(soft electronic music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation as part of the AWS Startup Showcase, season three, episode one, featuring Astronomer. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm in the CUBE's Palo Alto Studios, and today excited to be joined by a couple of guests, a couple of co-founders from Astronomer. Viraj Parekh is with us, as is Paola Peraza-Calderon. Thanks guys so much for joining us. Excited to dig into Astronomer. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> Yeah, and we're going to be talking about the role of data orchestration. Paola, let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience that understanding, that context about Astronomer and what it is that you guys do. >> Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. So, Astronomer is a, you know, we're a technology and software company for modern data orchestration, as you said, and we're the driving force behind Apache Airflow. The Open Source Workflow Management tool that's since been adopted by thousands and thousands of users, and we'll dig into this a little bit more. But, by data orchestration, we mean data pipeline, so generally speaking, getting data from one place to another, transforming it, running it on a schedule, and overall just building a central system that tangibly connects your entire ecosystem of data services, right. So what, that's Redshift, Snowflake, DVT, et cetera. And so tangibly, we build, we at Astronomer here build products powered by Apache Airflow for data teams and for data practitioners, so that they don't have to. So, we sell to data engineers, data scientists, data admins, and we really spend our time doing three things. So, the first is that we build Astro, our flagship cloud service that we'll talk more on. But here, we're really building experiences that make it easier for data practitioners to author, run, and scale their data pipeline footprint on the cloud. And then, we also contribute to Apache Airflow as an open source project and community. So, we cultivate the community of humans, and we also put out open source developer tools that actually make it easier for individual data practitioners to be productive in their day-to-day jobs, whether or not they actually use our product and and pay us money or not. And then of course, we also have professional services and education and all of these things around our commercial products that enable folks to use our products and use Airflow as effectively as possible. So yeah, super, super happy with everything we've done and hopefully that gives you an idea of where we're starting. >> Awesome, so when you're talking with those, Paola, those data engineers, those data scientists, how do you define data orchestration and what does it mean to them? >> Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. So, you know, if you Google data orchestration you're going to get something about an automated process for organizing silo data and making it accessible for processing and analysis. But, to your question, what does that actually mean, you know? So, if you look at it from a customer's perspective, we can share a little bit about how we at Astronomer actually do data orchestration ourselves and the problems that it solves for us. So, as many other companies out in the world do, we at Astronomer need to monitor how our own customers use our products, right? And so, we have a weekly meeting, for example, that goes through a dashboard and a dashboarding tool called Sigma where we see the number of monthly customers and how they're engaging with our product. But, to actually do that, you know, we have to use data from our application database, for example, that has behavioral data on what they're actually doing in our product. We also have data from third party API tools, like Salesforce and HubSpot, and other ways in which our customer, we actually engage with our customers and their behavior. And so, our data team internally at Astronomer uses a bunch of tools to transform and use that data, right? So, we use FiveTran, for example, to ingest. We use Snowflake as our data warehouse. We use other tools for data transformations. And even, if we at Astronomer don't do this, you can imagine a data team also using tools like, Monte Carlo for data quality, or Hightouch for Reverse ETL, or things like that. And, I think the point here is that data teams, you know, that are building data-driven organizations have a plethora of tooling to both ingest the right data and come up with the right interfaces to transform and actually, interact with that data. And so, that movement and sort of synchronization of data across your ecosystem is exactly what data orchestration is responsible for. Historically, I think, and Raj will talk more about this, historically, schedulers like KRON and Oozie or Control-M have taken a role here, but we think that Apache Airflow has sort of risen over the past few years as the defacto industry standard for writing data pipelines that do tasks, that do data jobs that interact with that ecosystem of tools in your organization. And so, beyond that sort of data pipeline unit, I think where we see it is that data acquisition is not only writing those data pipelines that move your data, but it's also all the things around it, right, so, CI/CD tool and Secrets Management, et cetera. So, a long-winded answer here, but I think that's how we talk about it here at Astronomer and how we're building our products. >> Excellent. Great context, Paola. Thank you. Viraj, let's bring you into the conversation. Every company these days has to be a data company, right? They've got to be a software company- >> Mm-hmm. >> whether it's my bank or my grocery store. So, how are companies actually doing data orchestration today, Viraj? >> Yeah, it's a great question. So, I think one thing to think about is like, on one hand, you know, data orchestration is kind of a new category that we're helping define, but on the other hand, it's something that companies have been doing forever, right? You need to get data moving to use it, you know. You've got it all in place, aggregate it, cleaning it, et cetera. So, when you look at what companies out there are doing, right. Sometimes, if you're a more kind of born in the cloud company, as we say, you'll adopt all these cloud native tooling things your cloud provider gives you. If you're a bank or another sort of institution like that, you know, you're probably juggling an even wider variety of tools. You're thinking about a cloud migration. You might have things like Kron running in one place, Uzi running somewhere else, Informatics running somewhere else, while you're also trying to move all your workloads to the cloud. So, there's quite a large spectrum of what the current state is for companies. And then, kind of like Paola was saying, Apache Airflow started in 2014, and it was actually started by Airbnb, and they put out this blog post that was like, "Hey here's how we use Apache Airflow to orchestrate our data across all their sources." And really since then, right, it's almost been a decade since then, Airflow emerged as the open source standard, and there's companies of all sorts using it. And, it's really used to tie all these tools together, especially as that number of tools increases, companies move to hybrid cloud, hybrid multi-cloud strategies, and so on and so forth. But you know, what we found is that if you go to any company, especially a larger one and you say like, "Hey, how are you doing data orchestration?" They'll probably say something like, "Well, I have five data teams, so I have eight different ways I do data orchestration." Right. This idea of data orchestration's been there but the right way to do it, kind of all the abstractions you need, the way your teams need to work together, and so on and so forth, hasn't really emerged just yet, right? It's such a quick moving space that companies have to combine what they were doing before with what their new business initiatives are today. So, you know, what we really believe here at Astronomer is Airflow is the core of how you solve data orchestration for any sort of use case, but it's not everything. You know, it needs a little more. And, that's really where our commercial product, Astro comes in, where we've built, not only the most tried and tested airflow experience out there. We do employ a majority of the Airflow Core Committers, right? So, we're kind of really deep in the project. We've also built the right things around developer tooling, observability, and reliability for customers to really rely on Astro as the heart of the way they do data orchestration, and kind of think of it as the foundational layer that helps tie together all the different tools, practices and teams large companies have to do today. >> That foundational layer is absolutely critical. You've both mentioned open source software. Paola, I want to go back to you, and just give the audience an understanding of how open source really plays into Astronomer's mission as a company, and into the technologies like Astro. >> Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we, so we at Astronomers started using Airflow and actually building our products because Airflow is open source and we were our own customers at the beginning of our company journey. And, I think the open source community is at the core of everything we do. You know, without that open source community and culture, I think, you know, we have less of a business, and so, we're super invested in continuing to cultivate and grow that. And, I think there's a couple sort of concrete ways in which we do this that personally make me really excited to do my own job. You know, for one, we do things like we organize meetups and we sponsor the Airflow Summit and there's these sort of baseline community efforts that I think are really important and that reminds you, hey, there just humans trying to do their jobs and learn and use both our technology and things that are out there and contribute to it. So, making it easier to contribute to Airflow, for example, is another one of our efforts. As Viraj mentioned, we also employ, you know, engineers internally who are on our team whose full-time job is to make the open source project better. Again, regardless of whether or not you're a customer of ours or not, we want to make sure that we continue to cultivate the Airflow project in and of itself. And, we're also building developer tooling that might not be a part of the Apache Open Source project, but is still open source. So, we have repositories in our own sort of GitHub organization, for example, with tools that individual data practitioners, again customers are not, can use to make them be more productive in their day-to-day jobs with Airflow writing Dags for the most common use cases out there. The last thing I'll say is how important I think we've found it to build sort of educational resources and documentation and best practices. Airflow can be complex. It's been around for a long time. There's a lot of really, really rich feature sets. And so, how do we enable folks to actually use those? And that comes in, you know, things like webinars, and best practices, and courses and curriculum that are free and accessible and open to the community are just some of the ways in which I think we're continuing to invest in that open source community over the next year and beyond. >> That's awesome. It sounds like open source is really core, not only to the mission, but really to the heart of the organization. Viraj, I want to go back to you and really try to understand how does Astronomer fit into the wider modern data stack and ecosystem? Like what does that look like for customers? >> Yeah, yeah. So, both in the open source and with our commercial customers, right? Folks everywhere are trying to tie together a huge variety of tools in order to start making sense of their data. And you know, I kind of think of it almost like as like a pyramid, right? At the base level, you need things like data reliability, data, sorry, data freshness, data availability, and so on and so forth, right? You just need your data to be there. (coughs) I'm sorry. You just need your data to be there, and you need to make it predictable when it's going to be there. You need to make sure it's kind of correct at the highest level, some quality checks, and so on and so forth. And oftentimes, that kind of takes the case of ELT or ETL use cases, right? Taking data from somewhere and moving it somewhere else, usually into some sort of analytics destination. And, that's really what businesses can do to just power the core parts of getting insights into how their business is going, right? How much revenue did I had? What's in my pipeline, salesforce, and so on and so forth. Once that kind of base foundation is there and people can get the data they need, how they need it, it really opens up a lot for what customers can do. You know, I think one of the trendier things out there right now is MLOps, and how do companies actually put machine learning into production? Well, when you think about it you kind of have to squint at it, right? Like, machine learning pipelines are really just any other data pipeline. They just have a certain set of needs that might not not be applicable to ELT pipelines. And, when you kind of have a common layer to tie together all the ways data can move through your organization, that's really what we're trying to make it so companies can do. And, that happens in financial services where, you know, we have some customers who take app data coming from their mobile apps, and actually run it through their fraud detection services to make sure that all the activity is not fraudulent. We have customers that will run sports betting models on our platform where they'll take data from a bunch of public APIs around different sporting events that are happening, transform all of that in a way their data scientist can build models with it, and then actually bet on sports based on that output. You know, one of my favorite use cases I like to talk about that we saw in the open source is we had there was one company whose their business was to deliver blood transfusions via drone into remote parts of the world. And, it was really cool because they took all this data from all sorts of places, right? Kind of orchestrated all the aggregation and cleaning and analysis that happened had to happen via airflow and the end product would be a drone being shot out into a real remote part of the world to actually give somebody blood who needed it there. Because it turns out for certain parts of the world, the easiest way to deliver blood to them is via drone and not via some other, some other thing. So, these kind of, all the things people do with the modern data stack is absolutely incredible, right? Like you were saying, every company's trying to be a data-driven company. What really energizes me is knowing that like, for all those best, super great tools out there that power a business, we get to be the connective tissue, or the, almost like the electricity that kind of ropes them all together and makes so people can actually do what they need to do. >> Right. Phenomenal use cases that you just described, Raj. I mean, just the variety alone of what you guys are able to do and impact is so cool. So Paola, when you're with those data engineers, those data scientists, and customer conversations, what's your pitch? Why use Astro? >> Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. And honestly, to piggyback off of Viraj, there's so many. I think what keeps me so energized is how mission critical both our product and data orchestration is, and those use cases really are incredible and we work with customers of all shapes and sizes. But, to answer your question, right, so why use Astra? Why use our commercial products? There's so many people using open source, why pay for something more than that? So, you know, the baseline for our business really is that Airflow has grown exponentially over the last five years, and like we said has become an industry standard that we're confident there's a huge opportunity for us as a company and as a team. But, we also strongly believe that being great at running Airflow, you know, doesn't make you a successful company at what you do. What makes you a successful company at what you do is building great products and solving problems and solving pin points of your own customers, right? And, that differentiating value isn't being amazing at running Airflow. That should be our job. And so, we want to abstract those customers from meaning to do things like manage Kubernetes infrastructure that you need to run Airflow, and then hiring someone full-time to go do that. Which can be hard, but again doesn't add differentiating value to your team, or to your product, or to your customers. So, folks to get away from managing that infrastructure sort of a base, a base layer. Folks who are looking for differentiating features that make their team more productive and allows them to spend less time tweaking Airflow configurations and more time working with the data that they're getting from their business. For help, getting, staying up with Airflow releases. There's a ton of, we've actually been pretty quick to come out with new Airflow features and releases, and actually just keeping up with that feature set and working strategically with a partner to help you make the most out of those feature sets is a key part of it. And, really it's, especially if you're an organization who currently is committed to using Airflow, you likely have a lot of Airflow environments across your organization. And, being able to see those Airflow environments in a single place and being able to enable your data practitioners to create Airflow environments with a click of a button, and then use, for example, our command line to develop your Airflow Dags locally and push them up to our product, and use all of the sort of testing and monitoring and observability that we have on top of our product is such a key. It sounds so simple, especially if you use Airflow, but really those things are, you know, baseline value props that we have for the customers that continue to be excited to work with us. And of course, I think we can go beyond that and there's, we have ambitions to add whole, a whole bunch of features and expand into different types of personas. >> Right? >> But really our main value prop is for companies who are committed to Airflow and want to abstract themselves and make use of some of the differentiating features that we now have at Astronomer. >> Got it. Awesome. >> Thank you. One thing, one thing I'll add to that, Paola, and I think you did a good job of saying is because every company's trying to be a data company, companies are at different parts of their journey along that, right? And we want to meet customers where they are, and take them through it to where they want to go. So, on one end you have folks who are like, "Hey, we're just building a data team here. We have a new initiative. We heard about Airflow. How do you help us out?" On the farther end, you know, we have some customers that have been using Airflow for five plus years and they're like, "Hey, this is awesome. We have 10 more teams we want to bring on. How can you help with this? How can we do more stuff in the open source with you? How can we tell our story together?" And, it's all about kind of taking this vast community of data users everywhere, seeing where they're at, and saying like, "Hey, Astro and Airflow can take you to the next place that you want to go." >> Which is incredibly- >> Mm-hmm. >> and you bring up a great point, Viraj, that every company is somewhere in a different place on that journey. And it's, and it's complex. But it sounds to me like a lot of what you're doing is really stripping away a lot of the complexity, really enabling folks to use their data as quickly as possible, so that it's relevant and they can serve up, you know, the right products and services to whoever wants what. Really incredibly important. We're almost out of time, but I'd love to get both of your perspectives on what's next for Astronomer. You give us a a great overview of what the company's doing, the value in it for customers. Paola, from your lens as one of the co-founders, what's next? >> Yeah, I mean, I think we'll continue to, I think cultivate in that open source community. I think we'll continue to build products that are open sourced as part of our ecosystem. I also think that we'll continue to build products that actually make Airflow, and getting started with Airflow, more accessible. So, sort of lowering that barrier to entry to our products, whether that's price wise or infrastructure requirement wise. I think making it easier for folks to get started and get their hands on our product is super important for us this year. And really it's about, I think, you know, for us, it's really about focused execution this year and all of the sort of core principles that we've been talking about. And continuing to invest in all of the things around our product that again, enable teams to use Airflow more effectively and efficiently. >> And that efficiency piece is, everybody needs that. Last question, Viraj, for you. What do you see in terms of the next year for Astronomer and for your role? >> Yeah, you know, I think Paola did a really good job of laying it out. So it's, it's really hard to disagree with her on anything, right? I think executing is definitely the most important thing. My own personal bias on that is I think more than ever it's important to really galvanize the community around airflow. So, we're going to be focusing on that a lot. We want to make it easier for our users to get get our product into their hands, be that open source users or commercial users. And last, but certainly not least, is we're also really excited about Data Lineage and this other open source project in our umbrella called Open Lineage to make it so that there's a standard way for users to get lineage out of different systems that they use. When we think about what's in store for data lineage and needing to audit the way automated decisions are being made. You know, I think that's just such an important thing that companies are really just starting with, and I don't think there's a solution that's emerged that kind of ties it all together. So, we think that as we kind of grow the role of Airflow, right, we can also make it so that we're helping solve, we're helping customers solve their lineage problems all in Astro, which is our kind of the best of both worlds for us. >> Awesome. I can definitely feel and hear the enthusiasm and the passion that you both bring to Astronomer, to your customers, to your team. I love it. We could keep talking more and more, so you're going to have to come back. (laughing) Viraj, Paola, thank you so much for joining me today on this showcase conversation. We really appreciate your insights and all the context that you provided about Astronomer. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this Cube conversation. (soft electronic music)

(soft music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this Cube conversation here from the studios of theCube in Palo Alto, California. John Furrier, your host. We're featuring a startup, Astronomer, astronomer.io is the url. Check it out. And we're going to have a great conversation around one of the most important topics hitting the industry, and that is the future of machine learning and AI and the data that powers it underneath it. There's a lot of things that need to get done, and we're excited to have some of the co-founders of Astronomer here. Viraj Parekh, who is co-founder and Paola Peraza Calderon, another co-founder, both with Astronomer. Thanks for coming on. First of all, how many co-founders do you guys have? >> You know, I think the answer's around six or seven. I forget the exact, but there's really been a lot of people around the table, who've worked very hard to get this company to the point that it's at. And we have long ways to go, right? But there's been a lot of people involved that are, have been absolutely necessary for the path we've been on so far. >> Thanks for that, Viraj, appreciate that. The first question I want to get out on the table, and then we'll get into some of the details, is take a minute to explain what you guys are doing. How did you guys get here? Obviously, multiple co-founders sounds like a great project. The timing couldn't have been better. ChatGPT has essentially done so much public relations for the AI industry. Kind of highlight this shift that's happening. It's real. We've been chronologicalizing, take a minute to explain what you guys do. >> Yeah, sure. We can get started. So yeah, when Astronomer, when Viraj and I joined Astronomer in 2017, we really wanted to build a business around data and we were using an open source project called Apache Airflow, that we were just using sort of as customers ourselves. And over time, we realized that there was actually a market for companies who use Apache Airflow, which is a data pipeline management tool, which we'll get into. And that running Airflow is actually quite challenging and that there's a lot of, a big opportunity for us to create a set of commercial products and opportunity to grow that open source community and actually build a company around that. So the crux of what we do is help companies run data pipelines with Apache Airflow. And certainly we've grown in our ambitions beyond that, but that's sort of the crux of what we do for folks. >> You know, data orchestration, data management has always been a big item, you know, in the old classic data infrastructure. But with AI you're seeing a lot more emphasis on scale, tuning, training. You know, data orchestration is the center of the value proposition when you're looking at coordinating resources, it's one of the most important things. Could you guys explain what data orchestration entails? What does it mean? Take us through the definition of what data orchestration entails. >> Yeah, for sure. I can take this one and Viraj feel free to jump in. So if you google data orchestration, you know, here's what you're going to get. You're going to get something that says, data orchestration is the automated process for organizing silo data from numerous data storage points to organizing it and making it accessible and prepared for data analysis. And you say, okay, but what does that actually mean, right? And so let's give sort of an example. So let's say you're a business and you have sort of the following basic asks of your data team, right? Hey, give me a dashboard in Sigma, for example, for the number of customers or monthly active users and then make sure that that gets updated on an hourly basis. And then number two, a consistent list of active customers that I have in HubSpot so that I can send them a monthly product newsletter, right? Two very basic asks for all sorts of companies and organizations. And when that data team, which has data engineers, data scientists, ML engineers, data analysts get that request, they're looking at an ecosystem of data sources that can help them get there, right? And that includes application databases, for example, that actually have end product user behavior and third party APIs from tools that the company uses that also has different attributes and qualities of those customers or users. And that data team needs to use tools like Fivetran, to ingest data, a data warehouse like Snowflake or Databricks to actually store that data and do analysis on top of it, a tool like DBT to do transformations and make sure that that data is standardized in the way that it needs to be, a tool like Hightouch for reverse ETL. I mean, we could go on and on. There's so many partners of ours in this industry that are doing really, really exciting and critical things for those data movements. And the whole point here is that, you know, data teams have this plethora of tooling that they use to both ingest the right data and come up with the right interfaces to transform and interact with that data. And data orchestration in our view is really the heartbeat of all of those processes, right? And tangibly the unit of data orchestration, you know, is a data pipeline, a set of tasks or jobs that each do something with data over time and eventually run that on a schedule to make sure that those things are happening continuously as time moves on. And, you know, the company advances. And so, you know, for us, we're building a business around Apache Airflow, which is a workflow management tool that allows you to author, run and monitor data pipelines. And so when we talk about data orchestration, we talk about sort of two things. One is that crux of data pipelines that, like I said, connect that large ecosystem of data tooling in your company. But number two, it's not just that data pipeline that needs to run every day, right? And Viraj will probably touch on this as we talk more about Astronomer and our value prop on top of Airflow. But then it's all the things that you need to actually run data and production and make sure that it's trustworthy, right? So it's actually not just that you're running things on a schedule, but it's also things like CI/CD tooling, right? Secure secrets management, user permissions, monitoring, data lineage, documentation, things that enable other personas in your data team to actually use those tools. So long-winded way of saying that, it's the heartbeat that we think of the data ecosystem and certainly goes beyond scheduling, but again, data pipelines are really at the center of it. >> You know, one of the things that jumped out Viraj, if you can get into this, I'd like to hear more about how you guys look at all those little tools that are out there. You mentioned a variety of things. You know, if you look at the data infrastructure, it's not just one stack. You've got an analytic stack, you've got a realtime stack, you've got a data lake stack, you got an AI stack potentially. I mean you have these stacks now emerging in the data world that are >> Yeah. - >> fundamental, but we're once served by either a full package, old school software, and then a bunch of point solution. You mentioned Fivetran there, I would say in the analytics stack. Then you got, you know, S3, they're on the data lake stack. So all these things are kind of munged together. >> Yeah. >> How do you guys fit into that world? You make it easier or like, what's the deal? >> Great question, right? And you know, I think that one of the biggest things we've found in working with customers over, you know, the last however many years, is that like if a data team is using a bunch of tools to get what they need done and the number of tools they're using is growing exponentially and they're kind of roping things together here and there, that's actually a sign of a productive team, not a bad thing, right? It's because that team is moving fast. They have needs that are very specific to them and they're trying to make something