engaged with those customers to help them through that. >> So for me, when I talk to customers, I say this is an amazing time to reimagine your business and really focus on what you think your technology and strategic advantage of your business is. Use technology for that. You can build versus buy. Build for the things that are going to create strategic advantage, buy for everything else. >> Maribel and PJ, thank you so much for joining me. Great discussion, lots things for people to think about. And looking forward to watching everybody as they go through their journey in the next steps going back to work. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman. As always, thank you for watching "theCUBE". (upbeat music)

>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hey! Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend and we're pleased to welcome to theCUBE PJ Hough, EVP and Chief Product Officer at Citrix. PJ, it's great to have you on theCUBE! >> I'm delighted to be here, thank you. >> Really enjoyed your keynote yesterday morning. The excitement, the energy that you guys kicked off everything with yesterday with intelligent experience. People get it. We're all employees, we all want to have an experience. I would love to have a whole day back in a week. >> Yes. >> By bringing the apps and the actions to me, rather than me having to go and find and interact with all these different apps. What's been the feedback that you've heard over the last 24 hours with intelligent enterprise? >> The intelligent experience features, people are really liking it because I think, as you say, they recognize it. It feels already somewhat familiar. I think sometimes when you introduce new products, I've introduced brand new products in the past, where you really have to explain the use and why it's built that way. We are not having to explain very much about it. We show it to people and they identify with the workflows, the tasks. They recognize the challenges that they face today with getting access to that same information in the systems that they use. I think there is a need right now for us to solve this problem. I think customers are really feeling a sense of pain around the number of applications that they have, and I think I.T. knows that they have actually burdened their users with actually doing a lot of human workflow themselves. >> So since the WinFrame days, Microsoft, Citrix, synonymous with each other, huge partnership, huge and deep partnership over the years. Something that they'll appear to be a video yesterday. To say that Citrix and Microsoft has announced something, it's kind of a big deal, and it got lost, I think, in the excitement of the intelligent experience, which is a lot to say. Can you help explain that partnership, the deepening of that partnership, a little bit better? >> Sure. I think, as you know, and probably most of the audience know, the foundation of the partnership was in virtualization. That really is at the heart of what we do. Application delivery, particularly Windows applications, and Windows delivery, over all types of networks, and to all types of devices. Maybe what's more important about our relationship right now is if you look at the announcements we made yesterday, yes at the heart of it was new announcements around Windows virtual desktop on Azure and our desktop is a service that both run on Azure. That's at the heart of it. But then if you look at the continuing set of announcements we've made, improvements in the delivery of Microsoft Teams. In order to do that work we actually partnered really closely with that Microsoft Teams group at Microsoft. And then the Office 365 Networking initiatives that we have, that of course required partnership with all of the teams at Office 365. And then finally, the Intune partnership we have, which of course is with Brad Anderson, who was on stage with us. Across the whole delivery from cloud-hosted applications to applications themselves, the network over which the applications are delivered, and helping to secure the endpoint devices. We had innovation announcements in all categories, and every single one of them required a pretty deep partnership and co-development in many cases with Microsoft. >> So PJ, Citrix has over 400,000 customers globally. That's a lot! You've got, I think, 98 plus percent of the F100, the F500. As Chief Product Officer, if we look at the Microsoft, the deepening of that partnership, where are customers in terms of influence, maybe shed some light on some of the conversations that you have with customers that help dictate, for example, the deepening of that Microsoft relationship with Citrix. >> I think that's a really important point. It's not like our relationship with Microsoft is just for ourselves. It's actually spurred by many of the things that our customers are trying to do, primarily with their technology, and then with us as an enabler to help really deliver great experiences on that. Windows 10, kind of a big deal in the marketplace. I hear about that from all enterprise customers. And you combine Windows 10 with Office 365. Pretty much every customer I get to speak to has either initiatives around one or both of those technologies as part of their broader digital transformation. So the announcements we made yesterday align very well with these initiatives that Microsoft is driving into the enterprise, and I think customers see the promise of what Microsoft is offering with Windows and with the Office family of products, but they need to put that in everybody's hands, not just those who happen to be in the headquarters and on a great network and running on a top class device, you really have to get that out to your branches, to your mobile workers, and that's really where we come in to play, really helping, really delivered that great experience to all of those employees. >> We were just talking to Dana Garner right before our conversation with you, and he said that Citrix has been pretty modest over the years. You guys are kind of the original cloud. To be frank, a lot of SAAS services are built on Citrix. With that, you're looking into the intelligent experience, you guys are positioning yourselves once again to be at the forefront of innovation when it comes to employee experience. With that comes cultural change. I think you guys have experienced over the past 30 years of kind of saying, you know what, we can do cool stuff, too, and talking to a new audience. Talk to us about that new audience you're going to have to go after with these products because these are not just I.T. products when you're talking about changing processes, now you're getting into the wheelhouses of the PWCs, the EMYs, the big four of the world. >> Yep, yep. I think that's a really important point, and one that's certainly not lost on those of us at Citrix who know that this pivot to broaden our opportunity in the market and broaden our perspective on what we can do to help customers, it requires us to think about our go-to-market in a slightly different way. You mentioned some of those very large companies out there that I now look to for partnership in helping deliver those solutions to customers. I think we have great technology, but we really are going to need people who understand deeply the industries of these customers. If you're in finance, or oil and gas, or healthcare, you want your partner to understand the processes and the structure of your market. While we'll have great technology to help deliver oil and gas solutions, we're going to look to oil and gas solution partners and system integrators to really help build the, I will call it, the customized intelligent experience for those industries. We've always had a very strong partner network, I mean we have over 10,000 partners today at Citrix, and I think we are going to leverage that partner channel again, potentially in new ways, to deliver this intelligent experience to customers. But you do raise a very important point. We do not have, and never have had, a go it alone strategy, either from a technology point of view, with our partnership with Microsoft, and the announcements we made with Google, and in the past we've made with the other clouds, et cetera, but it's also true from a solution delivery perspective. We absolutely rely on really great partnerships in the marketplace. >> You've mentioned, you know, developing potentially customized solutions. If I think of customization, I think of personalization, and you talked a lot about that yesterday. As all of us are consumers, that consumerization, the influence that we're bringing into businesses, we want things personalized. We want experiences to come to us that have enough intelligence to know, show PJ this, not this. >> Yeah. >> So talk to us about how Citrix is distilling apps into what you called yesterday these personalized units of work. >> Yeah, I think that fundamentally, there's a initial set of those units of work that I think everyone recognizes and would say, oh yes, I know how that works. But they would also presume that it works pretty much the same way for all of us. Like the way that we book time off from our companies, or the way that we submit our expenses, other employees are going to do that the same way. I think what's much more interesting is using our analytics and our artificial intelligence to really figure out what's the pattern of work that PJ has and how that differs from the pattern of work that Lisa has. Now, we may both have similar responsibilities, but I expect that over time, and this is sort of one of the acid tests for me, for the workspace, even if we are in the same organization, after several months of use, my feed should look different to yours. Just like on our social feeds. Even if we more or less have the same friends, and we more or less have similar interests, still no two feeds are identical, and they're driven a little bit by our preferences, but they're also driven by our habits, the way we work with the software, and so we're building all of that intelligence into the workspace. >> So we don't get the chance to talk to people who are at the forefront of these products often, so I'm going to try to get a little peak into the future here. When the iPhone was created, what 10 years ago, it was an amazing thing. You give me a 10 year old iPhone today, and we'll have a conversation. (laughter) So you guys are innovating, innovating, employee experience, customer experience, is the output of digital transformation. You look at analytics, what is the output of the employee experience and the customer experience? What is Citrix looking at like, you know customers are not quite ready for this, but we have it in our back pocket? >> It's a really great question. I'm glad you brought up the example like the iPhone because I think the flip-side is that if you were to go back 10 years ago, I don't know that Apple knew what it would look like today. I think they had the broad brush stokes of where they were going, but I don't know they would have known exactly how to navigate the last decade in advance. I feel the same way about the journey that we're on. But that's partly what makes working on those forefront technology projects so exciting. I just did an interview where somebody asked me, "What do you think the future of work looks like?" And I said, well, in some ways, I'm already living it because I'm experiencing these products inside Citrix before they get released to customers. So we already have a little glimpse of what might be next. I think some of the biggest opportunities for us are really to take the assistance and the learning capabilities of the workspace in a different direction. Yes, we will add more applications, yes, the micro-applications will get richer, yes, the user interface might change a little bit, but really what's the fundamental technology shift that's going to drive innovation for the next decade, and I think it's analytics and machine learning. We're already, I think, at the very early stages of seeing some of the ways that impacts the work experience, but my hope for the decade is that all of the workspaces that we work in and all of the tools that we have get a little smarter about me, and some of the things that we've come to trust with regard to software in other environments and other places, that we get to trust our work tools to the same extent, which I don't think we're there yet. >> In terms of the messaging to customers, we've talked to your three innovation award finalists from different industries: financial services, education, global technology, all really helping to make big impacts to their employees, their customers. Those two things I see as absolutely tantamount. They're inextricably linked. You have to have a great employee experience to deliver a great customer experience. If there's a problem with employee experience, it's going to manifest. In some form or fashion as employees, we all in some way are interacting with customers and have the opportunity to influence their loyalty or churn. >> Yeah. >> So we've heard a lot about how these customers are really leveraging what Citrix is enabling. This modern workforce, let me do what I need to where it helps me be most productive, but also drive these big outcomes. When it comes to A.I. and machine learning, we talk about them at every event that we go to. Where are your customers in terms of being receptive to understanding it's not Big Brother looking in at PJ's productivity, it's really working to understand, like you said before, how differently you and I might be using the exact same software application to make our jobs far more productive. Where is that appetite for A.I. machine learning for that kind of productivity? >> Well I think a concern that all customers have, set aside our technology and just talk about the industry in general, I think as an industry, we have to really continue to earn the trust of customers, both in the consumer lives as well as in the professional lives with regard to the governance that we put around information that they share with us and how we treat that for their benefit, not just for ours. I think those same concerns exist, broadly speaking, whether it's a Microsoft, or a Google, or a Facebook, or a Citrix, maybe to some extent less to us because I think customers have historically not entrusted a lot of that type of information to us. They have entrusted that to our customers, who are delivering solutions, whether it's a financial solution or a healthcare solution, et cetera. So that's one thing for us to continue to improve is that we are good custodians of that information and that we're using it, I will say, for good and for the purposes of improving experiences that matter. I think in general our customers understand that there is a value exchange. That our ability to deliver new value to them requires them to exchange insight with us so that we can turn that into value for them. That I think is pretty clear to most customers right now. In some ways, we're at the forefront of what we're trying to do for intelligence in a workspace, but many of the core technologies have been proven in other fields, and we're certainly trying to leverage that and the comfort that customers already have achieved with some of those technologies. >> Excellent, alright. We have had just a great couple of days here. The excitement is palpable. The impact that you guys are having on a wide variety of customers in every industry is palpable, and I also really liked the fact that as an individual contributor you guys showed this is how Citrix workspace can impact your lives in a way that is really going to be a driving force of the workforce of the future. So, PJ, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this afternoon >> Thank you. I enjoyed being here on theCUBE and thank you for your coverage of the event. It's been really great. >> We've had a great time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California, it's theCUBE, covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Ferrier. We have two guests for this segment. We have PJ Farmer, she is the Director, Cloud Product Management at TierPoint. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, I'm very excited. >> Rebecca: And we have David Hines, VP, Architecture and Engineering at TierPoint. Thanks, David. >> Yes, thank you. >> So, for our viewers that maybe unfamiliar with TierPoint, can you tell us all about this St. Louis based company, what you do, give us an introduction. >> Oh, absolutely. So, TierPoint is a managed services, data services, and colocation provider. We have a broad footprint. We have over 40 data centers in the United States, and we have a broad portfolio of services we offer because we're really interested in meeting customers where they are in their digital transfortation, or transformation, excuse me. So everything from colo to cloud and beyond, we offer because customers come to us for a consultative approach. They have a problem, they needed solutions, and we can offer them those solutions, right. So we manage all of that. >> So you're helping them with their digital transformations and everything. >> Absolutely. >> And where does Nutanix come into play here? >> So, Nutanix is a part of that cloud services really that we're offering our customers, but also giving them a dedicated environment really that they can manage their workloads, but also have some more control, security, compliance, so that overall, the customers end up with a solution that helps them drive their business forward. And of course, TierPoint, our goal is to make sure that we're taking care of all that underlying infrastructure and systems and components, so again, the customer can focus on driving their business forward, and taking that burden off of IT and Nutanix is a great platform that really helps enable us and enable our customers, at the end of the day. >> Talk about the technical challenges you guys had before Nutanix, after Nutanix. What changed, what was the journey like, how did the door open up for them? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So, I think overall, we as technologists, work very hard to piece together solutions, varied solutions, to provide a platform for our customers that they can consume, but that is challenging, right, as a company, technology changes quickly. There are a lot of different vendors in the marketplace offering a lot of different technologies, and I think one of the things that we see as a huge value for Nutanix, is they've got a very complete platform, across the spectrum. It's not just a box with compute and storage. It is so much more than that, and so for us, that's very exciting, it's very intriguing, and something that really helps us be efficient, and also our customers, be efficient. >> So, digital transformation is something that we're talking about so much, on theCUBE in general, here at this show. What are you hearing from customers and what is sort of their bugaboos and their pain points? >> So, we recently had a customer who, their hypervisor of choice is something they're super familiar with, right. They have a great amount of comfort, but over time they can see, there could be some cost savings in Nutanix, with going with the Acropolis hypervisor that's included. So our customer came to us and said, hey, can you help us with this? Said, absolutely. So they are in our data center, we're taking care of them, we are consulting through their transformation and they are starting out with what they're comfortable with and as time changes and as they mature and transition, we're gonna help them get there, right. We're gonna help them change, if it's a hypervisor, if it's a different service, if it's a different way to set it up and present it out to their innovative IT developers, right. We're gonna help them do that. >> Talk about, can you guys share your insight into how you're operating the business? I mean obviously, you've got customers, a lot of customers. What's it like, operating this? 'Cause you got developers out there who want applications to be supported. I'm sure you got latency challenges around. We went to the cloud, a lot of multi-cloud conversations. People still gotta store stuff in their data centers or colos. So the edge, the network change, all these things are evolving. What's going on inside your company, in terms of how you operate? >> So, that's a great question. So, it is challenging to keep up with that landscape as it evolves but we are investing heavily in that. So the great thing about TierPoint, is we are in these edge markets. That is one of our real value adds, and so we're investing very heavily in our network. We also have some really strong partnerships with carriers that give us that on-ramp into the hyperscale. So it really helps complete that multi-cloud story that customers need. So yeah, they can come to us, colocate that equipment that they really have to hold on to, mainframes, mid-range servers, other legacy systems, while gaining that connectivity to those hyperscale environments. And then there's the middle, the middle where we provide a layer, like Nutanix, that gives them that enterprise type cloud. But again, it's dedicated to them, it's in our data center, it's local to their other systems, while also getting that reach to the hyperscale. So it's a really, really powerful story for us. >> On the hypervisor challenge question, this is interesting, we hear people saying, I got Hyper-Vi, I got Hyper-V, I got VMware, I wanna just use, Nutanix' got their own hypervisor. AVH has been an interesting product for Nutanix. The full stack is compelling for a lot of customers, but you guys probably have a lot of customers who wanna parole their own, or bring their own hypervisor. How do you deal with that, does that fit in to the value proposition? >> Well, I think there is some talk about the hypervisor, maybe being irrelevant, like it's obsolete, it's not something to be concerned about, and I think Dave said it earlier, best today, he said that-- >> John: You could be nice when you say that, by the way. >> I'm sorry, what? >> John: A lot of people are saying that. >> Well, yeah, a lot of people are saying that. I just think it's less of a focus, right, because TierPoint helps people focus on what is innovative, what is your business outcome, what are you really doing for your business? So I feel like the hypervisor is just less of a focus, right, than it is necessarily, not important. >> It's more commodity now. >> Yeah. >> It is, and we don't want the customers to have to focus on that, because again, IT really needs to drive business, not be a drag on business and so the less that they have to focus, as an IT organization, on the maintenance and management of infrastructure, and even up the stack towards operating systems, where we can take that burden off of them, then again, they can be a leader for their business and driving the business as a whole, not be held back. >> Okay, what's the playbook for doing that, not being a drag on the business? Because that's what everyone wants to do but they might have legacy stuff. What's the playbook? >> The playbook, is being a part of that business discussion and when the business itself is making decisions about how to drive forward, IT has that seat at the table, and again, is thinking about, how can we drive savings or cost cutting, how can we enable transactions, how can we enable the customer base? And not thinking about, oh, do I have my storage system updated, am I dealing with the old boxes that I have to replace, and do I have power and cooling problems in a data center. They don't need to be dealing with that. They need to be up front with the business, making business decisions. >> What you're talking about, really represents a complete shift in the role of the technologist. Do they have the skills to be thinking about, they obviously, can think about more than just the maintenance, and do I have the storage, and things like that. But does there need to be much more education around these business strategy questions that they should be thinking about? As you said, this is their role, to really help the business transform. >> David: Yeah. >> So, I think that often times I see people feel like they are just technology, oh, I'm just hands on keyboard, I'm doing this, but what their exposure and their natural interests, lead them to have a broad picture of how things can work, what is expected, and how do these things operate, what have I had experience with, and when they have a seat at the table and they're making, with the business decisions, they have value to add there. Right. That value is in that perspective, what they've seen, because that may not be forefront for some of the other business leaders at the table, right? And it is a collaborative discussion, that generates quality output, that generates innovation, that generates thinking outside of the box, and unique solutions that really lead the market. >> But I do think it really does, to your point, mean new education, new skills for these IT technologists and so that's part of, we've gone through this at TierPoint, transforming the engineers and the technologists that we have working on our staff and really teaching them new ways to work, new ways to think, new ways to collaborate, so that they're helping us move the business forward and not sitting behind a keyboard, isolated from the business itself. >> I was gonna ask you about the skill gap 'cause one of the things that comes up as the shift at DevOps is happening, with more development going on to make the infrastructure programmable so it's not a drag on the business, changing roles are a huge thing 'cause Nutanix essentially, the values, they enable new things to happen, the result is consolidation, so it's not consolidation as the primary. You get consolidation as a benefit of what they do. So people be like, whoa, what do I do now? But the benefit is people shift. So the IT Ops role has changed, it's best probably to get it before the operations. Where do you guys see that trend evolving? Because if this continues with AI and automation, you can almost imagine it's completely programmable infrastructure. >> Yeah, we do see a consolidation of Siloed Technologists, right, so this idea of I'm only a network engineer, I'm only a storage engineer, I'm only a cloud engineer, that is definitely going away and again, we've done this at TierPoint. We've kind of mixed those roles, right, educate the staff, but from additional education programmability, somebody'd be able to do the automation and the development in an engineering role verses having a separate development team working on that. It's gonna be really important as companies evolve their groups. >> I think you've had a lot of infrastructure engineers that 20 years ago, 15 years ago, knew Pearl, they knew scripting, they knew these things, and as time has gone on, now they know APIs, now they know RESTful APIs, now they're interacting, but we all know, in IT, it's always change and it's always learning, I mean, you got into this, right. So I think a lot of the infrastructure engineers, over time, are finding they were already automating things in some ways and they're becoming more mature in the ways that they automate things, right? I think it's a great transition as they go on, yeah. >> So, talk about the relationship with Nutanix. What's it like, partnering with them? They got a lot of momentum in enabling a partner strategy. We saw news with Hewlett Packard enterprise, potential channel opportunity there. They're a partner centric, they're partner friendly. What's it like, working with them? >> Fantastic, I mean absolutely fantastic, from go, see our customers were coming to us wanting to, they brought Nutanix to us, honestly, they came up. A lot of people that use Nutanix are like fans of Nutanix, right, you've seen some of those, and so our customers brought Nutanix to us, and as we began to see this trend, and we decided to make a private cloud product out of it, we engage with Nutanix. They've provided so many resources, they've been there for us, been very responsive. It's really been a natural and easy collaboration with them. And like you said, they do everything through partners so that has made it easy. We are another partner, right? They enable us, they know that part of their success is our success and vice versa, so it's almost like an extension of the team, which is fantastic. >> So what do you say to the new Nutanix customer that comes in, 'cause I agree with you, they're very hardcore loyal fans because they took a chance and they see benefits, so they took a chance and it paid off. It's like gambling, you put a number on the roulette wheel and it comes up black or red, whatever. They've had great success there and their promoter score is 90. But what about new people, are like, hey, I heard this Nutanix thing is out there, or software. How are you guys looking at these new opportunities, when is Nutanix a good fit? 'Cause you gotta balance it all for all your customers. >> Yeah. >> Depending on what they wanna do. >> Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. Honestly, for us it's really about enabling the higher order applications and workloads for our customers, so I don't know, unless the customer themselves is really bringing Nutanix to us, that we're having that conversation. It's really like, look, this is a solution that's gonna provide you the capabilities, and again, trying to not have the customer really worry too much about that and let us own that relationship, and as PJ mentioned, Nutanix has invested very heavily, not only in the partnership but also developing this platform and solution for us so it's been-- >> So you guys could provide it, if no one asks, just provide the best solution. >> Absolutely. >> Right. >> And that's the key, right? >> I want to ask you a question about geographics. So, I'm based in Boston, John's based in the Valley, you're a technology company based in St. Louis. I'm interested, we may just come to this with our east coast, west coast biases and I'm just, what's it like to be a technology company in St. Louis, in the heartland, do you feel part of the community? >> Oh absolutely, in fact, St. Louis really has been, you see several articles about all the startup tech in St. Louis because it is an affordable place to live. You have access to all the cities, usually direct flights, right, so from a community perspective, there's a lot more technology startups than you might think in St. Louis, but they do have access to-- >> Rebecca: And great barbecue too. >> Great barbecue, absolutely. And it really is a beautiful place. You also have lots of parks, lots of rivers, lots of outdoor, I mean, it's kinda surprising, honestly. We have a main technology center also, in Raleigh, North Carolina, so we are split between the two. >> David: Yeah. >> We do a lot of flights back and forth. >> WWT is out there too. >> RTP, yeah, the research truck will park in North Carolina, as a very big tech hub, so that split really provides a balance. There's a very big business hub in St. Louis and a lot of collaborational partnerships there from the business side, but also that Raleigh Tech Hub on the east coast is really a huge benefit to us. And a lot of our partners are there, >> PJ: And like a lot of-- >> Nutanix actually, is right there, down the street. >> We'll have to come down and visit you in North Carolina. My daughter's going to UNC >> Oh, okay. >> So I gotta find some excuses to get down there. >> That'd be great. >> Anytime. >> Maybe see your business. >> Some TierPoint shows. >> Oh, that's right. >> Exactly. >> And do a little, couple interviews. >> Anytime. >> Anytime. >> Well, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great talking to you. >> Yeah, we really enjoyed it. >> Thank you for having us. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Ferrier, you are watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its eco-system partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018, three days live coverage, kicking-off day two. On the right set, Michael Dell himself is talking. But I'm even more excited, because when we get to talk to the users here. That's what we love doing; talking, peers talking to their peers. I'm Stu Miniman, my guest host for this segment is, Joep Piscaer. Who's actually a user himself, and joining me, first time on the program, is PJ Romero who is the Principal IT Engineer at Turnitin, out of Oakland. >> Out of Oakland. >> Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, Stu. >> All right, so, PJ, first of all, your forth year at VMworld. Give us your initial impressions, and what brings you back to VMworld? >> VMworld is just getting, re-upping my education, so I'm learning more stuff, seeing what's new on the horizon, to get implemented in my situation. >> All right, you talk about learning more stuff. Tell us about Turnitin. Explain what this is and, you know, I think it'll resonate with a lot of our audience. >> Right. Turnitin is plagiarism detection software. So we're probably in most major universities throughout the world, really big in Europe and here at major universities. >> Okay. >> And we are also in the high school, high school down. >> Okay. Ya, I was wondering about that. My daughter actually starts high school tomorrow, so, make sure she understands that this is serious stuff. I mean, talk about education, I mean, heck, in this community when you talk about certification people are always worried about you know, tests getting out. >> Exactly. >> Things like that. >> Exactly. >> We take education seriously. >> Exactly. >> As a community, as we should. And your role at the company? >> My role; I'm the Principal IT Engineer, so basically I architect the corporate infrastructure, aside from the Turnitin papers. So I manage global infrastructure. >> Before we get into, you know, kind of the infrastructure itself, the business itself. How long has it been around? How long have you been in there? And what is the kind of, you know, mobile-web, digital-transformation impact your business? >> Oh, so everything's mobile now. Everything's on the web. We've migrated out there. We've moved out to the Cloud. And how it's migrated us, so, Turnitin's been around for about 20 years. We just uploaded our billionth paper a few weeks ago. So we have about nine petabytes worth of data to pull from. >> Oh wow. >> So you can imagine how we're getting that from our data centers into the Cloud. With nine petabytes, it's been a challenge. So recently we virtualized some VMware and to make that transition, we had rows and rows of servers to move them out; to virtualize. >> So nine terabytes. That's a lot of data. >> Petabytes. >> Petabytes even. >> Petabytes, ya. >> So tell me, how does that work from a tech perspective? What are you, what are you running, what's that tech stack look like? >> Well, Turnitin is actually a home-grown infrastructure from the ground for the storage. So it's highly available, it's highly redundant, we have multiple data centers new with the GDPR requirements. Now we have data centers in Europe, and we're moving all over the country. We're looking at EMA, APAC, and then South America. (laughing) Get it out there somewhere. >> So you're running your own data centers? >> Yes. >> I presume. >> Yes, we're running our own data centers. >> What does that mean for your hybrid cloud strategy? How much is in your data center? What are you considering to move to the Cloud? How does that impact your business? >> So right now we're probably 75%, 25% and, you know, with the Cloud being elastic as it is, as term papers come up, we're spinning them out. You know, so we're moving. >> Great, okay. So you're virtualized. Do you know what percentage of your applications are virtualized? And maybe walk us through a little bit about the stacks that you have, both on premises, as well as who you use for a public cloud. >> Oh, so we're using AWS and we're also, I think we use, some Google stuff. And Desrrve for some of the development. So we're using all of them, basically; to make sure we're fluid that way. We also do, all the applications, all the web servers are virtualized, and put up in the Cloud. But the main guts of it is still on premise. >> Okay, and what's that stack look like on premises? Who are you using today? >> As far as. >> Like, your whole infrastructure stacks? >> All the infrastructure has been super micro. >> Okay. >> Ya. >> But you're using like, an HCI solution? >> The corporate is. >> Okay. >> The corporate. Ya, I manage the corporate infrastructure. >> Right. >> Ya, we use HCI Solution. >> So whose are you're using. >> I'm using Nutanix. >> Okay. >> Ya. >> Great. So why don't you tell us a little bit about how you got to Nutanix. What apps you use that for? What apps you don't use that for? Maybe help to ease that out a little bit for us. >> Ya, of course. So I have the corporate infrastructure started out when I got there three years ago. I had server-sprawl. I had all physical serves. They weren't virtualizing yet and I got in there and was like, why not? So I did a small PoC with a couple of servers in a NAS that I built homemade and put VMware on it and said, look, this stuff works great. I can move stuff back. I can kill this box. And they were like, wow, that's pretty cool! And then I got a business intelligence project for the financial services. So they were doing some really high-end modeling based on Oracle database, and needed something redundant, powerful and fast to deploy. Well, that was the problem. It was going to take six weeks to get servers in, get them configured, stacked. I got Nutanix in within two weeks. So got Nutanix in there, I think I spent more time convincing them that this is really a to you box and I'm going to stick all our stuff in there, we started out with the three node unit, and got VMware on there to show them what I was doing, and then we deployed our Oracle stack in no time. >> So tell a little about the cost-model behind it. Has it changed the way, using HCI, has it changed the way you do business? Has is made it easier, cheaper faster? >> It's made it cheaper and faster. For me, easier, I don't say the easy part too much 'cause then they wonder what I'm doing. But it's really easy. (laughing) >> Yeah, that's interesting. When you talk about you've had homegrown stuff before. >> Yeah. >> Verses now. I've talked to some Nutanix customers they say, like hey, I got my nights and weekends back. >> Yeah. >> I don't have to worry about so many of the other pieces, maybe you talk a little bit about that dynamic. Did you have any change in personnel? Or who manages what after, or is it you? >> So I'm it. But with the ability to put Nutanix in there and ease of use, I give them access to the dashboards and show them how things work. It's been really simple, especially for some of my newer guys, the younger sys admins, who don't understand virtualization and it's still kind of magic for everybody. But now they got one dashboard. Green heart means good. Everything else, look at it. >> So you're saying you're the wizard now. >> I'm the wizard. >> Pay no attention behind the curtain. (laughing) It got really easy, but I'll just keep that behind. I can do more stuff and I'll just be the superhero. >> Yeah, exactly, exactly. It made my monitoring easier for them and my guys love it. They really love it. >> Tell a little bit about how you're using Nutanix. So Nutanix started-out as a virtualization, pure HCI company, but they've broadened their portfolio. So tell us a little bit about how you're using the Nutanix solution inside of your data centers. >> Right, so originally I put Nutanix with a virtualization product or the financial product. I was able to get a forth node. So I was able to use their analytics in there and say, hey, we're going to run out of space. So I'm running 47 machines on four nodes and I still have high redundancy. But I had no back-ups. So what do we do? So I got a second box, I put it inside of one of my other data centers and used that for replication in the back. And now with the Zy coming out, I'm going to start pushing that up to the Cloud, and start moving my single data center, toothpick as it were, it's going to be in the Cloud quickly. >> And you mentioned Oracle's, the application that catalyzed this. All certified, didn't have any issues. >> No issues. >> That's awesome. >> It was great. >> Those of us in the virtualization community, how many years did we spend just virtualizing Oracle, let alone, every new platform. It's challenging. >> Exactly. >> Your peers? All clear? They don't have to worry about it? >> Oh ya, they love it, they love it. They can't believe I got it all in the to you box. I like to take the picture of it and say, here's their stuff. I don't need this big stack, I just need the little box. (laughing) >> So basically, your whole operational model changed I'm guessing? You're not spending as much time anymore on operational issues. >> No. It's more of architecture now. We start moving the Cloud. I'm getting away from virtualizing more of the applications that we use. We just use basic active directory and DNS and that stuff. So it's all fine but, I'm going to start moving it so I push the button it will be in the Cloud, and I can literally lose my data center. >> Talk a little bit about the Zy. We've heard a lot the vision, so what's the roadmap for you to kind of embrace, adopt that? What's interesting to you about it? >> For me, I'm going to take the financial stack and really moving it right now in the tip is re-iping, it's a lot of back-end work. With the Zy, it should be a click and I mean, I've seen the database, so we're talking right now to get that done. It should be a click of the button and it's going to spin me up an AWS. So that's where I'm going next with my next project. That looks pretty cool. >> Okay, the rest of your applications, will you expand your Nutanix environment? Is this something to help you deal with that hybrid cloud environment? >> Yeah. >> What does the future look like? >> If I have my way, as I age-out my remote sites, we'll be putting more Nutanix out there. And then I can do more three to one back-ups. >> That frees-up even more time to be spending on future architecture. >> Yep, exactly. >> Instead of just the operational stuff. >> Yep, I'm making it so we can lose any leg and we're going to be fine. >> One of the things that everyone's poking at at this show is that whole multi-cloud environment. We said, I can make my data center kind of simple today. >> Yeah. >> But, multi-cloud, most people, at least I talked to, it's not simple. The Cloud is a little bit complex, it's not just swipe a credit card anymore. Managing between multiple environments, depending on how many clouds you have. What have you seen today? What would you like to see get even better over time? >> I'd like to see where Nutanix is going really, with the single-environment. I want to go one-spot. And right now I'm going to one-spot for my virtualization and all my on-prem stuff, but as I move up to the Cloud and spin stuff up, I want to go to the same spot. I don't want to have to think about it so much. Simple is good for me. I'm big in the KISS system. (laughing) >> Absolutely. Keep it simple. >> That's right. >> Engineering design, absolutely. >> I imagine your role is changing as well, right? It is becoming simpler, you get to spend more time on new projects. How is your role changing as an IT Engineer? >> I'm getting to think more. I'm not reactive anymore at all. When I got there it was a very reactive environment. And now it is more on design and how we can make sure we can tighten-up securities. We went through a whole bunch of new sox audits. And it's made it simple. It's made it simple for me. We're all in compliance now within the physical hardware and security and now, some of the other touches I'm able to think about and get those implemented. >> So outside of the Nutanix stuff, at VMworld, what kind of things are you digging into, learning, anything excite you that you either heard from your peers or announcements or sessions you've been in? >> VDI is still exciting to me. I'm still looking at those projects, and I have just enough space to do a PoC on my stuff, so I'm talking to management about that. As soon as I can show them they can do anything, from a web browser, I'd like to give them Chrome Books, and say, have a nice day. (laughing) >> It's funny you say that, because most people think of the HCI space and like, you start with VDI. And now you're like, oh well now I've got some fair capacity, I'm guessing. I can put in environment, manage it. Yeah, do some of the dynamics inside the company sounds like they're some of the bigger challenges. Always for VDI, has been a challenge. >> Yeah, it's always a challenge but so far, everything I've said's worked for them, so I've got a good trust-base. >> PJ Romero, really appreciate you talking about Turnitin. No plagiarism at this show, right? (laughing) >> That's right. We'll check. (laughing) >> PJ Romero, Turnitin, really appreciate you joining us. For you, Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman. Lots more coverage. Wall-to-wall, here at VMworld2018. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. This is the cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back, little smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event to his summit in new York's coming in the summer. We'll be there too with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the Groove's psych to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're can see a lot of virtual cube outta hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economists with duct bill, a group, he's the founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank >>You. Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe is shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at mark, Andrew's been doing a lot of shit posting lately. All a billionaires are shit posting, but they don't know how to do it. Like they're not >>Doing it right. There's something opportunity there. It's like, here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a midsize island to in doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. >>This shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on this side, I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what is shit posting? >>It's more or less talking about the world of enterprise technology, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream, but it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a jackass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't have have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, coupons coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you see the growth of cloud native Amazon's evolving Adams, especially new CEO. Andy's move on to be the chief of all Amazon. Just so I, the cover of was it time magazine, um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything. These folks do. They're they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble imagining the logistics. It takes to wind up handling the catering for a relat a downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. And it's, it's sprawling immense that dominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. Well, >>There's a lot of force for good conversations. Seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to port eight of us is trying to portray themselves as you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that. I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. It's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now it's saying kind of thing, as you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby race as a semi-pro race car driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. Either way, sounds like more exciting, like better >>Have a replacement ready <laugh> in case something gonna was wrong on the track, >>Highly available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in e-sports with, there are people in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and video graphics card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. >>Oh, it's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting into it because these things are basically rocket chips. When those cars go like they're sitting there, we cans instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going on in your world. I know you have a lot of great success. We've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter, check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's the blowback, any blowback lately? Has there been uptick? What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey or Corey, and then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's huh? I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They must not have heard me it. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters, that sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do that. >>We should do that. Actually. I think sure would call in. Oh, I, >>I think >>I guarantee we had that right now. People would call in and say, Cory, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised anything about how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the customer. >>You know, I always joke with Dave ante about how John Fort's always at, uh, um, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of Google from that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0 5, or we can't call, we >>Have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented SU uh, sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish. That's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So, you know, fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their >>Producting. So they're going in different directions. When they named Amazon Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonused on a number of words. They can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, session manager is a great one. I love the service ridiculous name. They have a systems manager, parameter store, which is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs my in a way that systems manage through parameter store does not. It's fun. >>What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination >>Of you got E Ks. You got EMR, you got EC two, you got S3 SQS. Well, RedShift's not an acronym. You >>Gots is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending into highly on the context of the conversation. They still >>Up Beanstalk or is that still around? >>Oh, they never turn anything off. They like the Antigo, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, well, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it, but while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it. John three <laugh>. Okay. Simple DV still haunts our dreams. >>I, I actually got an email on, I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C twos were being deprecated and I got an email. I'm like, couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me just like, give me something else. Right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you is that like, okay, so as Amazon gets better, so areas where do they need more work in your opinion? Because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database, Snowflake's got a database service. So, you know, Redshift, snowflake 80 is out there. So you got this co-op petition. Yes. How's that going? And what are you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with Amazon and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want. And they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multi-cloud cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word. Multi-cloud um, a lot of people are saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word. Like multi-cloud sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multi-cloud >>Multiple single, which >>Davey loves that term. Yeah. >>You know, you're building in multiple single points of failure, do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about multi-cloud either as industry leader, let's talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective. It doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of forms. Some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on context. But my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. >>Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question cause I know you we've been, you know, fellow journeymen in the, and the cloud journey, going to all the events and then the pandemic hit. Of course, we're now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna gonna end? Certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations. Community's gonna emerge. You've got a pretty big community growing and it's growing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing, or just big changes you've seen with the pandemic, uh, from your perspective. Cause you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. Seeing the event you circle offline, you saw the online piece, come in, you're commentating, you're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck bill group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, funny, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who can pony up two grand and a week in Las Vegas and get to Las Vegas and wherever they happen to be by moving virtually suddenly it, it embraces the reality that talent is evenly. Distributed. Opportunity is not. And that means that suddenly these things are accessible to a wide swath of audience and potential customer base and the rest that hadn't been invited to the table previously, it's imperative that we not lose that. It's nice to go out and talk to people and have people come up and try and smell my hair from time to time, I smell delightful. Let me assure you. But it was, but it's also nice to be. >>I have some product for you if you want, you know? Oh, >>Oh excellent. I look forward to it. What is it? Pudding? Why not? <laugh> >>What else have you seen? So when accessibility for talent, yes. Which by the way is totally home run. What weird things have happened that you've seen? Um, that's >>Uh, it's, it's weird, but it's good that an awful lot of people giving presentations have learned to tight their message and get to the damn point because most people are not gonna get up from a front row seat in a conference hall, midway through your Aing talk and go somewhere else. But they will change a browser tab and you won't get them back. You've gotta be on point. You've gotta be compelling if it's going to be a virtual discussion. Yeah. >>And also turn off your iMessage too. >>Oh yes. It's always fun in the, in the meetings when you're talking to someone and colleague is messaging them about, should we tell 'em about this? And I'm sitting there reading it and it's >>This guy is really weird. Like, >>Yes I am and I bring it into the conversation and then everyone's uncomfortable. It goes, wow. Why >>Not? I love when my wife yells at me over I message. When I'm on a business call, like, do you wanna take that about no, I'm good. >>No, no. It's better off. I don't the only encourager. It's fine. >>Kids texting you. That's fun. Again. That's another weird thing. And, and then group behavior is weird. Now people are looking at, um, communities differently. Yes. Very much so, because if you're fatigued on content, people are looking for the personal aspect. You're starting to see much more of like yeah. Another virtual event. They gotta get better. One and two who's there. >>Yeah. >>The person >>That's a big part of it too is the human stories are what are being more and more interesting. Don't get up here and tell me about your product and how brilliant you are and how you built it. That's great. If I'm you, or if I wanna work with you or I want to compete with you, or I wanna put on my engineering hat and build it myself. Cause why would I buy anything? That's more than $8. But instead, tell me about the problem. Tell me me about the painful spot that you specialize in. Yeah. Tell me a story there. >>I, I think >>That gets a glimpse in a hook and makes >>More, more, I think you nailed it. Scaling storytelling. Yes. And access to better people because they don't have to be there in person. I just did a thing. I never, we never would've done the queue. We did. Uh, Amazon stepped up in sponsors. Thank you, Amazon for sponsoring international women's day, we did 30 interviews, APAC. We did five regions and I interviewed this, these women in Asia, Pacific eight, PJ, they call for in this world. And they're amazing. I never would've done those interviews cuz I never, would've seen 'em at an event. I never would've been in Japan or Singapore, uh, to access them. And now they're in the index. They're in the network. They're collaborating on LinkedIn. So a threads are developing around connections that I've never seen before. Yes. Around the content. >>Absolutely >>Content value plus network >>Effecting. And that is the next big revelation of this industry is going to realize you have different companies. And in Amazon's case, different service teams, all competing with each other, but you have the container group and you have the database group and you have the message cuing group. But customers don't really want to build things from spare parts. They want a solution to a problem. I want to build an app that does Twitter for pets or whatever it is I'm trying to do. I don't wanna basically have to pick and choose and fill my shopping cart with all these different things. I want something that's gonna basically give me what I'm trying to get as close to turnkey as possible. Moving up the stack. That is the future. And just how it gets here is gonna be >>Well we're here with Corey Quinn, the master of the master of content here in the a ecosystem. Of course we we've been following up from the beginning. It's great guy. Check out his blog, his site, his newsletter screaming podcast. Corey, final question for you. Uh, what do you hear doing what's on your agenda this week in San Francisco and give a plug for the duck build group. What are you guys doing? I know you're hiring some people what's on the table for the company. What's your focus this week and put a plug in for the group. >>I'm here as a customer and basically getting outta my cage cuz I do live here. It's nice to actually get out and talk to folks who are doing interesting things at the duck build group. We solve one problem. We fixed the horrifying AWS bill, both from engineering and architecture, advising as well as negotiating AWS contracts because it turns out those things are big and complicated. And of course my side media projects last week in aws.com, we are it's more or less a content operation where I indulge my continual and love affair with the sound of my own voice. >><laugh> and you're good. It's good content it's on, on point fun, Starky and relevant. So thanks for coming on the cube and sharing with us. Appreciate it. No, >>Thank you. Fun. >>Okay. This cube covers here in San Francisco, California, the cube is back going to events. These are the summits, Amazon web services summits that happen all over the world. We'll be in New York and obviously we're here in San Francisco this week. I'm John fur. Keep, keep it right here. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break.

