>>LA from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and along with its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to the queue from Las Vegas. We are live at AWS reinvent 19 Lisa Martin with John furrier. We've been having lots of great conversations. John, we're about to have another one cause we always love to talk about customer proof in the putting. Please welcome a couple of guests. We have Rafael, director of analytics and data management from triple a life. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Our pleasure. And from Burkle anchor Jane, the SVP of cloud platforms. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. So here we are in this, I can't see of people around us as, as growing exponential a by the hour here, but awkward. Let's start with you give her audience an understanding of Merkel, who you are and what you do. >>Yeah, absolutely. So Marco is a global performance marketing agency. We are part of a dental agent network and a, it's almost about 9,000 to 10,000 people worldwide. It's a global agency. What differentiates Merkel from rest of the other marketing agencies is our deep roots and data driven approach. We embrace technology. It's embedded in all our, all our solutions that we take to market. Um, and that's what we pride ourselves with. So, um, that's basically a high level pitch about Merkel. What differentiates us, my role, uh, I lead the cloud transformation for Merkel. Um, uh, basically think of my team as the think tanks who bring in the new technology, come up with a new way of rolling out solutions product I solutions, uh, disruptive solutions, which helps our clients and big fortune brands such as triple life insurance, uh, to transform their marketing ecosystem. >>So let's go ahead and dig. A lot of folks probably know AAA life, but, but Raphael, give us a little bit of an overview. This is a 50 year old organization. >>So we celebrate our 50th 50 year anniversary this year. Actually, we're founded in 1969. So everybody life insurance, we endeavor to be the provider of choice for a AAA member. Tell them to protect what matters most to them. And we offer a diverse set of insurance products across just about every channel. Um, and um, we engage with Merkel, uh, earlier, the, um, in 2018 actually to, to, uh, to build a nice solution that allows us to even better serve the needs of the members. Uh, my role, I am the, I lead our analytics and data management work. So helping us collect data and manage better and better leverage it to support the needs of members. >>So a trip, I can't even imagine the volumes of data that you're dealing with, but it's also, this is people's data, right? This is about insurance, life insurance, the volume of it. How have you, what were some of the things that you said? All right guys, we need to change how we're managing the data because we know there's probably a lot more business value, maybe new services that we can get our on it or eyes >>on it. >>So, so that was, that was it. So as an organization, uh, I want to underscore what you said. We make no compromises when it comes to the safety of our, of our members data. And we take every step possible to ensure that it is managed in a responsible and safe way. But we knew that on, on the platform that we had prior to this, we weren't, we weren't as italics. We wanted to be. We would find that threaten processes would take spans of weeks in order to operate or to run. And that just didn't allow us to provide the member experience that we wanted. So we built this new solution and this solution updates every day, right? There's no longer multi-week cycle times and tumbler processes happen in real time, which allows us to go to market with more accurate and more responsive programs to our members. >>Can you guys talk about the Amazon and AWS solution? How you guys using Amazon's at red shift? Can he says, you guys losing multiple databases, give us a peek into the Amazon services that you guys are taking advantage of that anchor. >>Yeah, please. Um, so basically when we were approached by AAA life to kind of come in and you know, present ourselves our credentials, one thing that differentiated there in that solution page was uh, bringing Amazon to the forefront because cloud, you know, one of the issue that Ravel and his team were facing were scalability aspect. You know, the performance was, was not up to the par, I believe you guys were um, on a two week cycle. That data was a definition every two weeks. And how can we turn that around and know can only be possible to, in our disruptive technologies that Amazon brings to the forefront. So what we built was basically it's a complete Amazon based cloud native architecture. Uh, we leveraged AWS with our chip as the data warehouse platform to integrate basically billions and billions of rows from a hundred plus sources that we are bringing in on a daily basis. >>In fact, actually some of the sources are the fresh on a real time basis. We are catching real time interactions of users on the website and then letting Kimberly the life make real time decisions on how we actually personalize their experience. So AWS, Redshift, you know, definitely the center's centerpiece. Then we are also leveraging a cloud native ELT technology extract load and transform technology called. It's a third party tool, but again, a very cloud native technology. So the whole solution leverage is Python to some extent. And then our veil can