that's exactly tailored to their business. So a lot of times what we find is that customers have like some sort of base layer, right? That's kind of like, you know, it might be they're running most of the things in AWS, right? And then on top of that, they'll be using some of the things AWS offers, you know, things like SageMaker, Redshift, whatever. But they also might need things that their Cloud can't provide, you know, something like Fivetran or Hightouch or anything of those other tools and where data orchestration really shines, right? And something that we've had the pleasure of helping our customers build, is how do you take all those requirements, all those different tools and whip them together into something that fulfills a business need, right? Something that makes it so that somebody can read a dashboard and trust the number that it says or somebody can make sure that the right emails go out to their customers. And Airflow serves as this amazing kind of glue between that data stack, right? It's to make it so that for any use case, be it ELT pipelines or machine learning or whatever, you need different things to do them and Airflow helps tie them together in a way that's really specific for a individual business's needs. >> Take a step back and share the journey of what your guys went through as a company startup. So you mentioned Apache open source, you know, we were just, I was just having an interview with the VC, we were talking about foundational models. You got a lot of proprietary and open source development going on. It's almost the iPhone, Android moment in this whole generative space and foundational side. This is kind of important, the open source piece of it. Can you share how you guys started? And I can imagine your customers probably have their hair on fire and are probably building stuff on their own. How do you guys, are you guys helping them? Take us through, 'cuz you guys are on the front end of a big, big wave and that is to make sense of the chaos, reigning it in. Take us through your journey and why this is important. >> Yeah Paola, I can take a crack at this and then I'll kind of hand it over to you to fill in whatever I miss in details. But you know, like Paola is saying, the heart of our company is open source because we started using Airflow as an end user and started to say like, "Hey wait a second". Like more and more people need this. Airflow, for background, started at Airbnb and they were actually using that as the foundation for their whole data stack. Kind of how they made it so that they could give you recommendations and predictions and all of the processes that need to be or needed to be orchestrated. Airbnb created Airflow, gave it away to the public and then, you know, fast forward a couple years and you know, we're building a company around it and we're really excited about that. >> That's a beautiful thing. That's exactly why open source is so great. >> Yeah, yeah. And for us it's really been about like watching the community and our customers take these problems, find solution to those problems, build standardized solutions, and then building on top of that, right? So we're reaching to a point where a lot of our earlier customers who started to just using Airflow to get the base of their BI stack down and their reporting and their ELP infrastructure, you know, they've solved that problem and now they're moving onto things like doing machine learning with their data, right? Because now that they've built that foundation, all the connective tissue for their data arriving on time and being orchestrated correctly is happening, they can build the layer on top of that. And it's just been really, really exciting kind of watching what customers do once they're empowered to pick all the tools that they need, tie them together in the way they need to, and really deliver real value to their business. >> Can you share some of the use cases of these customers? Because I think that's where you're starting to see the innovation. What are some of the companies that you're working with, what are they doing? >> Raj, I'll let you take that one too. (all laughing) >> Yeah. (all laughing) So you know, a lot of it is, it goes across the gamut, right? Because all doesn't matter what you are, what you're doing with data, it needs to be orchestrated. So there's a lot of customers using us for their ETL and ELT reporting, right? Just getting data from all the disparate sources into one place and then building on top of that, be it building dashboards, answering questions for the business, building other data products and so on and so forth. From there, these use cases evolve a lot. You do see folks doing things like fraud detection because Airflow's orchestrating how transactions go. Transactions get analyzed, they do things like analyzing marketing spend to see where your highest ROI is. And then, you know, you kind of can't not talk about all of the machine learning that goes on, right? Where customers are taking data about their own customers kind of analyze and aggregating that at scale and trying to automate decision making processes. So it goes from your most basic, what we call like data plumbing, right? Just to make sure data's moving as needed. All the ways to your more exciting and sexy use cases around like automated decision making and machine learning. >> And I'd say, I mean, I'd say that's one of the things that I think gets me most excited about our future is how critical Airflow is to all of those processes, you know? And I think when, you know, you know a tool is valuable is when something goes wrong and one of those critical processes doesn't work. And we know that our system is so mission critical to answering basic, you know, questions about your business and the growth of your company for so many organizations that we work with. So it's, I think one of the things that gets Viraj and I, and the rest of our company up every single morning, is knowing how important the work that we do for all of those use cases across industries, across company sizes. And it's really quite energizing. >> It was such a big focus this year at AWS re:Invent, the role of data. And I think one of the things that's exciting about the open AI and all the movement towards large language models, is that you can integrate data into these models, right? From outside, right? So you're starting to see the integration easier to deal with, still a lot of plumbing issues. So a lot of things happening. So I have to ask you guys, what is the state of the data orchestration area? Is it ready for disruption? Is it already been disrupted? Would you categorize it as a new first inning kind of opportunity or what's the state of the data orchestration area right now? Both, you know, technically and from a business model standpoint, how would you guys describe that state of the market? >> Yeah, I mean I think, I think in a lot of ways we're, in some ways I think we're categoric rating, you know, schedulers have been around for a long time. I recently did a presentation sort of on the evolution of going from, you know, something like KRON, which I think was built in like the 1970s out of Carnegie Mellon. And you know, that's a long time ago. That's 50 years ago. So it's sort of like the basic need to schedule and do something with your data on a schedule is not a new concept. But to our point earlier, I think everything that you need around your ecosystem, first of all, the number of data tools and developer tooling that has come out the industry has, you know, has some 5X over the last 10 years. And so obviously as that ecosystem grows and grows and grows and grows, the need for orchestration only increases. And I think, you know, as Astronomer, I think we, and there's, we work with so many different types of companies, companies that have been around for 50 years and companies that got started, you know, not even 12 months ago. And so I think for us, it's trying to always category create and adjust sort of what we sell and the value that we can provide for companies all across that journey. There are folks who are just getting started with orchestration and then there's folks who have such advanced use case 'cuz they're hitting sort of a ceiling and only want to go up from there. And so I think we as a company, care about both ends of that spectrum and certainly have want to build and continue building products for companies of all sorts, regardless of where they are on the maturity curve of data orchestration. >> That's a really good point Paola. And I think the other thing to really take into account is it's the companies themselves, but also individuals who have to do their jobs. You know, if you rewind the clock like five or 10 years ago, data engineers would be the ones responsible for orchestrating data through their org. But when we look at our customers today, it's not just data engineers anymore. There's data analysts who sit a lot closer to the business and the data scientists who want to automate things around their models. So this idea that orchestration is this new category is spot on, is right on the money. And what we're finding is it's spreading, the need for it, is spreading to all parts of the data team naturally where Airflows have emerged as an open source standard and we're hoping to take things to the next level. >> That's awesome. You know, we've been up saying that the data market's kind of like the SRE with servers, right? You're going to need one person to deal with a lot of data and that's data engineering and then you're going to have the practitioners, the democratization. Clearly that's coming in what you're seeing. So I got to ask, how do you guys fit in from a value proposition standpoint? What's the pitch that you have to customers or is it more inbound coming into you guys? Are you guys doing a lot of outreach, customer engagements? I'm sure they're getting a lot of great requirements from customers. What's the current value proposition? How do you guys engage? >> Yeah, I mean we've, there's so many, there's so many. Sorry Raj, you can jump in. - >> It's okay. So there's so many companies using Airflow, right? So our, the baseline is that the open source project that is Airflow that was, that came out of Airbnb, you know, over five years ago at this point, has grown exponentially in users and continues to grow. And so the folks that we sell to primarily are folks who are already committed to using Apache Airflow, need data orchestration in the organization and just want to do it better, want to do it more efficiently, want to do it without managing that infrastructure. And so our baseline proposition is for those organizations. Now to Raj's point, obviously I think our ambitions go beyond that, both in terms of the personas that we addressed and going beyond that data engineer, but really it's for, to start at the baseline. You know, as we continue to grow our company, it's really making sure that we're adding value to folks using Airflow and help them do so in a better way, in a larger way and a more efficient way. And that's really the crux of who we sell to. And so to answer your question on, we actually, we get a lot of inbound because they're are so many - >> A built-in audience. >> In the world that use it, that those are the folks who we talk to and come to our website and chat with us and get value from our content. I mean the power of the open source community is really just so, so big. And I think that's also one of the things that makes this job fun, so. >> And you guys are in a great position, Viraj, you can comment, to get your reaction. There's been a big successful business model to starting a company around these big projects for a lot of reasons. One is open source is continuing to be great, but there's also supply chain challenges in there. There's also, you know, we want to continue more innovation and more code and keeping it free and and flowing. And then there's the commercialization of product-izing it, operationalizing it. This is a huge new dynamic. I mean, in the past, you know, five or so years, 10 years, it's been happening all on CNCF from other areas like Apache, Linux Foundation, they're all implementing this. This is a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to do this. >> Yeah, yeah. Open source is always going to be core to what we do because, you know, we wouldn't exist without the open source community around us. They are huge in numbers. Oftentimes they're nameless people who are working on making something better in a way that everybody benefits from it. But open source is really hard, especially if you're a company whose core competency is running a business, right? Maybe you're running e-commerce business or maybe you're running, I don't know, some sort of like any sort of business, especially if you're a company running a business, you don't really want to spend your time figuring out how to run open source software. You just want to use it, you want to use the best of it, you want to use the community around it. You want to take, you want to be able to google something and get answers for it. You want the benefits of open source. You don't want to have, you don't have the time or the resources to invest in becoming an expert in open source, right? And I think that dynamic is really what's given companies like us an ability to kind of form businesses around that, in the sense that we'll make it so people get the best of both worlds. You'll get this vast open ecosystem that you can build on top of, you can benefit from, that you can learn from, but you won't have to spend your time doing undifferentiated heavy lifting. You can do things that are just specific to your business. >> It's always been great to see that business model evolved. We used to debate 10 years ago, can there be another red hat? And we said, not really the same, but there'll be a lot of little ones that'll grow up to be big soon. Great stuff. Final question, can you guys share the history of the company, the milestones of the Astronomer's journey in data orchestration? >> Yeah, we could. So yeah, I mean, I think, so Raj and I have obviously been at astronomer along with our other founding team and leadership folks, for over five years now. And it's been such an incredible journey of learning, of hiring really amazing people. Solving again, mission critical problems for so many types of organizations. You know, we've had some funding that has allowed us to invest in the team that we have and in the software that we have. And that's been really phenomenal. And so that investment, I think, keeps us confident even despite these sort of macroeconomic conditions that we're finding ourselves in. And so honestly, the milestones for us are focusing on our product, focusing on our customers over the next year, focusing on that market for us, that we know can get value out of what we do. And making developers' lives better and growing the open source community, you know, and making sure that everything that we're doing makes it easier for folks to get started to contribute to the project and to feel a part of the community that we're cultivating here. >> You guys raised a little bit of money. How much have you guys raised? >> I forget what the total is, but it's in the ballpark of 200, over $200 million. So it feels good - >> A little bit of capital. Got a little bit of cash to work with there. Great success. I know it's a Series C financing, you guys been down, so you're up and running. What's next? What are you guys looking to do? What's the big horizon look like for you? And from a vision standpoint, more hiring, more product, what is some of the key things you're looking at doing? >> Yeah, it's really a little of all of the above, right? Like, kind of one of the best and worst things about working at earlier stage startups is there's always so much to do and you often have to just kind of figure out a way to get everything done, but really invest in our product over the next, at least the next, over the course of our company lifetime. And there's a lot of ways we wanting to just make it more accessible to users, easier to get started with, easier to use all kind of on all areas there. And really, we really want to do more for the community, right? Like I was saying, we wouldn't be anything without the large open source community around us. And we want to figure out ways to give back more in more creative ways, in more code driven ways and more kind of events and everything else that we can do to keep those folks galvanized and just keeping them happy using Airflow. >> Paola, any final words as we close out? >> No, I mean, I'm super excited. You know, I think we'll keep growing the team this year. We've got a couple of offices in the US which we're excited about, and a fully global team that will only continue to grow. So Viraj and I are both here in New York and we're excited to be engaging with our coworkers in person. Finally, after years of not doing so, we've got a bustling office in San Francisco as well. So growing those teams and continuing to hire all over the world and really focusing on our product and the open source community is where our heads are at this year, so. >> Congratulations. - >> Excited. 200 million in funding plus good runway. Put that money in the bank, squirrel it away. You know, it's good to kind of get some good interest on it, but still grow. Congratulations on all the work you guys do. We appreciate you and the open sourced community does and good luck with the venture. Continue to be successful and we'll see you at the Startup Showcase. >> Thank you. - >> Yeah, thanks so much, John. Appreciate it. - >> It's theCube conversation, featuring astronomer.io, that's the website. Astronomer is doing well. Multiple rounds of funding, over 200 million in funding. Open source continues to lead the way in innovation. Great business model. Good solution for the next gen, Cloud, scale, data operations, data stacks that are emerging. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Hello, and welcome to this Cube Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante, and we're here with Raj Gossain, who's the Chief Product Officer at Alation. We have some news. Hello, Raj. Thanks for coming on. >> Dave, it's great to be with you on theCUBE again. >> Yeah, good to see you. So, okay, we're going to talk about Alation Connected Sheets. You know, what is that? Talk to us about what it is, what it does, what it brings to customers. >> So we recognize, spreadsheets are really the dark matter of the data universe. And they're used by, over 78 million people use spreadsheets on a regular basis to drive critical business analysis. But there's a lot of challenges with spreadsheet usage. It brings risk to the organization. There's no visibility into where data comes from. And so we wanted to bring the power of the Alation Data Intelligence Platform to business users where they spend most of their time. And that's in a tool that they love, and that's spreadsheets. And so we're launching a brand new product next week called Alation Connected Sheets. >> So talk more about that. So yes, I get the lineage issue, like where did-- who did this, where's this data come from? I got different data. But talk more about the problems that Alation Connected Sheets solves, specifically for customers. >> Yeah, so the big challenges that we see when we talk to data organizations is how do they understand where the data came from? Is it trusted? Is it reusable? Should it be used in this format? And if you look at where most users that use spreadsheets get the data to power their spreadsheets, maybe it's a CSV download from a database, and then you have no idea where the data came from and where it's going. Or even worse, it's copying and pasting data from other spreadsheets. And so if you take those problems, how can we bring trusted data from governed sources like Snowflake and Redshift and put it in the hands of spreadsheet users, and give them the power and flexibility of Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel, but use trusted, reliable, well-governed data so that the data office feels great about them using spreadsheets and the end users, the business users, can take advantage of the tool that they know and love and do the work that they need to do quickly. >> So, okay. So I'm inferring from your comments there that you've got the ability to take data from you mentioned a couple, Snowflake and Redshift, other popular data warehouses. >> Yep. >> So talk about the key capabilities that you have, any specific features that we should know about. >> Sure. So, we built the leading data intelligence platform and the leading data catalog. And one of the benefits of that catalog is where you have visibility into all of the trusted, governed data sources that a data organization cares about, whether it's enterprise warehouses like Snowflake or Redshift, databases like SQL Server, Google BigQuery, what have you. So what we've done is we've brought the power of that data catalog directly into both Google Sheets as well as Excel. And the idea there is a user can log into their application, authenticate to Alation using the Alation Connected Sheets plugin into their spreadsheet tool, and browse those trusted data sets that are surfaced in the Alation catalog. They get trust signals, they get visibility into where this data came from. So lineage, insights, descriptive information. And then with one or two clicks, they can choose a data set from their warehouse, basically apply filtering conditions. So let's say I'm looking for customer data in Snowflake. I can find the right customer table. If I only want it for say, 2022, I can apply some filter conditions, I can reorder columns, push one button, authenticate to that data source. We want to maintain and ensure security is being applied, so only those users that have access to the warehouse can actually download that data set. But once they've authenticated, that data gets downloaded into their spreadsheet and there's a live connection that's maintained to that spreadsheet. So anytime you need to refresh the data, one push of a button and that data set gets updated. I can schedule the updates. So, you know, if I have to produce a report every Monday morning, I could have that data set refreshed at 8:00 a.m. Monday morning, or whatever schedule the user wants. And so it gives the user the data set they need, but the data organization, they can see where that data came from and they understand the lineage of the data as it is used in analysis in those spreadsheets themselves. >> So Raj, I know you're at the Super Bowl this week, a.k.a. re:Invent. >> Yes. >> And I know you got very close relationships with Snowflake, you've mentioned them a couple times with the data summit last spring. And I know you've done some integration work with those platforms and I'm sure others. So should we think of this as you're extending that sort of trust and governance out to spreadsheets, is that right? And stretching that out? >> That's exactly right. The way we talk about it is how do we bring data intelligence to business users in the tool that they know and love, which is the spreadsheet. And so, the data catalog and data intelligence platforms in general have really primarily been focused on servicing the needs of data users: data analysts, data scientists, data engineers. But you know, our vision, our aspiration at Alation is to really bring data intelligence to any business user. And so it's a big part of our strategy to make sure that the insights from the Alation catalog and platform can find their way into tools like Excel and Google Sheets. And so that's, what you highlighted, Dave, is exactly correct. We want to maximize the likelihood that a business user can have self-service access to trusted, governed data, do the work that they need to do, and ensure that the organization has a set of data assets in spreadsheets, frankly as opposed to liabilities, which is the way most data organizations look at spreadsheets is it's almost like a risk factor. We want to convert that risk, that liability, into an asset so that people can reuse data sets and they understand where this analysis is actually coming from. >> It's something that we've talked about for well over a decade on theCUBE. Is data an asset or is it a liability? >> Yeah, yeah. >> You obviously want to get value out of it, but if you can't share it, it's not trusted. So what people do is they lock it down and then that constricts value creation. >> Exactly. >> My understanding is this tech came out of an acquisition from a company, Kloudio. >> That's correct. >> Tell us about Kloudio. Why Kloudio? What's the fit there? >> Yeah, so Kloudio is a company, it's about five years old. We closed the acquisition of the company in March of this past year. And they had about 20 customers, 10 engineers. And we saw an opportunity with the spreadsheet tool that they'd created to really compliment our data intelligence strategy. And as you said, Dave, extend the value of data intelligence to business users. And so, we brought the Kloudio team into the fold. The thing I'm most excited about as a product guy, is within seven months of them joining Alation, we're actually shipping a brand new product that's going to drive revenue and meet the needs of tens of millions of users, ultimately. Like that's really our aspiration. And so, the tech they had was extremely modern. It reinforces the platform position that we have. You know, this microservices architecture that we've built Alation around, made it easy for that new team to come in and leverage existing APIs and capabilities from our platform and the tech that they brought into Alation to essentially connect the dots and deliver a brand new set of capabilities to an entirely new audience, to help our customers achieve their business objectives, which is really creating a data culture across their entire organization, inclusive of business users, not just, like I said, the data X users that are already taking advantage of solutions like Alation and cloud warehouses, et cetera. >> So I have two questions, follow up questions by me, and I think you might have answered the second one. The first one is what's the secret sauce behind Kloudio? How does the tech work? The second question is how does it fit into the Alation portfolio? How were you able to integrate it so quickly? Maybe that's the microservices architecture. But start with the secret sauce. What is it, what can you share with me? >> I think the thing that we saw with Kloudio that got us excited, and the fact that they, even though it was a small company, they had 20 customers, they were generating revenue, and they were delivering real value to business users, by really enabling business users to tap into the value of trusted, governed data, and frankly, get IT out of the way. You know, we almost refer to it as like smart self-service, which is, they could find a data asset and connect to that source, and just with a couple quick clicks, almost a low-code, no-code type of an experience, bring that sort of data into their spreadsheet so they could do the work that they needed to do. That opportunity, that tech that the Kloudio team had built out, the big gap that they had is, my goodness, what does it take to actually be aware of all the data sources that exist across an organization and connect to them? And that's what Alation does, right? That's why we built the platform that we built, so that we can basically understand all of a customer's data assets, whether they're on-prem or in the cloud. And so it was a little bit of, you know, that Reese's Peanut Butter Cup analogy. The chocolate and the peanut butter coming together. The Alation platform, the Alation catalog, coupled with the technology that Kloudio brought to us really was sort of a match made in heaven. And it's allowed us to bring this new capability to market that really is value-add on top of the platform and catalog investments that our customers have already made. >> Yeah, so they had this magic pixie dust, but it was sort of isolated, and then you've integrated it into your catalog. And that's the second part of my question. How were you able to do that so quickly? >> So, we've been on this evolution, enhancing the the Alation data intelligence platform. We've moved to a microservices architecture, we're fully multi-tenant in the cloud. And the fact that we'd made those investments over the past few years gave us the opportunity to make it easy for an acquired business like Kloudio, or you know, perhaps a future acquisition, or third party developers leveraging APIs that we expose to make it easy for them to integrate into the Alation platform. And so, I think it's a bit of foresight. We recognize that in starting with the catalog, the opportunity was much bigger than just providing a data catalog. We've added data governance, we've built out this platform and we recognize that more and more users can and should be benefiting from data intelligence. And so I think those platform investments have paid significant dividends and accelerated our ability to deliver Alation Connected Sheets as quickly as we have. >> Sounds like a great acquisition, like a diamond in the rough. I mean, I love big these big mega acquisitions 'cause the media company can write about 'em, but I really love the high, high return. You know, low denominator, high value. So, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Where can people learn more about this? Maybe play around a little bit with it? >> Yeah, so we're going to be demoing Alation Connected Sheets at AWS re:Invent next week. And it's going to be available starting next week, so the 28th of November. And obviously you'll see it online, on social media, on our website as well. But folks that are going to be in Las Vegas next week, come to the Alation booth and you'll get a chance to see it directly. >> Awesome. Okay, Raj. Hey, thanks for spending some time with us today. Really appreciate it. >> Great, thanks so much, Dave. Great to see you. >> Hey, you're very welcome. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm your host, Lisa Martin Rajko same joins me now the chief product officer at elation. Raj. Great to have you on the cube. Welcome. >>It's great to be here, Lisa. And I've been a fan for a while and excited to have a chance to talk with you live. >>And we've got some exciting stuff to talk about elation in terms of the success in the enterprise market. I see more than 25% of the fortune 100 doing great. There is customers elation and snowflake. Before we get into your exciting news. Talk to me a little bit about the evolution of the partnership. >>Yeah, no, absolutely. So, you know, we've always been a, a close partner and integrator with snowflake and last year snowflake became an investor in elation and they participated in our series D round. And the thing I'm most excited about beyond that is we were announced in the snowflake summit back in June to be their data governance partner of the year for the second year running. And so we've always had a closer relationship with snowflake, both at the go to market level and at the product level. And you know, the stuff that we're about to talk about is a Testament to that. >>Absolutely. It is. So talk to us before we get into the announcement. What you're seeing in the market as organizations are really becoming much more serious about being data driven and building a data culture. What are you seeing with respect to enterprises as well as those smaller folks? >>Yeah, no, it, it, it's, it's a great question. I mean, you, you hear the T tropes data is the new oil data is like water it's essential. And we're seeing that very consistently across every customer, every segment, every geo that we, that we talk to, I, I think the challenges that organizations are seeing that are leading to the amazing growth that we've seen at elation are there's so much data. They don't know where it resides. You've got silos or islands of knowledge that exist across the, the enterprise. And they need a data intelligence platform to bring it all together, to help them make sense of it and ultimately build a data culture that, you know, it lets their employees make data driven decisions as opposed to relying on gut. And so those are some of the macro trends that we're seeing and with the migration of data to the cloud and in particular snowflake, it seemed like a huge opportunity for us to partner even more closely with, with snowflake. And we're, we're excited about the progress that we've seen with them thus far. >>All right, let's get right into it. So first of all, define a data culture and then talk to us about how elation and snowflake are helping organizations to really achieve that. >>Yeah. You know, it, it's interesting. The, the company vision that we have at elation is to empower a curious and rational world. And you know, what that really means is we want to deliver solutions that drive curiosity and drive rational behavior. So making, making decisions based on data and insights, as opposed to gut, or, you know, the, the highest paid, you know, person's opinion or what have you. And so delivering a data culture, building a data culture, which is something we hear from all the CDOs that we talk to is, Hey, elation, help us drive data literacy across the organization, provide that single source of reference. So if anybody has a question about, do we have data that answers this, or, you know, what kind of performance are we seeing in this product area? Give me a starting point for my data exploration journey. And that's really where elation and our data intelligence solutions kind of come into the play. >>So unpack elation cloud service for snowflake. Talk to us about what it is, why you're doing it, what the significance of this partnership and this solution is delivering. >>Absolutely. So the elation cloud service for snowflake is a brand new offering that we just brought to market. And the intent really was, you know, we've had massive success in the global 2000. You mentioned the, the progress that we've had with fortune 100 customers, we see the need for data, culture, and data literacy and governance in organizations, you know, that are massive global multinational enterprises all the way down to divisions of an organization, or even, you know, mid-market and SMB companies. And so we thought there was a huge opportunity to really drive data culture for those organizations that are adopting snowflake, but still need that data intelligence overlay across the, the data that's in the snowflake cloud. And so what we did is we launched the elation cloud service for snowflake as a free trial, and then, you know, low cost purchase solution that, you know, can be adopted for less than a hundred thousand dollars a year. >>Got it. So tar from a target market perspective that lower end of the market for, of course, you know, these days, Raj, as we talk about every company, regardless of size, regardless of industry and location has to be a data company getting there and, and, and, and really defining and going on a journey to get there is really complex. So you're going now down market to meet those customers where they are, how will elation cloud service for snowflake help those customers, those smaller customers really become data driven and, and, and adopt a data culture. >>Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a great question. I, I think the biggest goal that we had was making it really simple and easy for them to begin this journey. So, you know, we are now live in the snowflake partner connect portal. And if someone wants to experience the power of elation cloud service for snowflake, they just need to go to that portal, click the elation tile. And literally within less than two minutes, a brand new instance of elation is spun up. Their snowflake data is automatically being cataloged as part of this trial. And they have 14 days to go through this experience and, and get a sense of the power of elation to give them insights into what's in their snowflake platform, what governance options they can layer on top of their snowflake data cloud and how the data is transforming across their organization. >>So talk to me about who you're talking to within a customer. I was looking at some data that elation provided to me, and I see that according to Gartner data culture is priority number one for chief data officers, but for those smaller organizations, do they have chief data officers? Is that responsibility line still with the CIO? Who are you engaging with? >>Yeah, it's very, very, really great question. I, I think the larger organizations that we sell to definitely have a, a CDO and, you know, CDO sometimes is the chief data and analytics officer in smaller organizations, or even in divisions of big companies that, that, you know, might be target customers for ACS, for snowflake could be a, a VP of analytics could be head of marketing. Operations could be a data engineering function, so that might roll up into the it. And so I think that's, what's interesting is we, we wanted to take the friction out of the, the experience process and the trial process, and whoever is responsible for the snowflake instance and, and leveraging snowflake for, for data and analytics, they can explore and understand what the, a power elation layered on top of snowflake can provide for them. >>Okay. So another, another thing that I uncovered in researching for this segment is McKenzie says data, culture is decision culture. I thought that was a really profound statement, but it's also such a challenge to get there is organizations of all sizes are on various points in their journey to become data driven. What does that mean? How, how well, how do elation and help customers really achieve that data culture so that they can really have that decision culture so they can make faster, better data based decisions? >>Yeah, it, so I, I think a huge part of it, like if we think about our, our, our big area of focus, how do we enable users to find, understand trust, govern, and use data within snowflake in this instance? And so step one to drive data culture is how, how do you provide a single source of reference a, a, a search box, frankly, you know, Google for your, for your data environment, so that you can actually find data, then how do you understand it? You know, what's in there. What does it mean? What are the relationships between these data objects? Can I trust this? Is this sandbox data, or is this production data that can be used for reporting and analytics? How do I govern the data? So I know who's using it, who should use it, what policies are there. And so if, if we go through the set of features that we've built into ation cloud service for snowflake, it enables us to deliver on that promise result at the very end, resulting in the ability to explore the data that exists in the snowflake platform as well. >>Let's go ahead and unpack that. Now, talk to me about some of the key capabilities of the solution and what it's enabling organizations to achieve. >>Yeah, so, you know, it starts with cataloging the data itself. You know, we, we, we are the data catalog company. We basically define that category. And so step one is how do we connect to snowflake and automatically ingest all the metadata that exists within that snowflake cloud, as well as extract the lineage relationships between tables. So you can understand how the data is transforming within the snowflake data cloud. And so that provides visibility to, to begin that fine journey. You know, how, how do I actually discover data on the understand and trust front? I think where things get really interesting is we've integrated deeply with Snowflake's new data governance features. So they've got data policies that provide things like row level security and, and data masking. We integrate directly with those policies, extract them, ingest them into elation so that they can be discovered, can be easily applied or added to other data sets within snowflake directly from the elation UI. >>So now you've got policies layered on top of your data environment. Snowflake's introduced, tagging and classification capabilities. We automatically extract and ingest those tags. They're surfaced in inhalation. So if somebody looks for a data set that they're not familiar with, they can see, oh, here are the policies that this data set is applied to. Here are the tags that are applied. And so snow elation actually becomes almost like a user interface to the data that exists within that snowflake platform. And then maybe just two other things with the lineage that we extract. One of the most important things that you can deliver for users is impact analysis. Hey, if I'm gonna deprecate this table, or if I'm gonna make a change to what this table definition is, what are the downstream objects and users that should know about that? So, Hey, if this table's going away and my Tableau report over here is gonna stop working, boy, it'd be great to be able to get visibility into that before that change is made, we can do that automatically within the elation UI and, and really just make it easier for somebody to govern and manage the data that exists within the snowflake data cloud. >>So easier to govern and manage the data. Let's go up a level or two. Sure. Talk to me about some of the business outcomes that this solution is gonna help organizations to achieve. We talked about every company these days has to be a data company. Consumers expect this very personalized, relevant experience. What are you thinking? Some of the outcomes are gonna be that this technology and this partnership is gonna unlock. >>Yeah, no, I, I, I think step one, and this has always been a huge area of focus for us is just simply driving business productivity. So, you know, the, the data that we see in talking to CDOs and CDOs is the onboarding and, and getting productive the time it takes to onboard and, and get a data analyst productive. It, it can be nine to 12 months. And, you know, we all know the battle for talent these days is significant. And so if we can provide a solution, and this is exactly what we do that enables an organization to get a data analyst productive in weeks instead of months, or, or, you know, potentially even a year, the value that that analyst can deliver to the organization goes up dramatically because they're spending less time looking for data and figuring out who knows what about the data. >>They can go to elation, get those insights and start answering business questions, as opposed to trying to wrangle or figure out does the data exist. And, and, and where does it exist? So that's, that's one key dimension. I'd say the other one that, that I'd highlight is just being able to have a governance program that is monitored managed and well understood. So that, you know, whether it's dealing with CCPA or GDPR, you know, some of the regulatory regimes, the, the ability for an organization to feel like they have control over their data, and they understand where it is who's using it and how it's being used. Those are hugely important business outcomes that CIOs and CDOs tell us they need. And that's why we built the lation cloud service for snowflake >>On the first front. One of the things that popped into my mind in terms of really enabling workforce productivity, workforce efficiency, getting analysts ramped up dramatically faster also seems to me to be something that your customers can leverage from a talent attraction and retention perspective, which in today's market is critical. >>I, I so glad you mentioned that that's, that's actually one of the key pillars that we highlight as well is like, if you give great tools to employees, they're gonna be happier. And, and you'll be a, a preferred employer and people are gonna feel like, oh, this is an organization that I wanna work at because they're making my job easier and they're making it easier for me to deliver value and be productive to the organization. And that's, it's absolutely critical this, this, this war for talent that everybody talks about. It's real and great self-service tools that are empowering to employees are the things that are gonna differentiate companies and allow them to, to unleash the power of data, >>Unleash the power of data, really use it to the competitive advantage that it can and should be used for. When we look at, when you look at customers that are on that journey, that data catalog journey, they, you probably see such a variety of, of locations about where they are in that journey. Do you see a common thread when you're in customer conversations? Is there kind of a common denominator that you, you speak to where you, you really know elation and snowflake here is absolutely the right thing. >>Yeah, no, it, it, it's a good question. I would actually say the fact that a customer is on snowflake. I they're already, you know, a step up on that maturity curve. You know, one of the big use cases that we see with customers that is, is leading to the need for data intelligence solutions that, you know, like that elation can deliver is digital transformation and, and, and cloud migration, you know, we've got legacy data. On-prem, we know we need to move to the cloud to get better agility, better scaling, you know, perhaps, you know, reduced costs, et cetera. And so I think step one, on that, that qualification criteria or that maturity journey is, Hey, if you're already in snowflake, that's a great sign because you're, you're recognizing the power of a data cloud platform and, and, and warehouse like snowflake. And so that's a, a, a great signal to us that this is a customer that wants to, you know, really better understand how they can get value out of, out of their solution. I think the next step on that journey is a recognition that they're not utilizing the data that they have as effectively as they can and should be, and they're not, and, and their employees are still struggling with, you know, where does the data exist? Can I trust it? It, you know, it, who do I know tends to be more important than do I have a tool that will help me understand the data. And so customers that are asking those sorts of questions are ideal customers for the elation cloud service for snowflake solution. >>So enabling those customers to get their hands on it, there's a free trial. Talk to us about that. And where can the audience go to actually click and try? >>Absolutely. So, you know, we'll, we'll be doing our usual marketing and, and promotion of this, but what I'm super excited about, you know, again, I mentioned earlier, you know, this is part of our, our cloud native multi 10 and architecture. We are live in the snowflake partner connect portal. And so if you are logged into snowflake and are an admin, you can go to the partner connect portal and you will see a tile. I think it's alphabetically, sorted and elation starts with a so pretty easy to find. I don't think you'll have to do too much searching. And literally all you have to do is click on that tile, answer a couple quick questions. And in the background in about two minutes, your elation instance will get spun up. We'll we will have sample data sets in there. There's some guided tours that you can walk through to kind of get a feel for the power of snowflake. >>So policy center lineage, you know, tags, our intelligent SQL tool that allows you to smartly query the snowflake data cloud and publish queries, share queries with others, collaborate on them for, for greater insights. And there's, you know, as you would expect with any, you know, online free trial, you know, we've got a built in chat bot. So if you have a question, wanna get a better sense of how a particular feature works or curious about how elation might work. In other areas, you can, you know, ask a question to the chat bot and we've got product specialists on the back end that can answer questions. So we really wanna make that journey as, as seamless and easy as, as possible. And hopefully that results in enough interests that the customer wants to, to, or the, the trial user wants to become a customer. And, and that's where our great sales organization will kind of take the Baton from there. >>And there's the, there's the objective there, and I'm sure Raj folks can find out about the free trial and access it. You, you mentioned through the marketplace, more information on elian.com. I imagine they can go there to access it as well, >>A hundred percent elation.com. We're on Twitter, we're on LinkedIn, but yeah, if you have any questions, you know, you can just search for elation cloud service for snowflake, or just go to the elation.com website. Absolutely. >>All right. Elation cloud service for snowflake. Congratulations on the launch to you and the entire elation team. We look forward to hearing customer success stories and really seeing those business outcomes realize in the next few months, Raj, thanks so much for your time. >>Thank you so much, Lisa. It's great to talk to you. >>Likewise, Raj gin. I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching this cube conversation. Stay right here for more great action on the cube, the leader in live tech coverage.

>>Hello, welcome back to the cubes coverage of Monaco, crypto summit presented by digital bits. It's a conference where a lot of the people using digital bits and the industry coming together around the future of crypto in the applicates got a great guest garage, rod cot, founder, and CEO of an innovative company. Love this co I love this company, Luke mogul, Rob, thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate it. Oh, >>Thank you for having >>Us. Yeah. So I checked out what you guys are doing. You've got the sports metaverse angle going on with super valuable, cuz sports is super entertaining. Uh, people are engaged. There's huge fan base, huge online now, digital convergence going on with the physical, you know, you see all kinds of sports betting going on now everything's going digital. There's a whole nother consumer experience going on with sports and the game is still the same on the, on the field or so to, or the court. That's correct. Yeah. Now it's going to digital take a minute to explain what you guys are working on. >>Yeah, so yes, we are building out a sports ERs where we are bringing athletes, whether they're NBA stars, NFL stars, w N B a many of those athletes into meows giving them the ownership of the entire, um, meows commerce along with gameplay. So that's something from our perspective, this, uh, this is something that we're focused on. We're building out stadiums. Athletes can own stadiums. Athlete can create their own training centers, media hubs. Um, and imagine Lisa, Leslie for example, is building out a woman leadership sports academy, right? We have Michael Cooper building out defensive academy. So those are all the brands. We have 174 NBA w N B stars. And, um, and we are building out this, >>The brand is the brand, is the platform that's correct. That's the trend we're seeing. And it's, it's also an extension of their reach in community. So there's, they can convert their star power and athlete with owner's approval. If they probably write it on to the contracts, he, they can imagine all the complications, but they bring that online and extend that energy and brand equity yep. To fans and social network. Yeah. >>And many of these athletes are tremendous successful in their web two careers, right? Yeah. Um, some are current athletes, some are former athletes, but they have built such a brand persona where people are following them on Instagram. For example, Carlos Boozer. He has like almost 6 million followers between Twitter and Instagram and those kind of brands are looking or how do I give back to the community? How do I engage with my community and web three? And especially with our platform, we are giving that power back to the players. >>So you guys got some big names booers on there. You mentioned Carlos Boozer. You mentioned that Lisa, Leslie others among others, Michael Cooper throw back to the old Lakers, uh, magic. Johnson's kind actually here in crypto. We just saw him in the lobbies and in dinner and the other night, um, at Nobu, um, you got a lot of NBA support. Take a take, take, even explain how you're working this angle. Uh, you got some great traction, uh, momentum. Um, you got great pedigree, riot games in your career. Uh, you kind of get the world, the tech world, the media world, as it comes together. What's the secret sauce here? Is it the NBA relationship combination of the team explained >>It's really focusing on what, uh, we are building on me was focusing on players first, right? So players are literally, we call our platform as, uh, owned by the players, made for the players. Uh, and engagement is really all done through the players, right? So that's our key sauce. And when we worked out with NBA, we, we are part of the NBA BPA acceleration program for 2022 that is funded by a six Z, uh, and, and many others. Um, and our partnership with league is very critical. So it's not only partnered with player association partnered with leagues, whether it's NBA, w N B a NFL. So those are the venues. And this becomes almost a program, especially for athletes to really generate this lifetime engagement and royalty model because some of this famous athletes really want to give back to the communities. So like for example, I use Lisa Leslie a lot, but Lisa, Leslie really wants to empower women leadership, leadership, and really help, um, women in sports, for example. Right? So those are the angles that, um, that really people are excited about. >>Well, for the people watching that might not understand some of the ins and outs of sports and, and rod, your background in your team, it's interesting. The sports teams have been on the big day to train for many, many years. You look at all the stadiums. Now they've got mobile devices, they got wifi under the chairs. They use data and technology to manage the team. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> manage the stadium and venue and operations suppliers, whatnot. And then also the fans. So you, they, they got about a decade or so experience already in the digital world. This is not new to the, to the sports world. Yeah. So you guys come to the table kind of at a good time. >>Yeah. Especially the defi of the sports, right? So there's a defi of the finance, but this is the really, uh, a, a decentralization of the sports is something that there's a lot of traction. And there are many companies that are really focusing on that. Our focus obviously is players first, right? How do we give power to the players? Uh, and those are really driving the entire engagement. And also the brands >>How's the NBA feel about this because, you know, you got the NBA and you get the team, you got the owners. I mean, the democratization of the players, which I love by the way that angle kind of brings their power. Now's the new kind of balance of power. How is the NBA handling this? What's some of the conversations you've had with the, the organization. >>Yeah. So obviously there are a lot of things that, uh, people have to be careful about, right? They have existing contracts, existing, digital media rights. Um, so that's something that, uh, we have to be very tactful when we are working with NBA and NPA, uh, on what we can say, we cannot say. So that is obviously they have a lot of existing multimillion or billion dollar contracts that they cannot void with the web because the evolution of web three, >>You know, I love, uh, riffing on the notion of contract compliance when there's major structural change happening. Remember back in baseball, back in the days before the internet, the franchise rights was geographic territory. Mm-hmm <affirmative> well, if you're the New York Yankees, you're doing great. If you're Milwaukee, you're not doing too good, but then comes the internet. That's good. That's no geography. There's no boundaries. That's good. So you're gonna have stadiums have virtual Bo. So again, how do they keep up with the contracts? Yeah. I mean, this is gonna be a fundamental issue. >>That's >>Good. Good. And I think if they don't move, the players are gonna fill that void. >>That's correct. Yeah. And especially with this, this an IL deal, right. That happened for the players, uh, especially college athletes. So we are in process of onboarding 1.5 million college athletes. Uh, and those athletes are looking for not only paying for the tuition for the colleges, but also for engagement and generating this early on, uh, >>More okay. Rod, we're gonna make a prediction here in the cube, 20, 20 we're in Monaco, all the NBA, NHL, the teams they're gonna be run by player Dows. Yeah. What do you think? A very good prediction. Yeah. Very good prediction. Yeah. I mean you, I mean, that's a joke, I'm joking aside. I mean, it's kind of connecting the dots, but you know, whether that happens or not, what this means is if this continues to go down this road, that's correct. Get the players collectively could come together. Yeah. And flip the script. >>Yeah. And that's the entire decentralization, right. So it's like the web three has really disrupted this industry as you know. Um, and, and I know your community knows that too. >>Of course, course we do. We love it. >>Something from sports perspective, we are very excited. >>Well, I love it. Love talking. Let's get to the, to the weeds here on the product, under the hood, tell about the roadmap, obviously NFTs are involved. That's kind of sexy right now. I get the digital asset model on there. Uh, but there's a lot more under the coverage. You gotta have a platform, you gotta have the big data and then ultimately align into connecting other systems together. How do you view the tech roadmap and the product roadmap? What's your vision? >>Yeah. So the, the one thing that you had to be T full, uh, as a company, whether it's LUT, mogul or any other startup, is you have to be really part of the ecosystem. So the reason why we are here at Monaco is that we obviously are looking at partnership with digital bits, um, and those kind of partnership, whether it's fourth centric, centric are very critical for the ecosystem in the community to grow. Um, and that's one thing you cannot build a, another, uh, isolated metaverse right? So that's one thing. Many companies have done it, but obviously not. >>It's a wall garden doesn't work. >>Exactly. So you have to be more open platform. So one things that we did early on in our platform, we have open APIs and SDKs where not only you as an athlete can bring in your, uh, other eCommerce or web, uh, NFTs or anything you want, but you can also bring in other real estate properties. So when we are building out this metaverse, you start with real estate, then you build out obviously stadiums and arenas and academies training academies, but then athletes can bring their, uh, web commerce, right. Where it's NFT wearables shoe line. So >>Not an ecosystem on top of Luke Mo. So you're like, I'm almost like you think about a platform as a service and a cloud computing paradigm. Yeah. Look different, not decentralized, but similarly enabling others, do the heavy lifting on their behalf. Yeah. Is that right? >>So that's correct. Yes. So we are calling ourself as the sports platform as a service, right. So we want to add the word sports because we, uh, in, in many contexts, right. When you're building metaverse, you can get distracted with them, especially we are in Los Angeles. Right. >>Can I get a luxury box for the cube and some of the metaverse islands and the stadiums you're doing? >>We, we are working >>On it. We're >>Definitely working on, especially the, uh, Los Angeles, uh, stadium. Yeah. >>Well, we're looking for some hosts, anyone out there looking for some hosts, uh, for the metaverse bring your avatar. You can host the cube, bro. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate. What's the, what's next for you guys, obviously, continuing to build momentum. You got your playful, how many people on the team what's going on, give a plug for the company. What are you looking for share with the audience, some of the, some of your goals. Yeah. >>So, uh, the main thing we're looking for is really, um, from a brand perspective, if you are looking at buying properties, this would be an amazing time to buy virtual sports stadium. Um, so we are, obviously we have 175 stadiums in roadmap right now. We started with Los Angeles. Then we are in San Francisco, New York, Qatar, Dubai. So all those sports stadiums, whether they're basketball, football, soccer are all the properties. And, uh, from a community perspective, if you want to get an early access, we are all about giving back to the community. Uh, so you can buy it at a much better presale price right now. Uh, so that's one, the second thing is that if you have any innovative ideas or a player that you want to integrate into, we have an very open platform from a community engagement perspective. If you have something unique from a land sale perspective yeah. Or the NFD perspective plug, contact us at, at Raj lumo.com. >>And I'm assuming virtual team, you in LA area where where's your home. >>So, yeah, so I live in Malibu, um, and our office is in Santa Monica. We have an office in India. Uh, we have few developers also in Europe. So, uh, and then we are team of 34 people right now >>Looking to hire some folks >>We are looking for, what >>Are you, what are you looking for? >>So, uh, we are looking for a passionate sports, uh, fanatics. >>It's a lot, not hard to find. Yeah. >><laugh> who knows how to also code. Right? So from blockchain perspective, we are, uh, chain agnostic. Uh, but obviously right now we are building on polygon, but we are chain agnostic. So if you have any blockchain development experience, uh, that's something we, we are looking for. Yeah. >>RA, thanks for coming out. Luke Mo check him out. I'm John furry with the cube here in Monaco for the mono crypto summit presented by digital bits. We got all the action, a lot of great guests going on, stay with us for more coverage. Um, John furrier, thanks for watching.