More bottoms up and have more technical early adopters. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software and it starts with great technical founders with great products and great bottoms of emotions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background, super smart, but Myer of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is all companies there's no, I mean, consumer is enterprise now, everything is what was once a niche. No, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. <laugh> but remember, like right now there's also a tech and VC conference in Miami <laugh> and it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, >>Ts is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. >>Well, and, and I think all of us here that are, uh, may maybe students of history and have been involved in open source in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three >>Movement. The hype is definitely one web three. Yeah. >>But, >>But you know, >>For sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east of Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case now? And maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many measures over, uh, $500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30% a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast, well, >>Let's get, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant <laugh> but there's also the hype of like the web three, for instance, but you know, for, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Luman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, higher, a direct sales force and SAS kind of crushed that now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS is snowflake assassin or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, they own all my data and you know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of common across all successful startups and the overall adoption of technology. Um, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually like growth, right. They're one and the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving growth. >>You just pull the product >>Through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this, but maybe started with open source where users were contributors, you know, contributors were users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing. It's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the, and they're really the, the beneficiaries and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a gen Xer technically. So for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I have what been saying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit digital hippie revolution, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one other group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. You, we hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>During the mainframe days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home group. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on. Well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal it'll trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion yeah. Around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source, one example of that religion. Some people will say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? Yeah. It's so it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily caring >>About data. Data drives all decision making. Let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've been a VC for many years, but you also have the founder entrepreneurial mindset, but you can get empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of it's about believing in the person. So faking it till you make it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. >>Oh, AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur. Right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, so somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story, and I still think that that's important, right. It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. Yeah. But having said that you're right. The proof is in the pudding, right. At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it gonna it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in the new economy that we live in, really, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative of because their product begins exactly >>The volume you back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song is the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, like the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with. Right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the it's gotta speak to the, >>Speak to the user, but let me ask a question now that for the people watching, who are maybe entrepreneurial entre, preneurs, um, masterclass here in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine with you an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do, do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think something will become. Right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way. And we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be the, of more likely somebody is gonna align with your vision and, and wanna invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I, you gotta >>Show the >>Path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision. Uh, if you have the same vision, you can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle. The journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the latest trends because it's over before you can get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living, we'll say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. <laugh> so you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going in this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but some times it happens in six months. Sometimes it takes six years. Sometimes it takes 16 years. Uh, >>What's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Bel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There's three big trends that we invest in. And the they're the only things we do day in, day out one is the explosion and open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen, an alwa timeline >>Happening forever. >>But, uh, it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's, it's one big, massive wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now, a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally, it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is underinvested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a dessert do over, right? I mean, do we need you do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cybersecurity as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is run $150 billion. And it still is a fraction of what we're, >>What we're and national security even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital that's >>Right. You mean arguably, right? I mean, arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say, you gotta love your firm. Love. You're doing we're big supporters, your mission. Congratulations on your entrepreneurial venture. And, uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cuban. Uh, absolutely not. Certainly EU maybe even north Americans in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for helping me on the show. >>Guess be VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California. After this short break, stay with us. Everyone. Welcome to the cue here. Live in San Francisco. K warn you for AWS summit 2022 we're live we're back with events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube. Got a great guest here, Justin Kobe owner, and CEO of innovative solutions. Their booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us the story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. >>Yeah. <laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to mid-size businesses that are moving to the cloud, or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control security, compliance, all the good stuff that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is, but now we have offices down in Austin, Texas, up in Toronto, uh, Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago. And it's been a great ride. >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by a of us. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization, but obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? >>Yeah. It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small mids to size business. They're all trying to understand how to leverage technology better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech is really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're of like, listen, we gotta move to the cloud or we move some things to the cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then so, uh, progressively working through a modernization strategy is always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to mid-size businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. And they want to get set up. But the, the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is not it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem. And you guys solve >>In the SMB space. The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and our hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with, to technology staff that has traditional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether that's, we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to yeah. Feel like, listen, at the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's on primer in the cloud, I just want know that I'm doing that way. That helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. Good. >>How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I think there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start down your journey in one way and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's a, gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning, the projects that early, not worrying about it, you got it mean most people don't abandon stuff cuz they're like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. >>And they get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. >>Yeah. Frog and boiling water, as we used to say, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean, this, this is a dynamic. That's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you guys come in. I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talked to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did Andy jazzy announcer Adam? You know, the 5,000 announcement or whatever. They did huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just processes. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are >>Values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to midsize business leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a 10 a company in the process of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning they know that we have their back and we're the safety net. So when a customer is saying, right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand and dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going in alone. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say your high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attacks. If you have a partner that's offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products, uh, that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own. It, it would cost 'em a four, >>The training alone would be insane. A risk factor. I mean the cost. Yes, absolutely opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018. When, uh, when we, he made the decision to go all in on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious, it wasn't requirement. It still isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front >>Desk and she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I >>Love it. It's >>Amazing. >>But I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get >>The right people with. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point out SMBs and businesses in general, small and large it staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the buildout, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner, SMB, do I get to ROI? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cyber security issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one in the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Like critical issues. >>This is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about this, >>That's, that's what, at least a million in loading, if not three or more Just to get that app going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side. No. And they remind AI and ML. >>That's right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It it's incredibly difficult. And the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll do all that exactly. In the it department. >>Exactly. >>So like, can we just call up, uh, you know, our old vendor that's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like it, >>But that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I was a business owner starting a business today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. It's something that we talk about every, with every one of our small to mid-size >>Businesses. So just, I want get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative yeah. Award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, I was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduced other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. Yeah. I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months than I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at RT long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2000 and I was like, Hey, I'm growing the value of this business. And who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years? What do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner. But if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that were gonna also buy the business with me. >>And they were the owners, no outside capital, >>None zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons. They all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like, if we're own, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015 and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an earn out process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the BI cuz they cared very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting all going all in on the cloud was important for us. And we haven't looked back. >>And at that time, the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly the, uh, and those kinds of big enterprises. The GA I don't wanna say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to midsize business to migrate completely to the cloud is as infrastructure was considered, that just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing where the, a lot of our small to midsize business customers, they wanted to leverage cloud based backup, or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration. The, the Microsoft suite to the cloud. And a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on AWS at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plugin for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating into the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customer is not to be cash strapped and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so they can modernize. So >>Like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers and being empathetic to where they are in their journey. >>And that's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable win that's right. Seeing the value and ING down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate >>It. Thank you very much for having me. >>Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We're back with more great coverage for two days after this short break >>Live on the floor in San Francisco for Aus summit. I'm John for host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the actual back in person we're at AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube. Bring all the action. Also virtual. We have a hybrid cube, check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. >>So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to be back through events. It's >>Amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to, to in what two, three >>Years. That's awesome. We'll be at the, uh, a AWS summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and the big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything devs sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Benet, he's got cloud native. So the, the game is pretty much laid out. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's >>Right. Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions. The at our around, especially the edge public cloud for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give >>An example, >>Uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech data and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running or FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering Aw since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam slaps in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't wanna say trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listens to the customer. They work backwards from the customer. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does >>Computing. >>It >>Does. That's not centralized in the public cloud now they got regions. So what is the issue with the edge what's driving? The behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got five GM having. So it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data in is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always use the riff on the cube, uh, cause it's basically Amazon in a box, pushed in the data center, running native, all this stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of becoming standard. You're starting to see some standard. Deepak syncs group is doing some amazing work with opensource Raul's team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my datas center, do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outpost. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone now happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment. And it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. Right? So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. That's right. Innovative. Does that get the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in these new areas that you're helping out are they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is that they don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on what's making them money as a business. They wanna focus on their applications. They wanna focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and a AWS. You take the infrastructure, you take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. Uh, we help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. So >>Basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it >>Works? Right. And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy fin in the Caribbean, we're gonna talk about hurricanes. And we're gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that, that requirement. It makes total sense. We're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's a, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech. And in, in the islands there a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming. Uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a, uh, technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure, because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on >>It's interesting. I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, project going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart contract, we use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead and it's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain just for like smart contracts, for instance, or certain transactions. And they go to Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service. Well, what happened to decentralized? >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance issue. Yeah. And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through, uh, a use case of a customer Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my a, I also want all the benefit of the cloud. So I want the modern, and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer. >>Yeah. Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up, they don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with a regular commercially available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Inside of that manufacturing plant, we can do pre-procesing on things coming out of the robotics, depending on what we're manufacturing. Right. And then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard >>For data, data lake, or whatever, >>To the data lake. Yeah. Data lake house, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but a lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just time manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going to the data that saves that cost yeah. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data unless you have to. Um, but those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever, the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? There's a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe, maybe this decision can wait. Right. And then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot tube doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture on the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about customers are starting to talk about throwing away data. Uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And well, >>I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session this, but the one pattern we're seeing come of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retrain their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes co as we call it in our last showcase, we did a whole whole an event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw away. It's not just business benefits. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. There >>Are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are running petabyte level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a, kind of a, um, fun, I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, Aus cloud, and skydiving instructor. How does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? >>Yeah. Uh, I, >>You jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump >>Out kind of. So I was, you jumped out. I was teaching Scott eing, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a Scott I instructor. Uh, I was teaching Scott eing and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and how his customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, I started in the first day there, we had a, and, uh, EC two had just come out <laugh> um, and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that, and through being in on premises, migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services to premises. >>So it's such a great story. You know, I was gonna, you know, you know, the, the, the, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early days was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, uh, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and I, maybe it does still feel like that to some people, right. Yeah. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting stuff like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You guys, the right equipment, you gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Matthew, thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here, lot in San Francisco for AWS summit, I'm John for your host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look at this calendar for all the cube, actually@thecube.net. We'll right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube, a summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John furry host of the cube. We'll be at the, a us summit in New York city this summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco getting all coverage, what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dos car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor and a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you, Pam. Cool. How are you? Good. >>How are you? >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah so give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? First >>Of all, thank you for having me. We're back to be business with you never while after. Great to see you. Um, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. Um, we have raised close to a hundred million there. Uh, the investors are people like nor west Menlo, true ventures, coast, lo ventures, Ram Shera, and all those people, all known guys that Antibe chime Paul Mayard web. So a whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley vs are involved. >>And has it gone? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISR is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and ServiceNow to take it to the next stage? Well, >>I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, and Dave Valenti as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh>, >>You know, >>You >>Get, the comment is fun to talk to you though. >>You get the commentary, you, your, your finger on the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud out scale. You predicted that we talked about in the cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing Docker just raised a hundred million on our $2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from an enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control, plane emerging, AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded observability there's 10 million observability companies. Data is the key. This is what's your angle on this. What's your take. Yeah, >>No, look, I think I'll give you the view that I see, right? I, from my side, obviously data is very clear. So the things that room system of record that you and me talked about, the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud native, it'll be called AI. NA NA is a new buzzword and using the AI for customer service, it operations. You talk about observability. I call it AI ops, applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and AI service desk. What needs to be helped desk with ServiceNow BMC <inaudible> you see a new ALA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflows, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with AI workflows. So you'll see AI going >>Off is RPA a company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI S one will be at their event this summer? Um, or is it a product company? I mean, I mean, RPA is almost, should be embedded in everything. >>It's a feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company also, but that automation should be a, in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NA and AI NATO it'll become automation. NA yeah. And that's your thinking. >>It's almost interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kind having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle and it was software was action. Now you have all kinds of workflows abstractions everywhere. Right? So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed or they integrated. I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So don't about the databases become all polyglot databases. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area, like, as you were talking about, it should be part of ServiceNow. It should be part of ISRA, like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see MuleSoft and Salesforce buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies could cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also will have an automation as a layer <inaudible> inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind us, you got the expo hall. You got, um, we're back to vents, but you got, you know, am Clume Ove, uh, Dynatrace data dog, innovative all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right. Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Deibel later today. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen, we know all the, the VCs. What does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation. Cloud's bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's. Yes. Basically. Data's everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders, how Amazon created the startups 15 years back, everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be is people don't just build on Amazon. They're gonna build it on top of snowflake. Companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake. Right? So I see my old boss flagman try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer. Right? So I think that's the next level of <inaudible> trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis of a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your Mo is what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in, in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last reinvent, coined the term super cloud, right? He's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage, and guys, Charles Fitzgerald out there who we like was kind of shitting on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get it. Like, yeah, I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> cause he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Now. They say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist. And, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. It >>Is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer. Remember the middle layer pass will be snowflake so I can build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer if I really need to size build it on force.com Salesforce. Yeah. Right. So I think that's where you'll see. So >>Basically the, if you're an entrepreneur, the, the north star in terms of the, the outcome is be a super cloud. >>It is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. Yeah. >>Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales, the snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think they had Redshift. Amazon has got Redshift. Um, but Snowflake's a big customer in the, they're probably paying AWS, I think big bills too. So >>Joe on very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-optation will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with, uh, snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouses or data layer. So I think depending on the application use case, you have to use each of the above. I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that it comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, you know, foreclose, your, you that's right with some sort of internal hack. Uh, but I think, I think the general question that I have is that I, I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point, when does the rising tide stop and do the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth? So >>I think it's growth. You call it cloud scale, you invented the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's as long as there more movement from on, uh, OnPrem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations. It helpless, even the customer service service now and, uh, ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go >>Made. I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers are practitioners, not suppliers to the more market, feel free to text me or DMing. The next question's really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products, cuz you know, the big enterprises now and you know, small, medium, large and large enterprise are all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean I'm seeing some stuff, but why don't get your thoughts on that? What, >>No, it is. If I growing by or 2007 or eight, when I used to talk to you back then and Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or 1% today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a CIO or line of business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. >>Yeah. And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I reference the URL cause it's like, there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solutions that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there. Um, and goes back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure is code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share >>Yourself a lot of first is I see the AIOP solutions in the future should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app Dyna, right? Dynatrace, all this solution. We will go future towards predict to proactive solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service desk. Customers are give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can them, but I gotta train them, modify them, tweak them, make them >>Better, >>Make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to big data days back in 2009, you know, >>Look at, look how much data Rick has grown. >>It is. They doubled the >>Key cloud air kinda went private. So good stuff, man. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking at that growing customers and my customers are some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk McAfee, uh, grand to so all the top customers, um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on predict is one area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service. >>Great stuff, man. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of Aish summit 2022. And we're gonna be at Aus summit in San, uh, in New York in the summer. So look for that on this calendar, of course go to eight of us, startups.com. I mentioned that it's decipher all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This the cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back, little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit in new York's coming in the summer. We'll be there too with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the groove psych to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're can see a lot of virtual cube outta hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economists with bill group. He's the founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank >>You. Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe is shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at mark, Andrew's been doing a lot of shit posting lately. All a billionaires are shit hosting, but they don't know how to do it. Like they're not >>Doing it right? So there's something opportunity there. It's like here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a midsize island, do begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. >>This shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on this side I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what is shit posting? >>It's more or less talking about the world of enter prize technology, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream. But it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a jackass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, coupons coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you see the growth of cloud native Amazon's of all the Adams, especially new CEO. Andy's move on to be the chief of all Amazon. Just so I'm the cover of was it time met magazine? Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything. These folks do. They're they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble imagining the logistics. It takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. And it's, it's sprawling immense that dominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. >>Well, there's a lot of force for good conversations. Seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to port eight of us is trying to portray themselves as you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. <laugh> either way, sounds like more exciting. Like I better >>Have a replacement ready <laugh> I, in case something goes wrong on the track, highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in east sports with other people in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and videographic card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. >>Oh, it's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going on in your world. I know you have a lot of great success. We've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter, check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's the blowback, any blowback late? Has there been uptick? What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's high. I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They must not have heard me it. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do >>That. We should do that. Actually. I think you're people would call in, oh, >>I, I think >>I guarantee we had that right now. People would call in and say, Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised about anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the >>Customer. You know, I always joke with Dave Alane about how John Fort's always at, uh, um, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0, 0 5, or we can't call, we >>Have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And then there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented SU sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish. That's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their >>Producting. So they're going in different directions. When they named Amazon Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonused on number of words, they can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, session manager is a great one. I love the service ridiculous name. They have a systems manager, parameter store, which is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage your parameter store does not. It's fun. >>What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination >>Of gots. You got EMR, you got EC two, you got S3 SQS. Well, RedShift's not an acronym you >>Gets is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation, they >>Shook up bean stock or is that still around? Oh, >>They never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, well, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it, but while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it. John three <laugh>. Okay. Simple BV still haunts our dreams. >>I, I actually got an email on, I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C twos were being deprecated and I got an email I'm I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me? Just like, give me something else. All right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you, is that like, okay. So as Amazon better in some areas where do they need more work in your opinion? Because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database Snowflake's got out database service. So Redshift, snowflake data breach is out there. So you got this co-op petition. Yes. How's that going? And what do you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with, and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want. And they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multicloud. Cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word multicloud. Um, a lot of people though saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word. Like multicloud sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multicloud? >>Multiple single >>Cloudant loves that term. Yeah. >>You know, you're building in multiple single points of failure, do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about my multi-cloud either as the industry leader, let's talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective. It doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of forms. Some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on, but my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. >>Yeah, course. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question cause I know you we've been, you know, fellow journeyman and the, and the cloud journey going to all the events and then the pandemic hit. We now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna gonna end. Certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations. Community's gonna emerge. You've got a pretty big community growing and it's growing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing or just big changes you've seen with the pandemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece, come in, you're commentating, you're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck build group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, funny, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who can pony up two grand and a week in Las Vegas and get to Las Vegas from wherever they happen to be by moving virtually suddenly it, it embraces the reality that talent is evenly. Distributed. Opportunity is not. And that means that suddenly these things are accessible to a wide swath of audience and potential customer base and the rest that hadn't been invited to the table previously, it's imperative that we not lose that. It's nice to go out and talk to people and have people come up and try and smell my hair from time to time, I smelled delightful. Let me assure you. But it was, but it's also nice to be. >>I have a product for you if you want, you know? Oh, >>Oh excellent. I look forward to it. What is it? Pudding? Why not? <laugh> >>What else have you seen? So when accessibility for talent. Yes. Which by the way is totally home run. What weird things have happened that you've seen? Um, that's >>Uh, it's, it's weird, but it's good that an awful lot of people giving presentation have learned to tighten their message and get to the damn point because most people are not gonna get up from a front row seat in a conference hall, midway through your Aing talk and go somewhere else. But they will change a browser tab and you won't get them back. You've gotta be on point. You've gotta be compelling if it's going to be a virtual discussion. Yeah. >>And you turn off your iMessage too. >>Oh yes. It's always fun in the, in the meetings when you're ho to someone and their colleague is messaging them about, should we tell 'em about this? And I'm sitting there reading it and it's >>This guy is really weird. Like, >>Yes I am and I bring it into the conversation and then everyone's uncomfortable. It goes, wow. Why >>Not? I love when my wife yells at me over I message. When I'm on a business call, like, do you wanna take that about no, I'm good. >>No, no. It's better off. I don't the only entire sure. It's >>Fine. My kids text. Yeah, it's fine. Again, that's another weird thing. And, and then group behavior is weird. Now people are looking at, um, communities differently. Yes. Very much so, because if you're fatigued on content, people are looking for the personal aspect. You're starting to see much more of like yeah. Another virtual event. They gotta get better. One and two who's there. >>Yeah. >>The person >>That's a big part of it too is the human stories are what are being more and more interesting. Don't get up here and tell me about your product and how brilliant you are and how you built it. That's great. If I'm you, or if I wanna work with you or I want to compete with you or I want to put on my engineering hat and build it myself. Cause why would I buy anything? That's more than $8. But instead, tell me about the problem. Tell me about the painful spot that you specialize in. Yeah. Tell me a story there. >>I, I think >>That gets a glimpse in a hook and makes >>More, more, I think you nailed it. Scaling storytelling. Yes. And access to better people because they don't have to be there in person. I just did a thing. I never, we never would've done the queue. We did. Uh, Amazon stepped up in sponsors. Thank you, Amazon for sponsoring international women's day, we did 30 interviews, APAC. We did five regions and I interviewed this, these women in Asia, Pacific eight, PJ, they call for in this world. And they're amazing. I never would've done those interviews cuz I never, would've seen 'em at an event. I never would've been in pan or Singapore, uh, to access them. And now they're in the index, they're in the network. They're collaborating on LinkedIn. So a threads are developing around connections that I've never seen before. Yes. Around the content. >>Absolutely >>Content value plus and >>Effecting. And that is the next big revelation of this industry is going to realize you have different companies. And, and I Amazon's case different service teams all competing with each other, but you have the container group and you have the database group and you have the message cuing group. But customers don't really want to build things from spare parts. They want a solution to a problem. I want to build an app that does Twitter for pets or whatever it is I'm trying to do. I don't wanna basically have to pick and choose and fill my shopping cart with all these different things. I want something that's gonna basically give me what I'm trying to get as close to turnkey as possible. Moving up the stack. That is the future. And just how it gets here is gonna be >>Well we're here at Corey Quinn, the master of the master of content here in the a ecosystem. Of course we we've been following up from the beginning. His great guy, check out his blog, his site, his newsletter screaming podcast. Corey, final question for, uh, what are you here doing? What's on your agenda this week in San Francisco and give a plug for the duck build group. What are you guys doing? I know you're hiring some people what's on the table for the company. What's your focus this week and put a plug in for the group. >>I'm here as a customer and basically getting outta my cage cuz I do live here. It's nice to actually get out and talk to folks who are doing interesting things at the duck bill group. We solved one problem. We fixed the horrifying AWS bill, both from engineering and architecture, advising as well as negotiating AWS contracts because it turns out those things are big and complicated. And of course my side media projects last week in aws.com, we are, it it's more or less a content operation where I in my continual and ongoing love affair with the sound of my own voice. >><laugh> and you're good. It's good content it's on, on point fun, Starky and relevant. So thanks for coming to the cube and sharing with us. Appreciate it. No >>Thank you button. >>You. Okay. This the cube covers here in San Francisco, California, the cube is back going to events. These are the summits, Amazon web services summits. They happen all over the world. We'll be in New York and obviously we're here in San Francisco this week. I'm John fur. Keep, keep it right here. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Okay. Welcome back everyone. This's the cubes covers here in San Francisco, California, we're live on the show floor of AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube and remember AWS summit in New York city coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. And of course reinvent the end of the year for all the cube coverage on cloud computing and AWS two great guests here from the APN global APN Sege chef Jenko and Jeff Grimes partner lead Jeff and Sege is doing partnerships global APN >>AWS global startup program. Yeah. >>Okay. Say that again. >>AWS. We'll start >>Program. That's the official name. >>I love >>It too long, too long for me. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, >>Of course. >>Appreciate it. Tell us about what's going on with you guys. What's the, how was you guys organized? You guys we're obviously we're in San Francisco bay area, Silicon valley, zillions of startups here, New York. It's got another one we're gonna be at tons of startups. A lot of 'em getting funded, big growth and cloud big growth and data secure hot in all sectors. >>Absolutely. >>So maybe, maybe we could just start with the global startup program. Um, it's essentially a white glove service that we provide to startups that are built on AWS. And the intention there is to help identify use cases that are being built on top of AWS. And for these startups, we want to pro vibe white glove support in co building products together. Right. Um, co-marketing and co-selling essentially, um, you know, the use cases that our customers need solved, um, that either they don't want to build themselves or are perhaps more innovative. Um, so the, a AWS global startup program provides white glove support. Dedicat at headcount for each one of those pillars. Um, and within our program, we've also provided incentives, programs go to market activities like the AWS startup showcase that we've built for these startups. >>Yeah. By the way, AWS startup, AWS startups.com is the URL, check it out. Okay. So partnerships are key. Jeff, what's your role? >>Yeah. So I'm responsible for leading the overall effort for the AWS global startup program. Um, so I've got a team of partner managers that are located throughout the us, uh, managing a few hundred startup ISVs right now. <laugh> >>Yeah, you got a >>Lot. We've got a lot. >>There's a lot. I gotta, I gotta ask a tough question. Okay. I'm I'm a startup founder. I got a team. I just got my series a we're grown. I'm trying to hire people. I'm super busy. What's in it for me. Yeah. What do you guys bring to the table? I love the white glove service, but translate that what's in it for what do I get out of it? What's >>A story. Good question. I focus, I think. Yeah, because we get, we get to see a lot of partners building their businesses on AWS. So, you know, from our perspective, helping these partners focus on what, what do we truly need to build by working backwards from customer feedback, right? How do we effectively go to market? Because we've seen startups do various things, um, through trial and error, um, and also just messaging, right? Because oftentimes partners or rather startups, um, try to boil the ocean with many different use cases. So we really help them, um, sort of laser focus on what are you really good at and how can we bring that to the customer as quickly as possible? >>Yeah. I mean, it's truly about helping that founder accelerate the growth of their company, right. And there's a lot that you can do with AWS, but focus is truly the key word there because they're gonna be able to find their little piece of real estate and absolutely deliver incredible outcomes for our customers. And then they can start their growth curve there. >>What are some of the coolest things you've seen with the APN that you can share publicly? I know you got a lot going on there, a lot of confidentiality. Um, but you know, we're here a lot of great partners on the floor here. I'm glad we're back at events. Uh, a lot of stuff going on digitally with virtual stuff and, and hybrid. What are some of the cool things you guys have seen in the APN that you can point to? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can point to few, you can take them. So, um, I think what's been fun over the years for me personally, I came from a startup brand sales at an early stage startup and, and I went through the whole thing. So I have a deep appreciation for what these guys are going through. And what's been interesting to see for me is taking some of these early stage guys, watching them progress, go public, get acquired and see that big day mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, and being able to point to very specific items that we help them to get to that point. Uh, and it's just a really fun journey to watch. >>Yeah. I, and part of the reason why I really, um, love working at the AWS, uh, global startup program is working with passionate founders. Um, I just met with a founder today that it's gonna, he's gonna build a very big business one day, um, and watching them grow through these stages and supporting that growth. Um, I like to think of our program as a catalyst for enterprise is sort of scale. Yeah. Um, and through that we provide visibility, credibility and growth opportunities. >>Yeah. A lot, a lot of partners too. What I found talking to staff founders is when they have that milestone, they work so hard for it. Whether it's a B round C round Republic or get bought. Yeah. Um, then they take a deep breath and they look back at wow, what a journey it's been. So it's kind of emotional for sure. But still it's a grind. Right? You gotta, I mean, when you get funding, it's still day one. You don't stop. It's no celebrate, you got a big round or valuation. You still gotta execute >>And look it's hypercompetitive and it's brutally difficult. And our job is to try to make that a little less difficult and navigate those waters. Right. Where ever everyone's going after similar things. >>Yeah. And I think as a group element too, I observe that startups that I, I meet through the APN has been interesting because they feel part of AWS. Yeah, totally. As a group of community, as a vibe there. Um, I know they're hustling, they're trying to make things happen. But at the same time, Amazon throws a huge halo effect. I mean, that's a huge factor. I mean, you guys are the number one cloud in the business, the growth in every sector is booming. Yeah. And if you're a startup, you don't have that luxury yet. And look at companies like snowflake that built on top of AWS. I mean, people are winning by building on AWS. >>Yeah. And our, our, our program really validates their technology first. So we have, what's all the foundation's technical review that we put all of our startups through before we go to market. So that when enterprise customers are looking at startup technology, they know that it's already been vetted. And, um, to take that a step further and help these partners differentiate, we use programs like the competency programs, the DevOps competencies, the security competency, which continues to help, um, provide sort of a platform for these startups, help them differentiate. And also there's go to market benefits that are associated with that. >>Okay. So let me ask the, the question that's probably on everyone's mind, who's watching, certainly I asked this a lot. There's a lot of companies startups out there who makes the cut, is there a criteria cut? It's not like it's sports team or anything, but like sure. Like there's activate program, which is like, there's hundreds of thousands of startups out there. Not everyone is at the APN. Right? Correct. So ISVs again, that's a whole nother, that's a more mature partner that might have, you know, huge market cap or growth. How, how do you guys focus? How do you guys focus? I mean, you got a good question, you know, thousand flowers blooming all the time. Is there a new way you guys are looking at it? I know there's been some talk about restructure or, or new focus. What's the focus. >>Yeah. It's definitely not an easy task by any means. Um, but you know, I recently took over this role and we're really trying to establish focus areas, right. So obviously a lot of the ISVs that we look after are infrastructure ISVs. That's what we do. Uh, and so we have very specific pods that look after different type of partners. So we've got a security pod, we've got a DevOps pod, we've got core infrastructure, et cetera. And really, we're trying to find these ISVs that can solve, uh, really interesting AWS customer. >>You guys have a deliberate, uh, focus on these pillars. So what infrastructure, >>Security, DevOps, and data and analytics, and then line of business >>Line, business line business, like web >>Marketing, business apps, >>Owner type thing. Exactly. >>Yeah, exactly. >>So solutions there. Yeah. More solutions and the other ones are like hardcore. So infrastructure as well, like storage back up ransomware kind of stuff, or, >>Uh, storage, networking. >>Okay. Yeah. The classic >>Database, et cetera. Right. >>And so there's teams on each pillar. >>Yep. So I think what's, what's fascinating for the startups that we cover is that they've got, they truly have support from a build market sell perspective, right. So you've got someone who's technical to really help them get the technology, figured out someone to help them get the marketing message dialed and spread, and then someone to actually do the co-sell, uh, day to day activities to help them get in front of customers. >>Probably the number one request that we always ask for Amazon is can wish that sock report, oh, download it on the console, which we use all the time. <laugh> exactly. But security's a big deal. I mean, you know, ask the res are evolving, that role of DevOps is taking on dev SecOps. Um, I, I can see a lot of customers having that need for a relationship to move things faster. Do you guys provide like escalation or is that a part of a service or that not part of, uh, uh, >>Yeah, >>So the partner development manager can be an escalation for absolutely. Think of that. 'em as an extension of your business inside of AWS. >>Great. And you guys, how is that partner managers, uh, measure >>On those three pillars? Right. Got it. Are we billing, building valuable use cases? So product development go to market, so go to market activities, think blog, posts, webinars, case studies, so on and so forth. And then co-sell not only are we helping these partners win their current opportunities that they are sourcing, but can we also help them source net new deals? Yeah. Right. That's very, >>I mean, top asked from the partners is get me in front of customers. Right. Um, not an easy task, but that's a huge goal of ours to help them grow their top line. >>Right. Yeah. In fact, we had some interviews here on the cube earlier talking about that dynamic of how enterprise customers are buying. And it's interesting, a lot more POCs. I have one partner here that you guys work with, um, on observability, they got a huge POC with capital one mm-hmm <affirmative> and the enterprises are engaging the star ups and bringing them in. So the combination of open source software enterprises are leaning into that hard and bringing young growing startups in mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yep. So I could see that as a huge service that you guys can bring people in. >>Right. And they're bringing massively differentiated technology to the table. The challenge is they just might not have the brand recognition. The, at the big guys have mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so that's, our job is how do you get that great tech in front of the right situations? >>Okay. So my next question is about the show here, and then we'll talk globally. So here in San Francisco sure. You know, Silicon valley bay area, San Francisco bay area, a lot of startups, a lot of VCs, a lot of action. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so probably a big market for you guys. Yeah. So what's exciting here in SF. And then outside of SF, you guys have a global pro, have you see any trends that are geography based or is it sure areas more mature? There's certain regions that are better. I mean, I just interviewed a company here. That's doing, uh, a AWS edge really well in these cases. It's interesting that these, the partners are filling a lot of holes and gaps in the opportunities with a AWS. So what's exciting here. And then what's the global perspective. >>Yeah, totally. So obviously see a ton of partners from the bay area that we support. Um, but we're seeing a lot of really interesting technology come out of AMEA specifically. Yeah. Uh, and making a lot of noise here in the United States, which is great. Um, and so, you know, we definitely have that global presence and, and starting to see super differentiated technology come out of those regions. >>Yeah. Especially Tel Aviv. Yeah. >>Amy and real quick before you get into surge. It's interesting. The VC market in, in Europe is hot. They've got a lot of unicorns coming in. We've seen a lot of companies coming in. They're kind of rattling their own, you know, cage right now. Hey, look at us. Let's see if they crash, you know, but we don't see that happening. I mean, people have been predicting a crash now in, in the startup ecosystem for least a year. It's not crashing. In fact, funding's up. >>Yeah. The pandemic was hard on a lot of startups for sure. Yeah. Um, but what we've seen is many of these startups, they, as quickly as they can grow, they can also pivot as, as, as well. Um, and so I've actually seen many of our startups grow through the demo because their use cases are helping customers either save money, become more operationally efficient and provide value to leadership teams that need more visibility into their infrastructure during a pandemic. >>It's an interesting point. I talked to Andy jazzy and Adam Celski both say the same thing during the pandemic. Necessity's the mother of all invention. Yep. And startups can move fast. So with that, you guys are there to assist if I'm a startup and I gotta pivot cuz remember iterate and pivot, iterate and pivot. So you get your economics, that's the playbook of the ventures and the models. >>Exactly. How >>Do you guys help me do that? Give me an example of what me through. Pretend me, I'm a start up. Hey, I'm on the cloud. Oh my God. Pandemic. They need video conferencing. Hey cube. Yeah. What do I need? Search? What, what do >>I do? That's a good question. First thing is just listen. Yeah. I think what we have to do is a really good job of listening to the partner. Um, what are their needs? What is their problem statement? Where do they want to go at the end of the day? Um, and oftentimes because we've worked with, so how many successful startups that have come out of our program, we have, um, either through intuition or a playbook determined what is gonna be the best path forward and how do we get these partners to stop focusing on things that will eventually, um, just be a waste of time. Yeah. And, or not provide, or, you know, bring any fruit to the table, which, you know, essentially revenue. >>Well, we love startups here in the cube because one, um, they have good stories, they're oil and cutting edge, always pushing the envelope and they're kind of disrupting someone else. Yeah. And so they, they have an opinion. They don't mind sharing on camera. So love talking to startups. We love working with you guys on our startups. Showcases startups.com. Check out AWS startups.com and she got the showcase. So is, uh, final word. I'll give you guys the last word. What's the bottom line bumper sticker for AP globe. The global APN program summarize the opportunity for startups, what you guys bring to the table and we'll close it out. Totally. We'll start >>With you. Yeah. I think the AWS global startup programs here to help companies truly accelerate their business full stop. Right. And that's what we're here for. Love it. >>It's a good way to, it's a good way to put it. Dato yeah. >>All right. Thanks for coming out. Thanks John. Great to see you love working with you guys. Hey, startups need help. And the growing and huge market opportunities, the shift cloud scale data engineering, security infrastructure, all the markets are exploding in growth because of the digital transformation of realities here, open source and cloud. I'll making it happen here in the cube in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, your host. Thanks for >>Watching Cisco, John. >>Hello and welcome back to the Cube's live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, two days of coverage, AWS summit, 2022 in New York city coming up this summer will be there as well. Events are back. The cube is back of course, with the cube virtual cube hybrid, the cube.net. Check it out a lot of content this year more than ever a lot more cloud data cloud native, modern applic is all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, Cub alumni, uh, CEO of observe Inc in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data observability, Jeremy. Great to see you. Thanks. >>Coming on. Always great to come and talk to you on the queue, man. It's been been a few years, so, >>Um, well you, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, uh, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability Smith hot area, but also you've been a senior executive president of Dell EMC. Um, 11 years ago you had a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. Um, yeah. And it's here, you predicted it 11 years ago. Um, look around it's cloud meets big data. >>Yeah. I mean the, the cloud thing I think, you know, was, was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for, for sort of catching that bus early, um, you know, we, we were on the, the, the bus early and, and I think it was only inevitable. Like, you know, if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you, you could find out things you could never possibly imagine. >>So you're close to a lot of companies that we've been covering deeply snowflake, obviously you involved, uh, at the board level, the other found, you know, the people there, uh, cloud, you know, Amazon, you know, what's going on here? Yeah. You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, uh, chief of observ, Inc, which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data engineering, large scale integrations, um, data as code integrating into applications. I mean, it's a whole nother world developing, like you see with snowflake, it means snowflakes is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's your, what's this wave we're on what's how would you describe the wave? >>Well, a couple of things, I mean, people are, I think right in more software than, than ever before are why? Because they've realized that if, if you don't take your business online and offer a service, then you become largely irrelevant. And so you you've got a whole set of new applications. I think, I think more applications now than any point. Um, not, not just ever, but the mid nineties, I always looked at as the golden age of application development. Now, back then people were building for windows. Well, well now they're building for things like AWS is now the platform. Um, so you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data. And the, you know, there's sort of the transactions, you know, what you bought today are something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry, all the exhaust fumes. And I think people really are realizing that their differentiation is not so much their application. It's their understanding of the data. Can, can I understand who my best customers are, what I sell today. If people came to my website and didn't buy, then why not? Where did they drop off all of that? They wanna analyze. And, and the answers are all in the data. The question is, can you understand it >>In our last startup showcase, we featured data as code one of the insights that we got out of that, and I wanna get your opinion on our reaction to is, is that data used to be put into a data lake and turns into a data swamp or throw into the data warehouse. And then we'll do some queries, maybe a report once in a while. And so data, once it was done, unless it was real time, even real time was not good anymore after real time. That was the old way. Now you're seeing more and more, uh, effort to say, let's go look at the data, cuz now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once mm-hmm <affirmative> they're iterating. Yeah. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting. Yeah, that's a Silicon valley story. That's like how startups work, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have another, this data concept that's now yeah. Part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole, this whole new cycle of >>Yeah. >>Data being reused and repurposed and figured out and yeah, >>Yeah. I'm a big fan of, um, years ago. Uh, uh, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee at the MIT C cell labs I spent time with and he, he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look I'm I'm. He said I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you have enough data, you can answer any question. And, and this is going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and, and certainly, you know, research is on the forefront. But I think, you know, starting to see that mindset of the, the sort of MIT research be mainstream, you know, in enterprises, they they're realizing that. Yeah, it is about the data. You know, if I can better understand my data better than my competitor, then I've got an advantage. And so the question is is, is how, what, what technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to, to allow me to do that. >>So let's talk about observing you the CEO of, okay. Given you've seen the ways before you're in the front lines of observability, which again is in the center of all this action what's going on with the company. Give a quick minute to explain, observe for the folks who don't know what you guys do. What's the company doing? What's the funding status, what's the product status and what's the customer status. Yeah. >>So, um, we realized, you know, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago that, um, look, the way people are building applications is different. They they're way more functional. They change every day. Uh, but in some respects they're a lot more complicated. They're distributed. They, you know, microservices architectures and when something goes wrong, um, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not gonna fly because you had SA so much change going into production on a daily basis. It was hard to tell like where the problem was. And so we thought, okay, it's about time. Somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and all the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot and make sense of the problems that they're seeing. So, I mean, that's observability, it's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was a guy called, uh, Rudolph like, like everything in tech, you know, it's, it's a reinvention of something from years gone by. >>Um, there's a guy called, um, Rudy Coleman in 1960s coiner term and, and, and the term was being able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for, uh, the best part of four years now. Um, it took us three years just to build the product. I think, I think what people don't appreciate these days often is the barrier to entry in a lot of these markets is quite high. You, you need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. Um, so yeah, this last year we, we, we did our first year selling, uh, we've got about 40 customers now. Um, we just we've got great investors for the hill ventures. Uh, I mean, Mike SP who was, you know, the, the guy who was the, really, the first guy in it snowflake and the, the initial investor were fortunate enough to, to have Mike and our board. And, um, you know, part of the observed story is closely knit with snowflake all of that time with your data, you know, we, we store in there. >>So I want to get, uh, yeah. Pivot to that. Mike SP snowflake, Jeremy Burton, the cube kind of, kind of same thinking this idea of a super cloud or what snowflake became. Yeah. Snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of snowflake. Yeah. So that's become an entrepreneurial story that we think that to go big in the cloud, you can have a cloud on a cloud, uh, like as Jerry, Jerry Chan and Greylock calls it, castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you, you're doing some stuff with snowflake. So as a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a snowflake or an AWS, because again, you gotta go where the data is. You need all the data. >>Yeah. So >>What's your take on that? I mean, >>Having enough gray hair now, um, you know, again, in tech, I think if you wanna predict the future, look at the past. And, uh, you know, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a, a smaller company called Oracle and an Oracle was the database company. And, uh, their, their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms, one, one windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operating system was the platform. And, and then that was the, you know, ecosystem that you would compete on top of. And then there were companies like SAP that built applications on top of Oracle. So then wind the clock forward 25 years gray hairs. <laugh> the platform, isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, you know, Google cloud. I gotta probably look around if I say that in. Yeah, >>It's okay. Columbia, but hyperscale. Yeah. CapX built out >>That is the new platform. And then snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generated data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. And I think they they've done an amazing job are doing for the, I'd say, say the, the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world, you know, way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and, and of course my ambition would be, look, if, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of snowflake, uh, as, as they were on top of Oracle, then, then we'd probably be quite happy, >>Happy. So you're building on top of snowflake, >>We're building on top of snowflake a hundred percent. And, um, you know, I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that that's a risk. You're >>Still on the board. >>Yeah. I'm still on the board. Yeah. That's a risk I'm prepared to take. I am more on snowing. >>It sounds well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board, then you'll know what's going on. Okay. No, yeah. Serious one. But the, this is a real dynamic. It is. It's not a one off its >>Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS is in order of magnitude, more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so I've believe the opportunity for folks like snowflake and, and folks like observe it. It's an order of magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old world. >>Yeah. And I think this is really, I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you gotta be on a platform. Yeah. >>It's quite easy >>Or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how seats were at that table left >>Well value migrates up over time. So, you know, when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, you know, rack space and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure, a service platform as a service. My, my old, uh, um, employee EMC, we had pivotal, you know, pivotal was a platform as a service. Don't hear so much about it these days, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to, to like extract, uh, a real business, you gotta move up, you gotta add value, you gotta build databases, then you gotta build applications. So >>It's interesting. Moving from the data center of the cloud was a dream for starters within if the provision, the CapEx. Yeah. Now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on, on top of that, you got snowflake. Now you got on top of that. >>The assumption is almost that compute and storage is free. I know it's not quite free. Yeah. It's almost free, but you can, you know, as an application vendor, you think, well, what can I do if I assume compute and storage is free, that's the mindset you've gotta get >>Into. And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm gonna get a series us multiple of value in what I'm paying. Yeah. Most people don't even blanket their Avis pills unless they're like massively huge. Yeah. Then it's a repatriation question or whatever discount question, but for most startups or any growing company, the Amazon bill should be a small factor. >>Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, um, ask me, uh, like, look you build in on snowflake. Um, you, you know, you, you, you're gonna be, you're gonna be paying their money. How, how, how, how does that work with your business model? If you're paying their money, you know, do, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. I, we could build a database as well and observe, but then I've got half the development team working on something that will never be as good as snowflake. And so we made the call early on that. No, no, we, we want a eight above the database. Yeah. Right. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and, and the same is true of something like Amazon, like, like snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >>Yeah. And what's interesting is that Dave <inaudible> and I have been pointing this out and he's obviously a more on snowflake. I've been looking at data bricks, um, and the same dynamics happening, the proof is the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, if you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and data bricks it's exploding. Right. I mean, the shows are selling out the floor. Space's book. That's the old days at VMware. Yeah. The old days at AWS. >>Well, and for snowflake and, and any platform from VI, it's a beautiful thing because, you know, we build on snowflake and we pay them money. They don't have to sell to us. Right. And we do a lot of the support. And so the, the economics work out really, really well. If you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of >>Ecosystems. Yeah. And then also you get, you get a, um, a trajectory of, uh, economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of snowflake integrations, right. New product, you're scaling a step function with them. >>Yeah. I mean, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. Right. When I, when I, when I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had, we had one petabyte customer. And, and so at observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so been able to rely on a platform that can manage that is inve >>You know, well, Jeremy great conversation. Thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. Uh, we got a couple minutes left, um, put a plug in for observe. What do you guys know? You got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your, your, your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You getting in traction. >>Yeah. Yeah. Scales >>Around the corner. Sounds like, are you, is that where you are scale? >>We've got a big that that's when coming up in two or three weeks, we've got, we've got new funding, um, which is always great. Um, the product is, uh, really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, you know, which is at which point can you just start hiring salespeople? And the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. Um, we've got about 40 SaaS companies that run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, uh, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting, um, enterprise type customers. We're, we're, you know, F five networks we're POC in right now with capital one, we got some interest in news around capital one coming up. I, I can't share too much, but it's gonna be exciting. And, and like I said, so hill continue to, to, >>I think capital one's a big snowflake customer as well. Right. >>They were early in one of the things that attracted me to capital one was they were very, very good with snowflake early on. And, and they put snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. And, and today that, that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts, >>Capital, one, very innovative cloud, obviously Atos customer, and very innovative, certainly in the CISO and CIO, um, on another point on where you're at. So you're, Prescale meaning you're about to scale, >>Right? >>So you got POCs, what's that trajectory look like? Can you see around the corner? What's, what's going on? What's on, around the corner. That you're, that you're gonna hit this straight and narrow and, and gas it fast. >>Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the key thing for us is we gotta get the product. Right. Um, the nice thing about having a guy like Mike Pfizer on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage. His questions that the board are always about, like is the product, right? Is the product right? Is the product right? Have you got the product right? And cuz we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and, and the revenue will take care of itself. Yeah. So right now all the attention is on the product. Um, the, this year, the exciting thing is we we're, we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that by in the day you could do with the new relics and AppDynamics, the last generation of, of APM tools, you're gonna be able to do that within observe. And we've already got the logs and the metrics capability in there. So for us this year is a big one, cuz we sort of complete the trifecta, you know, the, the >>Logs, what's the secret sauce observe. What if you had the, put it into a, a, a sentence what's the secret sauce? >>I, I, I think, you know, an amazing founding engineering team, uh, number one, I mean, at the end of the day, you have to build an amazing product and you have to solve a problem in a different way. And we've got great long term investors and, and the biggest thing our investors give is it actually, it's not just money. It gives us time to get the product, right. Because if we get the product right, then we can get the growth. >>Got it. Final question. While I got you here, you've been on the enterprise business for a long time. What's the buyer landscape out there. You got people doing POCs on capital one scale. So we know that goes on. What's the appetite at the buyer side for startups and what are their requirements that you're seeing? Uh, obviously we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their, this restructure. So, so a lot of happening in cloud, what's the criteria. How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >>Yeah. I mean, enterprises, they know they've gotta spend money transforming the business. I mean, this was, I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but, um, what, what we were saying five years ago is happening. Um, everybody needs to figure out a way to take their business to this digital world. Everybody has to do it. So the nice thing from a startup standpoint is they know at times they need to risk or, or take a bet on new technology in order to, to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that a have money, uh, B it prepared to take risks and it's, it's a race against time to you'll get their, their offerings in this, a new digital footprint. >>Final, final question. What's the state of AWS. Where do you see them going next? Obviously they're continuing to be successful. How does cloud 3.0, or they always say it's day one, but it's more like day 10, but what's next for Aw. Where do they go from here? Obviously they're doing well. They're getting bigger and bigger. Yeah, >>Better. It's an amazing story. I mean, you know, we're, we're on AWS as well. And so I, I think if they keep nurturing the builders and the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They, they have an early leads. And if you look at where, you know, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the, in the late nineties, it was, they stopped, uh, really caring about developers in the folks who were building on top of their ecosystem. In fact, they started buying up their ecosystem and competing with people in their ecosystem. And I see with AWS, they, they have an amazing headstart and if they did more, you know, if they do more than that, that's, what's gonna keep this juggernaut rolling for many years to come. >>Yeah. They got the Silicon and got the stack. They're developing Jeremy Burton inside the cube, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called observing in the middle of all the action on the board of snowflake as well. Um, great startup. Thanks for coming on the cube. Always a pleasure. Okay. Live from San Francisco. It's to cube. I'm John for your host. Stay with us more coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. >>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here live in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cubes cube coverage of AWS summit 2022 here in San Francisco. We're all the developers are the bay air at Silicon valley. And of course, AWS summit in New York city is coming up in the summer. We'll be there as well. SF and NYC cube coverage. Look for us. Of course, reinforcing Boston and re Mars with the whole robotics, AI. They all coming together. Lots of coverage stay with us today. We've got a great guest from Bel VC. John founding partner, entrepreneurial venture is a venture firm. Your next act, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Good to see you, man. I feel like it's been forever since we've been able to do something in person. Well, >>I'm glad you're here because we run into each other all the time. We've known each other for over decade. Um, >>It's been at least 10 years, >>At least 10 years more. And we don't wanna actually go back as bring back the old school web 1.0 days. But anyway, we're in web three now. So we'll get to that in a second. We, >>We are, it's a little bit of a throwback to the path though, in my opinion, >>It's all the same. It's all distributed computing and software. We ran each other in cube con. You're investing in a lot of tech startup founders. Okay. This next level, next gen entrepreneurs have a new makeup and it's software. It's hardcore tech in some cases, not hardcore tech, but using software to take an old something old and make it better new, faster. So tell us about Bel what's the firm. I know you're the founder, uh, which is cool. What's going on. Explain >>What you, I mean, you remember I'm a recovering entrepreneur, right? So of course I, I, >>No, you're never recovering. You're always entrepreneur >>Always, but we are also always recovering. So I, um, started my first company when I was 24. If you remember, before there was Facebook and friends, there was instant messaging. People were using that product at work every day, they were creating a security vulnerability between their network and the outside world. So I plugged that hole and built an instant messaging firewall. It was my first company. The company was called IM logic and we were required by Symantec. Uh, then spent 12 years investing in the next generation of software companies, uh, early investor in open source companies and cloud companies and spent a really wonderful years, uh, at a firm called NEA. So I, I feel like my whole life I've been either starting enterprise software companies or helping founders start enterprise software companies. And I'll tell you, there's never been a better time than right now to start an enterprise software company. >>So, uh, the passion for starting a new firm was really a recognition that founders today that are starting an enterprise software company, they, they tend to be, as you said, a more technical founder, right? Usually it's a software engineer or a builder mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, they are building that are serving a slightly different market than what we've traditionally seen in enterprise software. Right? I think traditionally we've seen it buyers or CIOs that have agendas and strategies, which, you know, purchase software that is traditionally bought and sold tops down. But you know, today I think the most successful enterprise software companies are the ones that are built more bottoms up and have more technical early adopters. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software. And it starts with great technical founders with great products and great bottoms of motions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background. You're super smart admire of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is, is all companies there's no, I mean, consumer is enterprise now. Everything is what was once a niche, not, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. But remember, like right now, there's also a giant tech in VC conference in Miami <laugh> and it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, well, >>MFTs is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. >>Well, and, and I think all of us here that are of may, maybe students of his stream have been involved in open source in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three >>Movement. The hype is definitely web >>Three. Yeah. But, >>But you know, >>For sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east to Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case and maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many measures over, uh, $500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30 a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast >>Let's getting, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant <laugh> but there's also the hype of like the web three, for instance, but you know, for, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Lutman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, hire a direct sales force and sass kind of crushed that now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS? Is snowflake a SAS or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, and they own all my data. And you know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of commonalities across all six of startups and the overall adoption of technology. Uh, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually user like growth, right. They're one in the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving. >>You just pull the product >>Through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this movement may be started with open source where users were contributors, you know, contributors were users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing and it's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the users. And they're really the, the offic and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a gen Xer technically. So for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I've, I've been saying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit a digital hippie Revolut, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one of group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. We hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>During the mainframe days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home brew club. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on like, well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source. One example of that religion. Some people say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? It's, it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily. I mean, >>The data drives all decision making. Let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've been a VC for many years, but you also have the founder entrepreneurial mindset, but you can empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of is about believing in the first. So faking it till you make it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. Oh, >>AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur, right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story. And I still think that that's important, right. It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. Yeah. But having said that you're right. The proof is in the pudding, right. At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it's gonna, it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in this new economy, that're, we live in really, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative because their product begin for exactly >>The volume you back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song is the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, like the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with for right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the it's gotta speak to the, >>Exactly. Speak to the user. But let me ask a question now that for the people watching, who are maybe entrepreneurial entre entrepreneurs, um, masterclass here is in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur to come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine. Whether you're an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think will become, right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way, and we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be, the more likely somebody is gonna to align with your vision and, and want to invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I, you gotta show the path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision. Uh, if you have the same vision, you can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle of the journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the, the latest trends because it's over before you even get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living will say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. So you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but sometimes it happens ins six months. Sometimes it takes six years. Sometimes it takes 16 years. Uh, >>What's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Tebel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There there's three big trends that we invest in. And then the, the only things we do day in day out one is the explosion at open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen an alwa timeline happening forever, but it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's its one big mass of wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is underinvested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a do over, right? I mean, do we need a do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cyber security as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole like economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is around 150 billion and it still is a fraction of what >>We're, what we're and even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital >>That's right. You mean arguably, right. Arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say you gotta love your firm. Love who you're doing. We're big supporters of your mission. Congrat is on your entrepreneurial venture. And uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cuban. Uh, >>Absolutely >>Not. Certainly EU maybe even north America's in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for helping me on the show. >>Des bell VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California, after the short break, stay with us. Hey everyone. Welcome to the cue here. Live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022 we're live we're back with events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, 80% summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube. Got a great guest here. Justin Colby, owner and CEO of innovative solutions they booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us the story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. Yeah. >><laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to midsize businesses that are moving to the cloud or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control, cost, security, compliance, all the good stuff, uh, that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is. But now we have offices down in Austin, Texas up in Toronto, uh, Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago. And it's been a great ride. >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by AWS. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization and obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? Yeah. >>It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small to mid-size business. I'll try and understand how to leverage technology better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech is really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're like, listen, we gotta move to the out or we move some things to the cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then, uh, progressively working through a modernization strategy is always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to midsize businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. They want to get set up. But the, the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is. And it's not, it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem you guys solve >>The SMB space. The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and are hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with technology staff that has additional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether that's, we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to, yeah, they're like, listen, the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's OnPrem or in the cloud. I just want to know that I'm doing that in a way that helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. Good. >>How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I think there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start the, on your journey in one way, and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's a, gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning, the projects that early and not worrying about it, you got it. I mean, most people don't abandon stuff cuz they're like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. >>And they get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. Yeah. >>Frog and boiling water as we used to say so, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean this, this is a dynamic that's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you guys come in. I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talk to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did Andy jazzy announcer Adam, you know, five, a thousand announcement or whatever they did with huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just product. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are >>The values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to mid-size business, leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a tech company in the pro of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning know that we have their back and we're the safety net. So when a customer is saying, all right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going on loan. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say you're high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attack. If you have a partner that's offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own, it would cost 'em a fortune. If >>It's training alone would be insane. A risk factor not mean the cost. Yes, absolutely. Opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. Yeah. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018, when, uh, when we made the decision to go all on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious decision. It wasn't requirement isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front desk >>And she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I >>Love it. It's amazing. So I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get the right >>People involved. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point about SMBs and BIS is in general, small and large. It staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the build out, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner or SMB, do I get the why? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cyber security issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one in the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Like critical issues. This >>Is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about this, that's, >>That's what, at least a million in bloating, if not three or more Just to get that going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side now. Yeah. No. And nevermind AI and ML. That's >>Right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It's incredibly difficult. And the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll do all that exactly. In the it department. >>Exactly. >>Like, can we just call up, uh, you know, our old vendor that's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like >>It, >>But that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I were a business owner starting a business today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. And it's something that we tell, talk about every, with every one of our small to mid-size >>Businesses. So just, I wanna get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative yeah. Award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, I was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduce other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. And I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months that I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at RT long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2010 and I was like, Hey, on the value of this business and who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years, what do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner, but if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that were gonna also buy into the business with me. >>And they were the owners, no outside capital, none >>Zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons, they all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like if we're owners, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015, and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an early now process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the business, cuz they cared very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting going all in on the cloud was important for us and we haven't looked back. >>And at that time the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly. And those kinds of big enterprises, the GA I don't wanna say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to mid-size business, to migrate completely to the cloud as, as infrastructure was considered. That just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing where a lot of our small to mid-size as customers, they wanted to leverage cloud-based backup or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration, the Microsoft suite to the cloud. And a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on AWS at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is it the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plug in for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking to migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating to the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customers not to be cash strap and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so that they can modernize. >>So like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers and being empathetic to where they are in their journey. >>And that's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable wind. That's right. Seeing the value and Ling down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much for having me. >>Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We're back with more great coverage for two days after this short break, >>Live on the floor and see San Francisco for a AWS summit. I'm John ferry, host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the action we're back in person. We're at a AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back. Events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube. Bring all the action. Also virtual. We have a hybrid cube. Check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad to be >>Here. So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to have to be back through events. >>It's amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to and what two, three years. >>It's awesome. We'll be at the UHS summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and a big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything dev sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the game is pretty much laid out mm-hmm <affirmative> and the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's right. >>Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around, especially the edge public cloud for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give an example, uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, it's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering a, since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam's in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't wanna say trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listen to the customers. They work backwards from the customer. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does computing. It >>Does. That's not centralized in the public cloud now they got regions. So what is the issue at the edge what's driving the behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see that the data at the edge, you got 5g having. So it's pretty obvious, but there's a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation where today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always used to riff on the cube cause it's basically Amazon and a box pushed in the data center, running native, all the stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of becoming standard. You're starting to see some standard Deepak syncs. Group's doing some amazing work with open source Rauls team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW, he was giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my data center, do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outposts. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere or in your VMware environment. And it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. Right? So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. That's right. Innovative as that you get the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in, in these new areas that you're helping out are, they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is it. They don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on, what's making them money as a business. They want on their applications. They want to focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS, you take the infrastructure. You take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. Uh, we help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping of these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. So >>Basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it works? Right. >>And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy FinTech in the Caribbean, we talk about hurricanes and we're gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where you now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that, that required. It makes total sense. We're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech. And in, in the islands there a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what's your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming a, uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a, uh, technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure, because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on it's >>Interesting. I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, projects going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart concept. We use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead and it's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain, just for this like smart contracts for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service, but what happened to decentralized. >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance issue. Yeah. And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through, uh, a use case of a customer, um, Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud. Um, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my ad. And I also want all the benefit of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer. Yeah. >>Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment inside that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with, uh, regular commercial available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Uh, inside of that manufacturing plant, uh, we can do pre-procesing on things coming out of the, uh, the robotics that depending on what we're manufacturing, right. Uh, and then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard for >>Data, data lake, or whatever, to >>The data lake. Yeah. Data lake house, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but a lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just in time, manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going to the data that saves that cost yep. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data, unless you have to, um, those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever, the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? This is a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud out? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe maybe decision can wait. Right? Yeah. Uh, and then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot too, doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture on the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are. And, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about customers are starting to talk about throwing away data, uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And >>Well, I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this, but the one pattern was income of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retrain their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes code, as we call it our lab showcase, we did a whole, whole, that event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw away. It's not just business benefits. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. There >>Are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are run petabyte level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, uh, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to the AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a kind of a, um, fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, a cloud and skydiving instructor. <laugh> how does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? Yeah. >>Uh, you >>Jumped out a plane and got a job. You, you got a customer to jump out >>Kind of. So I was jump, I was teaching Scott eing, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a Scott I instructor. Yeah. Uh, I was teaching Scott eing and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and, and how his cus customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, uh, I was living in a tent in the woods teaching scout. I think I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, uh, I started in the first day there, uh, we had a, a discussion, uh, EC two, just come out <laugh> um, and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that and through being an on premises migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services to >>It's. So it's such a great story, you know, I was gonna, you know, you know, the, the, the, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early day was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, um, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and I, maybe it does still feel like that to some people. Right. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days, AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's pretty much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting edge stuff, like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You guys, the right equipment, you gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Matthew, thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here live and San Francisco for summit. I'm John Forry host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. look@thiscalendarforallthecubeactionatthecube.net. We'll be right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube a be summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John fury host to the cube. We'll be at the eight of his summit in New York city. This summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco, getting all the coverage what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dudes, car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor and a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you, sir. Chris. Cool. How are, are you >>Good? How are you? >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah. So give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? First >>Of all, thank you for having me back to be business with you. Never great to see you. Um, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. Um, we have raised close to a hundred million there. Uh, the investors are people like Norwes Menlo, Tru ventures, coast, lo ventures, Ram Sheam and all those people, all well known guys. The Andy Beckel chime, Paul Mo uh, main web. So a whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley VCs are involved >>And has it come? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISR is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk, uh, the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and ServiceNow to take it to the next stage? >>Well, I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, Dave Valenti as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a GE, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh> >>You know who you >>Get to call this fun to talk. You though, >>You got the commentary, you, your, your finger on the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud scale. You predicted that we talked about on cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing DACA just raised a hundred million on a 2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from an enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control, plane emerging, AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded, observability there's 10 million observability companies. Data is the key. What's your angle on this? What's your take. Yeah, >>No, look, I think I'll give you the view that I see right from my side. Obviously data is very clear. So the things that remember system of recorded you and me talked about the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud NA it'll be called AI, NA AI native is a new buzzword and using the AI customer service it operations. You talk about observability. I call it, AIOps applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and service desk. What needs to be helped us with ServiceNow BMC G you see a new ELA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflow, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with a AI workflows. So you'll see AI going >>Off is RPA a company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI pass? One will be at their event this summer? Um, is it a product company? I mean, I mean, RPA is almost, should be embedded in everything. It's >>A feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company, or, but that automation should be embedded in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NA and AI NATO it'll become automation. NA yeah. And that's your thinking. >>It's almost interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kinda having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it. It was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle, and it was software abstraction. Now you have all, all kinds of workflows, abstractions everywhere. So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed or they integrated. I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So don't about the databases become called poly databases. Yeah. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area like you were talking about. It should be part of service. Now it should be part of ISRA, like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see MuleSoft and Salesforce buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies, cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also have an automation as a layer <inaudible> inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind us, you've got the expo hall. We got, um, we're back to vents, but you got, you know, AMD, Clum, Ove, uh, Dynatrace data, dog, innovative, all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right. Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Bel later today. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen. We know all the, the VCs. What does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation, clouds bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's code. Yes. Basically data is everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders of Amazon created the startups 15 years back. Everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be is people don't just build on Amazon. They're going to build it on top of snowflake. Companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake. Right? So I see my old boss flagman try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer. Right? So I think that's in the of, <inaudible> trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your moat is, what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last reinvent, coined the term super cloud, right? He's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage. And guys like Charles Fitzgeral out there, who we like was kind of shit on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get it. Like, yeah. I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> if he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Yes. Now they say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist. And, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. >>It is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer. Remember the middle layer pass will be snowflake. So can build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer. If I really need to size, I'll build it on four.com Salesforce. So I think that's where you'll see. So >>Basically if you're an entrepreneur, the north star in terms of the outcome is be a super cloud. >>It is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. >>Yeah. Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales? The snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think got Redshift. Amazon has got red, um, but Snowflake's a big customer. They're probably paying AWS think big bills too. >>So John, very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-option will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with, uh, snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouse as a data layer. So I think depending on the application use case, you have to use each of the above. I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, You know, foreclose your value that's right. But some sort of internal hack, but I think, I think the general question that I have is that I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point. When does the rising tide stop >>And >>Do the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth cycle? I >>Think it's growth. You call it cloud scale. You invented the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's, as long as there are more movement from on, uh, OnPrem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations. It helpless, even the customer service service now and, uh, ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go made. >>I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers or practitioners, not suppliers to the market, feel free to, to XME or DMing. Next question's really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products. Cause you know, the big enterprises now and, you know, small, medium, large, and large enterprise are all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or a growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean I'm seeing some stuff, but why don't we get your thoughts on that? What, no, it is. >>If I remember going back to our 2007 or eight, it, when I used to talk to you back then when Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or 1% today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a CIO line business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can double in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. >>Yeah. And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I reference the URL cause it's like, there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solutions that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting left for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there, um, and gives back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure as code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share >>Yourself? No, I have a lot of thoughts that plus I see AIOP solutions in the future should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app Dyna, right? Dynatrace, all this solution will go future towards to proactive solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service that customers are give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can come the best algorithm, but I gotta train them, modify them, tweak them, make them better, make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to our big data days back in 2009, you know, >>Look at, look how much data bricks has grown. >>It is uh, double, the key >>Cloud kinda went private, so good stuff. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking at that growing customers and my customers are some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk, Mac of fee, uh, grandchildren, all the top customers. Um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on predict S one area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service, >>Great stuff, man. Doing great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of 80 summit, 2022. And we're gonna be at 80 summit in San, uh, in New York and the summer. So look for that on this calendar, of course go to eight of us, startups.com. I mentioned that it's a site for all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This to cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back a little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit new York's coming in the summer. We'll be there too with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the groove, psyched to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're gonna see a lot of virtual cube, a lot of hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economists with duck, bill groove, he founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe as shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at Mark's been doing a lot of shit posting lately, all a billionaires are shit posting, but they don't know how to do it. Like they're not >>Doing it right. Something opportunity there. It's like, here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a mid-size island to begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. This >>Shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on the other side, I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what is shit posting? >>It's more or less talking about the world of enterprise tech, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream. But it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a jackass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, coupons coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you can see the growth of cloud native Amazons, all, all the Adams let see new CEO, Andy move on to be the chief of all. Amazon just saw him. The cover of was it time magazine. Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything these folks do. They they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble imagining the logistics. It takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. It's, it's sprawling, immense that dominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. Well, >>There's a lot of force for good conversations, seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to port and he was trying to portray themselves as you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now it same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. Either way, sounds like more exciting >>Replacement ready <laugh> in case something goes wrong. I, the track highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in e-sports with other, in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and video graphics card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. >>Oh, it's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going in your world. I know you have a lot of great success. We've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter. Check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's back any blow back late there been uptick. What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's high. I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They must not have heard me it. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do that. >>We should do that. Actually. I think sure would call in. Oh, I, >>I think >>Chief, we had that right now. People would call in and say, Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the customer. >>You know, I always joke with Dave ante about how John Fort's always at, uh, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0 5, or we can't, >>We have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish. That's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their >>Producting, they're going in different directions. When they named Amazon Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonused on a number of words. They can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, session manager is a great one. I love the service, ridiculous name. They have systems manager, parameter store, which is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage your parameter store does not. It's >>Fun. What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination of you >>Got Ks. You got EMR, you got EC two. You got S three SQS. Well, Redshift the on an acronym, you >>Gots is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation. >>They still up bean stalk. Or is that still around? Oh, >>They never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, wow, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it. But while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it. John three <laugh>. >>Okay. >>Simple BV still haunts our dreams. >>I, I actually got an email. I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C two S were being deprecated and I got an email I'm like, I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me just like, give me something else. Right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you is that like, okay. So as Amazon gets better in some areas, where do they need more work in your opinion? Because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database, Snowflake's got a database service. So Redshift, snowflake database is, so you got this co-op petition. Yes. How's that going? And what are you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with Amazon and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want and they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multi-cloud cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word. Multi-cloud um, a lot of people are saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word, like multi sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multi-cloud >>Multiple single points? >>Dave loves that term. Yeah. >>Yeah. You're building in multiple single points of failure. Do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about multi-cloud either as the industry leader, talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective, it doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of forms. Some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on context. But my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing, because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. Yeah. >>Cool. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question, cause I know you, we you've been, you know, fellow journeymen and the, and the cloud journey going to all the events and then the pandemic hit where now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna gonna end. Certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations. Community's gonna emerge. You got a pretty big community growing and it's throwing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing, or just big chain angels. You've seen with the pandemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece, come in, you're commentating. You're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck bill group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, fun, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who can pony up two grand and a week in Las Vegas and get to Las Vegas from wherever they happen to be by moving virtually suddenly it, it embraces the reality that talent is even distributed. Opportunity is not. And that means that suddenly these things are accessible to a wide swath of audience and potential customer base and the rest that hadn't been invited to the table previously, it's imperative that we not lose that. It's nice to go out and talk to people and have people come up and try and smell my hair from time to time, I smell delightful. Let make assure you, but it was, but it's also nice to be. >>I have a product for you if you want, you know. >>Oh, excellent. I look forward to it. What is it putting? Why not? <laugh> >>What else have you seen? So when accessibility for talent, which by the way is totally home run. What weird things have happened that you've seen? Um, that's >>Uh, it's, it's weird, but it's good that an awful lot of people giving presentations have learned to tighten their message and get to the damn point because most people are not gonna get up from a front row seat in a conference hall, midway through your Aing talk and go somewhere else. But they will change a browser tab and you won't get them back. You've gotta be on point. You've gotta be compelling if it's going to be a virtual discussion. >>Yeah. And also turn off your IMEs too. >>Oh yes. It's always fun in the, in the meetings when you're talking to someone and their co is messaging them about, should we tell 'em about this? And I'm sitting there reading it and it's >>This guy is really weird. Like, >>Yes I am and I bring it into the conversation and then everyone's uncomfortable. It goes, wow. >>Why not? I love when my wife yells at me over I message. When I'm on a business call, like, do you wanna take that about no, I'm good. >>No, no. It's better off. I don't. No, the only encourager it's fine. >>My kids. Excellent. Yeah. That's fun again. That's another weird thing. And, and then group behavior is weird. Now people are looking at, um, communities differently. Yes. Very much so, because if you're fatigued on content, people are looking for the personal aspect. You're starting to see much more of like yeah. Another virtual event. They gotta get better. One and two who's there. >>Yeah. >>The person >>That's a big part of it too is the human stories are what are being more and more interesting. Don't get up here and tell me about your product and how brilliant you are and how you built it. That's great. If I'm you, or if I wanna work with you or I want to compete with you, or I wanna put on my engineering hat and build it myself. Cause why would I buy anything? That's more than $8. But instead, tell me about the problem. Tell me about the painful spot that you specialize in. Tell me a story there. >>I, I >>Think that gets a glimpse in a hook and >>Makes more, more, I think you nailed it. Scaling storytelling. Yes. And access to better people because they don't have to be there in person. I just did it thing. I never, we never would've done the queue. We did. Uh, Amazon stepped up in sponsors. Thank you, Amazon for sponsoring international women's day, we did 30 interviews, APAC. We did five regions and I interviewed this, these women in Asia, Pacific eight, PJ, they called for in this world. And they're amazing. I never would've done those interviews cuz I never, would've seen 'em at an event. I never would've been in Japan or Singapore to access them. And now they're in the index. They're in the network. They're collaborating on LinkedIn. So a threads are developing around connections that I've never seen before. Yes. Around the content, >>Absolutely >>Content value plus >>The networking. And that is the next big revelation of this industry is going to realize you have different companies. And in Amazon's case, different service teams, all, all competing with each other, but you have the container group and you have the database group and you have the message cuing group. But customers don't really want to build things from spare parts. They want a solution to a problem. I want to build an app that does Twitter for pets or whatever it is I'm trying to do. I don't wanna basically have to pick and choose and fill my shopping cart with all these different things. I want something that's gonna give me what I'm trying to get as close to turnkey as possible. Moving up the stack. That is the future. And just how it gets here is gonna be >>Well we're here with Corey Quinn, the master of the master of content here in the a ecosystem. Of course we we've been following up in the beginnings. Great guy. Check out his blog, his site, his newsletter screaming podcast. Cory, final question for you. Uh, what do you hear doing what's on your agenda this week in San Francisco and give a plug for the duck build group. What are you guys doing? I know you're hiring some people what's on the table for the company. What's your focus this week and put a plug in for the group. >>I'm here as a customer and basically getting outta my cage cuz I do live here. It's nice to actually get out and talk to folks who are doing interesting things at the duck build group. We solve one problem. We fixed the horrifying AWS bill, both from engineering and architecture, advising as well as negotiating AWS contracts because it turns out those things are big and complicated. And of course my side media projects last week in aws.com, we are, it it's more or less a content operation where I indulge my continual and ongoing law of affair with the sound of my own voice. >><laugh> and you good. It's good content. It's on, on point fun, Starky and relevant. So thanks for coming to the cube and sharing with us. Appreciate it. No, thank you. Fun. You. Okay. This the cube covers here in San Francisco, California, the cube is back at to events. These are the summits, Amazon web services summits. They happen all over the world. We'll be in New York and obviously we're here in San Francisco this week. I'm John furry. Keep, keep it right here. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Okay. Welcome back everyone. This's the cubes covers here in San Francisco, California, we're live on the show floor of AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube and remember AWS summit in New York city coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. And of course reinvent the end of the year for all the cube coverage on cloud computing and AWS. The two great guests here from the APN global APN se Jenko and Jeff Grimes partner leader, Jeff and se is doing partnerships global APN >>AWS global startup program. Yeah. >>Okay. Say that again. >>AWS global startup program. >>That's the official name. >>I love >>It too long, too long for me. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, of course. Appreciate it. Tell us about what's going on with you guys. What's the, how was you guys organized? You guys we're obviously were in San Francisco bay area, Silicon valley, zillions of startups here, New York. It's got another one we're gonna be at tons of startups. Lot of 'em getting funded, big growth and cloud big growth and data security, hot and sectors. >>Absolutely. >>So maybe, maybe we could just start with the global startup program. Um, it's essentially a white glove service that we provide to startups that are built on AWS. And the intention there is to help identify use cases that are being built on top of AWS. And for these startups, we want to provide white glove support in co building products together. Right. Um, co-marketing and co-selling essentially, um, you know, the use cases that our customers need solved, um, that either they don't want to build themselves or are perhaps more innovative. Um, so the, a AWS global startup program provides white glove support, dedicated headcount for each one of those pillars. Um, and within our program, we've also provided incentives, programs go to market activities like the AWS startup showcase that we've built for these startups. >>Yeah. By the way, start AWS startups.com is the URL, check it out. Okay. So partnerships are key. Jeff, what's your role? >>Yeah. So I'm responsible for leading the overall F for, for the AWS global startup program. Um, so I've got a team of partner managers that are located throughout the us, uh, managing a few hundred startup ISVs right now. <laugh> >>Yeah, I got >>A lot. We've got a lot. >>There's a lot. I gotta, I gotta ask the tough question. Okay. I'm I'm a startup founder. I got a team. I just got my series a we're grown. I'm trying to hire people. I'm super busy. What's in it for me. Yeah. What do you guys bring to the table? I love the white glove service, but translate that what's in it. What do I get out of it? What's >>A good story. Good question. I focus, I think. Yeah, because we get, we get to see a lot of partners building their businesses on AWS. So, you know, from our perspective, helping these partners focus on what, what do we truly need to build by working backwards from customer feedback, right? How do we effectively go to market? Because we've seen startups do various things, um, through trial and error, um, and also just messaging, right? Because oftentimes partners or rather startups, um, try to boil the ocean with many different use cases. So we really help them, um, sort of laser focus on what are you really good at and how can we bring that to the customer as quickly as possible? >>Yeah. I mean, it's truly about helping that founder accelerate the growth of their company. Yeah. Right. And there's a lot that you can do with AWS, but focus is truly the key word there because they're gonna be able to find their little piece of real estate and absolutely deliver incredible outcomes for our customers. And then they can start their growth curve there. >>What are some of the coolest things you've seen with the APN that you can share publicly? I know you got a lot going on there, a lot of confidentiality. Um, but you know, we're here lot of great partners on the floor here. I'm glad we're back at events. Uh, a lot of stuff going on digitally with virtual stuff and, and hybrid. What are some of the cool things you guys have seen in the APN that you can point to? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can point to few, you can take them. Sure. So, um, I think what's been fun over the years for me personally, I came from a startup, ran sales at an early stage startup and, and I went through the whole thing. So I have a deep appreciation for what these guys are going through. And what's been interesting to see for me is taking some of these early stage guys, watching them progress, go public, get acquired, and see that big day mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, and being able to point to very specific items that we help them to get to that point. Uh, and it's just a really fun journey to watch. >>Yeah. I, and part of the reason why I really, um, love working at the AWS, uh, global startup program is working with passionate founders. Um, I just met with a founder today that it's gonna, he's gonna build a very big business one day, um, and watching them grow through these stages and supporting that growth. Um, I like to think of our program as a catalyst for enterprise sort of scale. Yeah. Um, and through that we provide visibility, credibility and growth opportunities. >>Yeah. A lot, a lot of partners too. What I found talking to staff founders is when they have that milestone, they work so hard for it. Whether it's a B round C round Republic or get bought. Yeah. Um, then they take a deep breath and they look back at wow, what a journey it's been. So it's kind of emotional for sure. Yeah. Still it's a grind. Right? You gotta, I mean, when you get funding, it's still day one. You don't stop. It's no celebrate, you got a big round or valuation. You still gotta execute >>And look it's hypercompetitive and it's brutally difficult. And our job is to try to make that a little less difficult and navigate those waters right. Where everyone's going after similar things. >>Yeah. I think as a group element too, I observe that startups that I, I meet through the APN has been interesting because they feel part of AWS. Yeah, totally. As a group of community, as a vibe there. Um, I know they're hustling, they're trying to make things happen. But at the same time, Amazon throws a huge halo effect. I mean, that's a huge factor. I mean, yeah. You guys are the number one cloud in the business, the growth in every sector is booming. Yeah. And if you're a startup, you don't have that luxury yet. And look at companies like snowflake, they're built on top of AWS. Yeah. I mean, people are winning by building on AWS. >>Yeah. And our, our, our program really validates their technology first. So we have, what's called a foundation's technical review that we put all of our startups through before we go to market. So that when enterprise customers are looking at startup technology, they know that it's already been vetted. And, um, to take that a step further and help these partners differentiate, we use programs like the competency programs, the DevOps compet, the, the security competency, which continues to help, um, provide sort of a platform for these startups, help them differentiate. And also there's go to market benefits that are associated with that. >>Okay. So let me ask the, the question that's probably on everyone's mind, who's watching. Certainly I asked this a lot. There's a lot of companies startups out there who makes the, is there a criteria? Oh God, it's not like his sports team or anything, but like sure. Like there's activate program, which is like, there's hundreds of thousands of startups out there. Not everyone is at the APN. Right? Correct. So ISVs again, that's a whole nother, that's a more mature partner that might have, you know, huge market cap or growth. How do you guys focus? How do you guys focus? I mean, you got a good question, you know, a thousand flowers blooming all the time. Is there a new way you guys are looking at it? I know there's been some talk about restructure or, or new focus. What's the focus. >>Yeah. It's definitely not an easy task by any means. Um, but you know, I recently took over this role and we're really trying to establish focus areas, right. So obviously a lot of the fees that we look after our infrastructure ISVs, that's what we do. Uh, and so we have very specific pods that look after different type of partners. So we've got a security pod, we've got a DevOps pod, we've got core infrastructure, et cetera. And really we're trying to find these ISVs that can solve, uh, really interesting AWS customer challenges. >>So you guys have a deliberate, uh, focus on these pillars. So what infrastructure, >>Security, DevOps, and data and analytics, and then line of business >>Line of business line, like web marketing >>Solutions, business apps, >>Business, this owner type thing. Exactly. >>Yeah, exactly. >>So solutions there. Yeah. More solutions and the other ones are like hardcore. So infrastructure as well, like storage, backup, ransomware of stuff, or, >>Uh, storage, networking. >>Okay. Yeah. The classic >>Database, et cetera. Right. >>And so there's teams on each pillar. >>Yep. So I think what's, what's fascinating for the startup that we cover is that they've got, they truly have support from a build market sell perspective. Right. So you've got someone who's technical to really help them get the technology, figured out someone to help them get the marketing message dialed and spread, and then someone to actually do the co-sell, uh, day to day activities to help them get in front of customers. >>Probably the number one request that we always ask for Amazon is can we waste that sock report? Oh, download it, the console, which we use all the time. Exactly. But security's a big deal. I mean, you know, SREs are evolving, that role of DevOps is taking on dev SecOps. Um, I, I could see a lot of customers having that need for a relationship to move things faster. Do you guys provide like escalation or is that a part of a service or not, not part of a, uh, >>Yeah, >>So the partner development manager can be an escalation point. Absolutely. Think of them as an extension of your business inside of AWS. >>Great. And you guys how's that partner managers, uh, measure >>On those three pillars. Right. Got it. Are we billing, building valuable use cases? So product development go to market, so go to market activities, think blog, posts, webinars, case studies, so on and so forth. And then co-sell not only are we helping these partners win their current opportunities that they are sourcing, but can we also help them source net new deals? Yeah. Right. That's >>Very important. I mean, top asked from the partners is get me in front of customers. Right. Um, not an easy task, but that's a huge goal of ours to help them grow their top >>Line. Right. Yeah. In fact, we had some interviews here on the cube earlier talking about that dynamic of how enterprise customers are buying. And it's interesting, a lot more POCs. I have one partner here that you guys work with, um, on observability, they got a huge POC with capital one mm-hmm <affirmative> and the enterprises are engaging the startups and bringing them in. So the combination of open source software enterprises are leaning into that hard and bringing young growing startups in mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yep. So I could see that as a huge service that you guys can bring people in. >>Right. And they're bringing massively differentiated technology to the table. Mm-hmm <affirmative> the challenge is they just might not have the brand recognition that the big guys have. And so that it's our job is how do you get that great tech in front of the right situations? >>Okay. So my next question is about the show here, and then we'll talk globally. So here in San Francisco sure. You know, Silicon valley bay area, San Francisco bay area, a lot of startups, a lot of VCs, a lot of action. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so probably a big market for you guys. Yeah. So what's exciting here in SF and then outside SF, you guys have a global program, you see any trends that are geography based or is it sure areas more mature? There's certain regions that are better. I mean, I just interviewed a company here that's doing, uh, AWS edge really well in these cases. It's interesting that these, the partners are filling a lot of holes and gaps in the opportunities with AWS. So what's exciting here. And then what's the global perspective. >>Yeah, totally. So obviously a ton of partners, I, from the bay area that we support. Um, but we're seeing a lot of really interesting technology coming out of AMEA specifically. Yeah. Uh, and making a lot of noise here in the United States, which is great. Um, and so, you know, we definitely have that global presence and, and starting to see super differentiated technology come out of those regions. >>Yeah. Especially Tel Aviv. Yeah. >>Amy real quick, before you get in the surge. It's interesting. The VC market in, in Europe is hot. Yeah. They've got a lot of unicorns coming in. We've seen a lot of companies coming in. They're kind of rattling their own, you know, cage right now. Hey, look at us. We'll see if they crash, you know, but we don't see that happening. I mean, people have been projecting a crash now in, in the startup ecosystem for at least a year. It's not crashing. In fact, funding's up. >>Yeah. The pandemic was hard on a lot of startups for sure. Yeah. Um, but what we've seen is many of these startups, they, as quickly as they can grow, they can also pivot as, as, as well. Um, and so I've actually seen many of our startups grow through the pandemic because their use cases are helping customers either save money, become more operationally efficient and provide value to leadership teams that need more visibility into their infrastructure during a pandemic. >>It's an interesting point. I talked to Andy jazzy and Adam Leski both say the same thing during the pandemic necessity, the mother of all invention. Yep. And startups can move fast. So with that, you guys are there to assist if I'm a startup and I gotta pivot cuz remember iterate and pivot, iterate and pivot. So you get your economics, that's the playbook of the ventures and the models. >>Exactly. How >>Do you guys help me do that? Give me an example of walk me through, pretend me I'm a startup. Hey, I am on the cloud. Oh my God. Pandemic. They need video conferencing. Hey cube. Yeah. What do I need? Surge? What, what do I do? >>That's a good question. First thing is just listen. Yeah. I think what we have to do is a really good job of listening to the partner. Um, what are their needs? What is their problem statement and where do they want to go at the end of the day? Um, and oftentimes because we've worked with so many successful startups, they have come out of our program. We have, um, either through intuition or a playbook, determined what is gonna be the best path forward and how do we get these partners to stop focusing on things that will eventually, um, just be a waste of time yeah. And, or not provide, or, you know, bring any fruit to the table, which, you know, essentially revenue. >>Well, we love star rights here in the cube because one, um, they have good stories. They're oil and cutting edge, always pushing the envelope and they're kind of disrupting someone else. Yeah. And so they have an opinion. They don't mind sharing on camera. So love talking to startups. We love working with you guys on our startup showcases startups.com. Check out AWS startups.com and you got the showcases, uh, final. We I'll give you guys the last word. What's the bottom line bumper sticker for AP the global APN program. Summarize the opportunity for startups, what you guys bring to the table and we'll close it out. Totally start >>With you. Yeah. I think the AWS global startup program's here to help companies truly accelerate their business full stop. Right. And that's what we're here for. I love it. >>It's a good way to, it's a good way to put it Dito. >>Yeah. All right, sir. Thanks for coming on. Thanks John. Great to see you love working with you guys. Hey, startups need help. And the growing and huge market opportunities, the shift cloud scale data engineering, security infrastructure, all the markets are exploding in growth because of the digital transformation of the realities here. Open source and cloud all making it happen here in the cube in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, your host. Thanks for watching >>John. >>Hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, two days of coverage, AWS summit, 2022 in New York city. Coming up this summer, we'll be there as well at events are back. The cube is back of course, with the cube virtual cube hybrid, the cube.net, check it out a lot of content this year, more than ever, a lot more cloud data cloud native, modern applic is all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, Cub alumni, uh, CEO of observe Inc in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data observability Jeremy. Great to see you. Thanks >>Always great to come and talk to you on the queue, man. It's been been a few years, so, >>Um, well you, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, uh, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability hot area, but also you've been a senior executive president of Dell, uh, EMC, uh, 11 years ago you had a, a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. Um, yeah. And it's here. You predicted it 11 years ago. Um, look around it's cloud meets big data. >>Yeah. I mean the, the cloud thing I think, you know, was, was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for, for, for sort of catching that bus out, um, you know, we, we were on the, the, the bus early and, and I think it was only inevitable. Like, you know, if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you, you could find out things you could never possibly imagine. >>So you're close to a lot of companies that we've been covering deeply. Snowflake obviously are involved, uh, the board level, you know, the founders, you know, the people there cloud, you know, Amazon, you know, what's going on here? Yeah. You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, uh, chief of observ, Inc, which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data engineering, large scale integrations, um, data as code integrating into applic. I mean, it's a whole nother world developing, like you see with snowflake, it means snowflake is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's your, what's this wave we're on what's how would you describe the wave? >>Well, a couple of things, I mean, people are, I think riding more software than, than ever fall. Why? Because they've realized that if, if you don't take your business online and offer a service, then you become largely irrelevant. And so you you've got a whole set of new applications. I think, I think more applications now than any point. Um, not, not just ever, but the mid nineties, I always looked at as the golden age of application development. Now back then people were building for windows. Well, well now they're building for things like AWS is now the platform. Um, so you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data and the, you know, the sort of the transactions, you know, what you bought today or something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry data, all the exhaust fumes. And I think people really are realizing that their differentiation is not so much their application. It's their understanding of the data. Can, can I understand who my best customers are, what I sell today. If people came to my website and didn't buy, then I not, where did they drop off all of that they wanna analyze. And, and the answers are all in the data. The question is, can you understand it >>In our last startup showcase, we featured data as code. One of the insights that we got out of that I wanna get your opinion on our reaction to is, is that data used to be put into a data lake and turns into a data swamp or throw into the data warehouse. And then we'll do some query, maybe a report once in a while. And so data, once it was done, unless it was real time, even real time was not good anymore after real time. That was the old way. Now you're seeing more and more, uh, effort to say, let's go look at the data cuz now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once mm-hmm <affirmative> they're iterating. Yeah. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting. Yeah, that's a Silicon valley story. That's like how startups work, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have another, this data concept that's now yeah. Part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole, this whole new cycle of >>Yeah. >>Data being reused and repurposed and figured out and >>Yeah, yeah. I'm a big fan of, um, years ago. Uh, uh, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee at the MIT C cell labs I spent time with and he, he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look I'm I'm. He said I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you, of enough data, you can answer any question. And, and this is going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and, and certainly, you know, research is on the forefront. But I, I think, you know, starting to see that mindset of the, the sort of MIT research be mainstream, you know, in enterprises, they they're realizing that yeah, it is about the data. You know, if I can better understand my data better than my competitor than I've got an advantage. And so the question is is, is how, what, what technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to, to allow me to do that. So >>Let's talk about observing you the CEO of, okay. Given you've seen the wave before you're in the front lines of observability, which again is in the center of all this action what's going on with the company. Give a quick minute to explain, observe for the folks who don't know what you guys do. What's the company doing? What's the funding status, what's the product status and what's the customer status. Yeah. >>So, um, we realized, you know, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago that, um, look, the way people are building applications is different. They they're way more functional. They change every day. Uh, but in some respects they're a lot more complicated. They're distributed. They, you know, microservices architectures and when something goes wrong, um, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not gonna fly because you had SA so much change going into production on a daily basis. It was hard to tell like where the problem was. And so we thought, okay, it's about time. Somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and all the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot and make sense of the problems that they're seeing. So, I mean, that's observability, it's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was a guy called, uh, Rudolph like, like everything in tech, you know, it's, it's a reinvention of, of something from years gone by. >>But, um, there's a guy called, um, Rudy Coleman in 1960s, kinder term. And, and, and the term was been able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for, uh, the best part of the all years now. Um, it took us three years just to build the product. I think, I think what people don't appreciate these days often is the barrier to entry in a lot of these markets is quite high. You, you need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. Um, so yeah, this last year we, we, we did our first year selling, uh, we've got about 40 customers now. <affirmative> um, we just we've got great investors for the hill ventures. Uh, I mean, Mike SP who was, you know, the, the guy who was the, really, the first guy in it snowflake and the, the initial investor were fortunate enough to, to have Mike on our board. And, um, you know, part of the observed story yeah. Is closely knit with snowflake because all of that time data know we, we still are in there. >>So I want to get, uh, >>Yeah. >>Pivot to that. Mike Pfizer, snowflake, Jeremy Burton, the cube kind of, kind of same thinking this idea of a super cloud or what snowflake became snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of snowflake. Yeah. So that's become an entrepreneurial story that we think that to go big in the cloud, you can have a cloud on a cloud, uh, like as Jerry, Jerry Chan and Greylock calls it castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you're doing some stuff with snowflake. So a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a snowflake or an AWS, because again, you gotta go where the data is. You need all the data. >>Yeah. So >>What's your take on that? >>I mean, having enough gray hair now, um, you know, again, in tech, I think if you wanna predict the future, look at the past. And, uh, you know, to many years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a, a smaller company called Oracle and an Oracle was the database company. And, uh, their, their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms, one, one windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operator and system was the platform. And, and then that was the, you know, ecosystem that you would compete on top of. And then there were companies like SAP that built applications on top of Oracle. So then wind the clock forward 25 years gray hairs. <laugh> the platform, isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, you know, Google cloud. I gotta probably look around if I say that in. Yeah. It's >>Okay. But hyperscale, yeah. CapX built out >>That is the new platform. And then snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generator data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. And I think they they've done an amazing job doing for the, I'd say, say the, the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world, you know, way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and, and of course my ambition would be, look, if, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of snow snowflake, uh, as, as they were on top of Oracle, then, then we'd probably be quite happy. >>So you're building on top of snowflake. >>We're building on top of snowflake a hundred percent. And, um, you know, I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that that's a risk. You >>Still on the board. >>Yeah. I'm still on the board. Yeah. That that's a risk I'm prepared to take <laugh> I am long on snowflake you, >>Well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board, then you'll know what's going on. Okay. No know just doing, but the, this is a real dynamic. It is. It's not a one off it's. >>Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS is an order of magnitude more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so I believe the opportunity for folks like snowflake and folks like observe it's an order of magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old >>World. Yeah. And I think this is really, I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you gotta be on a platform. Yeah. >>It's quite >>Easy or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how many seats are at that table left. >>Well, value migrates up over time. So, you know, when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, you know, Rackspace and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure, a service platform as a service, my, my old, uh, um, employee EMC, we had pivotal, you know, pivotal was a platform as a service. You don't hear so much about it, these, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to, to like extract, uh, a real business, you gotta move up, you gotta add value, you gotta build databases, then you gotta build applications. So >>It's interesting. Moving from the data center of the cloud was a dream for starters. Cause then if the provision, the CapEx, now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on top of that, you got snowflake you on top of that, the >>Assumption is almost that compute and storage is free. I know it's not quite free. Yeah. It's >>Almost free, >>But, but you can, you know, as an application vendor, you think, well, what can I do if I assume compute and storage is free, that's the mindset you've gotta get into. >>And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm gonna get a serious, multiple of value in what I'm paying. Yeah. Most people don't even blanket their Avis pills unless they're like massively huge. Yeah. Then it's a repatriation question or whatever discount question, but for most startups or any growing company, the Amazon bill should be a small factor. >>Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, um, ask me like, look, you're building on snowflake. Um, you, you know, you are, you are, you're gonna be, you're gonna be paying their money. How, how, how, how does that work with your business model? If you're paying them money, you know, do, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. I, we could build a database as well in observe, but then I've got half the development team working on in that will never be as good as snowflake. And so we made the call early on that. No, no, we, we wanna innovate above the database. Yeah. Right. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and, and the same is true of something like Amazon, like, like snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >>Yeah. And what's interesting is that Dave <inaudible> and I have been pointing this out and he's actually more on snowflake. I I've been looking at data bricks, um, and the same dynamics happening, the proof is the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, if you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and data bricks it's exploding. Right. I mean, the shows are selling out the floor. Space's book. That's the old days at VMware. Yeah. The old days at AWS >>One and for snowflake and, and any platform provider, it's a beautiful thing. You know, we build on snowflake and we pay them money. They don't have to sell to us. Right. And we do a lot of the support. And so the, the economics work out really, really well. If you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of ecosystems. >>Yeah. And then also you get, you get a, um, a trajectory of, uh, economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of snowflake integrations, right. New products. You're scaling that function with the, >>Yeah. I mean, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. Right. When I, when I, when I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had, we had one petabyte customer. And, and so at observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so been able to rely on a platform that can manage that is invaluable, >>You know, but Jeremy Greek conversation, thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. Uh, we got a couple minutes left. Um, put a plug in for observe. What do you guys, I know you got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your, your, your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You getting traction. Yeah. >>Yeah. >>Scales around the corner. Sounds like, are you, is that where you are scale? >>Got, we've got a big announcement coming up in two or weeks. We've got, we've got new funding, um, which is always great. Um, the product is, uh, really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, you know, which is at which point can you just start hiring salespeople? And the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. Um, we've got about 40 SaaS companies run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, uh, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting, um, enterprise type customers. We're, we're, you know, F five networks we're POC in right now with capital one, we got some interest in news around capital one coming up. I, I can't share too much, uh, but it's gonna be exciting. And, and like I saids hill continued to, to, to stick, >>I think capital one's a big snowflake customer as well. Right. They, >>They were early in one of the things that attracted me to capital one was they were very, very good with snowflake early on. And, and they put snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. Yeah. And, and today that, that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts. >>So capital one, very innovative cloud, obviously AIOS customer and very innovative, certainly in the CISO and CIO, um, on another point on where you're at. So you're, Prescale meaning you're about to scale, right? So you got POCs, what's that trick GE look like, can you see around the corner? What's, what's going on? What's on, around the corner. That you're, that you're gonna hit the straight and narrow and, and gas it >>Fast. Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the key thing for us is we gotta get the product. Right. Um, the nice thing about having a guy like Mike Pfizer on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage is questions that the board are always about, like, is the product, right? Is the product right? Is the product right? If you got the product right. And cuz we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and, and the revenue will take care of itself. Yeah. So right now all the attention is on the product. Um, the, this year, the exciting thing is we were, we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that back in the day you could do with the new lakes and, and AppDynamics, the last generation of, of APM tools, you're gonna be able to do that within observe. And we've already got the logs and the metrics capability in there. So for us, this year's a big one, cuz we sort of complete the trifecta, you know, the, the logs, >>What's the secret sauce observe. What if you had the, put it into a, a sentence what's the secret sauce? I, >>I, I think, you know, an amazing founding engineering team, uh, number one, I mean, at the end of the day, you have to build an amazing product and you have to solve a problem in a different way. And we've got great long term investors. And, and the biggest thing our investors give is actually it's not just money. It gives us time to get the product, right. Because if we get the product right, then we can get the growth. >>Got it. Final question. Why I got you here? You've been on the enterprise business for a long time. What's the buyer landscape out there. You got people doing POCs on capital one scale. So we know that goes on. What's the appetite at the buyer side for startups and what are their requirements that you're seeing? Uh, obviously we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their business restructure. So a lot happening in cloud. What's the criteria. How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >>Yeah. I mean, enterprises, they know they've gotta spend money transforming the business. I mean, this was, I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but, um, what, what we were saying five years ago is happening. Um, everybody needs to figure out out a way to take their, this to this digital world. Everybody has to do it. So the nice thing from a startup standpoint is they know at times they need to risk or, or take a bet on new technology in order to, to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that a have money, uh, B prepared to take risks and it's, it's a race against time to, you know, get their, their offerings in this. So a new digital footprint, >>Final, final question. What's the state of AWS. Where do you see them going next? Obviously they're continuing to be successful. How does cloud 3.0, or they always say it's day one, but it's more like day 10. Uh, but what's next for Aw. Where do they go from here? Obviously they're doing well. They're getting bigger and bigger. >>Yeah. They're, they're, it's an amazing story. I mean, you know, we we're, we're on AWS as well. And so I, I think if they keep nurturing the builders in the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They, they have an early leads. And if you look at where, you know, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the, in the late it was, they stopped, uh, really caring about developers and the folks who were building on top of their ecosystem. In fact, they started buying up their ecosystem and competing with people in their ecosystem. And I see with AWS, they, they have an amazing head start and if they did more, you know, if they do more than that, that's, what's gonna keep the jut rolling for many years to come. Yeah, >>They got the silicone and they got the staff act, developing Jeremy Burton inside the cube, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called observing in the middle of all the action on the board of snowflake as well. Um, great start. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Always a pleasure. >>Okay. Live from San Francisco to cube. I'm John for your host. Stay with us more coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. >>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here live in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cubes cube coverage of AWS summit 2022 here in San Francisco. We're all the developers of the bay area at Silicon valley. And of course, AWS summit in New York city is coming up in the summer. We'll be there as well. SF and NYC cube coverage. Look for us. Of course, reinforcing Boston and re Mars with the whole robotics AI thing, all coming together. Lots of coverage stay with us today. We've got a great guest from Deibel VC. John Skoda, founding partner, entrepreneurial venture is a venture firm. Your next act, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Good to see you, Matt. I feel like it's been forever since we've been able to do something in person. Well, >>I'm glad you're here because we run into each other all the time. We've known each other for over a decade. Um, >><affirmative>, it's been at least 10 years now, >>At least 10 years more. And we don't wanna actually go back as frees back, uh, the old school web 1.0 days. But anyway, we're in web three now. So we'll get to that in >>Second. We, we are, it's a little bit of a throwback to the path though, in my opinion, >><laugh>, it's all the same. It's all distributed computing and software. We ran each other in cube con you're investing in a lot of tech startup founders. Okay. This next level, next gen entrepreneurs have a new makeup and it's software. It's hardcore tech in some cases, not hardcore tech, but using software is take old something old and make it better, new, faster. <laugh>. So tell us about Deibel what's the firm. I know you're the founder, uh, which is cool. What's going on. Explain >>What you're doing. I mean, you remember I'm a recovering entrepreneur, right? So of course I, I, I, >>No, you're never recovering. You're always entrepreneur >>Always, but we are also always recovering. So I, um, started my first company when I was 24. If you remember, before there was Facebook and friends, there was instant messaging. People were using that product at work every day, they were creating a security vulnerability between their network and the outside world. So I plugged that hole and built an instant messaging firewall. It was my first company. The company was called, I am logic and we were required by Symantec. Uh, then spent 12 years investing in the next generation of our companies, uh, early investor in open source companies and cloud companies and spent a really wonderful 12 years, uh, at a firm called NEA. So I, I feel like my whole life I've been either starting enterprise software companies or helping founders start enterprise software companies. And I'll tell you, there's never been a better time than right now to start enter price software company. >>So, uh, the passion for starting a new firm was really a recognition that founders today that are starting in an enterprise software company, they, they tend to be, as you said, a more technical founder, right? Usually it's a software engineer or a builder mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, they are building products that are serving a slightly different market than what we've traditionally seen in enterprise software. Right? I think traditionally we've seen it buyers or CIOs that have agendas and strategies, which, you know, purchased software that has traditionally bought and sold tops down. But, you know, today I think the most successful enterprise software companies are the ones that are built more bottoms up and have more technical early opts. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software. And it starts with great technical founders with great products and great and emotions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background, super smart admire of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is all companies. The is no, I mean, consumer is enterprise. Now everything is what was once a niche. No, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. But remember, like right now, there's also a giant tech in VC conference in Miami <laugh> it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, >>Ts is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. Well, and, >>And I think all of us here that are, uh, maybe students of history and have been involved in, open in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three movement. >>The hype is definitely that three. >>Yeah. But, but >>You know, for >>Sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east to Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case now? And maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many men over, uh, 500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30% a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast, >>Let's getting, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant, but it's also the hype of like the web three, for instance. But you know, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Luman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, higher direct sales force and SAS kind of crushed the, at now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS? Is snowflake a SAS or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, they own all my data. You know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of commonalities across all successful startups and the overall adoption of technology. Uh, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually user like growth, right. They're one in the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving. You >>Just pull the >>Product through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this movement maybe started with open source where users were, are contributors, you know, contributors, we're users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing and it's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the users. And they're really the, the beneficiaries and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a GenXer technically, so for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I've, I've been staying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit a digital hippie revolution, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one other group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. We hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>It's the main for days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home brew club. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on. Well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source, one example of that religion. Some people will say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? It's, it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily. I mean >>The decision making, let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've made a VC for many years, but you also have the founder, uh, entrepreneurial mindset, but you can get empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of is about believing in the person. So fing, so you make, it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. Oh, >>AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur, right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story. You, I still think that that's important, right? It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. But having said that you're right, the proof is in the pudding, right? At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in this new economy that we live in, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative because their products exactly >>The volume back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song was the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with. Right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the, you know, it's gotta speak to >>The, speak to the user, but let me ask a question now that the people watching who are maybe entrepreneurial entrepreneur, um, masterclass here is in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur to come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine. Whether you're an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage, engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think something will become. Right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way, and we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be, the more likely somebody is gonna align with your vision and, and want to invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I >>Show >>The path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision, uh, have the same vision. You can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle of the journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the latest trends because it's over before you can get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living will say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. So you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but sometimes it happens in six months. Sometimes it takes six years is sometimes like 16 years. >>Uh, what's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Desel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There, there's three big trends that we invest in. And they're the, they're the only things we do day in, day out. One is the explosion and open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen and on what timeline happening >>Forever. >>But it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's, it's one big, massive wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now, a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a, a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally, it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is under invested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a dessert do over, right? I mean, do we need a do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cyber security as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is around 150 billion. And it still is a fraction of what we're, what >>We're and security even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital >>That's right. You mean arguably, right? I mean, arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say, you gotta love your firm. Love. You're doing we're big supporters of your mission. Congratulations on your entrepreneurial venture. And, uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cub gone. Uh, >>Absolutely. >>Certainly EU maybe even north America's in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for having me on >>The show. Guess bell VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California. After the short break, stay with us. Everyone. Welcome to the queue here. Live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022 we're live we're back with the events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, 80% summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube got a great guest here. Justin Coby owner and CEO of innovative solutions. Their booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us a story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. >>Yeah. <laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to midsize businesses that are moving into the cloud or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control, cost, security, compliance, all the good stuff, uh, that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is, but now we have offices down in Austin, Texas up in Toronto, uh, key Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago and it's been a great ride. It >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by AWS. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization and obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? >>Yeah. It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small to midsize business. They're trying to understand how to leverage technology. It better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech ISNT really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're like, listen, we gotta move to the cloud or we move some things to cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then, uh, progressively working through a modernization strateg, always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to midsize businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. They want get set up. But then the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is. And it's not, it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem you guys solve >>In the SMB space? The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and are hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with technology staff that has traditional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to, yeah, they're like, listen, the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's OnPrem or in the cloud. I just want to know that I'm doing that in a way that helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. >>Good. How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I, there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start down your journey in one way and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning the projects that early and not worrying about it, you got it. I mean, most people don't abandon cause like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. And >>They get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. Yeah. >>Frog and boiling water as we used to say. So, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean, this is a dynamic that's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you, I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talked to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did am jazzy announce or Adam, you know, the 5,000 announcement or whatever. They do huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just processes. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are, >>What's the values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to midsize business leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a tech company in the process of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your, or it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning they know that we have their back Andre or the safety net. So when a customer is saying, all right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going in alone. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say you're high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attack. If you have a partner, that's all offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products, uh, that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own. It, it would cost 'em a fortune. If >>Training alone would be insane, a factor and the cost. Yes, absolutely. Opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. Yeah. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018, when, uh, when we made the decision to go all in on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious decision. It wasn't requirement and still isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front desk >>And she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I love it. It's amazing. >>But I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get >>The right people involved. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point about SMBs and businesses in general, small en large, it staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the build out, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner or SMB, do I get the ROI? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cybersecurity issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one and the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Critical issues. This >>Is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about. So that's, >>That's what, at least a million in bloating, if not three or more Just to get that going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side though. Yeah. No. And nevermind AI and ML. That's >>Right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It it's incredibly difficult. And, and the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll >>Do all that >>Exactly. In it department. >>Exactly. >>Like, can we just call up, uh, you know, <laugh> our old vendor. That's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like it, but that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I was a business owner, starting a business to today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. And it's something that we talk about every, with every one of our small to midsize business. >>So just, I want to get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduce other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. And I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months that I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at R I T long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2010 and I was like, Hey, I'm growing the value of this business. And who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years? What do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner, but if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that we're gonna also buy the business with >>Me. And they were the owners, no outside capital, >>None zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons. They all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like if we're owners, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015, and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an earn out process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the business, cuz they care very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting all going all in on the cloud was important for us and we haven't looked back. >>And at that time, the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly the, uh, and those kinds of big enterprises. The game don't, won't say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to midsize business, to migrate completely to the cloud as, as infrastructure was considered. That just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing were a lot of our small to midsize business customers, they wanted to leverage cloud based backup, or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration. The, the Microsoft suite to the cloud and a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on eight at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plug in for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking to migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating to the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customers not to be cash strapped and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so that they can modernize. >>So like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers, empathetic to where they are in their journey. And >>That's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable wind. That's right. Seeing the value and doubling down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate it. Thank >>You very much for having >>Me. Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching with back with more great coverage for two days after this short break >>Live on the floor in San Francisco for 80 west summit, I'm John ferry, host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the action we're back in person. We're at AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube, bringing all the action. Also virtual, we have a hybrid cube, check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticketing off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad >>To be here. So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to have to be back through events. >>It's amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to and what two, three years. >>It's awesome. We'll be at the, uh, New York as well. A lot of developers and a big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything dev sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the, the game is pretty much laid out. Mm. And the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's right. >>Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around, especially the edge public cloud out for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give >>An example, >>Uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech data and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering Aw since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and then became the CEO. Now Adam Slosky is in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to, I don't wanna say, trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listen to customers. They work backwards from the customers. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does >>Computing. It >>Does. >>That's not central lies in the public cloud. Now they got regions. So what is the issue with the edge what's driving? The behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got five GM having. So it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the <affirmative> what's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over fit 15 AWS edge services, and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always used to riff on the cube, uh, cuz it's basically Amazon in a box, pushed in the data center, uh, running native, all the stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of become standard. You're starting to see some standard Deepak sings group is doing some amazing work with open source Rauls team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see low the zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my data center, do I wanna manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outpost. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment and it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. Innovative does that. You have the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in, in these new areas that you're helping out are they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their available ability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is it. They don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on, what's making them money as a business. They wanna focus on their applications. They want focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS, you take the infrastructure. You take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. We help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company, we have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. >>So basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it works? Right. >>And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy FinTech in the Caribbean, we're gonna talk about hurricanes and gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where now have data, you have applications that are tapping into that, that requirement. It makes total sense. We're seeing across the board. So it's not like it's, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech in, in the islands. There are a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what's your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto underly parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming. Uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a tech technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on it's >>Interesting. And I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, projects going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart contract, we use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead. It's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain, just for this like smart contracts for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service, but what happened to decent centralized. >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance. >>Yeah. >>And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through a, a use case of a customer, um, Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud. Um, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my a and I also want all the benefits of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the good this of the cloud. What's the answer. Yeah. >>Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment inside that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with, uh, regular commercially available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Uh, inside of that manufacturing plant, uh, we can do pre-processing on things coming out of the, uh, the robotics that depending on what we're manufacturing, right. Uh, and then we can take the, those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard >>For data lake or whatever, >>To the data lake. Yeah. Data Lakehouse, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but I'll lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just in time, manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going of the data that saves that cost yep. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data unless you have to. Um, but those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you, what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacture, industrial, whatever the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? There's a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe, maybe this decision can wait. Yeah. Uh, and then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot tube doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture in the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are. And, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about out. Customers are starting to talk about throwing away data, uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And well, >>I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this, but the one pattern we're seeing of the past year is that throwing away data's bad, even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retraining their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes code, as we call it in our last showcase, we did a whole whole event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw it away. It's not just business better. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. >>There are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are running pay Toby level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, uh, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move Aytes of data to the AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a kind of a, um, fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background, OnPrem architect, Aus cloud, and skydiving instructor. <laugh> how does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? Yeah. >>Uh, you >>Jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump out >>Kind of. So I was, you jumped out. I was teaching having, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a sky. I instructor, uh, I was teaching skydiving and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and, and how his customers are working. And he can't find an enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, uh, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, uh, I started and the first day there, uh, we had a, a discussion, uh, EC two had just come out <laugh> and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that, and through being in on premises, migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services tore >>It's. So it's such a great story, you know, was gonna, you know, you know, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early days was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, uh, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and maybe it does still feel like that to some people. Right. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting edge stuff, like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You got the right equipment. You gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Yeah. Thanks for coming. You really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here live in San Francisco for eight of us summit. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look up this calendar for all the cube, actually@thecube.net. We'll right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube a be summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John fury host of the cube. We'll be at the eighties summit in New York city this summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco, getting all the coverage what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dos car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor in a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you. Cool. How are you? Good. >>How hello you. >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah. So give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? >>First of all, thank you for having me. We're back to be business with you, never after to see you. Uh, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. We have raised close to a hundred million there. The investors are people like Norwes Menlo ventures, coastal ventures, Ram Shera, and all those people, all well known guys. And Beckel chime Paul me Mayard web. So whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley VCs are involved >>And has it gone? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISRA is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk, uh, the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and service now to take you to the next stage? Well, >>I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, Dave LAN as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh> >>You know, who does >>You, >>You >>Get the call fund to talk to you though. You >>Get the commentary, your, your finger in the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud scale. You predicted that we talked about in the cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing Docker just raised a hundred million on a $2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control plan? Emerging AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded, observability there's 10 billion observability companies. Data is the key. This is what's your end on this. What's your take. >>Yeah, look, I think I'll give you the few that I see right from my side. Obviously data is very clear. So the things that rumor system of recorded you and me talked about the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud native, it'll be called AI. NA AI enable is a new buzzword and using the AI for customer service. It, you talk about observability. I call it, AIOps applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and AI services. What used to be desk with ServiceNow BMC GLA you see a new ALA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflows, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with AI workflows. So you, you see AI going >>Off is RPA. A company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI S one will be at their event this summer? Um, is it a product company? I mean, or I mean, RPA is, should be embedded in everything. It's a >>Feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company also, but that automation should be embedded in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NATO and AI. They it'll become automation data. Yeah. And that's your, thinking's >>Interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kinda having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle, and it was software abstraction. Now you have all kinds of workflows, abstractions everywhere. So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed. Are they integrated? I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So remember the databases became called polyglot databases. Yeah. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area like you, you were talking about, it should be part of service. Now it should be part of ISRA. Like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see it MuleSoft and sales buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies, cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also have an automation as a layer embedded inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind, as you got the XPO hall got, um, we're back to vis, but you got, you know, AMD, Clum, Dynatrace data, dog, innovative, all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right? Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Deibel later. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen, we know all the, the VCs, what does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation. Cloud's bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's code. Yes. Basically. Data's everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders of Amazon created the startups 15 years back. Everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be people don't just build on Amazon. They're going to build it on top of snow. Flake companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake, right? So I see my old boss playing ment, try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer, right? So I think that's the next level of companies trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your moat is, what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last re invent, coined the term super cloud, right? It's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You're starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage. And guys like Charles Fitzgeral out there, who we like was kind of hitting on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get him. Like, yeah, I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> cause he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Yes. Now they say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist and, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. >>It is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer room. The middle layer pass will be snowflake. So I cannot build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer if I really need to size, I'll build it on force.com Salesforce. Yeah. Right. So I think that's where you'll >>See. So basically the, the, if you're an entrepreneur, the, the north star in terms of the, the outcome is be a super cloud. It >>Is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. Yeah. >>Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales, the snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think got Redshift. Amazon has got Redshift. Um, but snowflake big customer. The they're probably paying AWS big, >>I >>Think big bills too. >>So John, very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-option will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with the snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouse as a data layer. So I think depending on the use case you have to use each of the above, I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, you know, foreclose your value. That's right. With some sort of internal hack, but I've think, I think the general question that I have is that I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point, when does the rising tide stop and the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth cycle? I >>Think it's growth. You call it closed skill you the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's as long as there more movement from on, uh, on-prem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations, it helpless. Even the customer service service. Now the ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go made. >>I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers are practitioners, not suppliers to the market. Feel free to text me or DMing. Next question is really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products. Cause you know, the big enterprises now and you know, small, medium, large, and large enterprise, they're all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean seeing some stuff, but why don't we get your thoughts on that? What it >>Is you, if I remember going back to our 2007 or eight, when I used to talk to you back then when Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or one person today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a C I will line our business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can double in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. Yeah. >>And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I, I reference the URL causes like there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solution that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting left for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there. Um, and goes back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure as code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share? >>I, a lot of thoughts that Fu I see the AI op solutions in the futures should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app dynamic, right? Dynatrace, all this solution will go future towards predict to pro so solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service that customers give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can give the best algorithm, but I gotta train them, modify them, make them better, make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to big data days back in 2009, you know that >>Look at, look how much data bricks has grown. >>It is doubled. The key cloud >>Air kinda went private, so good stuff. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking year that growing customers and my customers, or some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk, McAfee, uh, grand <inaudible>. So all the top customers, um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on, predict ours. One area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service, >>Great stuff, man. Doing great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of a us summit 2022. And we're gonna be at Aus summit in San, uh, in New York in the summer. So look for that on the calendar, of course, go to a us startups.com. That's a site for all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This the cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back, little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit in new York's coming in the summer. We'll be two with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the Groove's psych to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're gonna see a lot of virtual cube outta hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economist with duck bill groove, he's the founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe is shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at mark, Andrew's been doing a lot of shit posting lately. All a billionaires are shit posting, but they don't know how to do it. They're >>Doing it right. There's something opportunity there. It's like, here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a mid-size island to begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. >>This shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on this side I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what, what is shitposting >>It's more or less talking about the world of enterprise technology, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream, but it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a Jack ass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, Cuban coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you see the growth of cloud native Amazon's evolving Atos, especially new CEO. Andy move on to be the chief of all. Amazon just saw him the cover of was it time magazine. Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything. These folks do. They're they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble. Imagine the logistics, it takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. And it's, it's sprawling immense, the nominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. >>Well, there's a lot of force for good conversations. Seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to a, is trying to portray themselves, you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now it's same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car, our driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. Either way, it sounds like more exciting. Like they >>Better have a replacement ready in case something goes wrong on the track, highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula, the one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in e-sports with other people in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and video graphics card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. Oh, >>It's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting it into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going on in your world. I know you have a lot of great SA we've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter. Check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's the blowback, any blowback late leads there been tick? What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's hi, I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They not have heard me. It. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do that. >>We should do that. Actually. I think sure would call in. Oh, I, I >>Think >>I guarantee if we had that right now, people would call in and Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the customer. >>You know, I always joke with Dave Avante about how John Fort's always at, uh, um, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0, 0 5, or we can't, we >>Have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And then there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish, but that's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their product >>They're going in different directions. When they named Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonus on number of words, they can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, a session manager is a great one. I love the service ridiculous name. They have a systems manager, parameter store with is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage through parameter store does not. It's fun. >>What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination of you >>Got Ks. You got EMR, you got EC two. You got S three SQS. Well, RedShift's not an acronym. You got >>Gas is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation, >>They still got bean stock or is that still >>Around? Oh, they never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, wow, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it. But while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it, John. >>Okay. >>Simple BV still haunts our >>Dreams. I, I actually got an email on, I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C twos were being deprecated and I got an email I'm like, I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me just like, gimme something else. Right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you is that like, okay, so as Amazon gets better in some areas where do they need more work? And you, your opinion, because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database Snowflake's got out database service. So, you know, Redshift, snowflake database is out there. So you've got this optician. Yes. How's that going? And what are you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with Amazon and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want. And they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multi-cloud cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word. Multi-cloud um, a lot of people are saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word. Like multicloud sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multicloud? >>Multiple single >>Loves that term. Yeah. >>You're building in multiple single points of failure. Do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the, the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about multi-cloud either as the industry leader, let's talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective. It doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on context. But my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. >>Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question cause I know you we've been, you know, fellow journey mean in the, in the cloud journey, going to all the events and then the pandemic hit where now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna end, certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations community's gonna emerge. You've got a pretty big community growing and it's growing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing, or just big changes you've seen with the pan endemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece come in, you're commentating, you're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck bill group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, funny, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who >>Can pony. >>Hello and welcome back to the live cube coverage here in San Francisco, California, the cube live coverage. Two days, day two of a summit, 2022 Aish summit, New York city coming up in summer. We'll be there as well. Events are back. I'm the host, John fur, the Cub got great guest here. Johnny Dallas with Ze. Um, here is on the queue. We're gonna talk about his background. Uh, little trivia here. He was the youngest engineer ever worked at Amazon at the age. 17 had to get escorted into reinvent in Vegas cause he was underage <laugh> with security, all good stories. Now the CEO of company called Z know DevOps kind of focus, managed service, a lot of cool stuff, Johnny, welcome to the cube. >>Thanks John. Great. >>So tell a story. You were the youngest engineer at AWS. >>I was, yes. So I used to work at a company called Bebo. I got started very young. I started working when I was about 14, um, kind of as a software engineer. And when I, uh, it was about 16. I graduated out of high school early, um, working at this company Bebo, still running all of the DevOps at that company. Um, I went to reinvent in about 2018 to give a talk about some of the DevOps software I wrote at that company. Um, but you know, as many of those things were probably familiar with reinvent happens in a casino and I was 16. So was not able to actually go into the, a casino on my own. Um, so I'd have <inaudible> security as well as casino security escort me in to give my talk. >>Did Andy jazzy, was he aware of >>This? Um, you know, that's a great question. I don't know. <laugh> >>I'll ask him great story. So obviously you started a young age. I mean, it's so cool to see you jump right in. I mean, I mean you never grew up with the old school that I used to grew up in and loading package software, loading it onto the server, deploying it, plugging the cables in, I mean you just rocking and rolling with DevOps as you look back now what's the big generational shift because now you got the Z generation coming in, millennials on the workforce. It's changing like no one's putting and software on servers. Yeah, >>No. I mean the tools keep getting better, right? We, we keep creating more abstractions that make it easier and easier. When I, when I started doing DevOps, I could go straight into E two APIs. I had APIs from the get go and you know, my background was, I was a software engineer. I never went through like the CIS admin stack. I, I never had to, like you said, rack servers, myself. I was immediately able to scale. I was managing, I think 2,500 concurrent servers across every Ables region through software. It was a fundamental shift. >>Did you know what an SRE was at that time? >>Uh, >>You were kind of an SRE on >>Yeah, I was basically our first SRE, um, was familiar with the, with the phrasing, but really thought of myself as a software engineer who knows cloud APIs, not a SRE. All >>Right. So let's talk about what's what's going on now as you look at the landscape today, what's the coolest thing that's going on in your mind in cloud? >>Yeah, I think the, I think the coolest thing is, you know, we're seeing the next layer of those abstraction tools exist and that's what we're doing with Z is we've basically gone and we've, we're building an app platform that deploys onto your cloud. So if you're familiar with something like Carku, um, where you just click a GitHub repo, uh, we actually make it that easy. You click a GI hub repo and it will deploy on ALS using a AWS tools. So, >>Right. So this is Z. This is the company. Yes. How old's the company about >>A year and a half old now. >>All right. So explain what it does. >>Yeah. So we make it really easy for any software engineer to deploy on a AWS. It's not SREs. These are the actual application engineers doing the business logic. They don't really want to think about Yamo. They don't really want to configure everything super deeply. They want to say, run this API on S in the best way possible. We've encoded all the best practices into software and we set it up for you. Yeah. >>So I think the problem you're solving is that there's a lot of want be DevOps engineers. And then they realize, oh shit, I don't wanna do this. Yeah. And some people want to do it. They loved under the hood. Right. People love to have infrastructure, but the average developer needs to actually be as agile on scale. So that seems to be the problem you solve. Right? >>Yeah. We, we, we give way more productivity to each individual engineer, you know? >>All right. So let me ask you a question. So let me just say, I'm a developer. Cool. I build this new app. It's a streaming app or whatever. I'm making it up cube here, but let's just say I deploy it. I need your service. But what happens about when my customers say, Hey, what's your SLA? The CDN went down from this it's flaky. Does Amazon have, so how do you handle all that SLA reporting that Amazon provides? Cuz they do a good job with sock reports all through the console. But as you start getting into DevOps <affirmative> and sell your app, mm-hmm <affirmative> you have customer issues. How do you, how do you view that? Yeah, >>Well, I, I think you make a great point of AWS has all this stuff already. AWS has SLAs. AWS has contract. Aw has a lot of the tools that are expected. Um, so we don't have to reinvent the wheel here. What we do is we help people get to those SLAs more easily. So Hey, this is AWS SLA as a default. Um, Hey, we'll fix you your services. This is what you can expect here. Um, but we can really leverage S's reliability of you. Don't have to trust us. You have to trust ALS and trust that the setup is good there. >>Do you handle all the recovery or mitigation between, uh, identification say downtime for instance? Oh, the server's not 99% downtime. Uh, went down for an hour, say something's going on? And is there a service dashboard? How does it get what's the remedy? Do you have a, how does all that work? >>Yeah, so we have some built in remediation. You know, we, we basically say we're gonna do as much as we can to keep your endpoint up 24 7 mm-hmm <affirmative>. If it's something in our control, we'll do it. If it's a disc failure, that's on us. If you push bad code, we won't put out that new version until it's working. Um, so we do a lot to make sure that your endpoint stay is up, um, and then alert you if there's a problem that we can't fix. So cool. Hey S has some downtime, this thing's going on. You need to do this action. Um, we'll let you know. >>All right. So what do you do for fun? >>Yeah, so, uh, for, for fun, um, a lot of side projects. <laugh> uh, >>What's your side hustle right now. You got going on >>The, uh, it's >>A lot of tools playing tools, serverless. >>Yeah, painless. A lot of serverless stuff. Um, I think there's a lot of really cool WAM stuff as well. Going on right now. Um, I love tools is, is the truest answer is I love building something that I can give to somebody else. And they're suddenly twice as productive because of it. Um, >>It's a good feeling, isn't it? >>Oh yeah. There's >>Nothing like tools were platforms. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know, the expression, too many tools in the tool. She becomes, you know, tools for all. And then ultimately tools become platforms. What's your view on that? Because if a good tool works and starts to get traction, you need to either add more tools or start building a platform platform versus tool. What's your, what's your view on a reaction to that kind of concept debate? >>Yeah, it's a good question. Uh, we we've basically started as like a, a platform. First of we've really focused on these, uh, developers who don't wanna get deep into the DevOps. And so we've done all of the pieces of the stacks. We do C I C D management. Uh, we do container orchestration, we do monitoring. Um, and now we're, spliting those up into individual tools so they can be used. Awesome in conjunction more. >>All right. So what are some of the use cases that you see for your service? It's DevOps basically nano service DevOps. So people who want a DevOps team, do clients have a DevOps person and then one person, two people what's the requirements to run >>Z. Yeah. So we we've got teams, um, from no DevOps is kind of when they start and then we've had teams grow up to about, uh, five, 10 men DevOps teams. Um, so, you know, as is more infrastructure people come in because we're in your cloud, you're able to go in and configure it on top you're we can't block you. Uh, you wanna use some new AWS service. You're welcome to use that alongside the stack that we deploy >>For you. How many customers do you have now? >>So we've got about 40 companies that are using us for all of their infrastructure, um, kind of across the board, um, as well as >>What's the pricing model. >>Uh, so our pricing model is we, we charge basically similar to an engineering salary. So we charge a monthly rate. We have plans at 300 bucks a month, a thousand bucks a month, and then enterprise plan for >>The requirement scale. Yeah. So back into the people cost, you must have her discounts, not a fully loaded thing, is it? >>Yeah, there's a discounts kind of asking >>Then you pass the Amazon bill. >>Yeah. So our customers actually pay for the Amazon bill themselves. So >>Have their own >>Account. There's no margin on top. You're linking your, a analyst account in, um, got it. Which is huge because we can, we are now able to help our customers get better deals with Amazon. Um, got it. We're incentivized on their team to drive your costs down. >>And what's your unit main unit of economics software scale. >>Yeah. Um, yeah, so we, we think of things as projects. How many services do you have to deploy as that scales up? Um, awesome. >>All right. You're 20 years old now you not even can't even drink legally. <laugh> what are you gonna do when you're 30? We're gonna be there. >>Well, we're, uh, we're making it better, better, >>Better the old guy on the queue here. <laugh> >>I think, uh, I think we're seeing a big shift of, um, you know, we've got these major clouds. ALS is obviously the biggest cloud and it's constantly coming out with new services, but we're starting to see other clouds have built many of the common services. So Kubernetes is a great example. It exists across all the clouds and we're starting to see new platforms come up on top that allow you to leverage tools for multiple times. At the same time. Many of our customers actually have AWS as their primary cloud and they'll have secondary clouds or they'll pull features from other clouds into AWS, um, through our software. I think that's, I'm very excited by that. And I, uh, expect to be working on that when I'm 30. <laugh> awesome. >>Well, you gonna have a good future. I gotta ask you this question cuz uh, you know, I always, I was a computer science undergrad in the, in the, and um, computer science back then was hardcore, mostly systems OS stuff, uh, database compiler. Um, now there's so much compi, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> how do you look at the high school college curriculum experience slash folks who are nerding out on computer science? It's not one or two things. You've got a lot of, lot of things. I mean, look at Python, data engineering and emerging as a huge skill. What's it, what's it like for college kids now and high school kids? What, what do you think they should be doing if you had to give advice to your 16 year old self back a few years ago now in college? Um, I mean Python's not a great language, but it's super effective for coding and the datas were really relevant, but it's, you've got other language opportunities you've got tools to build. So you got a whole culture of young builders out there. What should, what should people gravitate to in your opinion and stay away from or >>Stay away from? That's a good question. I, I think that first of all, you're very right of the, the amount of developers is increasing so quickly. Um, and so we see more specialization. That's why we also see, you know, these SREs that are different than typical application engineering. You know, you get more specialization in job roles. Um, I think if, what I'd say to my 16 year old self is do projects, um, the, I learned most of my, what I've learned just on the job or online trying things, playing with different technologies, actually getting stuff out into the world, um, way more useful than what you'll learn in kind of a college classroom. I think classroom's great to, uh, get a basis, but you need to go out and experiment actually try things. >>You know? I think that's great advice. In fact, I would just say from my experience of doing all the hard stuff and cloud is so great for just saying, okay, I'm done, I'm banning the project. Move on. Yeah. Cause you know, it's not gonna work in the old days. You have to build this data center. I bought all this, you know, people hang on to the old, you know, project and try to force it out there. Now you >>Can launch a project now, >>Instant gratification, it ain't working <laugh> or this is shut it down and then move on to something new. >>Yeah, exactly. Instantly you should be able to do that much more quickly. Right. So >>You're saying get those projects and don't be afraid to shut it down. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that? Do you agree with that? >>Yeah. I think it's ex experiment. Uh, you're probably not gonna hit it rich on the first one. It's probably not gonna be that idea is the genius idea. So don't be afraid to get rid of things and just try over and over again. It's it's number of reps >>That'll win. I was commenting online. Elon Musk was gonna buy Twitter, that whole Twitter thing. And someone said, Hey, you know, what's the, I go look at the product group at Twitter's been so messed up because they actually did get it right on the first time. And we can just a great product. They could never change it because people would freak out and the utility of Twitter. I mean, they gotta add some things, the added button and we all know what they need to add, but the product, it was just like this internal dysfunction, the product team, what are we gonna work on? Don't change the product so that you kind of have there's opportunities out there where you might get the lucky strike right outta the gate. Yeah. Right. You don't know. >>It's almost a curse too. It's you're not gonna hit curse Twitter. You're not gonna hit a rich the second time too. So yeah. >><laugh> Johnny Dallas. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Give a plug for your company. Um, take a minute to explain what you're working on. What you're look looking for. You hiring funding. Customers. Just give a plug, uh, last minute and kind the last word. >>Yeah. So, um, John Dallas from Ze, if you, uh, need any help with your DevOps, if you're a early startup, you don't have DevOps team, um, or you're trying to deploy across clouds, check us out z.com. Um, we are actively hiring. So if you are a software engineer excited about tools and cloud, or you're interested in helping getting this message out there, hit me up. Um, find us on z.co. >>Yeah. LinkedIn Twitter handle GitHub handle. >>Yeah. I'm the only Johnny on a LinkedIn and GitHub and underscore Johnny Dallas underscore on Twitter. All right. Um, >>Johnny Dallas, the youngest engineer working at Amazon, um, now 20 we're on great new project here in the cube. Builders are all young. They're growing into the business. They got cloud at their, at their back it's tailwind. I wish I was 20. Again, this is a I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. Thanks. >>Welcome >>Back to the cubes. Live coverage of a AWS summit in San Francisco, California events are back, uh, ADAS summit in New York cities. This summer, the cube will be there as well. Check us out there lot. I'm glad we have events back. It's great to have everyone here. I'm John furry host of the cube. Dr. Matt wood is with me cube alumni now VP of business analytics division of AWS. Matt. Great to see you. Thank >>You, John. Great to be here. >>Appreciate it. I always call you Dr. Matt wood, because Andy jazzy always says Dr. Matt, we >>Would introduce you on the he's the one and only the one and >>Only Dr. Matt wood >>In joke. I love it. >>Andy style. And I think you had walkup music too on, you know, >>Too. Yes. We all have our own personalized walk. >>So talk about your new role. I not new role, but you're running up, um, analytics, business or AWS. What does that consist of right now? >>Sure. So I work, I've got what I consider to be the one of the best jobs in the world. Uh, I get to work with our customers and, uh, the teams at AWS, uh, to build the analytics services that millions of our customers use to, um, uh, slice dice, pivot, uh, better understand their day data, um, look at how they can use that data for, um, reporting, looking backwards and also look at how they can use that data looking forward. So predictive analytics and machine learning. So whether it is, you know, slicing and dicing in the lower level of, uh Hado and the big data engines, or whether you're doing ETR with glue or whether you're visualizing the data in quick side or building models in SageMaker. I got my, uh, fingers in a lot of pies. >>You know, one of the benefits of, uh, having cube coverage with AWS since 2013 is watching the progression. You were on the cube that first year we were at reinvent 2013 and look at how machine learning just exploded onto the scene. You were involved in that from day one is still day one, as you guys say mm-hmm <affirmative>, what's the big thing now. I mean, look at, look at just what happened. Machine learning comes in and then a slew of services come in and got SageMaker became a hot seller, right outta the gate. Mm-hmm <affirmative> the database stuff was kicking butt. So all this is now booming. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that was the real generational changeover for <inaudible> what's the perspective. What's your perspective on, yeah, >>I think how that's evolved. No, I think it's a really good point. I, I totally agree. I think for machine machine learning, um, there was sort of a Renaissance in machine learning and the application of machine learning machine learning as a technology has been around for 50 years, let's say, but, uh, to do machine learning, right? You need like a lot of data, the data needs to be high quality. You need a lot of compute to be able to train those models and you have to be able to evaluate what those mean as you apply them to real world problems. And so the cloud really removed a lot of the constraints. Finally, customers had all of the data that they needed. We gave them services to be able to label that data in a high quality way. There's all the compute. You need to be able to train the models <laugh> and so where you go. >>And so the cloud really enabled this Renaissance with machine learning, and we're seeing honestly, a similar Renaissance with, uh, with data, uh, and analytics. You know, if you look back, you know, five, 10 years, um, analytics was something you did in batch, like your data warehouse ran a analysis to do, uh, reconciliation at the end of the month. And then was it? Yeah. And so that's when you needed it, but today, if your Redshift cluster isn't available, uh, Uber drivers don't turn up door dash deliveries, don't get made. It's analytics is now central to virtually every business and it is central to every virtually every business is digital transformation. Yeah. And be able to take that data from a variety of sources here, or to query it with high performance mm-hmm <affirmative> to be able to actually then start to augment that data with real information, which usually comes from technical experts and domain experts to form, you know, wisdom and information from raw data. That's kind of, uh, what most organizations are trying to do when they kind of go through this analytics journey. It's >>Interesting, you know, Dave LAN and I always talk on the cube, but out, you know, the future and, and you look back, the things we were talking about six years ago are actually happening now. Yeah. And it's not a, a, a, you know, hyped up statement to say digital transformation. It actually's happening now. And there's also times where we bang our fist on the table, say, I really think this is so important. And Dave says, John, you're gonna die on that hill <laugh>. >>And >>So I I'm excited that this year, for the first time I didn't die on that hill. I've been saying data you're right. Data as code is the next infrastructure as code mm-hmm <affirmative>. And Dave's like, what do you mean by that? We're talking about like how data gets and it's happening. So we just had an event on our 80 bus startups.com site mm-hmm <affirmative>, um, a showcase with startups and the theme was data as code and interesting new trends emerging really clearly the role of a data engineer, right? Like an SRE, what an SRE did for cloud. You have a new data engineering role because of the developer on, uh, onboarding is massively increasing exponentially, new developers, data science, scientists are growing mm-hmm <affirmative> and the, but the pipelining and managing and engineering as a system. Yeah. Almost like an operating system >>And as a discipline. >>So what's your reaction to that about this data engineer data as code, because if you have horizontally scalable data, you've gotta be open that's hard. <laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative> and you gotta silo the data that needs to be siloed for compliance and reasons. So that's got a very policy around that. So what's your reaction to data as code and data engineering and >>Phenomenon? Yeah, I think it's, it's a really good point. I think, you know, like with any, with any technology, uh, project inside an organization, you know, success with analytics or machine learning is it's kind of 50% technology and then 50% cultural. And, uh, you have often domain experts. Those are, could be physicians or drug experts, or they could be financial experts or whoever they might be got deep domain expertise. And then you've got technical implementation teams and it's kind of a natural often repulsive force. I don't mean that rudely, but they, they just, they don't talk the same language. And so the more complex the domain and the more complex the technology, the stronger that repulsive force, and it can become very difficult for, um, domain experts to work closely with the technical experts, to be able to actually get business decisions made. And so what data engineering does and data engineering is in some cases team, or it can be a role that you play. >>Uh, it's really allowing those two disciplines to speak the same language it provides. You can think of it as plumbing, but I think of it as like a bridge, it's a bridge between like the technical implementation and the domain experts. And that requires like a very disparate range of skills. You've gotta understand about statistics. You've gotta understand about the implementation. You've gotta understand about the, it, you've gotta understand and understand about the domain. And if you could pull all of that together, that data engineering discipline can be incredibly transformative for an organization, cuz it builds the bridge between those two >>Groups. You know, I was advising some, uh, young computer science students at the sophomore junior level, uh, just a couple weeks ago. And I told 'em, I would ask someone at Amazon, this questions I'll ask you since you're, you've been in the middle of of it for years, they were asking me and I was trying to mentor them on. What, how do you become a data engineer from a practical standpoint, uh, courseware projects to work on how to think, um, not just coding Python cause everyone's coding in Python mm-hmm <affirmative> but what else can they do? So I was trying to help them and I didn't really know the answer myself. I was just trying to like kind of help figure it out with them. So what is the answer in your opinion or the thoughts around advice to young students who want to be data engineers? Cuz data scientists is pretty clear in what that is. Yeah. You use tools, you make visualizations, you manage data, you get answers and insights and apply that to the business. That's an application mm-hmm <affirmative>, that's not the, you know, sta standing up a stack or managing the infrastructure. What, so what does that coding look like? What would your advice be to >>Yeah, I think >>Folks getting into a data engineering role. >>Yeah. I think if you, if you believe this, what I said earlier about like 50% technology, 50% culture, like the, the number one technology to learn as a data engineer is the tools in the cloud, which allow you to aggregate data from virtually any source into something which is incrementally more valuable for the organization. That's really what data engineering is all about. It's about taking from multiple sources. Some people call them silos, but silos indicates that the, the storage is kind of fungible or UND differentiated. That that's really not the case. Success requires you to really purpose built well crafted high performance, low cost engines for all of your data. So understanding those tools and understanding how to use 'em, that's probably the most important technical piece. Um, and yeah, Python and programming and statistics goes along with that, I think. And then the most important cultural part, I think is it's just curiosity. >>Like you want to be able to, as a data engineer, you want to have a natural curiosity that drives you to seek the truth inside an organization, seek the truth of a particular problem and to be able to engage, cuz you're probably, you're gonna have some choice as you go through your career about which domain you end up in, like maybe you're really passionate about healthcare. Maybe you're really just passionate about your transportation or media, whatever it might be. And you can allow that to drive a certain amount of curiosity, but within those roles, like the domains are so broad, you kind of gotta allow your curiosity to develop and lead, to ask the right questions and engage in the right way with your teams. So because you can have all the technical skills in the world, but if you're not able to help the team's truths seek through that curiosity, you simply won't be successful. >>We just had a guest on 20 year old, um, engineer, founder, Johnny Dallas, who was 16 when he worked at Amazon youngest engineer at >>Johnny Dallas is a great name by the that's fantastic. It's his real name? >>It sounds like a football player. Rockstar. I should call Johnny. I have Johnny Johnny cube. Uh it's me. Um, so, but he's young and, and he, he was saying, you know, his advice was just do projects. >>Yeah. That's get hands on. >>Yeah. And I was saying, Hey, I came from the old days though, you get to stand stuff up and you hugged onto the assets. Cause you didn't wanna kill the cause you spent all this money and, and he's like, yeah, with cloud, you can shut it down. If you do a project that's not working and you get bad data, no one's adopting it or you don't want like it anymore. You shut it down. Just something >>Else. Totally >>Instantly abandoned it. Move onto something new. >>Yeah. With progression. Totally. And it, the, the blast radius of, um, decisions is just way reduced, gone. Like we talk a lot about like trying to, you know, in the old world trying to find the resources and get the funding. And it's like, right. I wanna try out this kind of random idea that could be a big deal for the organization. I need 50 million in a new data center. Like you're not gonna get anywhere. You, >>You do a proposal working backwards, document >>Kinds, all that, that sort of stuff got hoops. So, so all of that is gone, but we sometimes forget that a big part of that is just the, the prototyping and the experimentation and the limited blast radius in terms of cost. And honestly, the most important thing is time just being able to jump in there, get fingers on keyboards, just try this stuff out. And that's why at AWS, we have part of the reason we have so many services because we want, when you get into AWS, we want the whole toolbox to be available to every developer. And so, as your ideas developed, you may want to jump from, you know, data that you have, that's already in a database to doing realtime data. Yeah. And then you can just, you have the tools there. And when you want to get into real time data, you don't just have kineses, but you have real time analytics and you can run SQL again, that data is like the, the capabilities and the breadth, like really matter when it comes to prototyping and, and >>That's culture too. That's the culture piece, because what was once a dysfunctional behavior, I'm gonna go off the reservation and try something behind my boss's back or cause now as a side hustle or fun project. Yeah. So for fun, you can just code something. Yeah, >>Totally. I remember my first Haddo project, I found almost literally a decommissioned set of servers in the data center that no one was using. They were super old. They're about to be literally turned off. And I managed to convince the team to leave them on for me for like another month. And I installed her DUP on them and like, got them going. It's like, that just seems crazy to me now that I, I had to go and convince anybody not to turn these service off, but what >>It was like for that, when you came up with elastic map produce, because you said this is too hard, we gotta make it >>Easier. Basically. Yes. <laugh> I was installing Haddo version, you know, beta nor 0.9 or whatever it was. It's like, this is really hard. This is really hard. >>We simpler. All right. Good stuff. I love the, the walk down memory lane and also your advice. Great stuff. I think culture's huge. I think. And that's why I like Adam's keynote to reinvent Adam. Lesky talk about path minds and trail blazers because that's a blast radius impact. Mm-hmm <affirmative> when you can actually have innovation organically just come from anywhere. Yeah, that's totally cool. Totally. Let's get into the products. Serverless has been hot mm-hmm <affirmative> uh, we hear a lot about EKS is hot. Uh, containers are booming. Kubernetes is getting adopted. There's still a lot of work to do there. Lambda cloud native developers are booming, serverless Lambda. How does that impact the analytics piece? Can you share the hot, um, products around how that translates? Sure, absolutely. Yeah, the SageMaker >>Yeah, I think it's a, if you look at kind of the evolution and what customers are asking for, they're not, you know, they don't just want low cost. They don't just want this broad set of services. They don't just want, you know, those services to have deep capabilities. They want those services to have as lower operating cost over time as possible. So we kind of really got it down. We got built a lot of muscle, lot of services about getting up and running and experimenting and prototyping and turning things off and turn turning them on and turning them off. And like, that's all great. But actually the, you really only most projects start something once and then stop something once. And maybe there's an hour in between, or maybe there's a year, but the real expense in terms of time and, and complexity is sometimes in that running cost. Yeah. And so, um, we've heard very loudly and clearly from customers that they want, that, that running cost is just undifferentiated to them and they wanna spend more time on their work and in analytics that is, you know, slicing the data, pivoting the data, combining the data, labeling the data, training their models, uh, you know, running inference against their models, uh, and less time doing the operational pieces. >>So is that why the servers focus is there? >>Yeah, absolutely. It, it dramatically reduces the skill required to run these, uh, workloads of any scale. And it dramatically reduces the UND differentiated, heavy lifting, cuz you get to focus more of the time that you would've spent on the operation on the actual work that you wanna get done. And so if you look at something just like Redshift serverless that we launched a reinvent, you know, there's a kind of a, we have a lot of customers that want to run like a, uh, the cluster and they want to get into the, the weeds where there is benefit. We have a lot of customers that say, you know, I there's no benefit for me though. I just wanna do the analytics. So you run the operational piece, you're the experts we've run. You know, we run 60 million instant startups every single day. Like we do this a lot. Exactly. We understand the operation. I >>Want the answers come on. So >>Just give the answers or just let, give me the notebook or just give the inference prediction. So today for example, we announced, um, you know, serverless inference. So now once you've trained your machine learning model, just, uh, run a few, uh, lines of code or you just click a few buttons and then yeah, you got an inference endpoint that you do not have to manage. And whether you're doing one query against that endpoint, you know, per hour or you're doing, you know, 10 million, but we'll just scale it on the back end. You >>Know, I know we got not a lot of time left, but I want, wanna get your reaction to this. One of the things about the data lakes, not being data swamps has been from what I've been reporting and hearing from customers is that they want to retrain their machine learning algorithm. They want, they need that data. They need the, the, the realtime data and they need the time series data, even though the time has passed, they gotta store in the data lake mm-hmm <affirmative>. So now the data lakes main function is being reusing the data to actually retrain. Yeah, >>That's >>Right. It worked properly. So a lot of, lot of postmortems turn into actually business improvements to make the machine learning smarter, faster. You see that same way. Do you see it the same way? Yeah, >>I think it's, I think it's really interesting. No, I think it's really interesting because you know, we talk it's, it's convenient to kind of think of analytics as a very clear progression from like point a point B, but really it's, you are navigating terrain for which you do not have a map and you need a lot of help to navigate that terrain. Yeah. And so, you know, being, having these services in place, not having to run the operations of those services, being able to have those services be secure and well governed, and we added PII detection today, you know, something you can do automatically, uh, to be able to use their, uh, any unstructured data run queries against that unstructured data. So today we added, you know, um, text extract queries. So you can just say, well, uh, you can scan a badge for example, and say, well, what's the name on this badge? And you don't have to identify where it is. We'll do all of that work for you. So there's a often a, it's more like a branch than it is just a, a normal, uh, a to B path, a linear path. Uh, and that includes loops backwards. And sometimes you gotta get the results and use those to make improvements further upstream. And sometimes you've gotta use those. And when you're downstream, you'll be like, ah, I remember that. And you come back and bring it all together. So awesome. It's um, it's, uh, uh, it's a wonderful >>Work for sure. Dr. Matt wood here in the queue. Got just take the last word and give the update. Why you're here. What's the big news happening that you're announcing here at summit in San Francisco, California, and update on the, the business analytics >>Group? Yeah, I think, you know, one of the, we did a lot of announcements in the keynote, uh, encouraged everyone to take a look at that. Uh, this morning was Swami. Uh, one of the ones I'm most excited about, uh, is the opportunity to be able to take, uh, dashboards, visualizations. We're all used to using these things. We see them in our business intelligence tools, uh, all over the place. However, what we've heard from customers is like, yes, I want those analytics. I want their visualization. I want it to be up to date, but you know, I don't actually want to have to go my tools where I'm actually doing my work to another separate tool to be able to look at that information. And so today we announced, uh, one click public embedding for quick side dashboards. So today you can literally, as easily as embedding a YouTube video, you can take a dashboard that you've built inside, quick site cut and paste the HTML, paste it into your application and that's it. That's all you have to do. It takes seconds and >>It gets updated in real time. >>Updated in real time, it's interactive. You can do everything that you would normally do. You can brand it like this is there's no power by quick site button or anything like that. You can change the colors, make it fit in perfectly with your, with your applications. So that's sitting incredibly powerful way of being able to take a, uh, an analytics capability that today sits inside its own little fiefdom and put it just everywhere. It's, uh, very transformative. >>Awesome. And the, the business is going well. You got the serverless and your tailwind for you there. Good stuff, Dr. Matt with thank you. Coming on the cube >>Anytime. Thank >>You. Okay. This is the cubes cover of eight summit, 2022 in San Francisco, California. I'm John host cube. Stay with us with more coverage of day two after this short break.