talk about AI and machine learning that how they are leveraging AWS ecosystem there. >>Yeah. So that was um, so, uh, I anchor said it right. One thing that differentiated Merkel was that cloud first approach, right? Uh, we looked at it what a, all of the analysts were saying. We went to all the key vendors in this space. We saw the, we saw the architecture is, and when Merkel walked in and presented that, um, that AWS architecture, it was great for me because if nausea immediately made sense, there was no wizardry around, I hope this database scales. I was confident that Redshift and Lambda and dynamo would this go to our use cases. So it became a lot more about are we solving the right business problem and less about do we have the right technologies. So in addition to what Ankur mentioned, we're leveraging our sort of living RNR studio, um, in AWS as well as top low frat for our machine learning models and for business intelligence. >>And more recently we've started transition from R to a Python as a practitioner on the keynote today. Slew a new thing, Sage maker studio, an IDE for machine learning framework. I mean this is like a common set. Like finally, I couldn't have been more excited right? That, that was my Superbowl moment. Um, I was, I was as I was, we were actually at dinner yesterday and I was mentioning Tonker, this is my wishlist, right? I want AWS to make a greater investment in that end user data scientists experience in auto ML and they knocked it out of the park. Everything they announced today, I was just, I was texting frat. Wow, this is amazing. I can't wait to go home. There's a lot of nuances to, and a lot of these announcements, auto ML for instance. Yeah. Really big deal the way they did it. >>And again, the ID who would've thought, I mean this is duh, why didn't we think about this sooner? Yeah. With auto ML that that focus on transparency. Right. And then I think about a year ago we went to market and we ended up not choosing any solutions because they hadn't solved for once you've got a model built, how do you effectively migrated from let's say an analyst who might not have the, the ML expertise to a data science team and the fact that AWS understood out of the gate that you need that transparent all for it. I'm really excited for that. What do you think the impacts are going to be more uptake on the data science side? What do you think the impact of this and the, so I think for, I think we're going to see, um, that a lot of our use cases are going to part a lot less effort to spin up. >>So we're going to see much more, much faster pilots. We're going to have a much clearer sense of is this worth it? Is this something we should continue to invest in and to me we should drive and I expect that a lot, much larger percentage of my team, the analysts are going to be involved in data and data science and machine learning. So I'm really excited about that. And also the ability to inquire, to integrate best practices into what we're doing out of the gate. Right? So software engineers figured out profiling, they figured out the bugging and these are things that machine learners are picking up. Now the fact that you're front and center is really excited. Superbowl moment. You can be like the new England Patriots, 17 straight AFC championship games. Boston. Gosh, I could resist. Uh, they're all Seattle. They're all Seattle here and Amazon. I don't even bring Seattle Patriots up here and Amazon, >>we are the ESPN of tech news that we have to get in as far as conversation. But I want to kind of talk a little bit, Raphael about the transformation because presumably in, in every industry, especially in insurance, there are so many born in the cloud companies that are a lot, they're a lot more agile and they are chasing what AAA life and your competitors and your peers are doing. What your S establishing with the help of anchor and Merkel, how does this allow you to actually take the data that you had, expand it, but also extract insights from maybe competitive advantages that you couldn't think about before? >>Yeah, so I think, uh, so as an organization, even though we're 50 years old, one of the things that drew me to the company and it's really exciting is it's unrelated to thrusting on its laurels, right? I think there's tremendous hunger and appetite within our executive group to better serve our members and to serve more members. And what this technology is allowed is the technology is not a limiting factor. It's an enabling factors. We're able to produce more models, more performant models, process more of IO data, build more features. Um, we've managed to do away with a lot of the, you know, if you take it and you look at it this way and squeeze it and maybe it'll work and systematize more aspects of our reporting and our campaign development and our model development and the observability, the visibility of just the ability to be agile and have our data be a partner to what we're trying to accomplish. That's been really great. >>You talked about the significant reduction in cycle times. If we go back up to the executive suite from a business differentiation perspective, is the senior leadership at AAA understanding what this cloud infrastructure is going to enable their business to achieve? >>Absolutely. So, so our successes here I think have been instrumental in encouraging our organization to continue to invest in cloud. And uh, we're an active, we're actively considering and