>>Welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of day, one of the snowflake summit 22 live from seizures forum in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin. My co-host for the week is Dave ante, Dave and I are pleased to welcome Naga Raj Sastry to the program, the vice president of data and analytics at HCL technologies. Welcome. Great to have you. >>Same here. Thank you for inviting me here. >>Isn't it great to be back in person? >>Oh, love it. >>This the keynote this morning. I don't know if you had a chance to see it standing room only there was overflow rooms. People are ready for this, and it was a jam packed morning of announcements. >>Absolutely. >>Talk to us a little bit about the HCL snowflake partnership, but anybody in the audience who may not be familiar with HCL, give us a little bit of a background, vision, mission differentiation, and then that snowflake duo. >>Sure, sure. So let me first start off with, um, uh, talking about H at seal, we are 11.5 billion organization. Uh, we have three modes of working mode. One is everything to do with our infrastructure business and application services and maintenance mode. Two is anything that we do in the cutting edge, uh, ecosystem, whether it is cloud, whether it is application modernization, ERPs, uh, SA all of those put together is more to data. Analytics is part of our more to culture. Um, the whole ecosystem is called digital services business and, uh, within digital, uh, services, the one of the arms is data and analytics. We are about a billion dollars in terms of revenues from a data and analytics perspective, uh, of the 11 billion that I was talking to you about. And mode three is everything to do with our software services. So we have got our own software products, and that's a third of our business. So that's about HCL. So at C and, uh, snowflake relationship, we are a elite partner with snowflake. We are one of the fastest growing partners. We achieved the elite level within 18 months of us signing up as a snowflake partner. We're close to about 50 plus implementations worldwide, and, uh, about 800 people who are snowflake professionals within, within that CLE ecosystem, large customers that we serve. >>And how long have you been partners? >>Uh, about 18 to 20 months now. >>Okay. So, so the, during the last couple of tumultuous years, why snowflake, what was it about their vision, their strategy, their leadership that really to spoke to HCL as this is a partner for us? >>So, so one of the, uh, biggest things that we realized, uh, probably about four years ago was in terms of, you know, you had all the application databases or RDBMSs PPS, the huddle P ecosystems, which are getting expense systems, which were getting expensive, not in terms of the cost, but in terms of the pro processing times, the way the queries were getting created. And we knew that there was, there is something that is going to come and the people and the people. Yeah. >>And, uh, and we knew that, you know, there will be a hyperscaler that will come. And, uh, of course there was Azure was already there. AWS was there, Google was just picking it up. And at that point in time, we realized that, you know, there will be a cloud data warehouse because we had started reading about snowflake at that point in time. So fast forward a couple of years after that, and we realized that if we are to be in this business, you know, the, the right way of doing it is by getting partnering a partnering with the right tooling company. And snowflake brings that to table. We all know that now. And, uh, with, with what, what the keynote speakers were also saying, right, from 150 member team about five years ago in, uh, conference to about 12,000 people now. So you know that this is the right thing to do, and this is the right place to be at. So we, we devised a methodology in terms of saying that let's get into the partnership, let's get our resources trained and certified on the snowflake ecosystem. And let's take a point of view to our customers in terms of how data migrations and transformations have to be done in the snowflake arena. When >>You, when you think about your modes, you talked about modes one, two, and three. If I feel like snowflake touches on each of those, maybe not so much of the infrastructure and the apps, but although maybe going forward, it does increasingly. So, yeah, that's my question is where do you see snowflake vectoring into your modes? >>So it doesn in both in the first two modes, uh, and mode three also, uh, because, and I'll give you the reasons why mode one is predominantly because you can do application development on cloud yep. On the data cloud now, um, which basically means that I can have a qu application run on snowflake. Eventually that's the goal. Second is, uh, in, in more two, because it is a cloud data warehouse, it fits in exactly because the application data is in snowflake. I've got my, uh, regular data sets within snowflake. Both are talking to each other. There is zero, um, lapse time from a user perspective, >>It's a direct >>Tip. And then more three, the reason why I said more three was because software as a service or software services and products is because I can power by snowflake. I can implement that. So that's why it cuts across our entire ecosystem. >>The, the dig, the whole thing is called your dig business, correct? Yes. Is that right? So that's, this is the, the next wave of digital business that we're seeing here, cuz it's digital is data <laugh> right. That's really what it's about. It's about putting that data to work. >>So the president of our digital business, a BJA who was, who had done the, who had done a session in the, in the afternoon today, he says the D in the digital is data. >>There is right. >>And, uh, that's what we are seeing with our customers, large implementations that we do in this ecosystem. There is one other thing that we are focusing, uh, very heavily on is industrial solutions or industry led solutions. Like whether it is for healthcare, whether it's for retail or financial services, name, a vertical. And we have got our own capabilities around industrialized solutions that's fit that fit certain use cases. >>So in thinking about the D in, in digital is really data. If you think about the operating model for data, it's obviously evolved, you mentioned, had do, went to the cloud and all the data went to the cloud, but today it's, you've got an application development model, you got database, which is sort of hardened. And then you've got your data pipeline and your, your data stack and, and that's kind of the operating model. There's sort of siloed to a great degree. Mm-hmm <affirmative> how is that operating model changing as a result of, of data? So >>I answered it in two parts. Part is if you, if you realize over the years, what used to happen is you had a CIO in an organization or C more CIO, but, and then you had enterprise architecture teams, application development teams, support teams, and so on and so forth in the last 36 months. If you see there is an emergence of a new role, which is called the da chief data and analytics officer. So the data and analytics officer is a role that has been created. And the purpose of creating that role is to ensure that organizations will pull out our call out resources within the CIO organizations who are enterprise architects, who are data architects, who are application architects or security architects, and bring them under into the ecosystem of the data office from an operating model perspective. So that innovations can be driven. >>Data driven enterprises could be created and innovations can come through there. The other part of that is the use cases get prioritized when you start innovating. And then it is a factory model in terms of how those use cases get built, which is, which is, which is a no brainer in my mind, at least. But that is how the operating model is coming up from a people perspective, from a technology perspective. Also there is an operating model that is emerging. If you see all the hyperscalers that are there today, snowflake with its LA most latest and greatest announcements. If you see the way the industry is going, is everything will be housed into one ecosystem and the beauty of this entire thing. And if you, you are to, you'll be able to fathom it effectively, right? Because if you are, if I'm, multi-cloud kind of an environment and if I'm on snowflake, I don't care why, because I'm snowflake, which is, which can work around across the multi clouds. So my data is in one place >>Effectively. Yeah. It's interesting what you were saying about the chief data officer, the chief data officer, that role emerged out of the, the ashes, like a Phoenix of, of, you know, compliance data quality and, and healthcare and financial services and government, the highly regulated industries. And then it took a while, but it, it increasingly became, wow, this is a really front front of the board level role, if you will, you know, data, and now you're seeing it. It's it's, it is integrated with digital. >>Absolutely. And there is one other point, if you think about it, the emergence of the chief data officer came in because there were issues associated to data quality. Yeah. There were issues associated to data cataloging as to how data is cataloged. And there were issues in terms of trustability of the data. Now, the trustability of the data can be in two places. One is a data quality, Hey, bad data, garbage and garbage out. But then the other aspect of the trustability is in terms of, can I do the seven CS of data quality and say that, okay, I can hallmark this data platinum or gold or silver or bronze or UN hallmark data. And with snowflake, the advantage is if I, if you have a hallmark data set, that is a, say a platinum or a gold, and thanks to the virtual warehouse, the same data set gets penetrated across the enterprise. That's the beauty with which it comes. And then of course the metadata aspect of it, bringing in the technical metadata and the business metadata together for the purpose of creating the data catalogs is another key cool thing and enabled again by snowflake. >>What are some of it when you're in customer conversations, some of the myths or misconceptions that customers historically have typically been making when it comes to creating a data strategy, some of the misconceptions, and then what is your recommendation for those folks since every company, these days to be competitive has to be a data company. >>Yeah. So around data structures, the, the whole thought process has to be, uh, either do in the past, we used to go with, from source applications, we would gather requirements. Then we would figure out what sources are there, do a profiling of the data and then say, okay, the target data, data model should be this >>Too slow, >>Too slow right now, fast forward to the digital transformation. There is producers of data, which is basically that applications that are being modernized today are producers of data. They're actually telling you that I'm producing this kind of data. This is the kind of events that I'm producing. And this is my structure. Now the whole deal is I don't need to figure out what the requirements are. I know what the use case the application is going to be helping me with. So therefore the entire data model is supported. So, but at the same point in time, the newer generation applications that are getting created are not only created getting created in terms of the customer experience. Of course, that is very critical, but they're also taking into account aspects around metadata, the technical metadata associated within an application, the data quality rules or business rules that are implemented within an application, all of that is getting documented as a result, the whole timeline from source to profile to model, which used to be X number of days in the past is X minus, at least 20% now or 30% actually. So that is how the structures, uh, the data structures are coming into a play future futuristic thought process would be, there will be producers of data and there'll be consumers of data. Where is ETL then or ELT. Then there is not going to be any ETL or ELT because a producer is going to say that I'm producing the data for this. A consumer says that, okay, I wanna consume the data for this purpose. There, they meet through an API layer. So where is ETL eventually going to go away? >>Well, and those consumers of, if you think about the, the way it works today, the, the data operating model, if you will, the transaction systems and other systems draw off a bunch of exhaust, they gets thrown over the fence to the analytics system. They're not operation the data, the data pipeline, the data systems are not operationalized in a way that they need to be. And obviously Snowflake's trying to change that. >>So data >>That's a big change, please. >>Yeah. Sorry. Didn't mean to cut you off. My >>Apologies. No, no. I'm >>So data operations is a very, very critical aspect. And if you think about it holistically, we used to have ETL pipelines T pipelines. And then we used to have queries being written on top of metadata or PPS and HaLoop and all of that and reporting tools that would have number of reports that were created and certain self-service BI reports into the ecosystem. Now, when you think in terms of a cloud data warehouse, what is happening? Is this the way you are architecting your solution today in terms of data pipelines, those data pipelines are self manageable or self-healing do not need the number of people where there was no documentation in terms of what ETL pipelines were written in the past on certain ETL tools or why something is failing. Nobody knew why something was failing because these are age old code, but take it forward today. >>What happens is our organizations are migrating from on-prem to cloud and to the cloud data warehouse. And the overall cost of ownership is decreasing. The reason is the way we are implementing the data pipelines, the way the data operations are being done in terms of, you know, even before a pipeline is kicked, uh, or kicked in, then, you know, there is a check process to say whether the source application is ready or not ready. So such things, small, small things, which are part and parcel of the entire data operations lifecycle are taking the center stage as a result, self fueling mechanisms are coming in. And because of those self fueling mechanisms, metrics are being captured as a result, you know exactly where to focus on and where not to focus on as, as a result, the number of resources needed to support gets reduced. Cost of one service >>Is low, much higher trust self-service infrastructure, uh, data context in the hands of, of business users. Data is now more discoverable it's governed. So you can now create data products more quickly. So speed and scale become extremely important. >>Absolutely. And in fact, one of the things that, that, uh, that is changing is the way search is getting implemented here to in the past, you created an index and then, you know, the data is searchable, but now it is contextual search. Can I contextualize the entire search? Can I create a machine learning algorithm that will actually say that, okay, Nara as a persona was looking for this kind of data and then Nara as a person, or comes back again and looks for some different kind of data. Can the machine learning algorithm go and figure out, okay, what is, what is going on in a garage's mind? What is he trying to look at? And then, you know, improve the, the whole learnability of the, of the entire algorithm. That's how search is going to also take, get into a change kind of a scenario. >>Excellent NAAU garage. Thank you so much for joining us, talking about data modernization at speed, end scale HCL, what you're doing, what you're doing with snowflake, and the sounds like incredible power that you're enabling. And we're only just scratching the surface. I have a feeling there's a lot more under there that you guys are gonna uncover. >>Sure. So we have, we have a tool or an accelerator. We call it an accelerator in the HCL parlance, but just actually a tool. So when you think about data modernization onto snowflake, it is predominantly migrating the data set from your existing ecosystem onto snowflake. That is one aspect of it. The second aspect of it is the modernization of the ETL or E LT pipelines. The third aspect associated to the data that is there within this, these ecosystems is the reconciliation older application, uh, sorry, older legacy, uh, platform snowflake legacy platform gives me result. X does snowflake give me result X that kind of a reconciliation has to be done. Data reconciliation and testing. And then the third fourth layer associated is the reporting and visualization. So these four layers are part and parcel of something that we call as advantage. Migrate advantage migrate will convert your ter data, data, uh, model into a snowflake understandable data model automatically whether it's ter data, whether it is Oracle, extra data, green plum, <inaudible> you name a ecosystem. >>We have the mechanism to convert a data model from whatever it is into snowflake readable, understandable data model. The second aspect is the et L E L T pipeline. Whether you want to go from Informatica to DBT or Informatica to something else or data stage to something else doesn't matter. There is a, there is an algorithm, or there is a tool which is called the ETL pipeline. We call it gateway suit, gateway suit actually converts the code. It reads the code that is there on the left hand side, which is the legacy code, understands the logic, it reverse engineers and understands the logic. And then what it does is we use that understanding or that logic that has been called out into spark code or DBT or any other tool of your choice from a customer standpoint. That's the second layer. Third layer I talked about, which is basically data testing, automated data testing and data reconciliation and the last, but not the least is the reporting because older ways of reporting and visualization with, with current day reporting and visualization, which is more persona based, the art of visualization is something difficult or different in this, in this aspect, come over to our booth at 2 1, 1 4, and you'll see, uh, advantage migrate in the works >>Advantage. Migrate. There you go. Nero, thank you so much for joining us on the program and unpacking HCL, giving us really that technical dissection of what you guys are doing and together with snowflake. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you >>For our guest and Dave ante. This is Lisa Martin live from the show floor of snowflake summit 22, Dave and I will be right back with our final guest of day one in just a minute.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Seaport in Boston. This is day two of theCUBES's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022 different format this year for Red Hat Summit. You know we are used to the eight to 9,000 people big conferences, but this is definitely and a lot of developers this is definitely a smaller, more intimate, more abbreviated keynotes which I love that new style they've really catering to the virtual audience as well as the physical audience, a lot of good stuff going on last night in the Seaport, which a lot of fun Stephanie Chiras is here is the Senior Vice President of Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat. >> Yeah. >> On the move again, Stephanie love to see you. >> yeah. Thank you. It's great to be here with you and now in a little different bit of a role. >> Yeah, I'm happy that we're actually in Boston and we can meet face to face. >> Yes. >> We don't have to get in a plane, but you know we'll be on a lot of planes in the next few months. >> Yeah. >> But look, a new role for you in ecosystems. You are interviewing all the partners, which is very cool. So you get a big observation space as my friend Jeff Jonas would like to say. And so, but I'd like to observe the partner ecosystem in this new era is different. >> It's very different. >> I mean just press release is going back it's really deep engineering and really interesting flywheel approaches. How is the cloud and the hybrid cloud ecosystem and partner ecosystem different today? >> I think there's a couple of things, I think first of all cloud accelerating all the innovation, the whole cloud motion pulls in a cloud partner in addition to many of the other partners that you need to deploy a solution. So this makes almost every deployment a multi-partner deployment. So that creates the need not just for one on one partnerships between companies and vendors but really for a multi-partner experience. Right, how does an ISV work with a distributor work with a cloud vendor? How do you pull all of that together and I think at Red Hat, our view of being a platform company, we want to be able to span that and bring all of those folks together. So I see this transition going from a world of partnerships into a world of a networked ecosystem. And the real benefit is when you can pull together one ecosystem with another ecosystem, build that up and it really becomes an ecosystem of ecosystems. >> Well and I'm a fan, you're a multi tool star, so it may kind of makes you dangerous because you can talk tech in your technical roles. You've been a GM so you understand the business and that's really what it takes in the part of ecosystem. It can't be just technology and just engineering integration, it's got to be a business model associated with that. Talk about those two dimensions. >> And I think what we're seeing in the ecosystem is there are partners that you build with there are partners you service with, there are partners you sell with some do all three, some do two out of three. How do you work those relationships at the end of the day every partner in the ecosystem wants to bring their value to the customer. And their real goal is how do you merge those values together and I think as you know, right, I come from the technology and the product space. I love moving into this space where you look for those value and that synergy of value to bring better technology, a better procurement experience is often really important and simplicity of deployment to customers, but partners span everything we do. We develop with them, we build with them, we deploy with them, we service with them and all has to come together. >> So how do you make this simple for customers? I mean you're describing an increasingly complex environment. How do you simplify this? >> So a couple of things one, spot onto your point Paul, I think customer expectations now are more aggressive than they've ever been that the ecosystem has done pre-work before they show up. The customer doesn't want to be the one who's pulling together this from one vendor, this from another vendor and stitching it together themselves. So there's a number of things I think we've stepped in to try and do digital engagement for certification and deployment, the creation of operators on OpenShift is one way that technology from partners can be done and enabled more easily and quickly with Red Hat platforms. I think in addition, you've seen. >> Can you go a little deeper on that? >> Sure. >> Explain that a little bit more what does that mean? Yeah, First off, we have a digital experience where partners can come in, they can certify and test their applications to run it on Red Hat platforms themselves. So it's a bit of a come one, come all. We also have an engineering team and a developer team to work side by side with them to build those into solutions. We've done things again to supplement that with capabilities of what we call validated patterns things we've done in the market with customers, with partners, we pull together a validated pattern, we put it onto GitHub so anyone can get access to it. It becomes kind of a recipe for deployment that's available for partners to come in and augment on top of that or customers can come in and pull it up GitHub and build off of it. So I feel like there's different layers in the sort of build model that we work with partners and you want to be able to on-ramp any partner wherever they want to influence their value. It could be at the base certification level, it could be even with RHEL 9 was a good one, right. RHEL 9 was the first version of RHEL that we deployed based upon the CentOS Stream model. CentOS Stream is an upstream version of RHEL very tightly tied into the development model but it allowed partners to engage with that code prior to deployment everything from hardware partners to ISV partners, it becomes a much more open way for them to collaborate with us, so there's so much we can do. >> What's the pitch to partners. I mean I know hybrid cloud is fundamental to your value proposition. I mean most people want hybrid cloud even though the cloud guys might not admit it, right, but so what's the pitch, how do you approach partners there's got to be a common theme there pitch me. >> I think one of the things when it comes to the Red Hat ecosystem is the ecosystem itself has to bring value. Yes, we at Red Hat want to bring value, we want to come in and make it easy and simple for you to access our technology when want to make it easy and simple to engage side by side in front of a customer. But at the end of the day the value of the Red Hat ecosystem is not only Red Hat, it's our partnerships with others. It's our partnerships with the hyperscalers, it's our partnerships with ISVs, it's our work in open source communities. So it's not about Red Hat being this sort of epicenter of the ecosystem. The value comes from the collective ecosystem as it stands, and I think we've made a number of changes here at the beginning of the year in order to create a end to end team within Red Hat that does everything from the build to the sell with all the way from end to end. And I think that's bringing a new layer of simplicity for our engagement with their partners, and it's allowing us to stitch together and introduce partners to partners. >> But you are a dot connector in a sense. >> Absolutely. >> And you can't do it all, I mean nobody can. >> Yeah. But especially Red Hat your strategy is not to do it all by design, so where's the big white spaces where you feel as though your strengths need to be complimented by the partners? >> Oh, I think you caught it spot on. We don't think we can do it all, we're a platform company, we know the value of hybrid cloud is all about bringing a flexibility of an ecosystem together. I think the places where we're really doubling down on is simplicity. So the Ansible announcement that we did right with Ansible automation platform on Azure. With that announcement, it brings in certified collections of ecosystem partners on that deployment. We do the work with Azure in order to do that deployment of Ansible automation platform, and then it comes with a set of certified collections that have been done with other partners. And I think those are the pieces where we can really double down on bringing simplicity. Right, so if I look at areas of focus, that's a great space, and I think it is all about connecting the dots, right, it's about connecting our work with Azure with our work with other ISV partners to pull that together and show up to a customer with something that's fast time to value. >> With so many partners to manage, how do you make sure you're not playing favorites. I guess how do you treat all partners equally or do you even try? >> We absolutely try. I think any partnership is a relationship, right, so it is what Red Hat brings to the table, it's also what the partner brings to the table. Our goal is to understand what the value is the partner wants to deliver to the customer. We focus on that and bringing that to the forefront of what we deploy. We absolutely in a hybrid world it's about choice and flexibility. Certainly there are partners and we made some announcements of course, this week, right yesterday and today with some we're continued to deepen our partnerships with those folks who are doubling down with us where their strategy is very well aligned with us. But our goal is to bring a broad ecosystem that offers customers choice. That's what hybrid cloud's all about. >> I remember years ago, your colleague Bob Pitino, I went down and met him in his office and he schooled me, he was awesome and we did a white board on alternative processors. >> Yeah. >> You guys were doing combat duty in the power division at the time. But basically he helped me understand the trend that is absolutely come true which is alternative processors. It's not just about the CPU anymore, it's about all the CPU and GPU and NPU and accelerators and all these other connected parts. You guys obviously are in the middle of that, you've got relationships with ARM, NVIDIA, Intel, we saw on stage today. Explain the importance and the trends that you see of these alternative processors and accelerators and what that means for customers in terms of the applications that they're now going to be able to tap. >> Yeah, so you know I love this topic when it comes. So one of the spaces is edge, right, we talked about edge today. Edge to me is the epitome of kind of a white space and an opportunity where ecosystem is essential. Edge is pulling together unique hardware capabilities from an accelerator all the way out to new network capabilities and then to AI applications. I mean the number of ISVs building AI applications is just expanding. So it's really that top to bottom ecosystem story, and our work with the telco comes in, our work with the ARM partners, the NVIDIA of the world, the accelerators of the world comes in edge. And then you pull it up to the applications as well. And then to touch in, we're seeing edge be deployed a lot in industries and industry verticals, right. A lot of edge deployments are tailored for a retail market or for a financial services sector. Again, for us, we rely very much on the ecosystem to go into industry verticals where platform companies. So our goal is to find those key partners in those industry verticals who speak the speak, talk the language, and we partner with them in order to support them and so this whole edge space pulls all of that together I think even out to the go to market with industry alignment. >> It's interesting to partner, so we're talking about Silicon, we could talk about that all day long. >> Yes. >> And then it spans and that we had Accenture on we had Raj yesterday. And it was interesting 'cause you think Accenture's like deep vertical industry expertise which it is but Raj's role is really cross industry, and then to tap into that industry expertise you guys had an announcement yesterday with those guys and obviously the GSIs are a key player. >> Absolutely. >> We saw a bunch of 'em last night out and about. >> Yeah. >> So talk about the importance of those relationships. >> I think we are in the announcement with Accenture is a great one, right. We're really doubling down because customers are looking to them, they're looking to the Accentures of the world to help them move into this hybrid world. It's not simple, it's not simple to deploy and get that value of the flexibility. So Accenture has built a number of tools in order to help customers on that journey which we talked about yesterday it really is a continuum of how customers adopt for their cloud space. And so us partnering with them offers a platform underneath, give them technology capabilities