>>from around the globe. >>It's the cube >>covering fortunate security summit brought to you by ford in it. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage, affording that security summit at the ford championship here in napa. I'm lisa martin and I'm very pleased to welcome back to the cube kenzi founder and chairman and ceo affording that, ken. Welcome back to the program. >>Thank you is uh, we're happy to be here after almost two years and uh, >>I know it's great to see you in person. I was saying before we went live, I forgot how tall you are. So this is a great event. But I want you to talk to me a little bit about some of the amazing growth. The Fortinet has seen 500,000 customers close to 30% year on year growth continuing to post solid earnings stock is more than double this year. What are some of the things that you attribute this group to and what do you think in your opinion differentiates format? >>I think some of the more strategic long term investment we made started paying off like uh, we're still the only company actually develop basic chip which can making a huge computing power advantage compared to using software to all the security function computing Because security tend to need about like 1300 times more company in power to process the same data as a routing switching. So that's where for the network security definitely a chap, a huge advantage And we invested very early and take a long term and also a big investment and so far started paying off the other thing we also keeping a lot of innovation and the internal organic growth for the company instead of do a lot of acquisition and that's also started making all these different products integrate well ultimately to get well. And that's also driving a huge growth, not just that was security, but also we see the fabric also has global fast, >>interesting. So you're really keeping it organic, which is not common a lot of these days we see a lot of acquisitions, but one of the things, a lot of growth, another thing that we do know that's growing is the threat landscape I was mentioning before we went live that I spoke with Derek Manky a couple times this summer and John Madison and the global threat landscape report showing ransomware up nearly 11 times in the last year. Of course we had this rapid transition to work from home and all these devices on accessing corporate networks from home. Talk to me about some of the security challenges that you're helping customers deal with. >>I think during the pandemic, definitely you see a lot of security issues that come up because work from home with your remote access a lot of important information, a lot of important data there At the same time. The ransomware attacks studying like a mentioning 11 times compared to like one or two years ago all this driving all there's a new technology for security. So now you cannot just secure the board anymore. So you have a secure the whole infrastructure. Both internal to a lot of internal segmentation And also go outside security when like I see when the 5G. Connection and how to secure work from home and they trust their trust access environment all these drive a lot of security growth. So we see the yeah it's a it's a pretty healthy market >>it's definitely a healthy market that's one thing looking at it from that lens. What are some of the customer conversation? How have the customer conversations changed? Are you now talking with different levels and organizations security Being a board level conversation discussion and talk to me about how those conversations have evolved. >>Security now become very important part of I. T. And uh pretty much all top one top two on the 80 spending now and the same time what to work from home or some other uh definitely seeing the board level conversation right now because you can see if there's a security issue for the company the damage could be huge. Right? So that's where the secure awareness especially ransomware is very very huge And plus the supply chain issues some other attack on the infrastructure. So we see a lot of security conversation in the bowl level in the Ceo in the in the executive level now compared to before more I. T. Conversation. So it's to drive the huge awareness of security and that's also we see everybody citing concerns security now. >>But I'm sure I imagine that's across every industry. Yes. >>Yeah pretty much all the vertical right? And especially a lot of new area traditionally they don't have much security like some smb some consumer some traditional Ot IOT space now it's all security studying that very important for them now. >>So let's talk about, here we are. The security summit at the fortunate championship. Give me your perspective on the P. G. A. Ford in that relationship. >>Uh first I think it's a golf is also event sports especially during the epidemic that's probably become the most favorite spot. And for me also I'm a golfer for 30 years. Never market golfer but I love the sport on the other side we see sometimes it's uh working with a lot of a customer a lot of a partner they behave if we can combine some business and there was certain like activity especially outdoor that's also be great. And also helping Brandon and that's another way we can contribute back to the community. So they say hey then then that's that's the first time for us. We just love it gets going. >>It's great to be outdoors right at 40 minutes doing an event outdoors showing that yes you can do that safely. But also I also hear from some of your other team members that it's a very culturally synergistic relationship. The pgn format. >>Yes. Exactly. Yeah that's where we love this golf and especially working with a different partner and different partner and also all the team working together. So it's a team sport kind of on the other side it's all do and enjoy a combined working uh activity altogether. Everybody love it. >>Something that so many of us have missed Ken for the last 18 months or so. So we're at the security summit, there's over 300 technology leaders here. Talk to me about some of the main innovations that are being discussed. >>Uh definitely see security starting uh little covered whole infrastructure and uh especially in a lot of environment. Traditionally no security cannot be deployed like internal segmentation because internal network can be 10, 200 faster than the one connection. So it has to be deployed in the in the internal high speed environment whether inside the company or kind of inside the data center, inside the cloud on the other side, like a lot of one connection traditionally like whether they see one or the traditional like cuba more than the S E O. They also need to be combined with security and also in the zero trust access environment to really supporting work from home and also a lot of ot operation technology and a lot of other IOT space utility. All these different kind of like environment need to be supported, sometimes recognized environment. So we see security studying deport everywhere whether the new small city or the like connected car environment and we just see become more and more important. That's also kind of we studying what we call in a secure driven networking because traditionally you can see today's networking just give you the connectivity and speed so they treat everything kind of uh no difference but with security driven network and you can make in the networking decision move based on the security function, like a different application or different content, different user, different device, even different location, you can make a different kind of level decision so that we see is a huge demand right now can make the whole environment, whole infrastructure much secure. >>That's absolutely critical that pivot to work from home was pretty much overnight a year and a half ago and we still have so many people who are permanently remote, remote but probably will be permanently and a good amount will be hybrid in the future, some TBD amount. Uh and one of the challenges is of course you've got people suddenly from home you've got a pandemic. So you've got an emotional situation, you've got people multitasking, they've got kids at home trying to learn maybe spouses working, they're trying to do Everything by a video conferencing and collaboration tools and the security risks. There are huge and we've seen some of that obviously reflected in the nearly 11 x increase in ransomware but talk to me about what 14 announced yesterday with links is to help on that front in a considerable way. >>That's where we totally agree with you the work from home or kind of hybrid way to work in. Pretty much will become permanent. And that's where how to make a home environment more kind of supporting is a remote working especially like when you have a meeting, there are some other things going on in the whole activity and also sometimes data you access can be pretty important, pretty confidential. That's where whether in the zero trust environment or making the home connection more reliable, more secure. It's all very, very important for us. Uh, that's where we were happy to partner with Lynxes and some other partner here uh, to support in this hybrid working environment to make work from home more secure. And uh, as we see is a huge opportunity, >>huge opportunity and a lot of industries, I had the pleasure of talking with links to Ceo Harry do is just an hour or so ago and I asked him what are some of the vertical, since we know from a security and a ransomware perspective, it's just wide open. Right, Nobody's safe anymore from it. But what are some of the verticals that you think are going to be early adopters of this technology, government health care schools, >>I think pretty much all vertical start and see this work from home and it's very, very important for us. There's a few top vertical, traditionally finance service, uh, spend a lot of money healthcare, spend a lot of money on security. So they are still the same? We don't see that change March on the other side. A lot of high tech company, which also one of the big vertical for us now, I say maybe half or even more than half the employee they want to work for home. So that's also making they say uh they call home branch now, so it's just make home always just secure and reliable as a branch office and at the same time of Southern government and the sort of education vertical and they all started C is very, very important to do this, remote their trust access approach and the same time working with a lot of service providers to supporting this, both the D. N. A. And also the sassy approach. So we are only companies on the saturday company partner, a lot of IT service provider. We do believe long term of the service provider, they have the best location, best infrastructure, best team to supporting Sassy, which we also build ourselves. If customers don't have a service provider, we're happy to supporting them. But if they have a service provider, we also prefer, they go to service provider to supporting them because we also want to have a better ecosystem and making everybody like uh benefit has women's situation. So that's what we see is whether they trust no access or sassy. Very happy to work with all the partners to making everybody successful. >>And where our customers in that evolution from traditional VPN to Z T and a for example, are you seeing an acceleration of that given where we are in this interesting climate >>uh definitely because work from home is uh if you try to access use VPN, you basically open up all the network to the home environment which sometimes not quite secure, not very reliable. Right? So that's where using a Z T N A, you can access a certain application in a certain like environment there. And the same leverage ste when there's other huge technology advantage can lower the cost of the multiple link and balance among different costs, different connection and uh different reliability there. Uh it's a huge advantage, >>definitely one of the many advantages that reporting it has. So this afternoon there's going to be a, as part of the security summit, a panel that you and several other Fortinet execs are on taking part in A Q and a, what are some of the topics that you think are going to come up? And as part of that Q and >>A. I see for certain enterprise customer, definitely the ransomware attack, how to do the internal segmentation, how to securely do the remote access work from home. So we are very important For some service provider. We also see how to supporting them for the sassy environment and certain whole infrastructure security, whether the 5G or the SD went because everyone has a huge demand and uh it's a group over for us, we become a leader in the space. It's very very important for them. We also see uh like a different vertical space, Some come from healthcare, some from come from education. Uh they all have their own kind of challenge. Especially like there's a lot of uh oh T IOT device in healthcare space need to be secured and the same thing for the O. T. IOT space, >>Tremendous amount of opportunity. One thing I want to ask it, get your opinion on is the cybersecurity skills gap. It's been growing year, over year for the last five years. I know that just last week 14 that pledge to train one million professionals in the next five years, you guys have been focused on this for a while. I love that you have a veterans program. I'm the daughter of a Vietnam combat veterans. So that always warms my heart. But is that something, is the cybersecurity skills got something that customers ask you ken? How do you recommend? We saw this? >>Yes, we have been doing this for over 10 years. We have the program, we call the network secured expert program a different level. So we have 24 million people. We also commit a traditional million people because there's a huge shortage of the scale separate security expert there. So we do work in with over like a 4500 university globally at the same time. We also want to offer the free training to all the people interested, especially all the veterans and other Like even high school graduate high school student there and at the same time anyone want to learn several security. We feel that that's, that's very good space, very exciting space and very fast-growing space also still have a huge shortage globally. There's a 3-4 million shortage of skilled people in the space, which is a or fast growing space. And so we were happy to support all the train education with different partners at the same time, try to contribute ourselves. >>I think that's fantastic. Will be excited to see over the next five years that impact on that training one million. And also to see it to your point with how much the industry is changing, how much, how fast supporting that's growing. There's a lot of job opportunity out there. I think it was Sandra who said that I was talking to her this morning that there's no job security like cybersecurity. It's really true. If you think about it. >>Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah. Like remember a few years ago when we started the first time to do all this interview, I said, hey, it's a barber hot space now, let's get harder and harder, more people interested now. And I really thank you cube and you give all the support it all these years and we're happy to be here. >>Absolutely. It's our pleasure. Well, I know you are paired up. You said tomorrow with Phil Mickelson for the pro am. That's pretty exciting, ken. >>I'm not sure I'm a very good golfer, but I will try my best. >>You try your best. I'm sure it will be a fantastic experience. Thank you for having the cube here for bringing people back together for this event, showing that we can do this, we can do this safely and securely. And also what Fortinet is doing to really help address that cyber security skills gap and uh, really make us more aware of the threats and the landscape and how we, as individuals and enterprises can help sort to quiet that storm >>also will be happy to be here and also being honored to be part of the program at the same time. We also want to thank you a lot of partner model customer and join us together for this big PJ event and thank you for everyone. >>Absolutely. And you guys are a big partner driven organization. I'm sure the partners appreciate that, ken, Thank you so much. >>Thank you. Thank you lisa >>for kenzi. I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cue from the Fortinet security summit in napa valley. >>Yeah. Mhm

>> From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman And we're digging in with the VMware cloud on AWS update, of course, an important solution set we've been talking about for a couple of years. If you see we've done interviews with some of the VMware and AWS executives, we did a deep dive on some of the technology. And now we get to dig in with one of the users of the technology. Of course, the executive talk about the proof of how many customers have been using it. So happy to welcome to the program I have two guests from PLM insurance. First, sitting right next to me on the screen is BJ Gardner, who's the lead system architect. Next to him is Dave Zeigenfuss, who is a senior systems architect. BJ and Dave, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. All right. So BJ, just for our audience that does not know, Pennsylvania Lumberman's Mutual Insurance Company, give us a little bit about The company 125 years in history, obvious with the name, it's in the insurance business but help us understand, you know, what your business is and what you and Dave do for the organization. >> Sure, so Pennsylvania Lumbermens has been around for under 125 years, we just celebrated the 100 and 25th year. This February Actually, we are commercial insurance company, property Casualty. And we specialize in the wood niche. So we cover everything from lumber yards to auto fleets that have anything to do with moving wood selling wood. So we're pretty niche, we're pretty specific in our brand. And we're a mutual insurer. We're one of the few if not only one, left that does not offer insurance on mutual space >> Alright, and BJ give us a little bit of snapshot from an IT standpoint, obviously, you're using VMware, cause you're here, talk to us about what data centers and cloud usage looks like for PLM. >> So I've been without Pennsylvania Lumbermens for about 15 years, and we were operating in full on-prem with bare metal servers, and 2007-2008, We started with the VMware product set. And since then we've been moving little by little to the cloud. We have many of our core applications are sitting with vendors in the cloud as of right now, we have a small data center in Philadelphia that is an on prem. And then we have, which we'll talk about, why have cloud data center as a service model with the VMware Certified cloud partner called Faction. And then we also now have our disaster recovery as a cloud product. >> Excellent. Since we're talking about the the VMware cloud on AWS bring us inside a little bit,that DR In this case that you're using. That hybrid model, help tease that out. BJ will Start with you. And I'm sure, Dave will have some color to give after you share. >> Sure, I mean, you know, when you're talking about disaster recovery in general, the need to maintain business continuity, while keeping a lean IT staff and with no extended downtime and data loss is just... it's not an option. You can't afford to be down, you can't afford to lose data. So having a cloud service now for disaster recovery, or at least the concept of that helps us more IT shop, in the way of resources that we just don't have on hand on staff. So, that's, pretty much the biggest goal for us, is to maintain business continuity and you know, with our lean staff at the same time. >> Echoing BJ a bit, having an on prem solution and really, to BJ'S point about our lean staff, It made things quite cumbersome for us with maintaining backups replications and such. There was a lot involved. It was very time consuming. So the handoff to utilizing VMware cloud for our disaster purposes really, really helped that benefit our team as a whole. >> All right, you mentioned your partner on this solution is Faction. Help us understand how you made the decision to go down this path. >> So I can give you a quick... a quick rundown here how Faction came to be. so we're located our corporate is in fellow Philadelphia PA. We occupied two floors in an office building. Our data center was on the one floor we were consolidating. And we moved up to just one single floor. So we basically lost the footprint of the data center. So I went out hunting for co location type vendor, and hooked up with Faction. And yeah, so we've been with Faction for since 2015. We've had their, I call it kind of co lo, plus data centers as a service model, since then, since 2015. And we've been with them doing different initiatives here and there over the years and disaster recovery as a service is now one of them. >> Great, Dave, you've maybe supply a little more color on that piece. >> Yeah, sure. Yeah, the use of VMware cloud with Site Recovery Manager. Again, from a technical standpoint, it was second to none as far as the flexibility it gave us to grow our workloads, to maintain them. Recovery point objective was what really sold me. It allowed us to get extremely granular from a business continuity perspective. And, yeah, I'm a fan. I just, I really like VMware cloud with SRM. It's proven to be top notch. >> Yeah, maybe follow up on that, you've been a VMware customer for a number of years, you're familiar with the tooling, and everything else like that. So, how long did a solution like this take to roll out? >> So, I will guess so, absolutely, there was a good portion from when we started, so you have to kind of put it in perspective, because we had a data center in Atlanta, Georgia, that was our data recovery site with action. So we had a two fold project, we were going into a contract year, a renewal year. And Faction pitched, the AWS VMware on AWS service. So we were decommissioning a data center at the same time as we were rolling it out. So I'll just give you the quick timeline. So November of 2018, was basically the contract negotiations. We finalized everything kind of in February of 2019. As far as kicking off the call on how we are going to actually do the project. Work began around April of 2019. Faction went ahead and set up the AWS DDC environment in early May. Faction builds out the environment for the rest of May. June, we did some non disruptive load testing on the environment in AWS. We set up the replication recovery group build out throughout the summer of 2019. And then we had a full sign off in September 17th actually 2019 so I'll just kind of highlight though, in that process, that it took roughly about four months to do the full build out testing and the Atlanta data center decommissioning. >> Okay, and PJ after having done this, we've now got DR as a Service, what are the hero numbers? Have you reduced their cost savings loannes, How do you report up? The success or result of what you've done so far? >> Yeah, so speaking to that, so when we did the contract negotiation, in November of 2018, one of the things we realized when we were pitching the cloud disaster recovery as a service model, we saw roughly about a 20% annual savings in moving to this cloud service. So, a breakdown of what kind of the savings is it's pretty much in Atlanta we have some resource costs because we're running basically on a pillow type environment with with Baxter. and then we had a circuitry call, so we had a point to point line that would run out to, actually to New Jersey and then down to Atlanta. So we that cost as well. So we saved basically, we ripped out the point circuit And we got we offloaded some resource costs. So, like I said about a roughly about a 20% cost savings. >> Alright, so that that's some of the hard figures. Dave, bring us inside a little bit operationally, obviously, there's got to be a little bit of changes to how you manage things, automation is, has been hot for years, but even more so when you talk about cloud environments. So, how is this deployment, changed what the workers are doing and beyond that? >> Well, it's it's simplified things quite a bit, just by the partnership with Faction and in conjunction with VMware cloud for our disaster recovery solution, It's offered many benefits. For one, we had a primary engineer who left the company, we found some benefits to not having to fill that staff resource, so that that was also a positive from a money aspect. But as far as the day to day functioning where we go about doing things up, it really took things off my plate, off the rest of the teams plate And just really, really gave us a peace of mind as it pertains to our, our infrastructure and our data being secured. >> All right, well, I want to give you both the final word. What learnings do you have out of this? Any best practices you'd share? Or there's also some updates coming, taking VMware being able to take advantage of the latest bare metal offering from Amazon? I'll let you choose maybe BJ, we'll start with you and wrap with you Dave as to that those final words that you would share with your peers >> Yeah, I'll certainly start it off. I mean, coming from my perspective as kind of the manager of the team here, our goal as a company, our goal as an IT shop, our goal as an operations team, is to ensure the company's technology needs, will be met after, in the event of a disaster. And that is the key. You want to protect itself, you want to protect the data, you want to protect the customers. So, in the case of the cloud for us, is maintaining business continuity while reducing physical footprint and keeping the IT operations lean, like I had stated before. And one of the most important things and this is not just about disaster recovery, but establishing good partnerships with vendors, is absolutely imperative. Because I don't care how big your shop is, and again, we're on the small side, obviously, but you can't you can't do it alone. So you need really good strong partnerships and good relationships with them. >> And I would say, make sure you are Identify your critical business workloads. Know your environment, absolutely. It's imperative. Get it, you have to plan efficiently. And by all means, test, test test test, you can't test the solution enough. So that's really about all I have. >> All right, Well, David, BJ, thank you so much for joining us appreciate you sharing your your journey along and wish you the best of luck with the solution going forward. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> And thank you for joining us for this update VMware cloud on AWS, be sure to check out the cube.net for all the rest of the coverage we have both in the VMware and AWS ecosystems. I'm Stu Miniman And thank you as always for watching the cube. (upbeat music)

>>Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the cube covering Microsoft ignite brought to you by Cohesity. >>Good afternoon everyone and welcome back to the cubes live coverage of Microsoft ignite. We are wrapping up three days of wall to wall coverage. Back to back interviews. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, alongside my cohost Stu Miniman. We have saved the best for last. We have BJ Jenkins, president and CEO of Barracuda networks. Thank you so much for coming on the cube. Feel a lot of pressure on internet. It's going to be great. Why don't you start by Barracuda. I think of that heartsong tell our viewers a little bit about, about your business, what you do. >>Yeah. Um, Barracuda is a company focused in the security industry, primarily on email security and network and application security. Uh, we have over 220,000 customers, uh, since we were founded a little over 15 years ago. And um, you know, we have a passion for making our customers secure and safe and being able to run their business. And we're a great partner in Microsoft, so, uh, they really help us drive our business. >>Yeah. So, so much to catch up, PJ, since it's been many years since you've been on the program, you were new in the role, but let's start with that Microsoft relationship here. We've been spending all week talking through all of the various environments. Talk about a little bit about your joint customers, the relationship and what's happening there. >>Yeah. I joined Barracuda seven years ago. Yesterday was my anniversary. And um, when I came into Barracuda, it was primarily at the time focused on a kind of small and midsize businesses. And most of those businesses ran Microsoft exchange or ran some form of Microsoft applications. And really that was the start of our partnership, realizing how important Microsoft was and it's grown. We were the first, uh, security company to put our firewalls in Azure. And that was over five years ago. And I think being first with a partner like Microsoft who is really at that point trying to catch up with Amazon and you know, Satya was, we're starting to drive the business in that direction. Uh, it gave us a unique vantage point in the partnership and it's grown from there. We were, uh, the Azure partner the year in 2016, uh, across their business. Um, we do joint development with them. We do joint go to market activities. And when you look around and you see 30,000 customers here, it's a, it's a good, good place to focus for a company like ourselves. >>Yeah. Well the, the, the changes in Microsoft business has had a ripple effect in the ecosystem, not only the launch of Azure, but I mean a big push office three 65 you talk about there's gotta be a difference between I'm rolling out exchange servers and well, it's all in the cloud. We know that customers still need to think sick as strong about security when they go to SAS Deere. If your customers figured that out yet. >>Yeah. I think, um, the trends that played out on prom play out in the cloud, um, how am I gonna secure my applications? How am I going to secure my data, my network? Um, and then the individuals that are using that cause at the end of the day, the individuals tend to be the weakest link in the security chain. And, um, you know, Mike, what I like is Microsoft has done a really good job improving their security posture, the base level that they provide to their customers every single day improves. And our job is to innovate on top of that and make them even safer. And, um, Microsoft's position in the industry too has been one where they want to be a ecosystem. They want to partner with third parties to help their customers move from on prem into Azure. And they know they're not gonna be able to do it on their own. >>So they've upped their game. We've got to up our game and we do it jointly, which is the nice thing. I, I joke with people. When I was at EMC and I used to go to Redmond, I'd go with battle armor on because there was not gonna be a fun meeting, uh, who's going to be, how Microsoft was going to hurt our business. And now I go to Redmond and you're embraced as a partner. They want to understand what customers and partners are thinking. They jointly plan with you. It's a completely different tone and tenor, which has been nice for us. >>So it is a scary world out there. And as we know that the threat environment is changing, hackers are becoming more sophisticated. I wonder if you could just set the scene for our viewers and just talk about security challenges in general and then we'll get into the specifics of the new solutions that you've announced here. >>Yeah, it's, threats come from everywhere and I think it's hard to boil it down and make it simple at times. But one of the stories I tell, uh, investors and customers about how fast the world is changing, uh, when I came on board, CEO's are obviously targets for hackers and the types of phishing mails I would get at that point. Um, and they would be very obvious. I've gone by BJ my entire life. On the website it says William Jenkins. And so the phishing emails would come in and say, you know, today fog, no, Hey, can you wire money here, William? Right. And so there was just base level intelligence. Nowadays they use LinkedIn, they use fee, they create social graphs. They study your communication forms, they look, they know how you're organized and they target the people. It will have, I always signed my emails past comma, BJ, the best fishing males have that in there. >>They've discovered that they've incorporated that they, so the, just the level of intelligence, the sophistication of what hackers do today, uh, has exponentially changed. And, you know, we're fortunate you can, we have more computing power. We have more artificial intelligence that we can apply to stop them. But the game just keeps getting escalated. And it's a, it's why the security industry has been strong. It's why there's so many companies out there. We've got to keep getting better. Um, but it's, it's a scary world. It's, it's, you know, you can never, never rest and never think you're ahead. You always gotta keep attacking it. >>So BJ, you had a number of announcements. Barracuda did, not nearly as many as Microsoft did, but give us the highlights if you would. >>Yeah. Um, so a number number of things announced here. Uh, first we're part of, uh, Misa, the Microsoft intelligence security association. So we're proud, proud to be a part of that. At launch. Um, we announced, uh, the cloud application platform security platform and the big announcement for us around that was our launch of as a service, uh, that's run on Azure. And, uh, we've always had a strong application approach. We've got integrated, um, detection, DDoSs uh, the O OS top 20 are all in Kurt corporate into our platform. What we've done is really leveraged Microsoft scale to run a very easy, simple to deploy a web application security platform, uh, that takes advantage of Microsoft scale and resiliency and brings that to our customers. Uh, we did a study, you know, only 10% of the websites in the world today are protected. So 90% of the web sites and web applications in the world today run on protected. >>We think this is a great way to go out and, um, help protect more of those. And then finally, um, you know, we announced Microsoft announced their V land solution and we have done joint development with them. We'll continue to innovate here, but we announced obviously our solution that we'll run, uh, with Microsoft's B when we're the only ones who can provide a customer really with multiple lengths run on Microsoft backbone, they can really run their data center. Now the corporate data center out of Azure, uh, we give them traffic prioritization, fail over resiliency that customers need when they're making those types of decisions. So there was more than that, but that was a lot of good stuff for us. We're excited about it. >>What does the recent announcement that Microsoft has won the Jetta contract, does that have any impact on Barracuda's business? Is that, >>well, I think anytime Microsoft wins business, it's a good thing because we're partnering with them. That contract is so big and, uh, has a lot of different elements and, and certainly security is a part of it. So we think there's aspects where we can play. I did hear, I think, um, Oracle was suing and I think AWS, so this may have a lot of legs before it becomes real. But it, I, you know, I think it continues to show that customers want to utilize, um, the scale breadth and depth of solutions that the cloud companies are bringing. And, you know, we view that as opportunity because security is an important element to making that work for those customers. >>So PJ, one to put aside the Microsoft stuff for a second here, since last we talk barracudas gone private and the security industry feels like it just growing so fast. You know, every week we're getting approached by new startups, heavy investment and the like, give us a little bit about your position has a CIO and CEO in this space. Uh, and you know, the love, a little bit of a note. We know it happened a few years back now, but going private when so many companies have, >>yeah, they're, you know, obviously there's a lot of funded companies in the security market. You know, we were in, uh, we had been public for, for four years. Um, a company that's been around 15 years where we were a profitable security company to, we were unique. We weren't, uh, the high flyer growth, but we were growing, you know, kind of, uh, low double digits with profitability, but there were investments that needed to be made in the business. Uh, we were running our transaction system on code, the founder wrote. Um, so there were investments we really needed to make to go from, you know, the 400, 500 million Mark to 1 billion mark. And so going private with a partner like Thoma Bravo, um, who really understands this industry has allowed us to reset the strategy and focus on, uh, the highest growth areas for us, which are email and network and application security. >>Um, they've helped us, we've invested over 20 million in internal systems, um, modern systems, Salesforce, NetSuite, uh, that we think give us the foundational elements to scale to $1 billion. And, um, you know, they combine that with operational expertise that they bring in to help us get more customers to the 220,000. Uh, one of the other interesting things for us too is, um, well we have 220,000 customers. We have 50 of the fortune 100. We have 250 of the fortune 1000 and as the movement, as, as customers have move to cloud, our solutions have become more relevant for customers of scale. And so they've given us the backing really to make that transition into that. So I liked not having to go on public conference calls every quarter. That's been a really nice thing. Um, but they've been a great partner for us. So we've, I think what you can think of us as we focused on areas that we think are the highest priority to our customers. >>Yeah, PJ, it also, we talked about there's so many startups in this space out there. The profile security keeps getting raised. Pat Gelsinger, VMware, you know, pounding the table saying that security needs to do over the, he just purchased black Boston based company that was public. You know, I talked to my friends that had been deep in the security industry and they scoff a little bit about, you know, we've been doing this for a long time. Barracuda is a company that has been around for quite a number of years. How's the industry doing? What do we need to do better? And how do you look at that landscape? >>Yeah, I, you know, I love pats energy and vigor, but there's no silver bullet that's gonna solve every problem out there. I do think, uh, where the industry is getting better is one on sharing information. You can see alliances, associations that have been formed. Um, you know, even with the cloud providers, we're actively sharing information and sharing of that information. We'll make more robust solutions first. Um, second you're seeing vendors go more towards platform where they're offering a larger, so the, the quality of solutions are getting better. And I do think there's consolidation happening where there, there are going to be certain segments of the market where you don't need 15 solutions. You really need, you know, one not from a particular player. So I think you'll see more, uh, consolidation occur around that. And you know, certainly that's been a trend we've been on in terms of integrating our solutions, making them easier to deploy and use for the customers. And then, you know, I think the last part of this is regulation is really a, it's still behind, but it's finally catching up and there's an interest in it. And I think in partnership with the industry, we can get our customers in a better position, a better security posture. So, you know, I, um, there will be consolidation over over time. Uh, you know, I've seen a map, I think there's 3000 security companies in all different segments that won't last forever. And, uh, it'll get easier for customers over time, is my belief. >>So with regulation, do you want to work in partnership with regulators? I mean, how do you, to help them understand the industry first of all and understand the dangers and the risks? I mean, how do you see the future of regulation for this industry? >>First of all, there's a large education process for legislators in general. You have to look no further than when Mark Zuckerberg got questioned by Congress. And the questions he were getting asked were not the best questions. Um, but you do have people who understand this industry and you can look at regulations like GDPR. You know, California's coming out data privacy law now and they're never perfect, but they're good foundational elements to start. And they're helping customers, um, get more aware of what they have to do to be secure and they're helping us explain to customers the things you can do to be in a better security posture. And so there's a continuum around this. We're in the early days, I, there's still a lot of education that has to go on, but when you see, >>start getting passed, it's a good step in the right direction. And by my estimation, BJ, we did save the best for last. Thank you so much for coming on the cube. That was terrific. Sorry it took so long. I'm Rebecca and I first two minutes and that wraps up three days of coverage at Microsoft ignite at the cube. Thank you so much for tuning in and we will see you next time.

>> Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE! Covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019! Brought to you by Citrix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin here with Keith Townsend, two days, wall-to-wall coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Keith and I have been geeking out for two full days now, and speaking of geeking out, I think its going to continue because Christian Reilly is here, back on theCUBE, the vice president and CTO of Citrix. Christian, welcome back! >> Thank you so much, it's been a while. >> It has! >> It really has. >> Well, we hope to make it fun. We have had, like I said, such great conversations with your executives, customers, analysts, everybody is so excited about this obvious pivot that Citrix is making towards the general user. You know, the power users being that 1 percent, and what you guys started off yesterday showing, resonates with everybody. I get it. I want my work day to be far more productive. I want apps and actions brought to me, so I can actually get down to the business of what I was hired to do. And we also are hearing over and over again, how employee experience is now elevated to a c-suite imperative, that is so critical because it directly affects the customer experience. >> Yeah, it's super exciting, isn't it? You know, it's great to watch it all come to life, because, you know, we've been working on this for a number of years behind the scenes and, you know, it's just so great to see all the effort that goes in come out on the big stage. And your right, I mean, we've been very calculated about the approach here. We do a lot of research in trying to understand these problems and these challenges. And, you know, quite frankly, customers are looking for more innovation from Citrix, looking for better ways to work, and, you know, I think we've got a very privileged position in being so important in customer application delivery over the decades that Citrix has been around. And so the, you know, the move, even though it seems like it's a quantum leap, is actually a really natural thing for us to go do, because we've won the trust over three decades of being, you know, the vendor to deliver mission critical apps so this is just an extension of that, but it's, yeah, it's super exciting. >> Yeah, so we've talked about that for the past couple of days. Citrix is a verb within IT. You know, "I'm going to Citrix into the application," or, "Is that on Citrix?" Or, "Is it Citrixed yet?" It is, we commonly understand what it means to be Citrix. But that's something that you guys have built over 30 years, and I think what's really interesting, Dana Gardner, we had him on earlier, he said Citrix is much too modest, there should be a Citrix inside for so many SaaS offerings, so that end-users in end-users understand that the foundational technology for this SaaS service, whether it's some payroll software, or some other third party healthcare solution, is being brought to you. The underlying application didn't have to be rewritten because of Citrix. I think we're at another foundational moment now. What you guys announced yesterday was foundational. I tweeted out as David was talking, saying, "You know what? Citrix is going to be the future of work." Like you know what? We'll follow doing automation. Citrix can't possibly be the- be the future of work. And he announced it, but, I want to try and get you- get this in one answer, hopefully, because it's big, you've been working on this for years, it shows, it's natural for Citrix to say that they're going to go to the next step of integrating different applications because you've been there already. What's the foundational technology? As, you know, when Frame back in 1995 was the foundational technology for virtual applications, what's the foundational capability that you're giving businesses today, that we're going to look back 20 years from now and say, "Obviously, that was the innovation"? >> Yeah, so that's a great question, I think there's a of couple things really, you know, We talked about it in the keynote extensively yesterday about the analytics piece. So, I wouldn't say that analytics is the only thing, but certainly when you think about the way we lined up the analytics conversation around security performance and then productivity. So that's the foundational element, and we're going to look back at that in a few years time and realize that we were very privileged to be in the path of user transactions, and the more you're in the path, the more transactions you get. The more transactions you get, the more source data you get. The more source data you get, the more you can feed the machine learning model, and the more accurate you can be about delivering the context of the workspace, so I think that's super important. The next bit, of course, would be the acquisition that we made of the Sapho technology back in November of 2018. And I think, you know, what you see there in the micros and the micro work flows, is really that big shift from the version 1 of the workspace, which was still very much about the traditional applications, traditional desktops, and then bringing together web and SaaS applications, but we sort of always knew that there was a bigger play, which was really to try and, as PJ talked about yesterday, how do we take work and break it down into atomic units? So we don't think about just the application, we think about the why. Why do people use applications? What is it that they do? And if you think about how that plays out with analytics, the more intelligence that we gather, the more intelligent we make the workspace. So I think with a couple of things, we'll look back at the Sapho acquisition as a key technology piece, but we'll look back at analytics as maybe the thing that helped to be the flywheel to deliver that intelligence within the workspace environment itself. >> And the power that that intelligence has to deliver a personalized experience to each user is huge. If we look at the consumerization and the expectations that we all bring to our business lives we want things to be smart enough to serve up just what I'm looking for. To make my life easier, so that the intelligence and the analytics has huge implications on being able to help companies use their applications better. If I'm having to go in and learn sales floors and try to talk glamor and all these things that as a marketer, I don't need to do, but if I could have technology that's under the covers- under the bonnet, is evaluating that and going to learn, "this is all that she needs to do for her role," how much happier am I going to be? How much more productive am I going to be? It's game-changing. >> Yeah, absolutely, and I think that the most important thing to remember about the whole of the the strategy around analytics, is it's constantly learning, so it's not like we just do it once. And if you think about where that goes along the term, you know, we're talking about, obviously, gathering user transaction data that I talked about. That will help us to generate the most valuable micro applications. But then if you think about that a little bit further on, you know, how do we actually then begin to get analytics on the micros themselves, and even begin to free up more productivity. So there's a continuum here that we see. You know, automation, as you mentioned, will be critical, you know, and if you think about what's happening and the industry in general. You know, robotic process information has skyrocketed to the game as organizations look to kind of do exactly what we're talking about, which is to free up the very scarce human capital to work on things that really matter, not on these mundane tasks. And you know, we talked to lots of customers about this, you know, the notion of how much application do you really use, and you know, it's been quite common, and one of the foundation- I guess foundational components that we talked about of why we did what we did was, we looked at enterprise applications that we were delivering through our traditional technologies, and they were really complex for some things that were really actually quite simple. And of course the Pareto thing holds true there that the 80% of people only want to get something out and 20% of people put something in. So that was obviously a key decision point for us to move ahead with, with the intelligent workspace, the micros that you saw. The other thing that's really interesting that we don't really talk about so much is that from a security perspective as well, being able to deliver just a part of the application actually minimizes the entire sort of attack surface, if you like. Whether that's for, you know, nefarious employees internally, or for true people who want to come in or sort of hack into your systems. The less that we can expose generally, then I think that's better overall. So there's actually some other upsides that we don't necessarily talk about in the context of intelligence, but when we talk to CIOs and we talk to the people in the business who really are interested in these technologies and these solutions, then we tend to expand the conversation a little bit into some things that we don't necessarily talk about all the time. >> Yeah, it's surprising how many questions you guys have answered for me today. I was at SAP, sapphire a couple weeks ago, and they were talking about X data, O data, X data being experienced data, and this is the output of digital transformation, and I was having a really tough time wrapping my head around the concept of X data. And I think this is hopefully something you could further along the discussion. When I think of just the access that Citrix has to this raw data, maybe the only other company that has more user data, or more access to user data, would be Microsoft via Windows. But Citrix presents SAP, which 80% of the world's transactions run through, is presented via Citrix a good majority of the time. Your CRM solutions and cloud-based options and sales forces presented again, through Citrix, so you're collecting a ton of data, as customers, you know, say, "okay, what's the account balance out of SAP, let me put it into this CRM solution and sales force". You're capturing that x data. How do you make sense of it? I think is the question, this is where the AI comes in. From a person looking at the process, and they come to Citrix and say, "Christian, you guys have the X data. Help us understand how that X data translates into business productivity. How do I personalize the experience for a individual use?" >> Yeah, absolutely, so I'll give you an example, you know, CTOs like to have a vision, right? So we'll talk a little about the vision. So I'll give you a relatively straight- forward example. So, we tend to see used cases around reviews and approvals and those kinds of things, whether it's expense reports or PTO requests, all the things that we've typically shown in the keynotes and the various demos that we've done as we've grown the solution. So here is what we kind of think about, so let's say, for example, that you have an employee. That employee submits expense reports on a fairly frequent basis and they tend to submit them for under $500. You may get to the point where you say, "actually, why do I keep approving these, because my level of trust with the employee is high, the dollar values of the individual reports is relatively low". So why would the system not just handle that and automatically approve them, until something was an anomaly. So if one came in that was $750, $1000, then I would get an alert. So I think when you talk about the X data, absolutely. The interaction with the X data is really where we see the value from the Citrix perspective, because we can learn how you actually deal with those notifications and those actions. So if there's an example of a micro application which gives you an expense report from let's say SAP Concur, and you never actually open it, you just click the approve button, then is there a real reason for you to continue to see the opportunity to open it? Because, you know, as I've said, the level of trust is high, the dollar value is low, and I could get productivity back that way, by actually looking at it from a sort of, "why should I actually approve this in the traditional way? I'll let the system take care of it until there's something that exceeds the threshold that I've learned that you're comfortable with". >> What- oh, sorry Keith, I was going to say, on that front though, where are enterprise companies in terms of letting that control go to the intelligence in the system? I mean how many times have we all submitted expense reports and maybe some of us like me go to Starbucks twice on the same day, hey, it happens, and you get rejection because it's the exact same dollar amount, and it's wasting all these cycles. But where is the appetite and maybe the trust from some of those larger organizations that culturally say somebody in procurement or finance has to click on every single funding and evaluate every single line item? >> Yeah, so I think the, sort of the beauty of what we've built here, certainly with what you saw yesterday and what we've been talking about at the show here. We're not actually changing any existing business rules or business work flow and gen components, right? So I think that's a really interesting point for us to bring up and to make sure that everybody understands, you know, right now, in the version that we're talking about for release later this year, you know, we're actually honoring most of the business rules and the work flows that are in the system of records. So that could be, you know, the HR system, the finance system, all the ERP system or whatever. So you know, I think when audit perspective, then we're good from that perspective, because you know, when we actually submit things back into the system of record from the micro apps, we're doing it on behalf of the user. So the transactions are still valid as if they were coming from the native experience. So I think that's great that we don't mess with any of that, because I think the higher, you know, we kind of make the hurdles for people to adopt by, and then, you know, whether it's cultural or whether it's regulatory, that obviously, you know, there's a downside to that. So, I think that's a good sort of first pass for us. I would suspect that as we go through this a little bit later though, there's going to be some potentially interesting questions that come up about, certainly of highly regulated environments about, you know, the legality of a robot, or digital assistant, or some kind of, you know, ancillary system being able to submit and do things on your behalf. So, you know, that's- this is not a GDPR thing by the way, or anything of that nature, it's more a, you know, if something was to happen in the system that wasn't intended, who's responsible? Is it the robot or is it the individual that's allowed the robot to work on their behalf? So I think there will be some interesting questions that come up along those lines, but I think, you know, in the v1 we're honoring the business rules, we're honoring the business logic and the work flow. And so, you know, I'm expecting that most customers will look at this and say, "yeah, I kind of get it," and you know, it's more valuable than it is a problem. That's certainly the goal. >> So let's talk about scale of this new foundational capability. Like I can easily see this working inside of your existing set of VDI products. You have visibility into the analytic data, but at some point, you're going to have enough data that the VDI isn't needed to create these work flows and these solutions. I can see this actually freeing up desktops for some employees where the only reason why they ever needed a desktop because they had to go on to Concur or the time management solution. If I do 40 hours every week for 52 weeks, I don't need to log into a portal to do that. How tied to your existing set of products is this capability? Is this something that, from a total addressable market that you- whether it's a mobile app or mobile first app that you guys can ingest this type of capability into? >> Yeah, so you know, as you know well, Kieth, we've been talking about the death of the PC in the industry for a decade, right? And it's- the reality is that most customers have an application portfolio that's heavily reliant on Windows. Now, having said that, there are obviously cases- and we look at sort of, some of the, what we call the customer jobs to be done, okay? Which is a Harvard business thing that came from Clayton Christianson. And it's a really interesting way of making sure that the innovations that we bring are actually addressing things that customers need to get done within their own environments. So if you take a used case, let's say it was a field technician. So you're going out, you're going to fix a faulty gas meter, or you're going to go out and perform some kind of maintenance work. It's highly likely that you're going to use a mobile device. And so, what we showed yesterday with the mobile version of the intelligent experience, what we show with the work space assistant, absolutely. I see used cases where we can give them instant productivity. So you know to pull and to push data into the systems of record, where the underlying operating system on the mobile device is kind of academic. But there will certainly be used cases where VDI or physical Windows desktops will be around for a very long time. So I think the value that we have is making sure that all those user transactions go through the workspace one way or another, so that helps us with the analytics piece. But I think I'll look a little bit further out, you know, again, we showed some demos of it yesterday, in one of the CTO breakout sessions that we had. The real ultimate goal is to think about the work space overall as more of an experience that will evolve. It's not necessarily an app, an app is one way to consume it, but we want to build a platform that can consume and be consumed by other things. So whether that's Microsoft teams that we showed yesterday, whether that becomes slack, Facebook for work, or whether it's an integrated voice assistant within, you know, an Apple device, or a Microsoft device, or a Google device, or a Samsung device. See, the value of that from a choice perspective is that we really then don't demand what the customers use, and ultimately their end use. So I think when we get a little bit further along in the thinking on the platform itself, it opens up endless possibilities to interact with the information you need. And it's not predicated upon any operating system because hopefully we can be ubiquitous. >> So, Citrix has over 400,000 customers worldwide. I think I read 98-99% of the Fortune 500, the Fortune 100, intelligence experience goes generally available later on this year, there's some customers in beta. What are you looking forward to as 2019 continues, coming off the high that is Citrix Synergy 2019? >> Well, you know, so like I said at the start here, I've been working on this thing with, frankly, the brilliant team we have here at Citrix for just about three years, so I wouldn't say it was quite stealth, but we've gone through these kind of programmatic changes internally. I'm looking for- I'm most looking forward to when customers understand the power of what we're going to give them with the builder. So the builder, again, is something we showed yesterday, but, you know, you think about the approach that we have is that we're going to, obviously, help customers to get productive and to get going with the intelligent experience by creating these out with the box micro apps and micro work flows for many of the most popular SaaS applications. The real big thing I'm looking forward to is when people can actually take the builder that we've developed and give it to their line of business people and say, "hey, you can create as many micro apps as you think are necessary within the constructs of your business process to enable your people". So that, to me, is kind of like, going to be the ultimate wow, when people say, "actually, I can give this to a person who is capable of creating a Pivot Table in Microsoft Excel," as an example. And they can then actually use the technologies that we provide to create the micros and micro work flows for their own part of the business without the help of traditional development. I think that's going to be huge and I can't wait until we've got, you know, the first examples of people who have said, "hey, you've made my life easier, I can't work without Citrix". >> While businesses can be built on that, the new Excel uh, Citrix builder, the new Excel. >> I hope so, I hope so. >> Well, we'll all be excited to- and be watching with close eyes. Christian, thank you for joining Kieth and me on theCUBE, but Synergy 2019! >> Thank you so much. >> Our pleasure. For Kieth Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching! (electronic music)

(upbeat digital music) >> Narrator: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy, Atlanta, 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE, our coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019, day one, continues. Lisa Martin here with Keith Townsend, in Atlanta, Georgia, and we're pleased to welcome the SVP of Sales and Services from Citrix APJ, Colin Brookes. Colin, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, Lisa, great to be here. >> So Keith and I, excited to have you here, as well. This has been a really exciting start to our day. >> Colin: Yes. The keynote this morning kicked off with David, PJ was there, Microsoft was there, there were some customers featured. Employee experience is so critical to a business's digital transformation, but we often, and theCUBE covers tech innovation all over the world, we don't hear it as a leading edge for companies who really can't transform digitally and be competitive, and identify new products and new services, if the employees don't have access to the apps they need, whether they're SaaS, mobile, web. Talk to us about employee experience, and particularly as it relates to customers down in APJ, as a critical factor in businesses success. >> Yeah sure, it's a great question, and the employee experience is just as you described, it's almost overwhelming the amount of technology that's thrown at people. Which initially is all there to try and make life easier, but it's just adding on top of existing applications and existing systems, and it isn't really making life easier. So what we found is that the employee experience is actually getting more and more frustrating, which means less productivity, which doesn't help the bottom line and the production of the organization, obviously. So our solutions are all around trying to enhance that employee experience, making sure that people have got absolute choice of anything they need, such as the applications that you mentioned on any device that they're using, and also, wherever they happen to be. So it's normally around the future of work, when we're talking about employee experience. And we're trying to make sure that no matter where you are, not just the office which is the traditional workplace of the past, if you're at home, if you're in the library, if you're on a plane, in the car, you should be able to work exactly the same way. And those are the types of solutions that we're bringing to market, to make just that thing happen. >> So Colin, talk to us about, your team is the tip of the spear. They are the first to hear the customer's success stories, they are the first to hear the frustrations. We're in an environment that Citrix is trying to solve a $7,000,000,000,000 challenge of becoming more efficient. IT is a huge part of that. Your frontline, your Sales Engineers, your AEs are having these kind of conversations. Talk to us about their experience of moving the conversation beyond IT into these new areas that Citrix is entering. >> Yeah, again, another great, great question, and that's one of the pitfalls that we normally fall into talking about products all of the time rather than the outcome, which is what we're trying to help our customers with. So perhaps, if I give you an example of some of the places that I travel around in APJ. So, I look after the APJ region, Asia, Pacific, and Japan. It's a huge, vast geography, with multiple cultures, obviously, very heterogenous. An example, say, for Japan, where I was in Japan last week, the Olympics are coming there in 2020. People who have seen Japan, or been to Japan, you'll know about the huge commute that people have to do. There's millions of people in Tokyo, for example, and their business day is long anyway, but when you add on to that one to two hours commute in the morning, and then the same at the end of the day, the normal everyday stressors are just magnified exponentially. And then with the Olympics coming along, you can imagine an extra few hundred thousand, or an extra couple of million people being in Tokyo, that commute is just going to get worse. So the government have actually launched something, I think it was actually in 2017, whereby we're trying to enable employees to work more remotely, which might not sound too new, but it's amazing how many organizations still feel the employees need to be in the office to work. So we're helping them to make sure that people can work just as efficiently at home as they can in the office. And it doesn't just have to be at home. We were talking earlier, Lisa, that traditional office used to be a place, and work, a place you went to, whereas now it can be at home, in the library, traveling in the car. It can be on the plane on the way to countries. I'm in a plane most of the time, every other week at least, but I'm still able and lucky enough to work extremely productively no matter where I am, and on any device. So that's the other thing that we're trying to bring to our customers. it's the ability to have access to any application that we want, so we have complete choice, on any device that we want. So whether I'm on my phone, whether I'm on my tablet, or I'm on my iPad, it should look and feel the same, and I should be able to get the same types of productivity levels. And now you can, with the solutions that we provide. So, in answer to you question, our customers are trying to find solutions to enable their employees to feel they have the best possible experience, and stay productive anywhere they are in the world. >> Well, and really, Citrix is taking it farther than that. It isn't just delivering the same experience on mobile versus desktop, versus tablet, and ensuring that you can do your job, Colin, from anywhere in the world in an airline seat, whatnot. It's also making that experience, the productivity apps, so much more connected. And the video example that David Henshall showed this morning, I thought, was fantastic. >> Colin: Right, wasn't it, yeah? >> It was showing a Senior Marketing Manager, whose a Marketing Manager, whose responsible for Rockstar marketing campaigns, who might be a people manager, and she logs in and goes to check email, and then all these other things pop up over the course of a couple of minutes, and she's in and out of seven to 10 apps, not connected. >> Colin: Exactly. >> Tell our audience a little bit more about how Citrix Workspace Intelligent Experience is really transforming that experience, allowing those workers to get back to their daily responsibilities. >> You need to come in work in APJ, that was perfect. (laughing) >> Lisa: Okay! (chuckling) >> I've got job just for you. Yeah, so, the day to day activities that we all go through, the lady in the video was the Head of Marketing, I believe it was, but most of her day is spent being distracted. I think the statistics that David gave was that something like 85% of the workforce are distracted throughout the day. You flip that around, that means only 15% or so are actually being productive. It's frightening, isn't it? So the examples that you saw were her signing some simple expenses, but that isn't as simple as it sounds. She needs to be almost an expert in the application that signs off the expenses. What we do with the Intelligent Workspace from Citrix is we pick out the bit's that actually she only every really needs to use, which are probably a small percentage, one, two, three, maybe five percent of the full, wonderful application that that expense report may be, she doesn't need to use all of that. so what we do with the Intelligent Workspace is we just bring forward onto her workspace the buttons that she needs, a summary of the expense, an accept or an approve, or a reject, and she can carry on straight away. And what you saw was about a 10 minute session within an application to approve an expense, reduced to less that 30 seconds. When you do that across the whole day, I think the numbers that David gave was our ambition, is to probably give people one day back of their week. That's 20%, that's a huge amount that we'll be able to find. Almost thinking of it like a time machine. We're going to give you some of your time back to actually be productive and do the things that you've been employed to do. She'd been employed to be creative in marketing, and now she can. >> So, you gave us the use case of the remote worker in Japan, great use case, but APJ, huge region. >> Colin: Yes. >> And you're not IT, and IT Vanders are not the only ones that have APJ regions, so talk to us about the importance of the relationship with Ajour and Google. David shared one stat, he said we're entering the yoda bite, which was a new word for even me... >> Lisa: Yeah! >> I'm a geek, the yoda bite era, and as data sets grow and the need to perform analysis against that data, but yet, we're in a very dispersed region. >> Colin: Sure. >> Keith: How important is the relationships with Microsoft and Google to enable that type of analysis of data? >> Yeah, sure. So look, the relationship with all of our partners is extremely important, especially within the APJ region. As you mention, it's such a vast geography, and I think people that have not actually lived in the APJ region just don't realize how vast it is. I'm often asked if I can go from where I am, where I'm based in Singapore, to nip over to Japan or down to Sydney to go and sort out some problems. >> Keith: It's only an eight hour flight. >> It's 10, 12 hours, but it's also a different time zone, and you know, then you talk back to the UK or the States, you lose a day with the time zone there. So, I mean, I love it, don't get me wrong, but it is a vast, and it's not just the geography, it's such a diverse culture area, as well. So everybody behaves slightly differently. Coming back to your Microsoft and Google, we're not a database company, we're not a data center organization, our solutions are going to provide these wonderful experiences for people. But we need the help and support, and we're very lucky to have it of the likes of the Microsoft, and the Google, and all of our other partners that have this infrastructure in place, and that effectively, shrink that geography for us, does that make sense? >> It does. >> So let's dig into the Citrix Workspace Intelligent Experience a little bit further, 'cause you talked about something that really struck me, saying with this video example that which David shared, and we were both talking about it here. So for our audience, it was this great video of a Marketing Manager's daily activities, I kind of mentioned on it a minute ago, but you mentioned that with Intelligent Experience, you're going to surface. Say, I'm a marketing person... >> Colin: Yep. >> And I need to get into Sales Force, 'cause like in this video, my boss has asked me the status of a deal that maybe marketing influenced, and I don't want to have to know a ton about Sales Force. What, how is Citrix using AI and data to evaluate per user what components of each of those applications should be shown to say, me, that Marketing Manager? >> Yeah, I think he gave the great example of the photocopier, didn't he? Whereby you walk up to these machines these days and they've a hundred different buttons on them. (laughs) >> Yes. >> And we basically just want to take a photocopy, and they make it simply one large, green button, and that's probably the one that we always use. It's the one percent of the functionality on the photocopier, and it's the same with the applications. That you and I are not super users, but these applications are wonderful applications, but they're built for the super user a lot of the times, with every part of the functionality within them, which makes it quite complicated for you and I to use when we want very simple tasks. So the Artificial Intelligence of the machine learning is used to, each time we go into one of the applications, to figure out what do we do on a day to day basis, what's normally the thing that we're trying to process? And the more and more that we do that, the smarter and smarter the application becomes. And it also, instead of just guiding us along the way, it's almost starting to think for us, and put the things in front of us that we only need for that day, which is great. So rather than me having to now look at my to do list, it's there for me already in the the Intelligent Workspace, and I can just go through things, skim across the applications where I need to be without going deep, four, five, six different layers, and I'm wasting time on things that I'm not really being paid to do. So, that's how it works. The more I go in, the more it learns about me and my behaviors, and if I go in one particular application, it probably means that I'm also going to be looking at another application that's connected, moving forward, and that's the sort of intelligence that we've built into the system. >> So going from that marketing person being reactive or staring at the copier, that brought back some memories today, I'm like, whoa, I haven't seen one of those in a while, but being reactive, to proactive, to eventually predictive. >> Absolutely, that's a great way of putting it. You definitely need to come to APJ. (laughs) >> Okay! >> Need to start writing these sound bites down. Yeah, that's exactly it, and not only, like, she's using the example of the lady, she's feeling less stressed, she's able to have more time being creative, which is what she's been employed for. So this is what turns 'round into the employee experience, which equates to better productivity, which is the bottom line for the organizations. And this is what it's all about at the end of the day. The organizations want to be more efficient, and they want to be more productive, and they want to make more profit. And we're enabling them to do that via enabling the user experience to be the absolute best that it can possibly be, whilst at the same time, making sure that everything is extremely secure. (crosstalk) >> Oh, sorry, Keith, go ahead. >> I want to get into a question around culture when it comes to APJ. You know, we have, to your point, very different cultures. There's Japan, whose embracing the concept of robots, so we've seen, like, software robots in different industries, and Japan embracing that idea of automating and making these tasks simpler. But yet, culturally, Australia's very different. There's maybe a little bit more hesitation to embrace robotics. How is your Sales Force bringing along the two different cultures so that, you know, you can have full experiences from one region, and bring that to, bring the best of class to...? >> Yeah, that's another great question. I think we have 57 different nationalities in our Australia and New Zealand team. The culture within Australia is multinational, as well, because of that. So although it's Australia, it's not just Australians that are there, and you find that across the whole of APJ, every office that I happen to work into has got a multitude of different nationalities. A bit less so in Japan and South Korea, but all of the others are very very mixed. So it helps that you're bringing people from different parts of the organization, even from the States or from the Mir, into the APJ region, so that they can cross culture and learn from other people. But it is one of the fascinating things of living in APJ that they're diverse cultures, and one of the reasons why I choose to live down in that part of the world. I have to act, sometimes, as the buffer between the North American mentality of everything's the same, and everybody speaks the same language, and why can they do it this way? And how I then have to translate that for the boys and girls in Japan, and the same in Australia and New Zealand. So it's a thing that's you're learning about every single day, and every single year. It is a fascinating place to live, fascinating place to live. >> Well, I imagine that really can be used as an internal engine for Citrix in the APJ region, because you mention, what, 57 nationalities in two countries alone represented on your team? About leveraging that as an opportunity for even maybe the rest of Citrix and your partners, too, to understand the nuances, why it's important to understand cultural differences as they relate to how technology is used, different security and compliance regulations. It's got to be an advantage. >> It is an advantage, and you also find that depending on the country that you're working, when they're at different stages of their journey, so moving to the cloud, for instance, it's as people have been moving to the cloud for many, many years, but you'll be amazed how many of the largest organizations in the world are still on that journey. And it's not a journey of you're suddenly have an unpremixed application on a Friday, and now we're in the cloud on a Monday, it just carries on going. I think there was a statistic that David mentioned this morning, that something like 95% of the applications that we currently have today are still going to be here in four or five years, plus all of the new applications that we're building every single day. So it is an advantage to be in such a melting pot of cultures and different personalities, you're absolutely right. >> And I'm sure having a boy from Manchester is a facilitator of all of that, right? >> There you go, there you go, I slot straight in. I think I'm the 58th nationality to go in there from Manchester. (laughs) >> There you go. Well, Colin, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE at Synergy. We're excited to hear about what you guys are doing down in APJ, and excited to hear more of what's to come from Synergy 2019. >> Thank you so much. >> We appreciate it. So, for Keith Townsend, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching us on theCUBE live, day one of our two day coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering Citrix Synergy Atlanta 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Keith Townsend, the CTO Advisor. Keith, it's so great to see you. >> Lisa, good to be on the show with you again. >> So we're going to geek out the next two days. >> Oh isn't it so good? >> We've been geeking out already just coming from the keynote. This is ... >> Yeah This is, it was really good there was meat, there was announcements, there was news, partnerships. Citrix is a 30 year old company, who's done a lot in the last 12/18 months, to transform. From rebranding, product names, et cetera, lots of launches and announcements. And something that really peaked my interest as a marketer this morning, is hearing the influence of consumerization. Them talking about leveraging Citrix Workspace, and the things that they have done to beef it up which we'll talk about, to deliver a stellar employee experience, to delight the users. And those are words that we hear often in the marketing space, like customer lifetime value, they talked about the employee lifetime value because employee attraction, talent attraction and retention, is critical for every business. Really meaty stuff. What was some of your take on some of the announcements on Workspace? >> So I was really interested because as I'm coming off of SAP SAPPHIRE, where I'm accustomed to hearing terms like customer experience, employee experience, you know, the kind of X-data versus O-data conversation. We heard a lot of that here today. And it's weird coming from an infrastructure company. Citrix in the past I like to put into a box, it's about VDI, application virtualization and networking, and that's pretty much the conversation, it stayed at the IT infrastructure leader perspective. Today we heard a lot that broke out of that, and it was going into the C-Suite and delivering not just technology results, but business results. There was a lot about making transformation real. >> You're right it was about making it real, and if you think at the end of the day, I think I heard a stat the other day, that by 2020, which is literally around the corner, 50% of workers are going to be remote. You and I are great examples of that, we're on the road all the time, we have multiple devices we need to have connectivity that ... to all the apps, SAS apps, mobile apps, web, that allow us to be productive from wherever we are, done in a way that our employers, are confident there is security behind this. But delivering that exceptional employee experience is absolutely business critical. They gave some stats today about the trillions of dollars that are spent, or rather work that's lost, with employees that have so many apps each day that they're working with that really distract from their actual day to day function. >> Yeah I think one of the stats that they gave from an ambitious perspective, they want to give one day back to every employee, 20% of their time, back, I think the stat you referred to some seven trillion dollars of productivity is lost from just hunting and pecking inside of applications. Both of us work remotely, you work from your tablet, I work from a tablet or my phone a lot. Because I just, you know, it's low power to, it lasts the day, but yeah I still need to edit video, I need to sign invoices, I need to create statements that worked. I need to be just as creative on the road as I am at home. It helps me to compete against larger competitors, but more importantly, offer a different customer experience and this is what Citrix was talking about today, was more than just VDIs, about picking up any device asking basic logical questions like what is the status of the latest deal, the big deal, and getting that status from Salesforce without again hunting and pecking, from whatever device you're on. >> Which is critical, especially to have that seamless experience going from desktop to mobile. I think they also said ... there was a lot of stats this morning, which I really geek out on. But that the average person is using seven to 10 apps a day and I loved the video that they showed this morning that really brought that to life. Looking at a senior marketing manager for some enterprise company, who, as she starts her day, there's 10 minutes that goes by which is lie, oh, I forgot I got to log into Workday and request my PTO, oh, one of my employees needs me to approve an expense report, and oh, my boss wants to know about this big deal that's closed. And the time that is spent logging into different applications is really as you mentioned that number seven trillion dollars lost, what they're doing with Citrix, with the intelligent, the workspace intelligence experience is bringing all of that to the end user. So it's much more an activities focus rather than an app focus experience. And I loved what you said that they're very ambitiously aiming to give each person back one day a week, yes please. I will take that. In any organization. >> So I was at a government conference a few weeks ago and they talked very much about this CFO of GSA presented to a crowd of fellow government workers, and they were talking about eliminating waste, they were talking about automating processes, taking the PDF, taking a document and scanning it into a system, and then kicking off a real workflow. And this is done, the industry's been working on this problem for the past 10 years, it's called RPA, Robotic Process Automation. One of Citrix's partners and I guess now competitors in that space just received $560,000,000 in funding, in a single round, to enable artificial intelligence to do this. What I thought was interesting, is that Citrix didn't use the term bots, I think other than one time ... >> Lisa: That's right. ... on the stage. But these are essentially bots, that take redundant processes, automates them, to ultimately add value. I'm anxious to dive in and talk about how Citrix is taking stuff like, they mentioned Mainframe, AS/400 applications, integrating that in Salesforce without having this huge multi-million dollar project to re-write these core business applications and processes. So, you know it's a really exciting time in the industry Citrix has really stepped up in saying, you know what, we won't settle for just having a good business, and this application virtualization and network space, we're going to go all in. >> So one of the things I saw in Twitter this morning, is you and I are both tweeting during the keynote, which we just came from is you talked about PRA right away on Twitter and it's something that you heard instinctively with what they were saying. What are your thoughts as to why RPA as a term wasn't discussed? Did you think it's the type of audience that's here? Is it just not a term that resonates as well as AI and machine learning, which are buzz words at every event we go to? >> And I think a good portion of that is a mix. We're at a conference that's very IT-centric. Citrix is a you know, one of the core IT infrastructure vendors. So when you throw out a term like Robotic Process Automation you constantly, you instantly think, you know, gain of productivity from me or your level maybe, but from an IT infrastructure practitioner perspective, Robotic Processing Automation has a resonance with being equal to eliminating jobs. If, you know, you're going to automate the integration between VMware VSphere and Citrix desktop virtualization and that administration piece, which these solutions definitely can do that, what's left for me to do the work on. If you're going to automate the provisioning of DNS and IP addressing and all these mundane tasks that administrators probably spend 50-60% of their day doing, you know what, that's threatening. To say that you know what, we're going to give you the same tools that we give to make the workspace available today from an application perspective and to tackle that from the concept of this is just extending that ideal and you're a what, your job and what you do today to adding true business value, I think it was smart on their part to kind of avoid the bot conversation. >> Okay, I'm glad that you shared that insight, that makes perfect sense. So, PJ Hough was up there, the Chief Product Officer, who's going to be on tomorrow, talking about what Citrix is doing to distill apps and make this experience much more personalized. And of course he was joined on stage with a big Microsoft announcement today. I think I've been to so many shows this year I've lost count but I think Satya Nadella has either been on stage, he was at Dell Technologies World with Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger, or in a video like he was today. So the partnership with Microsoft expanding here a little bit of a teaser at Microsoft Ignite a couple of months ago. Gimme your thoughts on what Microsoft, I should say what Citrix is doing to facilitate their users being much more proficient at using Microsoft Team, which I believe the gentleman from Microsoft said there's over 300,000 active users already. Fastest growing product in Microsoft's history. >> So when you talk about collaboration, you can't collaborate without these tools, whether Teams, Slack, whatever, it's become an integral part of how we communicate, how we interact, I know a lot of friends that I have are moving from Slack to Teams, just because of the integration with Office365 they can collaborate around, and I think here on theCUBE we talk about data as being the key. You have to talk about data. One of the things that was prepared to go kind of head on with Citrix today, and tomorrow about, was about data. You know it's great to present applications, but how are you helping to help users collaborate and use and access data and the combination of RPA with the intelligent experi- intelligent, it's going to take us some time to used to this ... >> I keep wanting to say enterprise. >> Yeah enterprise >> Intelligent experience >> Experience product, with Teams, with the Azure announcement, integration with Azure and full support of the Citrix platform inside Azure will just make the employee experience at least potentially seamless, a lot more seamless, I'm super excited about, you can't tell in my voice, I haven't gotten excited about Citrix in a long time. And this is the first time they've had theCUBE at Synergy since 2011, I think it was a great time to reignite that partnership, and this coverage is going to be an interesting two days. >> It is. So we talked about digital workspace, the other two areas of Citrix's business that you touched on a little bit, security and analytics. Let's talk about the security piece first as it relates to Microsoft Teams and Azure. SD-WAN is becoming more and more absolutely critical to ensure that because as people we are the number one threat vector in any organization. Not that we're all bad actors. >> Keith: Right. >> But because we need to get things done, as frictionless or seamless, as you said, as possible, and efficiently as possible. What did you hear today with respect to security, that might really make some of those IT folks take notice? >> Well, we want to work from any device. Like, I want to be able to, ideally if I say, you know what, I want to pick up a new Surface tablet, when I go to Atlanta I don't want to pack my iPad. I want to be able to pick that up, and work. If I go to a kiosk, I want to be able to, even if it's running Windows XP, I want to be able to do my work, I want to be able to do my work from any device. This is a nightmare for system administrators to say how do I control security, while making the experience frictionless? Those two things don't seem to go together. So Citrix, whether it's with this new announcement with Microsoft with Teams, it's traditional applications around SD-WAN, enabling access from remote locations, and Citrix is kind ... this is their bread and butter, offering remote access to applications securely and fast, this is you know, Citrix is starting to formulate a really great end to end story about making applications, data and more importantly, business answers and capability available anywhere securely, so it's a great story. >> It really is. So if you're excited, you already know how excited I am. I think we're going to have a fantastic day today, and tomorrow. We've got a whole bunch of the C-Suite from Citrix on, we're also going to be talking with some partners and customers, and interestingly as a marketer this peaked my interest as well, they have the innovation awards. There are three finalists, we will be talking with all three over the next two days, and this is a customer awards program, that anybody can vote on. So I haven't seen that before, so I'm excited to understand how Citrix is enabling them to have this great employee experience which is more and more critical as the shortages and the gaps are becoming more and more prevalence. And also, how these customers are reacting to just some of the news announced today, with Microsoft, the intelligent enterprise, and how they see their employees, and attracting and retaining top talent as actually really mission critical. So we're going to have fun Keith. >> I agree. >> All right, you're watching Keith Townsend and Lisa Martin live from theCUBE, we are on the show floor at Citrix Synergy 2019 from Atlanta, Georgia. Stick around, Keith and I will be right back with our first guest after a short break. (upbeat electronic music)