discussing additional cloud initiatives, especially around the areas of machine learning and AI. >>And the auger question for you in terms of, of your expertise, in your experience as we look at how cloud is changing, John, you know, educate us on cloud cloud, Tuto, AI machine learning. What are, as, as these, as businesses, as industries have the opportunity to for next gen cloud, what are some of the next industries that you think are really prime to be completely transformed? >>Um, I'm in that are so many different business models. If you look around, one thing I would like to actually touch upon what we are seeing from Merkel standpoint is the digital transformation and how customers in today's world they are, you know, how brands are engaging with their customers and how customers are engaging with the brands. Especially that expectations customer is at the center stage here they are the ones who are driving the whole customer engagement journey, right? How all I am browsing a catalog of a particular brand on my cell phone and then I actually purchased right then and there and if I have an issue I can call them or I can go to social media and log a complaint. So that's whole multi channel, you know, aspect of this marketing ecosystem these days. I think cloud is the platform which is enabling that, right? >>This cannot happen without cloud. I'm going to look at, Raphael was just describing, you know, real time interaction, real time understanding the behavior of the customer in real time and engaging with them based on their need at that point of time. If you have technologies like Sage maker, if you have technologies like AWS Redship you have technologies like glue, Kinesis, which lets you bring in data from all these disparate sources and give you the ability to derive some insights from that data in that particular moment and then interact with the customer right then and there. That's exactly what we are talking about. And this can only happen through cloud so, so that's my 2 cents are where they are, what we from Merkel standpoint, we are looking into the market. That's what we are helping our brands through to >>client. I completely agree. I think that the change from capital and operation, right to no longer house to know these are all the sources and all the use cases and everything that needs to happen before you start the project and the ability to say, Hey, let's get going. Let's deliver value in the way that we've had and continue to have conversations and deliver new features, new stores, a new functionality, and at the same time, having AWS as a partner who's, who's building an incremental value. I think just last week I was really excited with the changes they've made to integrate Sage maker with their databases so you can score from the directly from the database. So it feels like all these things were coming together to allow us as a company to better off on push our aims and exciting time. >>It is exciting. Well guys, I wish we had more time, but we are out of time. Thank you Raphael and anchor for sharing with Merkel and AAA. Pleasure. All right. Take care. Or John furrier. I am Lisa Martin and you're watching the cube from Vegas re-invent 19 we'll be right back.

la from Las Vegas it's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Vinum care along with its ecosystem partners hello everyone welcome to the cube we're here live in Las Vegas for AWS reinvent 2019 I'm John Farrar your host is silicon Angles flagship the cube we're extract a signal noise leader in event coverage with day Volante my co-host and justin warren tech analysts Forbes contributor guru of cube host guys keynote for J&E jassie first of all I don't know how he does it he's just like continues hissing Marc loved the live music in there but a slew of announcements this is a reinvention of AWS you can tell that they're just essentially trying to go the next level on what the cloud means how they're gonna bring it to customers and you know they've been criticized for you know kind of nut I won't say falling behind I could say Microsoft's been probably praised more for catching up and it's been a lot of discussion around that the loss of the Jedi contract variety of enterprise wins Microsoft has the field Salesforce Google's just kind of retooling but Amazon clearly the leader with a little pressure for the first time in the rearview mirror they've got someone on their on their tail win and Microsoft's far back but this isn't a statement from from chassis and Amazon of okay you want to see the Jets we're gonna we're gonna turn on the Jets and blow pass everybody Jesse gets cocky self Justin what do you think yeah so a lot of signaling to enterprise that it's safe to come here it's this is where you can have everything that you need to get everything that you need done you can get all of it in one place so there there is a real signal there to say Enterprise if you want to do cloud there's only one place to do cloud enterprise customers they tried out some big names Goldman Sachs not a small enterprise they had all the classic born in the cloud but you know we put out this concept on I'm on our Silicon angle post called reborn in the cloud almost born-again enterprise you start to see the telegraphing of what their core message is which is transform just don't kick the tires and fall into the Microsoft trap go with em is on and transform your business model transform your miss not just run IT a better way