and Accenture is able to help customers and guide them along that journey and add a new layer of simplicity. So I think the GSI are critical in this space. >> Yeah. >> You talked about the number of companies developing AI, new AI tools right now. And it seems like there's just the pace of innovation is amazing, the number of startups is unprecedented. How do you decide who makes it into your partner system? What bars do they have to jump over to become a Red Hat partner? >> I think our whole partner structure is layered out quite honestly a bit in tiering, depending upon how much the partner is moving forward with Red Hat, how strategically we aligned our et cetera. But there is definitely a tier that is a come one come all, get your technology to work with Red Hat. We do that digitally now in the world of digital it's much easier to do that to give accessibility but there is definitely a tier that is a come one come all and participate. And then above that, it comes into tierings. How deeply do we go to do joint building to do co-creation and how do we sort of partner even on things like we have ARO and ROSA as you know which is OpenShift built with AWS with Azure those provide very deep technical engagements to bring that level of simplicity, but I would say it spans all the layers, right. We do have a dedicated engineering team to work with the ecosystem partners. We have a dedicated digital team to reach out and proactively right, invite folks to participate and encourage them through the thing and through the whole path. And we've done some things on enablement, we just made early March, we made enablement free for all our partners in order to learn more and get more skilled in Red Hat. Skills and skill creation is just critical for partners, and we want to start there right. >> So we started this conversation with how cloud ecosystems are different. And I think AWS as the mother of all ecosystems, so does Microsoft too but they've had it for a while. And I got felt like last decade partners were kind of afraid, all right, we're going to partner with a cloud vendor, but they're going to eat our lunch. I noticed last year at Reinvent that whole dynamic is changing and I think the industry's realizing this is not a zero sum game. That there's just so much opportunity especially when you start thinking about the edge. So you guys use the term hybrid, right, and John and I wrote a piece prior to Reinvent last year, we said there's something new brewing, we've got on-prem connecting to the clouds, it's going across clouds. People call that multi-cloud, but multi-cloud has been like multi-vendor. It really hasn't been a sort of strategy or a technical layer. And now you're talking the edge and we see the hyperscaler spending a hundred billion dollars a year on infrastructure. And now we see companies like yours and your ecosystem building on top of that. They're not afraid of it anymore, they're actually looking at it as a gift and so we coined this term called Supercloud which is a abstraction layer, and it rises above highs all the complexity of the underlying primitives and APIs and people kind of wince at the term Ashesh called it Metacloud which I like it's kind of fun. But do you feel like that's happening in the ecosystem? Is that a real trend or is that just my imagination? >> I think it's definitely a real trend and it's coming from customers, right, that's what customers want. So customers want the ability to choose are they going to self-manage their applications within a public cloud. There's much more than just technology in the public cloud too right. There's a procurement experience that they provide a simplicity of our relationship. They may choose one of the hyperscalers. They pick a procurement experience, they deepen that relationship, they leverage the services. And I think now what you're seeing is customers are demanding it. They want to be a part of that, they want to run on multiple clouds. And now we're looking at cloud services you've seen our strategy double down on cloud services. I think that kind of comes back together to a customer wants simplicity. They expect the ecosystem to work together behind the scenes. That's what capabilities like ARO are or OpenShift on Azure and OpenShift on AWS. That's what we can provide. We have an SRV team, we jointly support it with those partners behind the scenes but as you said, it's no longer that fear, right. We've rolled up our sleeves together specifically because we wanted to show up to the customer as one. >> Yeah, and by the way, it's not just traditional technology vendors, it's insurance companies, it's banks, it's manufacturers who are building out these so-called super clouds. And to have a super cloud, you got to have a super PaaS and OpenShift is the supers of all PaaS So Stephanie cheers, thanks so much for coming back to theCUBE, >> Oh it's my pleasure. it great to see you again. >> Thank you for the time. >> All right, and thank you for watching keep it right there this is day two of Red Hat Summit 2022 from the Seaport in Boston. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>Mm. Welcome back to the seaports in Boston City is abuzz. Bruins tonight, Celtics Tomorrow night. We're all excited. We're talking open source, which is a very exciting topic. Every company is using open source. I mean, it is the mainspring of innovation. I'm Dave along with my co host, Paul Dillon. And you're watching the cubes. Coverage of Red Hat. Summer 2022. Raj Raj Masinga is here. He's hybrid and emerging Platforms lead at Accenture and Ghetto Greber. Who's red hats? Business group lead eccentric. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Thanks for coming >>on. Thank you. >>Thank you, Raj. We saw in the keynote up there today with Stephanie. She's coming on tomorrow. Rockstar Stephanie. Cheers. Also a Boston sports fan, and I have to work at it, but you can talk about the history with red hat. How long have you guys been at this? And give us a journey update. >>Well, first of all, thanks for having us here. Um, yes, we are big fans of Red Hat and especially Stephanie. I get to I had the pleasure of working with a very closely, um, our relationship with Red Hat goes many, many years, decades I think. And but Paul, come here will tell you that. You know, we've been focused a lot with the formation of our new business unit in Cloud. First around, migrating to the public cloud. But now, as we focus more and more around how our clients begin to operate in the public cloud in the cloud ecosystem hybrid is coming much more into focus. And Red Hat is very much a key client of a key partner of us. So we go way back. But this is all about us doubling down and increasing our partnership and deepening it with them. >>So, uh, you talked today about hybrid Cloud is everything. And it seems like a couple of years ago there was focuses more on moving to the public cloud and getting off of private infrastructure. Has there been a change in the ways in which customers are thinking, are they gonna be hanging onto their private infrastructure longer, perhaps, than was expected a couple of years ago? >>I think the first of all, it's a very different industry by industry. If you look at retail or consumer goods, I think there's a big movement in terms of percentages of workloads that are getting moved onto public cloud. If you look at industries like banking or utilities or government, more regular financial services, more regulated industries. I think we are finding a much larger percentage of their workloads because of regulatory reasons and security reasons, etcetera. Our need to remain either on premise or in private cloud. So I think it very much depends on the industry. But regardless the hype, you know, especially with the movement to edge now hybrid is going to be, you know, permeating everything. So I think by industry depends. But but the edges driving a whole new flywheel. >>You know, we started the Cuban 2010, so the cloud was, you know, modern cloud. Anyway, it was like, say, four years in into it and at the time, to your point Raj Financial Services, there was an evil word. No way we're ever going to the cloud. No, that's changed, obviously. But then, when the financial crisis hit, >>you >>had so initially it was a lot of tyre kicking experimentation. When the financial crisis hit, you had a lot of CFO saying, Okay, let's shift Capex to Apex and so that was sort of a bridge. And then after we came out, it was like this spate of innovation. And then we saw that during the pandemic, where cloud migration was a high priority and or it was the lifeline. And now it sounds like customers are kind of rethinking to your earlier conversation. What is cloud? It's that operating model. So I wonder if you could sort of Can you confirm that's kind of the journey that customers are taking? Where are they today? What does it mean? There? You know the the operating model. What do they consider cloud? >>Um, you actually, you see it? It's like it's really try forward to the cloud. Uh, but where it was in the beginning, If it doesn't hype about Public Cloud, they become more and more aware that it's hybrid because they have to bring the legacy system and process into the cloud as well. And it takes more time that actually they have fought before. So it's like there was a process of learning and also like in the steps moving forward to the operating model because they also understand I cannot operate a cloud like I was operating in the classical way like my old data centre and everything. It needs all the capabilities it needs, all the skills and especially if you go in a hybrid world. And it's a hybrid operation between the classic traditional but also the new ways of how you operate into a cloud. And you really see also the financial services. Now, uh, we had, uh I mean watch presented at keynote. We had a client in Germany. He made a decision, a very traditional financial services clients providing the service to chairman saving banks. And they did this decision and I would say, if you have spoken to them 10 years ago, they will not go into the cloud. But now they went to the cloud via private cloud, and now they got the confidence about how to operate in it. And now they move forward into a public cloud. But from a private cloud into the public cloud. Today, after security, they have up Skilling on skills and people and they understand the process and what's really required and needed in order to have such an environment. >>Generally, what's the strategy with regard to modernisation organisations? More building like an abstraction layer? Uh, with microservices and then connecting to the cloud. Or are they actually rewriting applications to make them cloud native? What are you What are you advising clients from a strategy standpoint, and I know it depends, but, you know, it's >>a It's a great question. I think the genesis to that strategy is how they view infrastructure, Right? So you know, everyone is, has this kind of, I don't know that this is almost mythical opinion out there with cloud. You don't need to worry about your infrastructure. All the providers will worry about it, and you just need to move it there. But the opposite is true. It's really critical what your infrastructure strategy is as you move to the cloud, because depending on what workload you have, you know it can be on any one of the continuum that you described. So the first thing is, where do you want to house your workload? Is the question and that will drive. How what do you want to do with your application? Whether you want to just maintain it the way it is, Do you want to simply modernise it, keeping where it is, or do you want to completely risk in it or even eliminated. So so I think the entire basically the answer to your question around. Do we? What do we do with the application? Is fundamentally driven by what is your infrastructure strategy and what that workload needs to do for you. >>So I know you want to jump in, but I got to follow up. You're saying hardware matters because we heard Paul Corvino today talking about this hardware renaissance. I'm actually I just ran a power panel called. Does hardware still matter? You're saying it matters? >>Yeah. And and it doesn't. And infrastructure doesn't always. I mean, now that you can do infrastructure as code, right? I mean, I was at the Del summit last time and read That is a huge partner of Dell now, right? Which, you know, uh, was much more, uh, partnered with VM ware. But I think the whole ecosystem is opening up, and even the hardware providers are looking at this in a much more nimble way. But yes, it's very much part of the conversation. They haven't gone away. >>During your keynote. You outlined sort of your strategy. Going forward is called cloud first. Yes. What does cloud first mean? >>Well, um, we we want to make sure that when we talk about transformation of business with our clients, So extension always goes with the idea of an industry lens of solving a specific problem for a client. What is the business problem we solve? And increasingly, what we want to message and drive to our clients is if you're thinking about, regardless of what the business is technologies absolutely critical to whatever transformation you're doing and when. When you look at technology, you have to think cloud first because that's where all the innovation is happening. That's where all the, um um, investments are being driven. Whether it's an I mean, it's a software vendor, but it's a hardware vendor with its uh, so you have to think cloud first when you think about transforming your business. >>Uh, what is How does modernisation play into that? You know, a lot of vendors are throwing a lot of resources that the modernisation market VM ware, Tanzania and IBM and such, uh, how interesting our customers really a Modernising legacy applications >>hugely right, because fundamentally, I think everything is now driven by our experiences. What we now are used to in terms of, uh, interfacing with applications are interfacing with function sets or interfacing with technology. So there is a lot of inherent, um, legacy technology that doesn't have that experience. So when you think about transforming, you have to come at it from an experience point of view. And when you think in those terms modernisation or even rebuilding the same, even if it's the same function set, uh, re skinning it and modernisation is critical for the purposes of engagement. >>What's the number one challenge that customers that you're working with face in terms of modernisation? Is it trying to figure out like Rogers sort of laying out the portfolio? What do I do with it? Do I modernise it? Do I retire it? Do I let it just die on the vine? What's their number one challenge? >>Uh, mainly it depends also on the industry, but it's, uh, I would say, for the highly regulated, certainly regulations. They always have an own interpretation of the regulations. Regulation means for them, but normally it's not really what they understand. But I think this is more and more coming to Annie's and more people understand what it really means, but it's also what we see a lot. They think first about technology, but not what kind of business problem they want, Uh, and they want to solve. So it's like, instead of having a technology neutral discussion is really do want to achieve, um, to have really start on this side and then having this discussion away, which, obviously it's one of the key, even because they start to the cloud even without having a strategy without having a vision. If you have a clear vision, if you have a clear strategy, you know where you want to go, and then you can make your business case. You can make you architecture and then you decide on technology. And then, of course, on this journey, all the things about security compliance coming to the plane, Yeah, and I think I think that's the easiest approach. But clients struggle to understand. Of course, I mean, the technology is changing rapidly. Even new products and release cycle new life cycles, the complexity of all the tools hardware we mentioned before network is changing new working coming up. It's really hard to keep pace or keep up with the base of the technology and what's happening even for us. And then you understand the complexity and bring this complexity back to simplicity, but not without losing. We have this also keynote the efficiency and, uh, flexibility for an engineer, because that's what he needs >>to your clients. Have the skill sets to do all that such a self serving question to you guys. But but no, do they? I mean, there's a skills shortage. There's a a battle for talent. So how are they >>dealing? I mean, it's obvious the battle for talent is here. I mean, everybody is looking for the best talent, and if we need, if you need a full stack. Engineer, for example, is very hard to get a full stack engineer on your ground. You call really cloud native. So you have to up skill people to re skilled people. There's also a change coming into it and the changes not to forget. So it's what we say most time. The technology is an easy part, but the change change the organisation, change up skilled organisation. That's the hard part because you need to change from from one mindset to another, and we know from the from the past. What change? People are not open to change in general, so we need to change the mindset. >>I wanna go back to Hybrid Cloud because we have Dani from Red Hat was on earlier and he said, Edges really redefining the definition of hybrid cloud. It's it's more complex architecture, and it's changing the nature of how we think about hybrid Cloud. Are you seeing that with your customers? Are they changing their thinking about what hybrid means in that context? >>Yeah, completely. You know, I was I was We did a bunch of, uh, research recently, and I had I just wanted to make sure I called this. I mean, there's a flexible report that came out that says 80% of all enterprises now are on hybrid 89% multi cloud redheaded. A report that said 80% of our businesses are expected to, um, uh, increase their use of open source. Right, So So, yes, hybrid is everywhere. Edge is driving it, but there's a There's another critical element to that movement. The complexity of our clients. Estates are increasing because whether it's hybrid or whether it's edge or whatever, they are now. You know, given if you're a C i or a C T o. Your estate is really complex now. So one of the things that we now need to do is how do we simplify that? So, you know, we think and we've been talking with red hat about this. We need to come up with a clean, you know, we keep calling it, you know, single pane of glass for a enterprise that allows them to look at their estate in a way that allows them to then simply make some innovative decisions across the entire state. So, yes, edges driving hybrid. But the key thing that we now need to overcome is how do we manage that complexity? >>We have new term. Uh, I call it Super Cloud, but the session is a better word. Medic cloud. That's gonna what I think of that century. I think of deep industry expertise. Of course, we have that, but with the partnership from redhead, it's a very it's horizontal in the sense that it can go anywhere. So how do you guys work in in terms of within Accenture plugging into your deep industry expertise? And how does that horizontal redhead >>fit. That's a really good question. So, you know, one of the things, you know. First of all, we came out with a announcement today about our expanded relationship with Red Hat. One of the key elements in that announcement is how we are looking and bringing in red Hat into our industry business motions. So we actually have decided to pick a certain number of industries. You know, financial services is one. Telco is another. We are thinking about utilities in Europe. Public health is a is another one that we are looking at. And as we come up with our offerings, you heard me and Stephanie talk about joint offerings earlier on the keynote. Um, these offerings are industry offerings, but in those offerings we have embedded and we are, they're powered by redhead technology. Um, that allows these industry solutions to drive innovation through their technology. Um, yes. Red hat can be, for the most part, a horizontal cross industry, you know, technology. But you have to really bring them into specific industrial solutions because of the way we go to market. And I think Red hat brings innovation, uh, in a way that these industries haven't seen before. >>So I mean, how do you stay out of their way? Because they have a services operation that they're trying to grow. And that's your business as well. So where the lines of demarcation >>back to your question? I I don't I don't think there is a limiting opportunity. Read? Had, you know Stephanie Me, Paul, we're all talking about How do we collectively increase both our armies? You know, I I Yes, there might be occasional overlaps in the trenches, but when you look at the bigger picture, it is not a problem at all. >>I wouldn't think so. I mean, the way you're describing Rogers exactly the way it should work. You lead with the business, figure out the business problem, how you're gonna solve that. The technology will take care of itself. Technologies come and they go. And you want to use modern technologies, obviously. But if you don't get the business piece right, forget no technology is gonna save you >>exactly, right. And and the complexities of what the businesses today are facing is getting more and more difficult. And I think actually, technologies like red hat, you know, they're the whole concept of open source, I think is very creative around driving innovations from the market. I >>want to ask you that because Paul Kermie is you know, the storey was sort of an homage to open source. How much do customers really care about open source >>customers care about innovation and and anything that drives innovation to their business, whether it's whether it comes from technology, whether it comes from crowdsourcing, whether it comes from, you know, uh, marketing doesn't matter. I think when you look at the key hunger for innovation and how open source drives innovation, it becomes part of the business conversation. And, uh and I think that's been one of the mantras that Paul has had from day one about how this is such a great platform for innovation. And I think that's >>something customers asked for. They say we must develop this using open source platforms and tool sets. >>Um, it depends. I think I think there are some technology CEO s R c T O s that are much more religious about what? Their technologies that needs to be there are others that are that are much more business oriented. Um, so yes, there are. You know, if it's more in telecom field, I think telecom or some of the more, uh, technology driven fields, they will ask for open source. In others, they we bring, bring it through as part of offering. >>Here's the nuance that I see and you mentioned Paul Cormier. Accenture, especially. I mean, you look at your ascendancy as a company, you for years would take known processes and codify them in software. And you made, you know, a lot of great innovations doing that. And people who made a lot of >>money >>today, this new normal, he calls it. I call it the new abnormal. You don't know what's around the corner. You have to build flexibility into your business, and that is something that open source enables. Uh, so that's sort of this, Really Not really. We don't want to speak about it too much. Business resiliency and flexibility is that that is the new normal. I don't see how you can do it without without open sources expertise. >>I completely agree that I and I think, um, it's actually an asset. So you know, in some ways, selfishly, by having open source in a solution stack some of the innovation gets them much more democratised, right? So? So it can come from a much broader sweet. So the load is not only an extension to come up with all the innovation we can, we can actually come up with a more democratised way of bringing that innovation in. So I think that's that's >>great. And it doesn't always go back to the community. I mean, Amazon built a $70 billion business on open source, but not all right, guys. Thanks so much for coming. Thank you very much for having a pleasure. All right, keep it right there. This is Dave Volonte for Paul Dillon. The Cubes. Continuous coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022 from the seaport in Boston. We'll be right back. >>Mm mm.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the CUBE's Coverage of Coupa Inspire 2022 at the Cosmopolitan in bustling Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin, and very pleased to be welcoming back. One of our CUBE alumni, the chairman and CEO of Coupa, the man himself Rob Bernshteyn, Rob great to have you back on the program. >> Great to be with you again. >> It's great to be in person. >> Sure. >> I applaud Coupa for taking the risk and getting all the people here. People are absolutely ready for this. And if there's a company that brings the energy it's Coupa. >> Well, thank you for saying that, we're definitely feeling it. You're right, we took a bit of a risk when we opened up registration that was before COVID, omicron hit. We didn't know what would happen, but we just had such an overwhelming onslaught of registrations and people wanted to be here. And in the last two days of interaction with folks it's just been like a huge reunion after three years of kind of being in home and away. >> Absolutely a huge reunion. One that was, I just felt so normal walking into your keynote yesterday. And of course, I always look for numbers because I know you're going to have numbers. 3.3 trillion, spend under management. You're almost at a trillion, a year run rate, that's huge. The growth of Cuopa, just up into the right. >> It is and it's really in thanks to our customer community. I mean, there are just incredible champions here. Courageous folks that are pushing for change inside their of companies. And we're honored to be the technology platform that drives a lot of that change. A more and more spend driven through the system that spend being optimized going to the right channels. Companies are saving money and it's given them more fuel to pursue their own missions and visions and everything that their companies seek to do. >> I just had a conversation with a customer about an hour ago and he was talking about everything was paper-based, manual, no visibility, and I've talked to other customers and I think I've got Jabil on this afternoon who had like 6 billion in indirect spend. They couldn't see. And with Cuopa, the blinders are off. And there's that visibility, the BSM community is really helping organization glean value, drive profitability. Talk to me about from your perspective how the BSM community has grown to be able to deliver, as you say, value as a service. >> Look what's happening is that the customers we have, we have over 2,500 customers around the world. Every one of these customers, they have their own missions. They have their own visions, they're pursuing their goals, but in order to do that, they need energy. They need gas in their tank, right? And with every dollar we save them, with every method we allow them to become more efficient in the way that they work, the way that they have visibility, the way that they collaborate one another, the way that they think about fulfillment of demand through supply chain design, or sourcing activities, contract negotiations, procurement, sourcing, treasury the way they manage that cash. It's unlocking that firepower. It's given them more gas in the tank and that's incredibly rewarding for me and my colleagues and everyone here because our mission is the amplification of all of their missions on a daily basis, really. >> Right, that amplification that acceleration the AI and Coupa. I got to see you about, about a year and a half ago. We were a few months into the pandemic but I'm just curious what some of the customer conversations are that you've had given the challenges with the supply chain that's on the lips of every politician and pretty much everybody. What are some of the things that Coopa has really helped customers to mitigate? >> Well, first of all, the simplest things were when everyone went home they couldn't do those paper based processes anymore. So they leverage our platform much more, right? I mean, they couldn't write paper checks for example and go in the office and do that. And that's just a simple example, order things or or get goods and services to their folks that are now working from home, for example. But then they're also faced with the acute issue of supply chain needs and the agility of their supply chain. So we help them figure out different ways to transport the goods and services they need, different freighting routes in real time through our AI capabilities. So, I mean, those are just some of the examples but we really think of our value proposition as almost like a Swiss army knife. And what happened during COVID is, you know we went out into the jungle and you didn't know which of those tools you would've needed but we tried to be right there with our customer to give them, you know, the knife, the match, the scissors, the, you know the fishing line, whatever was needed at that point in time to help them survive and thrive. And that's really how we see ourselves is you know, a true partner to our customers. >> Yeah, a true enabler. Well, I was looking at your FY22 numbers growth in new business in excess of 60% percent record annual revenue, 725, be up for up 34% subscription revenue up. Coupa up into the right. >> Well, it is, and what we're trying to be very thoughtful with this business. We're trying not to grow so fast that suddenly we leave our customers behind. We really try to take it one customer at a time, but the beauty of this growth, this measured and thoughtful growth is that this, we have an incredible renewal rate. I mean, our customers stay with us and they add more and more capabilities. And that drives an incredible cash flow situation for our business. And that makes us as Coupa very resilient. That's why we love being so transparent with our customers. Here's our growth, here's our margins, here's our cash flow. Here's how we're investing into R&D and innovation. Here's the M&A that we're doing to bring you a greater set of value propositions. And I love that transparency. It's one of the beauties of being a public company everything's out there and everyone can see and decide whether they want to be a customer, be an investor, be a colleague. It's a wonderful thing. >> Talk about the power of the community. Community AI launched in FY22. You showed some numbers and just the power of all of that anonymized, aggregated data to be analyzed. What is that? How has that really driven the evolution of Coupa in the last 13 years you've been at the helm? >> Well, we set our sites on doing this as far back as 13 years ago. I know you interviewed Donna recently and she was sharing with you that we set up our contracts with the customers in a way where we could take their anonymized sanitized data, aggregate it, and see if we can glean insights from it that could be used to the benefit of each individual customer. Really break the silos of traditional enterprise software. You know, where you do one deployment at a time and you live in your own little silo in your own little world. Now we're pushing, you know, a myriad of prescriptions out to each of our customers. They can see the best ways in real time to avoid supplier risk for example, make sure that the goods and services they buy they get on time at the right price points, make sure that the suppliers that they're working with support their diverse needs, their minority own supplier needs. All of the transparency that comes with seeing trillions of dollars in data in real time and gleaning insights from it. And we're just scratching the surface in this area. We're absolutely just scratch and service. We've pushed out this platform to our customers and now they're coming back to us and saying, wow, could I glean this sign insight from the community? What if we can get access to that information? And we're encoding that for them and pushing that information and those applications out to them. So this is going to be an exciting couple of months and quarters and years to take this concept of community AI to a completely different level. And I think it's not only new for Coupa, but I really see it as something completely new for the enterprise software industry where the opportunity to break silos is really upon us. >> It's critical, but a lot of communities are very transactional episodic, Coupa isn't like that. >> Well, you know that there's no shortcut to that. That has taken 13 years. And I think that begins with the O in Coupa which is the openness, the openness, the transparency the authenticity in which we, with which we engage with our customers. They understand how we work. They have access to all of our other customers. They can interface with them and interact with them within their own industry, within their own company size, whether they're the largest companies in the world, or you know, upper mid-market or mid-market customers whether they're subscribing to our treasury applications or our supply chain or procurement applications. And by having access to this community in real time and a community that's grounded in that trust and authenticity, you know, only great things happen. Only great things happen. >> The trust in a authenticity is critical. It's easy to say, you can trust us. We're authentic. It's a whole other thing to actually feel it and believe it and see it. And you get that sense here from your keynote. Barbara Corcoran was fantastic. Inspiring, I loved how she said she'd probably never had an original good idea herself that always gets them from others. And I thought that's Coupa to me, that's the spirit of community, the spirit of collaboration. All of those Cs to me embody what Coupa is. >> Exactly, exactly. None of us is as smart as all of us. That's what it is. No doubt. >> It's true that power of that community is. And I think I read in Fast Company just really recently that you described the community AI as a moonshot. And I thought, where is he going to go from here? (laughing) >> Well, it's continuing to build on this concept. It's really continuing to build on this concept of breaking these siloed data stores, aggregating them and distilling insights from them in ways that we ourselves as Coupa, as our R&D team or Raj and our product team we don't know all the different ways the customers will want to use this power of community. But we know we have a very scalable underlying platform that operates in virtually every language and virtually every currency that will be there to support their evolving needs. As we continue our, you know, what we hope to be lifelong relationship with our customers. >> I was talking to one of your customers. I think it was Jabil recently, and we're having them on the program today. And they actually said they were an SAP ERP shop. They could have gone the SAP route and chose Coupa. And one of the main reasons was because Coupa was going to be able to evolve with them, but allow them to help Coupa evolve. And I get that sense from a lot of your customers that we have the opportunity to influence the direction that the technology goes. Because we are here in the back office now moving to the front. >> Rob: That's right. >> In a day to day, really figuring out what if it did this? What if it did that? Now it does all of these things because the community gets to be that influential >> That's right. And we also, the beauty is we're able to help them. Our customers unlock the value of their investments into core ERP platforms, whether it be SAP or Oracle a host of other ERPs, we help them get strategic leverage from those applications. And we're building this company very much on the shoulders of early, you know, enterprise software companies like themselves. So it's really a beautiful, you know relationship with our customers, but also a way to, to give them more and more leverage >> That's critical. Especially as every company these days it has to be a data company, but they have to be able to see the data, glean insights act on it, make pivots. It's one of the words that we probably use so often in the last two years is pivot, but I think without these companies having a data strategy from a competitive perspective, their toast. >> I think so I think it's really tough. You know, I frame it very simply. We spent many, many years in the industrial revolution. We're worried about, you know, physical labor, moving parts. We entered into the information revolution with the advent you know, the internet and now I think we're really in what I would call the knowledge revolution it's, as you said, it's not only the data, but gleaning valuable insights from that massive growing data store and delivering them at the point of need so that people can take advantage of that insight and that knowledge. And, you know, we're proud to be on the forefront of that as a growing, you know, technology company, a cloud based what we call values as a service company. >> Value as service, right. You mentioned in your keynote, you were talking about the the struggles of being a parent during the pandemic and trying to get your kids to watch some of the classics. I know it was right there with you, Superman, Rocky, was it Planes, Trains & Automobiles, that's another one, and I thought you mentioned, you know my kids had about three minutes of attention span. I thought in the business world, people have three seconds. The real time, get me what I need in the point of time when they need it. Is critical for every business in every industry because the consumer is so, our demands are just higher and higher. >> That's right. That's right. And you know, the U in Coupa stands for user centricity and the logic there was simply, if the machine could do the majority of the work there should be less and less stress upon the end user the user themselves, as I say, deliver exactly what they need at the point of need to them on the screen or on their phone or wherever it is so that they could keep business moving forward as efficiently thoughtfully and optimally as possible. And you know we take the responsibility as a value of service company, you know very seriously try to make sure that we optimize the time spent of the sort of the man machine, woman machine interaction then less and less is on the, on the man or woman, and much much more is on the, you know the platform that we continue to develop. >> One of the things I read that you said in the press release I think it was yesterday's, chief financial officers, chief information officers, CEOs, they need to be chief transformation officers. That's a hard thing to do, especially for, I can imagine organizations like I had Casey's General Store on, this is a company that was founded in the fifties. How are you seeing that manifest into reality when you're talking with those CFOs and CEOs, are they really becoming those chief transformation officers? >> Well, they're all aspiring to it and we're, in my view proudly helping them move as quickly as possible toward that end, to have companies that are highly agile, that can respond to shift and consumer demands, consumer needs, shifting supply chain, you know, challenges, shifting financial scenarios out in the marketplace given the volatility of the stock market. So if we could offer that agility and resiliency and that additional stool of digital transformation for CEOs, CFOs and CIOs, and, you know we're doing something special out there. >> So Rob, last question for you. What does tomorrow look like for Coupa? What are we going to see and feel next year? Any crystal ball insight you can share with me? >> You know, I don't know. One of the things about us is we're not we're a little bit of a boring company. It's one quarter after the next week. >> I saw the dancing video that is not boring. (Rob laughing) >> But you know, it's been what, 52 quarters of going at it, one quarter at a time, one customer at a time one interaction at a time, one line of code at a time, you know, one QA assurance at a time, one support ticket at a time just moving forward moving forward, moving forward. And before, you know, it, you turn around, you look around and we began as you know, know a couple of handfuls of people with a desire to inspire an industry is starting to take shape. And we feel like, you know, we're not just getting started, but we're certainly in the early innings of I think creating a very special company and more importantly, a very special community around the company that we're forming. I would say a very special community. Rob, great to have you on the program, congrats on doing the event in person, getting all of these people that are so ready to see you guys and to be able to interact with Coupa and its partner ecosystem, getting us all together. One of my favorite events, we appreciate you stopping by on the CUBE. >> Thank You. Thanks for having me again. >> All right. For Rob Bernshteyn, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE's coverage of day two Coupa Inspire 2022 from Las Vegas. Stick around. My next guest will join me shortly. (lighthearted music)

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon from Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, at The Cosmopolitan, here on day two of theCUBE's coverage of Coupa Inspire 2022. I'm excited to be joined by one of Coupa's many successful customers, Jaime Robles joins me, the chief procurement officer at Casey's General Stores. You're going to be talking about building a technology hub with source-to-pay and interconnecting ecosystem platforms. Welcome, Jaime. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's a pleasure to be here today in this week, hearing about Coupa and all the fabulous things that we can do around technology. >> Coupa is amazing, and in terms of their innovation, I don't know if you had a chance to see the Keynote this morning, but the slides that Raja showed with just the arrow going up and to the right. Talk to us a little bit about Casey's General Stores. This is the U.S's fourth largest convenience store retailer. But just for the audience who may not know, give us a background. >> So, just a little bit about Casey's. So, Casey's is, as you said, one of the largest convenience store chains out there. We got more than 2,500 locations in 16 states in the Midwest in the U.S. And just out of curiosity, we are the fifth largest pizza company as well. >> Lisa: Is that right? >> We make a great pizza and our guests love it. So, we are in three businesses. We are in convenience store, we are in fuel, and also we are in the food business, because we got a kitchen inside every single store that we got out there. So, for us it's been a fabulous journey with procurement, because we came to the company, joined the company two years ago in the middle of pandemic, and the whole idea was to build the procurement function from the ground up. Casey's didn't have a formal procurement function. So, pretty much, all the spend was done by the functions, by themselves, but no formal process, no technology, no platforms, nothing; very old school. And we came here to build a foundation and build, as I call it, a procurement tech house. >> A procurement tech house. So, talk to me, so I know that Casey's dates back to 1959, and what you described sounds like a lot of paper-based, manual processes; technology really wasn't in the mix. Is that what attracted you to take the role going, "I want to bring technology and build this powerhouse"? >> Yes, that was amazing. So, over my career, I've been doing this for several companies, such as in the past, in Phillips, G, and recently, with Walmart. And then, what attracted me for this opportunity was, well, everything is paper. Everything is manual. There's nothing digital in this company. There's no team, there's no sourcing, no process, no policies. It's like building everything from the ground up. So, it was very attractive. It's huge opportunities for the company, and we were going through this massive transformation to digitize the company all across the operations. So, procurement wasn't the core of those strategies for the CEO of the company, and that's what the opportunity lies. He was like, "How do we move from manual transactions to all this digital world?" and where, now everything is frictionless, that we move from 80%, 85%, that it was all manual. Now we are plus 65%, everything is digital now in the company, and just within one year of moving all over. So, the savings, the cost, the, the leakage, all the waste on the processes that we have, is just amazing, after one year. >> Sounds like the company had a cloud, a digitization strategy, brought you on board to help make that a reality for procurement. So, the appetite was there at Casey's from a cultural perspective, it wasn't battling uphill to get folks to go, "Let go of the paper. Let's go to Coupa." >> Yeah, that's the truth. So, it was the whole digital transformation for the company, not only on the procurement, spend side, but all the process in the company. So, as COVID hit our stores and the whole world, right? So, we had to move into more digital ordering, into more digital transaction, into more how my guests can interact with my stores without going to the stores, how they can order from the app, how they can get their food directly to their house, and all this stuff. And procurement was right there, hand to hand, as part of those strategies from the very beginning. And we were, I will say, very lucky to be on time to make all those digital transformations for the company, so when the COVID really hit, we were ready and prepared to take over. >> That's good, being ready and prepared. Oh my gosh. But some of the few people I've talked to. Talk to me about the core technology requirements that you had for the right BSM solution, and why Coupa ticked all those boxes. >> Yeah. So for us, it was one of the most important ones is as I said, bring the digital across the whole source to pay. Another big element for us, it was, how do we bring transparency into the process? How do we bring transparency on how much we pay, how do we spend our money, Which areas, which categories? We built a model in cases that are called, it's a self-service model. And this self service model is, I put the technology in its core, which is Coupa, and I give my users and my internal stakeholders all the power to take those decisions. So, now they can see how much they spend in different categories, with different suppliers, for the preferred vendors, what type of contracts do we have? And how do we manage that spend, versus the budget, as well? They have all that ability to take those decisions, and they don't need a procurement team. As I like to call, in my couple of speaker notes during this week, we like to make procurement invisible. We are in the back, they don't see us. And they got all the power to use the technology out there to do the job for us. >> Transparent, but empowered at the same time. >> Exactly, exactly. That's what we want, moving forward for this company. And I believe that is the vision that we got in the procurement 2.0. >> Procurement 2.0. Talk to me about some of the solutions that you implemented. You talked about source-to-pay, but give us kind of an idea if you double click on that, and then we'll kind of unpack ` what you talked about on your sessions. >> Yeah, pretty much, for Coupa, we implemented the whole source to pay. So, from sourcing, procurement, invoicing and payment. So, we implement all that at the core of the Coupa. I believe in an ecosystem of procurement technologies that are interconnected with Coupa, to interact for other needs, like contract lifecycle management, tail spend management, TNE, and some others that we're going after. Like, now for us, is going after supplier data hub, which for us is very important also to get it right. And that procurement ecosystem of different technologies connected is going to give us the ability to move faster, to be more lean and to have better data and technology accessible for the team that is in charge of procurement, to operate under that environment. >> You mentioned a few minutes ago that, when the pandemic hit, Casey's was ready, from a digital perspective. I imagine that was a huge advantage, going into such unknown times that we're still kind of in. >> Well, when I say ready, it's like, we were ready to go, and we were on the fly, implementing everything, and what the pandemic did is to accelerate all this. So, as many companies did, we were already in the process of going this direction, and when the pandemic start hitting, we accelerate everything, and we made it happen. So, we went live in three, four months, and a year later, we were completely live since we joined the company, and we were start seeing all this paying coming to ours. So, 18 months later, we are pretty much hitting best in class levels in terms of transactional, operational, tactical, savings, visibility, spend, transparency, risk management. Now we're going to take it to the next level of the maturity. It's like, how do we go for ESG? How do we go for supplier diversity? How do we manage risk management? Right? And all those things. >> You had a couple of presentations here at Inspire, talk to me about those, and some of the top takeaways that the audience gleaned from you. >> Yeah, one of the most important ones yesterday was about how to build a procurement organization from the ground up, or how to go through a digital transformation in procurement. That is something that has been on the topic on the procurement community for years now. Everybody talks about procurement transformation, et cetera. And I just showed to them, my journey in the companies that I've been doing this for the last two decades, across the world, in many different countries, and the things that work and the and the things that doesn't work, really. And how they need to build, for the future of procurement, a technology procurement house on the core. And that's how you operate day to day. And for us, organization was Coupa. And then on top of that, you need to build a procurement ops model, right? How you want to operate your procurement operating model. So, it's centralized, decentralized, a hybrid model. And it all depends about the type of company, the type of industry you are, how material is your organization, et cetera. And another big, big element in all your strategy is, how you're going to serve your customers, right? What type of service model do you have in place? If you're going to be like a full service mode, or you going to be in a strategic direction, or you going to be a self-service mode. And pretty much, what we have chosen as the best way to move forward in the future is, let's put the technology in the middle. Let's give the support our users need, but let them be self-service, and let's make our job invisible in the back, where we have all these sourcing events, all these beautiful negotiations, all these great deals, contracts, et cetera. So, by the time they use the technology, they know where to buy, how to buy, what's the right level, how to make it happen, and they don't need us. They can do it by their own. >> And they've got that visibility, that before, it sounds like they didn't have it at all. >> Exactly, so now we know how much we spend, where do we spend, and where are the opportunities? Where are some gaps that we can go after, as well? And I think one of the most important aspects in these transformations that many of my colleagues are going through is, then you have a model that you can repeat year over year and evolve with the company, so it's agile and it's flexible. Because companies keep evolving. You buy business, you sell business, you acquire, you expand, you grow, and how that model is going to shape around. So, by the time you're done, it's not obsolete again. So, technology is going to keep evolving with your model, and that for me, is the key part in all this. >> Do you feel like, this is a marketing term; future-proof, and it always is one of those things that, well what does that actually really mean? Do you feel though that, what you've put in place is future-proof? That it's going to be able to grow and scale as the company changes? >> Jaime: Totally, totally. Because as I said before, we put the technology on the core. And for us, having that technology on the core, and plugging different technologies around that and sourcing around that with our amazing sourcing team, is going to evolve whatever the company needs. If we expand into different regions, we're ready. If we expand into different business types, we're ready. I believe what we need to keep evolving, as well, is, there will be new emerging technologies. There's going to be way more AI. There's going to be way more machine learning. There's going to be more predictive analytic sourcing stuff. How do we keep pulling those technologies into our platforms to keep giving us that advantage and that edge to the market? I think we have the model, and I think it's one of the most advanced procurement functions that I've seen in the industries around. >> And it sounds like you designed and deployed it really quickly, >> We did. >> especially during a global crisis. >> Yeah, we are disruptors by nature. We love change. We love speed. And that is, I will say my procurement brand. We make it happen and we make it fast. That's how we do it. We keep momentum. >> That's incredibly important. I mean, one of the things that we've learned, many things the last two years, a couple things. Access to realtime data is no longer a "nice to have." It's absolutely business critical. The patience of many people, including myself, was quite thin, the last two years. But also, every company has to be a data company. Casey's has to be a data company. If I have the ability to order from my app, or order things, I want them to know when I'm here for, what I ordered before; make my visit personalized, efficient, easy. So, that data strategy, having that data at the core, is nowadays, you have to have it. >> It is essential. We're building a data hub for the company, completely showing us all that information. As you can imagine, being in those three business, on the food industry, on the retail convenience store, and in the fuel, so data for us is our living breath every single day. And not only having the data now, it's like, what type of decisions we're taking with all this data? And how fast we are adapting to all that, in pricing, in cost, in margin and availability and inventory and logistics and transportation, and in your whole supply chain. So, that is extremely important for us. Not only having the data, but what kind of decisions we're taking with the data, and everything starts with the transparency right? Whenever you see it, you act. >> You should be able to act, but to your point, you have to have that visibility. You have to be able to see it and act on it. Talk to me about what it's like being a Coupa customer. I know how I've been to many Inspires, and I always love seeing all the customer success stories everywhere across industries. What's it like being a Coupa customer, in terms of having the ability to influence, say, the roadmap? Is that something that you're able to work on in partnership with Raj's team? >> Yeah, that's great. So, Coupa has been a great company to work with, and I know them for some years now, and not only they been able to support our vision of what we're trying to build, but at the same time they're taking many of our feedback to make Coupa better, in many of the different models. Listen, Coupa's not perfect, right? And I don't think any tool out there is going to be perfect. But being in so many different industries and with so many opportunities in different areas, they've been able to take our feedback and make those improvements for ourselves. We have so many conversations with the Coupa product development team when we were going through a transformation, asking them for things that we thought it was very valuable to have on the tool, that was in our, in our eyes, no brainer, and they were very, very fast to react and make the change. And we are, I think, one of the most lousy customers, guilty as charged about that, but we just wanted to make it better because it's a benefit of the whole community. Everything that we've been talking this week about community AI, it's amazing. All the things that we're sharing during this week, all the ideas that we are getting about things that we can do. That's amazing. That's the value. >> It's huge value. And that's that sort of flywheel of the community and the power and the insights. Last question for you. If you talk to peers, or when you talk to peers who are maybe starting their procurement digitization journey, what advice do you give them? >> Don't take a no as an answer. Make it happen. Own it. Own it. I think you need to have a vision. You need to put in strategy in place. You need to build a business case. You need to earn your seat at the table at the C-suite. But you need to own it. You cannot let the IT, function, finance community too long, and decide how you want to operate and how you want to move your function as procurement, or build how you operate. You need to own it, and you need to build a business case and you need to make it happen. You need to, yeah. To struggle with that. But if you are a hustler, as we are in cases, we are disruptors. And if you don't disrupt, it's not going to happen. >> I completely agree. Own it, make it happen. Jaime, great to have you on the program. >> Jaime: Thanks so much. >> Thanks for hearing what Casey's is doing, how you're really leading the charge, and how you owned it and made it happen. That's awesome. >> Thank you, Lisa. Thank you for being here. >> Thanks. For Jaime Robles, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's coverage day two, Coupa Inspire 22, from Las Vegas. Join me with my next guest, coming up shortly. (lighthearted upbeat music)

>>Welcome everyone to our continuous coverage on the cube of AWS reinvent 2021. I'm your host, Dave Nicholson. And I am absolutely delighted to be joined by two folks from Unisys. I have a company that has been in the business of helping people with everything related to it for a very, very long time. We heard a talk about data monetization at modernization with ANU Priya, rom Raj vice president of cloud solution management at Unisys, along with ANU palms, the high VP and CTO of cloud solution engineering at UNISIS. And, uh, just so that we keep everything clear, I'm just going to call you on new and ANU Palm, and we'll all know who we're talking to. Sure. The funny thing is I'm David Nicholson or Dave Nicholson. Dave Vellante is one of the founders of Silicon angle, the cube. So usually it's two Dave's battling in >>So I get to be David and he's Dave typically. So we're completely, we're completely used to this, right? So, so tell me about what Eunice is doing UNISIS is doing in the arena of app modernization and data modernization and migration into cloud. You Unisys has a long and storied history of managing it in people's environments, you know, in the sort of on-premise world, as well as, as well as cloud now. But, uh, I knew tell us, tell us a little about what you'd assist is doing in this space. And then we'll, we'll double click and dive in. >>Um, so you, you're probably very, very familiar with the six RS of modernization, right? All the way from migration modernization, all the way from replatform rehost to, to the other side of the spectrum, refactor and rearchitect, right? So what is DASA is that it takes clients on that journey, right? So we see clients in different stages of that journey. There are clients that come to us, uh, recently brought on board a pipeline they're very early in their journey. They just talking about their first set of migrations. There are clients that have taken the leap and done 75% of their workload is on cloud, even for Unisys 95% of more than 95% of our workload actually runs on cloud public cloud. So different stages of the journey, but no matter where they are in the journey, really moving the needle on modernization. Right. And what did he mean by modernization? It's it's taking advantage of the innovation in cloud, whether it's seven containers are AI and bringing that to the client so that they can drive those business outcomes. That's what we are passionate about doing. And we can talk to you about a couple of clients where we've done this on a, but I like to unopened to add on. >>Sure. Yeah. And, and just, and before you dive in on a Palm, I want to hear specifically about the inhibitors that you're seeing, the things that causing friction, right. Movement to cloud. >>Yeah. So cloud of the transformative technology is as disruptive and it brings about lots of benefits that are very well understood, but not realized, um, lower total cost of ownership, higher security, innovation, and agility. But the challenges that you see for customers really benefit from moving and migrating to the cloud are related to security and compliance. That comes up to be the top pain point, followed by cost of ownership that are optimizations that you need to do before you can benefit from really leveraging the benefits from the cloud and then innovation and agility, how to drive that. And there are certain things around app and data about innovation, data analytics, AIML that really helps realize those values, but it needs a concerted effort and a drive and a push to transform your infrastructure from where you are today to really get to derive the true benefits from the cloud. >>And we do a cloud barometer study of about thousands of organizations from a Unisys perspective, Dave, and as a Oklahoma saying, um, more than 60% of our clients say security is the biggest inhibitor they want help with security. You >>No, you're saying the inhibitor to going to cloud is security >>To accelerating the cloud journey. They always are perceptive. >>Is that, is that hesitancy, uh, just perception or is it reality? >>That's a great question, >>Dave, and you don't have to be gentle with me. Like you might with a client, you know, you can, you can reach over and smack me and say get over it. You're going to be fine, Dave, >>Actually, I'm a new from leaned into it already. In many cases, when you, when you actually get to your cloud configuration, right. You probably be more secure in the cloud, but it's getting clients confident with that setup. That's where the rubber meets the road. Right. And that's where we come in to say, um, do you understand the shared responsibility model with cloud? What is the cloud provider do? What does being here at AWS reinvent? What has AWS bring to the table for security? This is what the client is responsible for. For example, application security is completely their client's responsibility, right? In most cases. So, um, just working with the clients so that they understand the shared responsibility model and then making sure we protect all the different layers of the stack, but security, right? Even, even as apps are developed, you need to have DevSecOps pipeline, right? So I didn't say dev ops, I said, dev sec ops, because we want to make security a part of developing your applications and deploying them in cloud as well. So that's what we bring to the table and making sure clients feel confident in, in accelerating their cloud journey. So >>You can deal with customers like me, who, who truly believed that my money is safer in a coffee, can buried in my backyard than it is in a bank, right. With all those banking people wandering around. Um, so when you start looking at an environment and you, and you look at the totality of an it infrastructure landscape, how do you go about determining what is the low hanging fruit? What makes sense to move first from is that, is that always an ROI discussion that comes into play and are your customers, I like to give like five questions at the same time to confuse you and are your customers expecting to immediately save money? And how big is the ROI conversation in this? >>Uh, great question. So a couple of things need to be considered first, just to understand where does the customer in the digital transformation journey are there green fee where they only have on premise data center and they're trying to get to the cloud, or they already have dipped their toes and move to the cloud. And in the cloud, how far in advance are they in their transformation journey, have them not have the done apps and data modernization? Do they have, uh, uh, management operations capability for day one and day two cloud ops and fin ops and security ops, and other leveraging the power of the cloud, the copious amounts of data that cloud brings to the table. Uh, the, the important thing to understand is that 80% of the tools that work in the on-prem do not work in the cloud. So you have to understand the very nature of the cloud and to deal with it differently. >>The same old tools and creeks will not work in the cloud. And I call it the three V's in the cloud, velocity volume, and variety of data is different in the cloud. So when you're talking about security, you need to look at the cloud infrastructure, posture management. You need to look at the cloud workload, pasture management. You need to look at the data that's available and analyze and harness the data using AIML and data analytics. So you need a new set of clicks as it were to really harness the power of the cloud to derive the benefits from increased security, lower cost of ownership and innovation and agility. >>And it makes sense. Yeah. >>I mean, I think you touched on touched on it, but fin ops, right. And you asked the question David on, is that the biggest driver in terms of savings to get to the, to the cloud. And I think it's definitely one of the bigger factors, um, because, and be believe to, to realize that we offer a fin op service. And if you know, Upserve is not just for the cloud, but choosing models at different, right. It's not like your data center planning. We talked about the tools being different. It's more than the tools, right? So you could do reserved instances or you could do spot instances, completely different ballgame with AWS, right. Or you could do AWS savings plans. Are you maximizing all of that? And even beyond that, are you thinking beyond that into like AWS container suppose, um, EKS, are you talking about seven less and that could completely change your bill and your total kind of cost of ownership. You talk Dave about past databases, right? So platform as a service, and that could completely change your total cost of ownership there as well. So are you really maximizing that? And do you have a service around that? Do you have a trusted partner who can help you with fin ops is I think an important consideration there? >>Well, I don't know. Pretty, I know you're dying to talk about a customer example, make it real for us. Give us an example of, uh, of this process inaction where UNISIS has helped a customer on the journey. >>Absolutely. Dave. So, um, uh, one example that comes to mind is a large public university and they've got about a half a million students and they've got 20 plus campuses around the U S in California, Sarah, I might've given myself away there. And, and, uh, in, into what they've done is, um, initially they are big into AWS and they are into their cloud, uh, higher into the IBM cloud journey, uh, big time. And they are a hybrid deployment at this point. And initially, uh, they, uh, when they subscribed to our fin ops service, uh, we, we brought in all the different, uh, thinking around working with different organizations, they need to like business planning, right? You need to know which is your most significant apps and what do you want to invest in them in terms of modernization and in tuning your AWS spend. And so we did that. And so we got them about a 33% cost saving and what they did was then they took, looked at all of their AWS accounts across the campuses and said, we want fin ops across all of them. Let's consolidate all of them. So that's, that's the power of a synopsis is about 33% saving right there. Well, that is >>Particularly exciting for me because I assume that they're going to be lowering my kid's tuition next year. So I'll be, I'll be looking forward to that. And now I know Palm, we know why she was kicked out of the, uh, you know, the, the intelligence agency can't keep a secret. Let's, let's, let's talk about an amusement park, uh, famous for its rodent, but I'm not going to say the name. So, so out upon talk about, uh, the technology space that we're in the midst of here at AWS reinvent, right? Um, each time we have a keynote, we're hit with an, almost a mind boggling number of announcements, right? Customers can't keep, keep this stuff straight. They're 575 different kinds of instances. It used to be, we have S3 and we have VC too. Right. Would you like, would you like one, or would you like both, right? How do you help customers make sense of this? >>Yeah, no, that's, that's a great question because, um, the cloud is, uh, I, as I said, cloud has three V's velocity, variety and volume of data and, and the new kinds of services that are available. Day-by-day, it's growing the keys to really figure out, again, map the business objectives that you as a customer or a company are trying to achieve, understand where you are in your digital transformation journey. And then based on the two, uh, and assess where you at and, and companies like Unisys can work with the customer to assess their, what I call the digital transformation posture, which will then give, uh, give us clear indications or recommendations on what are the next stages in the transformation of journey. So whether it's whether you want to improve your security posture, whether you want to improve your cost of ownership, posture, whether you want to go to go to the cloud and leverage DevSecOps to benefit from the innovation and agility, we can help you. >>Unisys has DevSecOps as a service, uh, containers as a service where we can help our customers and partners migrate to the cloud, modernize the apps. And again, based on research, that's out there, you can speed up app deployment and development by 60% by leveraging the power of the cloud. So the benefits out there for customers to get access to, it's a question of finding the right combination of people, process and technology to get you there. And Unisys being a very trusted advisor is certainly able to help you accelerate that journey and get you to meet your business outcomes. So me, >>Um, let me ask the two of you, what might be an uncomfortable question, and that is obviously Unisys is in the business of managing things that aren't in cloud. Also, you have very, very large existing customers that are spending money with you, right? And if they'll just stay still and not do anything and not change, you'll keep making money into the future. Aren't some of these things that you're doing as a trusted advisor, almost counterintuitive from a, from a finance perspective at Unisys, at least in the short term, how do you, how do you balance that? >>It's a, it's a great question, Dave, and for us, we are customer obsessed. So that's, I know one of the AWS principles and we, we live by that as well. Right? So customer comes first and doing the right thing by them, whether it is the total cost of ownership when it's getting the security posture, right. That comes first for us. And if, if moving them to a public cloud will help them achieve that. We will do that. Right. So even if it means that our bill is going to be lower, right. So we'll give you a great example there. Um, Eunice's, as you know, Dave has been in the mainstream business and we've got customers that are still on clear path, right? So even with those customers, we help them with both transitions. We can run clear path to the, on public cloud and we also help with modernization, right? So we always do the right thing by the customer. It's really the customer's tries in terms of what does the business warrant, how much business disruption are they willing to take as we do this modernization journey. And that's what determines us. And that's what makes us trusted advisers. Um, you're not looking out for the bottom line there in terms of how much our bill would be. Yup. >>Well, that's a, that's actually a great place to wrap up. Uh, I think it's hilarious that you mentioned mainframe since you were five years old, you gave me, you gave me a blank stare. When I mentioned stuff, Unisys was doing 20 years ago on a free auto Palm from Unisys. Thank you so much. It's a great point to close on. You're a trusted advisor when you're doing things that are truly in the customer's best interest and not just in your own company's best interests. I'm Dave Nicholson for the cube. We'd like to thank you for joining our continuous coverage at AWS reinvent 2021 stay tuned because we are your leader in hybrid tech event coverage.

(upbeat rhythmic music) >> Everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE here at Palo Alto on a remote interview for a special video interview. The EC2 15th birthday party celebration event. Raj Pai, who's the Vice President of EC2 Product Management AWS is here with me. Congratulations on Amazon Web Services, EC2 with the compute. What a journey. 15 years old. Soon we got the keys to the car at a couple more years. So Raj, great to see you. You guys have been doing great work. Congratulations. >> Thank you. It's great being here. It's super exciting for me too. I can't believe it's 15 years and you know that big, we're still at the very beginning as you know, that we often say. >> The building blocks that have been there from the beginning really set the table, and it's just been fun to watch the innovation on behalf of customers that you guys have done at AWS and more, and for entrepreneurs and for developers, it just continues to be great and the edge is right on the corner. Wavelength, all the great stuff. But let's talk about the specific topic here that I really want to drill into is that as you look at the 15th year and birthday for EC2, okay? You're looking at the future as well. You're looking at the past, present and future. And one of the things that's most compelling about recent re-invent was the Graviton performance numbers are amazing. You guys have been building custom silicon for a while. You also worked with Intel and AMD. What is it about? What's the huge investment for you guys? Where do you started to see some returns? Are you seeing returns? And then why did AWS decide to build its own processors? >> Yeah, now, that's a really good question. And I mean, like with everything else we do in AWS, it's all about innovating on behalf of our customers. And one of the things our customers are telling us, that they continue to tell us is they want to see better performance at lower prices. And we've been able to deliver that with our hardware partners for the last 15 years. But as we've understood the workloads that run on EC2 and AWS, we saw an opportunity. Like, what if we were going to go and design our own processor that was really optimized for the sort of workload that customers run on the Cloud? And make design decisions when designing the CPU and the system and the chip around the CPU that does things like bring a lot more core local cache and speed up the parts of the operations that really benefit real-world workload. So, this isn't about benchmarks. It's about how do real world workloads perform and how do we build systems that optimize that performance? And with Graviton, we were able to hit the nail on the head. We were also very pleasantly surprised when we got our first chips off the line. And we're seeing that a customer, like about 40% performance improvement at significantly lower cost. And that's super exciting. And that's one of the reasons we're getting so much interest from our customers. >> I got to say as a geek and a tech nerd, I love the silicon development. And there's benefits there, also the performance is there. The thing that also is pretty obvious that's happening is and the world seeing it is the shift towards ARM-based computing. What kinds of customers and use cases are you seeing adopt to Graviton? And what kind of workloads were they running on? What are the things that surprise you guys, that didn't surprise me. Did you guys always talk about the upcheck and how everyone's leveraging it? What are some of the examples? Take us through some of the customers, use cases, workloads. What's surprising you and what's going on with Graviton? >> Yes, so I think that the biggest surprise for us is how broadly applicable it's been. So one of the things we did, we launched with reinvent is like we have different form factors of compute. We have memory-optimized instances that are good for databases and in memory caches. We have compute optimized for HPC and workloads that really take advantage of the performance of the chip and then we have general purpose workloads. And we we introduced Graviton variants of all those instance families And we're actually seeing the same sort of performance benefits across workload. So, and it's one of the reasons why companies like Metrol, and Snap and SmugMug, they move one workload over, they see the performance benefit and before you know it, they're starting to move workloads and mass over across kind of that spectrum. So, I think that's one of the biggest surprises is that Graviton seems to do well across a wide range and we're going to keep on introducing it more and more of instance families, because we've seen this uptick well. >> You're seeing a lot of people move to the Graviton. You mentioned a few of those early adopters who were pushing the envelope, and they're always kind of trotted out there as examples at reinvent, which is always fun to see what they're working on next. And now is that people see the Graviton2 instances, okay, the architecture's different, higher performance. How much effort do our customers typically need to move to Graviton2 instances? And what are some of the benefits they're seeing on performance and price performance? Can you talk about that transition? Because that's natural evolution for them. >> Yeah. It's actually a lot less than they originally think. So, some of the hardest effort is just getting them over the line to try it. So, one of the things that we tell our customers who are considering Graviton is it just takes one or two developers take one workload and go off for a couple of weeks and just try reporting it to Graviton. And more often than not, they come back to us in four or five days. They're like, it works. And we just had to do some testing and verification, but we were able to afford it because, you know, the operating system support was there, the ISP support was there and the tools that they use, and they're using most cases, modern programming languages like Python or Go or Java or PhD where, you know, interpret the language and it just run. And so there's very little lift in comparison to what people think it's going to be. And that's one of the reasons that, you know, one of the big announcements we made in the last few weeks is what we're calling the Graviton challenge, right? So it's a set of blueprints for customers to essentially have best practices on how to in four days take, you know, a piece of code and piece of that workload and execute it and run it and migrate it to the Graviton. And we're seeing a lot of interest in that as people in the community realize how easy that actually is. >> What are some of the cool price performance things that are emerging? Obviously it makes sense if you don't really need it, don't pay for it, but you have that option. A lot of people are going there. Is there a wave you see coming that Graviton2 is going to be really set up for that you kind of see some early signals coming in, Raj? Because, I can see the 64 bit. I can see where Graviton fits today. Obviously, performance is key. Is it certain things that are emerging? What's the main problems that it solves? >> Well, I think anything that's a multi-threaded architecture is going to do really well in Graviton because of the, we have really densely packed 64 course. And so you're going to see things like microservices and containers and workloads that are more, that are able to take advantage of that parallel execution do really, really well. And so, we say 40% performance improvement, but like, when our customers have gone and tried this, they've seen upwards of 50% depending on the workload. So yeah, it's going to be more your multi-threaded application. There's some applications that may not be a fit, like it can give a legacy, you know, for example, like, there's some software that hasn't yet been moved over and we're going to continue to invest super heavily in our whole ecosystem of hardware, for the longterm. So I think that because there's a great option and we just encourage them to try it. And then they'll learn from their experience what works and what doesn't. >> Wow. 15th birthday. Still growing up and it's starting to get more mature. You're the VP of Product Management. You have the keys to the kingdom. So, you have wide-ranging responsibilities. Share with us if you can. I know that you really can't say much, but try to give a little bit of teaser. You got Wavelength. I can see the dots connecting at the edge. You got Outposts, so we see all that emerging. I can almost imagine that this is going to get stronger. What should people think about? Where's the headroom for EC2 with Graviton and Graviton2? >> Yeah, I know. I think like, a new architect (mumbles) yourself. But like, our goal is to have AWS kind of everywhere our customers are. And that means the full power of AWS. So, I think you're going to see more and more of us having EC2 in compute capacity, wherever customers need it. That could be in an Outpost. That could be on their 5G network. That could be in a city right next to them, right? And you're going to see us continue to offer the variety, the selection of instances and platforms in all those locations as well. So, I think the key for us is to be ubiquitous and have compute power everywhere our customers need it, in the form factors they need it. >> That's awesome. Congratulations. I love the power. You can't go wrong with sending computers where the data is, where the customers are. AWS, Amazon Web Services. Building their own custom silicon with Graviton2 processors. This is EC2 continuing to grow up. Raj Pai, Vice President of EC2 Product Management. Thank you for coming on and sharing the update and congratulations on the 15th birthday to EC2. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been great. Have a great Friday. >> All right. Great. I'm Jeffrey with theCUBE. You're watching theCUBE coverage of EC2's 15th birthday event. Thanks for watching. (soft rhythmic music)

>>Mhm Hello, I'm jennifer with the cube. We're here at Rogers vice president of EC two Product Manager, NWS raj. Thanks for coming off its quick cube conversation. Um Congratulations on your 15th birthday of E C two. You get the keys to the kingdom of one of the hottest products. The most important product you look at. I look at our billets. Ec two is the highest, it's always the best everyone focuses on. It's the compute a lot of other goodness with amazon cloud. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me. >>So, can you break down the graviton two processor overview? Why is custom Silicon important and why should architects and developers understand the opportunity with graviton to these are the other opportunities within 80 bucks. What's the, what's the magic do it we should that they think about as the architect their cloud. >>Yeah. So, I mean, I think why it's important is what you said like so much uh the workloads that they're running at the end of the day is running on EC two, whether it's running on Ec two directly or running on one of the other AWS services that's built on a C two and when you have, when you're able to, when we're able to innovate and deliver a very significant price performance advantage, not just lowers their costs. So like there, It's hardly a day of industry where you're able to go and do a pretty simple migration and get a 40% price performance improvement and that's huge and I think that's why this is, you know, raising a lot of interest. Is that um, customers, I found it relatively easy to go and do this migration and get that benefit. >>That's awesome mirage. I gotta ask you ec two offers more than 400 instant types with different combinations of compute memory, networking and storage, which is obviously the backbone of the cloud. A lot of people that are coming in learning about clouds, what does it mean that there's all these instances that because it's just more combinations, different workloads, why 400 instance types? What does that mean for someone learning about clouds? Does it mean anything to you actually? Would you explain the difference of instance types of 400 of them? >>Yeah. So, I mean when you think about an instance type, it's essentially configuration of a virtual machine, there's a certain amount of memory, there's a certain amount of processing power. Uh there could be a certain amount of disk and workloads, uh, the different ratios of these uh, dimensions, these characteristics. So by offering selection across a wide variety of instances were really able to optimize the compute that particular workload needs. The customers could essentially uh, increase their performance and have a more optimized price for what they want to get done. So ultimately, that's what that's what it's about having the right form factor for a given workload and the more configurations that we have, the more we're able to tune for those workloads. >>It's like having a driver riding a car you want the driver type to match the road, match the engine. So the instance has to match the profile of the app, the workload and kind of, and is that kind of where you're getting at getting met? You can do that. >>Yeah. And you know, and one of the things that we're also investing in at the same time as tools to enable customers to realize and learn what the right instance is. So, you know, we launched about a year ago uh capability called compute optimizer that lets customers look at their workloads, you know, in flight essentially and make recommendations saying, hey, instead of this instance, you know, you could Move to um this other instance type and save 50% or you know, as an example. So, um, you know, part of it, creating the selection and the other part of it is creating the tools. So customers, do you know what the right fit is for them so that they can really optimize their thin >>Well Roger, I really preach this is going to ask me anything guru question, but here's the simple one. What is gravitas to, at the end of the day when someone asks you what is graviton too? >>Yeah. So I mean grandma can do is a processor, it's a chip, it's a CPU um and so what that means essentially is and it's an arm. Basic. So um, you know, with, with are just like you have intel and AMG processors, these are the, the circuitry and the computer that does the work. Right. And um with, with Gravitas on we support arm which is a different architecture set but one that has been around long enough and it's pretty ubiquitous across mobile devices and servers now. So the operating systems that you know, you know all the Linux operating system, the tools that you know, they all work and are able to run on Graviton too. So this means that when you have applications, you can very easily take it from the same AMG or intel X 86 platform and move it over and just get the efficiencies that gravity to offers with lower power envelope and higher performance >>there it is many master class here at raj. Pie Vice President Ec two product management laying down the graviton to knowledge and for folks learning about cloud and architects really want to know the difference. It's a 40% performance improvement, lower power envelope, 20% less than cost. I believe something those range about right about in the same territory there. So basically high performance, lower costs, better power. So for workloads that demanded you got the option raj. Thank you for sharing. Thank you. All right. I'm john for, with the cube Thanks for watching. Mhm mm

>>Good morning. Good afternoon. And good evening. I am Kevin Duke with HPE GreenLake cloud services and welcome to the HPE GreenLake per private cloud session. I enjoined today by Raj mystery and Steve show Walter, who will walk us through today's presentation and demonstration. We'd like to keep this session interactive. So please submit your questions in the chat window. We have subject matter experts on the line to answer your questions. So with that, I'll hand over to Raj Kilz. Thanks Kevin. So cloud is now fast becoming a reality. We says HPE and what our customers say to is that it's not an expectation anymore. It's an absolute necessity. So the research and the stats that you see on the screen, just kind of like prove that over the last five to six years, organizations, enterprises are adopting cloud. Be it in the data center with the hyperscalers are a mixture of both. >>But the interesting thing that we see now is a moving investment to basically increase private cloud capability. Uh, and in that vein, what we've done with Greenlight cloud services is create a rich portfolio that delivers that cloud-like experience either at the edge in your data center, co-location the actually matches and actually embraces the work that you do with the hyperscalers. What we're doing here is we're providing self-service capability elasticity in the means and the way that you would use this and the way that you would flex things open down more importantly, all of this is one and operated for you, which comes true to what we say in terms of delivering that cloud experience within those locations, being at the edge, the data center or the Colwell, um, Greenlight for private cloud was initially launched, uh, in summer 2020, it was the first iteration of what we call the Greenlight platforms. >>What we're trying to do with this element of the Greenlight cloud services portfolio is four things which is eliminate the complexity of building things that live, breathe, behave, and act like in a cloud-like manner in the data center, because this is hard. Yeah, the visibility around the way that you would manage and understand and run and operate certain elements of that cloud, uh, the governance and the compliance pace, which is important, especially when it comes to things like applying policies, et cetera, that you would have. And then the skills gap that we do from our managed services perspective, that takes things off. So from an infrastructure standpoint, beginning of the left, well class HPE compute storage networks, which is embracing the virtualization and the software defined networking layer together with a pretty rich cloud automation and orchestration portal all wrapped up for you. Pre-built pre architected, removing complexity, increasing time to value, uh, and, and, uh, the, the actual delivery timescales, if we move to the actual experience, although this is actually, uh, embracing the way that you would access these, uh, solutions. >>So in, through GreenLake central, uh, that's where your other service experience begins with HPE is your entry point into the world of as a service from here on which you would actually access that service. So from a, from a private cloud standpoint, this is where you would initiate the cloud management portal. And then you would begin either working in that and the roles of either administrator, consumer, et cetera. Lastly, you know, pushing buttons and provisioning stuff is really easy, but a lot of our focuses is in the pulse provisioning processes, understanding is it turned on? Is it off? How much is it costing me? Am I getting the most efficiency out of it? Am I running out of capacity to deliver services to my users? All of this is finally wrapped up with the managed platform capability, which means you now have to understand and treat Hewlett-Packard enterprise as an MSP and a cloud provider within our data center. We take care of the infrastructure, the software, and the experience, your entry point is that the cloud management layer, that's how we get you going. >>Hey, Roger, I know we made some announcements earlier today about a new scalable form factor version of private cloud. I was wondering if maybe you could talk about how that extends the value proposition for customers >>Question Steve. Um, so what the scalable form factor is really is it's also looking at market feedback, understanding of what our customers are bringing this as a entry point into the smaller and the more medium enterprise who are looking to deliver private cloud capabilities, you know, making it easier for them to embrace it and then scale. The other differences is the way that we actually have flexibility in the way that that cloud solution now grows. So different options, uh, available to customers in terms of what they want to do. We typically talk as a team and to our customers about different roles. So we have a notion of the cloud administrator or the cloud operator. This is more of your classic kind of like administrative role. So this is where our customers would come in, right at the cloud management layer and begin configuring their EMR environment, networking services, et cetera, from here, onwards is the cloud consumer. >>So applications, line, application, developers, lines of business, et cetera, they're presented with a self-service catalog for them to come and provision stuff. It could be normal VMs. It could be kind of like applications depending on what the administrators or the operators of Charles and to present to them. Lastly, it's around, how do I understand what's going on in the environment? So the focus, as I mentioned beforehand, visibility to them understand what's happening to then optimize later. So addressing the needs of lines of, or it leaders and business leaders within our customer base, although this then begins from our central point of access, which is GreenLake central from here, services and solutions that customers subscribe to are presented, depending on who you are, your privileges, your role within the actual environment, you get different options. So a cloud administrator may see different things in central because they require administrative functions within the cloud environment. I consume it such as me may have limited views in central access a service, but I can basically only read our provision set, things that are done for me from a lines of business or from an it leadership perspective. It's about providing predictive billing visibility into cost, understanding from a planning standpoint and allowing people to optimize it, ease and speed. So central is where your journey begins. And then from within there, you launch the necessary service like you're subscribed to today's focus is the private cloud. >>So who is this a solution built for Raj? Uh, initially we started off at the large enterprise level, Kevin, but what we've done as we did as HPE has listened to our customers. So we've reintroduced on them. We're launching today, the scalable form factor to address the needs of a multitude of clients, both large and small and enable people to have different kind of like deployment types. So remote office branch office for the larger customers, and for those smaller enterprises wanting to begin their private cloud journey, a great way for them to do that with HPE. >>All right. Thank you. >>Um, how does the customer access the private cloud environment, uh, by agreeing like central Kevin? Great question. That's our entry point for any of the services? Uh, easier to see later on in the demo that Steve's going to walk through, uh, it's where customers come in and depending on role access, privilege, rights, et cetera, you are presented with your services. And from within that you access the service depending on the role that's been assigned to you. So state, why don't you show us a little bit about what a cloud administrator or a cloud operator can do within the environment? Sure. Happy to rush. As we talked to these personas are use cases. You know, our experience, as Raj mentioned, will always start in GreenLake central. So the role or persona I'm taking on here is that of an administrator of this private cloud environment. So again, I start off by logging into GreenLake central. Once this stood up, services stood up and available, uh, within my data center, I see the green Lake for private cloud tile, which gives me an overview of services I'm consuming. And some of the things that might be running in that environment, clicking on the tile, takes me to the cloud management platform dashboard. This is where I, as an administrator can configure and control lots of things in the environment on behalf of my end users. So a couple of examples of things I might want to do first off. Uh, there's an important >>Notion of grouping that we use for access control within the environment. So I may want to organize my users into groups to control what they can see, what they can do, what sort of policies I can apply to them next. I probably want to configure the underlying software defined network that Raj talked about. So again, we deliver a software defined networking capability from within the software defined network. This is where I can create things like underlying networks, underlying distributed V switches at an IP address pools. I can also configure and manage software defined routers, firewall rules, and some of those sorts of things within the environment, uh, in the IP address pools I have that I want to make available to some of those underlying networks I could manage from within here as well. We also feature software to find load balancing capabilities. So again, if I expect to my developers or my end users, to be able to provision resources that require some load balancing, I can create those load balancers define the types of load balancing I want to make available to those end users from within here as well. >>Finally, I can manage keys and certificates. So if I have things like key payers or SSL certificates, again, that I want to make available to my end users, um, I could manage all that from within here. And then one of the final things I might want to do is start to manage a, an automation library. So a library of virtual images, I don't want to make available for, for my end users because the private cloud solution is based on VMware. I might want to just pull in some existing VMware images. I have, I might want to create some new custom images, but really I have a central place to be able to manage that library of images and then, you know, decide who has access to which images and how I want to make those available to end users users to be able to provision and lifecycle manage. >>So that's a quick overview of some of the administrative capabilities, uh, Kevin, any questions at this point about that capability? I got one for you customers bring their own tooling to the private cloud. Oh yeah. So that's a great question. So, you know, almost every customer I talk to nowadays has made a large investment, typically in some sort of automation tooling. And one of the things that we want to provide is the ability to surface that tooling and kind of allow customers to be able to reuse that tooling within our private cloud environment. So within the private cloud platform, as an administrator, I can create all sorts of scripts and, you know, maybe some basic capabilities I wanted to find for scripts, but they also have the ability to integrate automation platforms. So we can see in this particular environment, I've, I've onboarded a, uh, a set of Ansible playbooks that exist in a get repo. Uh, I really just point the cloud management platform to that repo it scrapes all the playbooks that it finds there and those become available as tasks and workflows that I can use, uh, after I provisioned BM. So again, I can reuse that investment that I've made in automating things like application provisioning, application configuration for my end users within my environment. >>I've got another one for you. Uh, how do customers improve control and governance of their private cloud? Yeah. So there are a couple of different ways to do that. So, you know, we'll talk specifically. One of the capabilities I have within, uh, the cloud management platform is the ability to create, uh, policies. Policies are really a way I can provide my users with, you know, self-service access to kind of go do the things that they need to do, but provide some control around what they can do. So there's all sorts of policies I can create. So policies around things like if I've got certain group of users that I want to require to get provision approval, anytime they approve provision something, I wanted an administrator to approve it. I can also limit the things that maybe a group of consumers of consumers can consume within my environment. Maybe I want to define a certain host name rule. So rather than create your own host names, I have a rule I want applied. Um, if tagging and showback is important, I might want to force some tags within my environment, say, Hey, anybody who provisioned something needs to provide me a value for this tag. And then I can define how that applies within the environment. So hopefully that answers some questions and gives you a feel of how these cloud administrators would work within the environment, TB to be able to manage the overall environment itself. >>Perfect. Thanks Steve. So what we've just described in seeing is, is the ability for a cloud administrator to a do day one tasks, set things up, set some services off and more importantly, apply some rules, controls, and governance. So it keeps users safe and it keeps it happy. Really. So let's say I'm Raj, I'm the head of applications and I've got a team of developers. So I'm now going to come in as a consumer. Can you show me what I can do as a consumer pleaser? >>Sure. Raj. So again, just like with the administrative use case, we talked about as a, as a cloud consumer, my experience starts in GreenLake central. So once I'm logged into GreenLake central, if I've been provided access to the environment by my administrators, I see the green Lake for private cloud tile, and I click on it to get to the cloud management platform. Just like the administrator you use. Now, I probably see a lot less because I probably have a lot less capabilities here, but one of the first places I'd probably want to go is take a look at what instances have been provisioned and maybe provision an instance on my own. So, you know, instance provisioning is very simple. Really. It's just a few clicks and answer a few questions. Uh, so in this case, if I have access to multiple groups, so kind of that logical separation that I talked about, I'd first pick, you know, which group is this a part of? >>Uh, again, in my particular case, I can provide a freeform name because that's the policy that's been set up for me. Um, I've got a forced tag, right? So I have to provide a tag or a label that tells me what, uh, what, what area this is a part of. And as I continue to drill down, now I get to a point where I can select my image based on the images that have been made, made available to me. Um, I can choose a size of a VM. So we have sort of some pre-provision sizes that might administrators have made available to me. And in some cases I can customize some things within those sizes, or maybe I can't, again, just depending on how this was created, select the network that I want to connect to, uh, and provide a few other options. One, the things I do want to talk about is this notion of tagging tagging is very important from a showback perspective. >>And we'll talk about when we get to cost analysis, how we can use any tags that get applied here to be able to do some show back reporting later. So if I want to provide a tag for an owner to make sure I can always write a report that says, show me everything that Steve has consumed. I've got the ability to provide those tags here. And again, through a policy, I can make those tags required. A couple of other choices. I have any of that available automation that maybe my administrators have made available. I can run here. I can select some scaling of my application, maybe go ahead and auto select the backup schedule, manage some lifecycle actions if maybe this VM only needs to run during weekdays. And I don't need it on the weekends. I can have it automatically shut down and start up. >>And at the end, just click on complete. Uh, and my VM is often being built. And then, you know, once my VMs are up and running, I've got access to be able to manage those VMs on a running basis. So, you know, if I have a VM that's running and I want to be able to manage it very simple again, from within the cloud management platform to go take a look at maybe how this VM is performing, maybe I want to log into the console. Maybe I want to take a look at the log stash that, you know, the log log error messages that this VM has created, or maybe I just want to stop it, start, it can create an image from it, or maybe, you know, after I've provisioned, it runs some of those workflows on it as a, as a end-user, I've got the capability to kind of fully manage and fully control those VMs once I have them up and running. >>So that's a quick overview of that cloud consumer use case. Uh, Kevin, do you have any questions right now about that use case? Yeah, I do, uh, cloud consumers today want more than a VM, so how can a private cloud deliver more value for cloud consumers? Yeah, so that's a great question. So we talked a little bit about the cloud management platforms, ability to integrate with existing automation, for things like, uh, application installation and configuration. Uh, but one thing I didn't talk about is kind of an alternate way. We can use that and that's through this notion of blueprints. So within the cloud management platform, I, as a developer or as an administrator can set up blueprints, which are really, uh, very complex applications. These could be multi-node multi-tiered applications where each tier may have a different application installed. They may be load balanced, all those sorts of things, and I can stitch all those together and make them available as a catalog item. >>It's just kind of one simple catalog item for an end user to consume. So they don't have to understand all the complexity or all the multiple nodes or all the workflows required on the backend to provide that service. I've already done all that hard work. I advertise it to them and they don't have to know, again, in this particular case, I've got a web tier made up of a couple of VMs, a database tier made up of a couple of VMs. Uh, there's some automation running, maybe through those Ansible playbooks, uh, in, in the backend to make all those things happen really, as an end user, I just say, Hey, I want one of these applications. I may need to answer a few questions, uh, depending on how the application or their blueprint is built. And then I could push that out as an application. And again, I don't have to understand all the complexities that make up that multi-node multi-tiered application on in the background >>Stay. That's really cool. So like phase as good as it can be. So, right. So we've pushed some buttons, we've set some stuff up, we've provisioned some stuff. So right at the beginning, you know, we spoke about the post provisioning stuff. So how do we actually manage the costs and also look at their usage within their environment, which is also important to our customers. >>Yeah. So it's a great question, Raj. So, you know, obviously customers want to understand what their overall green link consumption is, what their bill is, how all those things relate together. And then they probably want to do much more detailed cost analysis as well. So the good news here, we provide all this tooling and all this is available right through GreenLake central. So a couple of the tiles that you'll see in GreenLake central tie into the private cloud solution, just like they would any other GreenLake solution. So if I want to see overall what I've consumed, uh, within my private cloud, as a GreenLake resource, I can drill down to understand, Hey, what was actually metered as what I consumed, how did that relate to my GreenLake rate card? You know, how did that, how did that create the number that appeared on my GreenLake bill for this particular service at the end of the month, I've also got the tools to do capacity planning, again, just like every other green Lake environment. >>Uh, we want to be able to show kind of that capacity planning view so customers can understand kind of what they're consuming, uh, what direction that's trending. And when we need to add some, we may need to add some more additional capacity. So again, when a customer needs more, it's already there and ready to go, they just start to consume it and pay for it as a part of their green Lake bill. So Greenlight customers have a dedicated account team that kind of works with them to keep an eye on that capacity. And again, make sure we're working with customers to make the right decisions about when is the right time to add additional capacity to the environment. And then finally, you know, our customers also get access to consumption analytics for much more detailed cost reporting. So within consumption analytics, I can take advantage of those tags that I talked about previously. >>So here's a report I created where I want to see my private cloud consumption and use really broken down by cost center. And by the VMs that my users within each of those cost centers is consuming. So I wrote a report to do some showback costing based on those tags. So in this particular case, I can tell, for example, the colo engineer cost center that Hey you over the last month, you've consumed 32, uh, elements within the private cloud environment. You know, your total cost for that was $860. And I can give them the ability to, you know, if they want drill down on this. So, you know, now they'll see every individual VM that was provisioned, uh, where it ran when it ran. And in this particular case, I've broken down the cost between compute and storage, because I really wanted to see those separately as separate line items, but, you know, really give customers the ability to do whatever showback or chargeback reporting makes sense within their organization, based on the tags. >>They want to apply it and how they want to be able to show and consume those costs. So, Kevin, any questions about, uh, sort of this cost analysis use case? Yep. Is there a way to proactively monitor consumption of the private cloud environment? Yeah, so we actually provide a couple of different ways to do that. Uh, one right within consumption analytics that we talked about, one of the capabilities I have is, is the ability to set a budget. So in this particular case, I've set a budget again, kind of by that cost center that I can take a look at, Hey, you know, what are all these cost centers consuming within this private cloud environment? Uh, and how does that relate to, you know, what maybe, uh, an amount that I've given them to be able to use? So I can take a look at it and see, Hey, in the current period, you know, I've got one, a cost center that's over budget two that are under budget and take a look at their historical use as well. >>Going back to the cloud management platform. I also have more of a hard way to be able to set those consumption boundaries, uh, by using a policy. So again, if I want to create a policy that says, Hey, you know, Steve can only have 20 VMs. Uh, once he's provisioned those 20 VMs, he can't have any more, um, you know, he's got to come back and ask for more. And again, you know, when I create this policy, I could apply it to a group or an individual user just kind of based on how I want to put those guard rails around that environment and then sort of do that around that environment. So there's kind of a way to do this in more of a soft way based on cost to understand budgets and get notifications. When I get close to my budget limits or more of a hard way to actually, you know, be able to limit resources that customers can consume within the environment itself. So with that, Raj, I'll throw it back to you. >>Thanks, Dave, >>Just to wrap up really, you know, Steve and Kevin, thank you for the great demonstration and the chat, really, um, a few things for the audience and our customers, uh, to understand what we're now doing with Greenlight for private cloud and other platform solutions is helping you to get started really, really quickly, allowing you to begin your journey with us at the right level. And then you can scale depending on how you are actually managing your transformation, be it from an infrastructure standpoint application standpoint, or you are looking to basically just modernize the way that you deliver services back out to your internal users. The other side of it is, is the important fact that we now act and behave very much like a cloud. So because we run those environments for you, we eliminate the complexity of feeding them all, Trang, all the infrastructure, the configuration, and the updates of the software layer. It leaves you free to basically deliver the services like Steve has just shown the other side of it. Final point, is this all usage based? Uh, so again, lowering kind of like the initial investment risk for you guys, allowing you to, uh, benefit from the way that we've actually integrated the solutions and technologies. So you can just embrace them and take advantage of. >>Excellent. Thank you, Raj. So I would like to thank you all for today. Thank >>You, Raj and Steve, for a brilliant demonstration. If you would like more information or like to speak to someone directly, then please fill out the poll by clicking on the poll option at the top of the chat box. So in closing, if you are interested in HPE GreenLake for private cloud, then please start a trial. It's easy. Thank you. Thank you all and goodbye for now..

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 Virtual the Cube Virtual. We're here covering the partner ecosystem and some of the new innovations coming from the reinvent community. Let's talk about something that anyone who drives a vehicle can relate to. Roadside assistance with me or Beth Davidson, chief marketing officer at a zero, and Raj borrows the vice president and c t o at zero folks, welcome to the Cube. >>Hello, nice to see you. >>So let's start with you. Maybe talk a little bit about your your mission, how you work with automakers. You've got, you know, a lot of good pipeline, their insurers and other others in the in the ecosystem. Tell us about the company. >>Absolutely. So for 50 years, we've been helping consumers with their cars. Um, that's what it comes down Thio. We know that one in three people has a roadside event every year on the way you think about that is, you know, if in three years you haven't had a roadside event, tick tock. You know, statistically, it's coming for you. We work with everybody. We work with the auto manufacturers. We work with the insurers. What we're trying to do is get closer to consumers. On the reason you may have never heard of a Gero is that's by design. Were white label. We work for our clients typically on. Do you know they trust us with their consumers? They trust us with their brands. Um, and we're just in the business of getting consumers back on the road. >>Thank you for that. So talk a little bit about how you approach this problem. I mean, you looked out roadside assistance, and you know, we can again all relate. Oh, am I up to date or at least the car? So there's gotta be some kind of 800 number in my glove compartment somewhere, right? So what was the state of roadside assistance before you guys got involved? And maybe we could get into sort of how you solve the problem. >>Yeah, I think that's a great question, Dave, as we look at roadside assistance, everyone things about picking up the phone number 800 number from the glove box compartment And over the years we have invested heavily on bringing a fully digital experience to our customers from insurance companies to AM. And when this Alexa opportunity came up earlier this summer, he said, Hi. How about taking that digital experience, adding, all the Alexa do goods goods about voice interaction, making it very interactive for the users to request that experience in a very normal consumer friendly, friendly were and brought that we integrated all those services got that whole uber like experience with for roadside assistance? >>Yeah. Now. So, Beth, you know, I reminded when, like the smart TV first came out, you had a type in right, and we're really getting spoiled now. It should be easy as a blink. Okay, so you're unveiling blink, you know, what's this service all about? >>So this service is about, you know, trying to get to consumers as easy as we can and getting removing the friction. Right? So what Rogers just talking about is again we asked consumers. We say, you know, imagine that tomorrow you went out and there was a flat tire on your car in your driveway. What do you dio? And universally, they pause and They're like, I don't know. I haven't thought about it, right. And then they start making up stuff. Like maybe I'm gonna go through the glove box. Maybe I'm going to go through my files. But wouldn't it be great if they could just kind of talked to the air and say, Alexa, what? Doe ideo and have it work for them, you know, And that's one friction. The second friction is consumers actually don't know their addresses or don't know it. Well, we joke around the office about the difference between saying you're on route one and Route one A is is the difference between 20 minutes of that tow truck getting to you in time. You know, these air points of friction that technology can help us with, you know, and then with payments even better, Right? So the fact that you can pay for this thing with Amazon pay and you don't have to worry about having cash for a driver or have a credit card. I mean, there's just so many points of friction that are reduced by using Alexa. >>Okay, so let's talk about the the integrations here in the technical aspects of how you put everything together and made it work, and we'll get into some of the cloud aspect >>Attack launched. We're asking users to tell what they want, and they can tell the whole address. They can get the address from the Alexa device. Or if it is Alexa Auto. The GPS will provide us the Latin belong. And we take that address and we get what kind of experience they want. Whether it is a flat tire, we're going to send somebody else to put despair. If it is a jump start, we're gonna put send somebody Thio jumps out the vehicle. So depending on that, we put pull all that information together, get this consent for the user to charge their an Amazon parrot card on profile, and then go So it's literally to come to sentences. And then we're on. We're on to sending you experience with some of the text messages that will allow you to truck tractor truck coming down to your driver. >>Now I'll show my age. So yeah, we've all I don't have all but I've been locked out of the car many times Now, in the old days, used to be able to get a coat hanger and pop it open. But so? So that people still get locked out of their cars. >>Yes, cars. More often than not, it's, you know, the key. Fob stopped working, right? Lost the battery of my key fob these days. But it's the equivalent. >>Alright, so All right, so right. What else do you guys do in the cloud? Do you use a W s for your own business? Maybe share with us some of >>the over the years. For the past 78 years, we have, uh, integrated and got all of our technologies into the AWS cloud. And we have now revamped and re innovated on top of those and create a new product lines. We have accident scene management. We do, um, handle automatic clash notifications for some of our partner customers. We dio dealer service appointments, so we do a lot of these things. And all of these are not possible without the amazing teams. 20 or so teams that we have across three continents working on 50 plus, uh, approved services on aws, uh, innovating around the clock, bringing these new innovations to our market. >>So, Beth, you were saying earlier that you, you know, want to reach out to the consumer. I mean, how do you market? Uh, you obviously go through through partners. And I'm curious system, What's your go to market and maybe how you're different from from others in the marketplace, >>right? Eso again because we're white label with most of the client side business that we do, we help our clients message better on DSO. We talked to them about how often you have to remind people that this isn't a one and done, um, on the skill store for Alexa. You know how we're different is you know, you don't aske much as I love the branding that we came up with blank roadside. You know, you don't actually have to use it. You don't have to say, Alexa, open my blank roadside. You could just say, Alexa, help me with my flat tire, which really helps cut out the fact that I actually need to market the brand like a traditional market or would have had Thio. But our biggest problem is how do you market something to someone in that moment of need, right? How do I How do I prime you to get you to think about it way, way before you ever actually have the problem. >>And how do you charge for the service? >>Eso It's it's a flat fee on did. It's better than what consumers would be able to get on their own. Or at least we believe so. But it is a flat fee for any kind of road service, so it's flat tire. It's dead batteries. It's winching you out. You know, it's it's all of those things. Um, that can happen to you that are just kind of those minor everyday mishaps. >>Okay? And so and so do I. How do I get it? Do I do I have tow hope that my you know, if I'm leasing a car that the auto has it, can I go direct? How doe I >>all direct? It's all direct. So you don't have to worry about an I d number membership number. You're just paying for it out of your Amazon account on. Do you know you don't have to worry about knowing your how many digit vin number. You know, none of that stuff. It's just one and done. >>Awesome. So, Raja, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your your scale. Um, maybe I don't know if you can share any metrics and what What factors? The cloud generally and a W s specifically has has played and enabling that scale. >>Yeah, we have amazing number of integrations with our Fortune 100 insurance companies. Um, over 35 insurance companies and we have 100 and 70 b two b clients today, Um, and we integrate with them were deeply, um, uh integrated into the building systems into their coverage systems. And all of that is to be able to provide that sub minute sub second experience to our customers when they're calling in, uh, when they need the service. Um, right now we do over a billion AP A calls. As a result of these transactions, all these integrations or for quarter and all of these, uh, our third parties, service providers who go around the on the roads and provide this location information today off the tow trucks to us, all of these 8 8000 or so trucks extreme that information to us almost on every hour. So we bring all that information together on the AWS platform, stream it back shaded back in a very secure private manner back to the customers, right at the moment of need. >>Yeah, So I mean, without the cloud, you'd be backing up. You know, the servers to the truck to the loading dock. And it would just take so much longer toe spin up new products. I would imagine that you guys have a lot of ideas about new data products or new services that you can you can provide. Um, you probably I'm sure you can tell us what they are, But but in terms of the time, it takes you to conceive toe to get to the market. That must be impressed with the cloud. >>Yeah, it's a fraction of what it used to take years ago when we were not in AWS, right? And it also allows us to not to spend all this time on worrying about the same thing that you used to worry about for every project. Now you can actually think about how, what how you let be able to leverage new innovations that are coming in and actually improve improve the experience with some kind of intelligence that is added on, which makes the experience much smoother for people. >>Well, Beth will give you last word. But first of all, thanks for helping us make our lives even even better and more convenient. But bring us home. What's the last word here? >>So the last word is, you know, we dio we do 12 million events a year right now, right? And if you if you like math, it's 35,000 day. It's 20 for every minute, you know. And the work that that Rajan team have done to make the scalable means we're ready to do the next 12 million on. Do you know we know. We know there are consumers out there having those events. We just want to be there for you, you know, take care of that frustrating event on get you back >>on the road. Well, it's just, you know, having you there and being able to push a button and talk to a device is just It's a game changer. So thank you guys for coming on the cube and sharing your story really interesting. Yeah. All right. Thanks for watching. Keep it right there. You're watching the cubes coverage of aws reinvent 2020. We'll be right back right after this short break