than before well yeah I mean I'm impressed they got two CEOs the CEO of Goldman Sachs David Solomon the CEO of Cerner coming to the show it's kind of rare that the CEO of your customer comes to the show I guess the second thing I'd say is you know Amazon is not a rinse and repeat company at these shows although they are when it comes to shock and awe so they ticked the Box on shock and awe but you're right John they're talking a lot about transformation I sort of think of it as disruption here's what I would say to that Amazon has a dual disruption agenda one is its disrupting the horizontal technology stack and 2 its disrupting industries it wants to be the platform of which startups in particular but also incumbents can disrupt industries and it's in their DNA because it's in Amazon's DNA and I think it's the last thing I'll say as Amazon is the reach a Amazon retailers the you can buy anything here store and now to your point Justin Amazon Web Services is you can get AWS anywhere at the edge and a little mini data centers that they're built on outpost and of course in the cloud all right I want to get you guys reactions a couple things I saw and I want to just analyze the keynote one as we saw Jesse come out with the transformation message that's really more of their posture to the market you should be transforming we're gonna take Amazon as a center of gravity and push it out to the edge without post so kind of a customer company posture there on the industry then you had the announcements and I thought that the sage maker studio was pretty robust a lot of data and announcements so you had the transformation message a lot of core data and then they kind of said hey we're open we got open source databases we got kubernetes and multiple flavors a couple steers from the Twitter crowd on that one and then finally outpost with the edge where they're essentially you know four years ago Dave they said no more data centers in ten years now they're saying we're gonna push Amazon to the your datacenter so you know a posture for the company a lot of data centric data ops almost program and build I'm also DevOps feel to it what's your reaction to that I think the most interesting part for me was the change there was a bit of a shift there I think he made the statement of rather than bringing the data to the computer we want to bring the compute to the data and I think that's that's acknowledging reality that data has gravity and it's very difficult for enterprises particularly if you've already invested a lot in building a data Lake so being able to just pick that up and then move it to any cloud nothing let alone AWS just moving that around is is a big effort so if you're going to transform your business you have to kind of rethink completely how you address some of these issues and one of that would be well what if rather than let's just pick everything up and move it to cloud what if we could actually do something a little bit better than that and we can pick and choose what we want to suit our particular solution and your point Dave I think that's where Amazon strength comes from is it they are the everything store so you can buy whatever you want be at this tiny little piece that only five companies need or the same thing that everyone else on the planet needs you can come and buy everything from us and that's what I think they're trying to signal to an organization that says look if you want to transform and you're concerned that it'll be difficult to do we've got you we've got something here that will suit your needs and we will be able to work with you to transform your business and we're seeing you know Amazon years ago we wouldn't talk about hybrid and now they're going really all-in on hybrid and it's not outpost is no longer just this thing they're doing with VMware it's now a fundamental piece of their infrastructure for the edge and I think the key point there is the the edge is going to be one with developers and Amazon is essentially bringing its development platform to the edge without posts as the the underpinning and I like the strategy much much better than I like what I'm seeing from some of the guys like HP and Dell which is they're throwing boxes you know over the fence with really without a strong developer angle your thoughts I mean my my big takeaway was I think this is key knows about a next-generation shift on the business model but that's the transformation he didn't come out and say it I said it in my post but I truly believe if you're not born in the cloud or reborn in the cloud you'll probably be out of business and as a startup were to ask them of the VCS this question how do you go after and target some of those people who aren't gonna be reborn in the cloud to have the scale advantage but the data announcements was really the big story here because we look at DevOps infrastructure as code programming infrastructure we've seen that that that's of now an established practice now you start to see this new concept around data ops some people call it AI ops whatever but Dana now the new programmability it's almost a devops culture - data and I think what got my attention the most was the IDE for stage maker which kind of brings in this cool feature of what everyone was which is I want machine learning but I can't hire anybody and I got to make I got a democratized machine learning I got to make application developers get value out of the data because the apps need to tap the data it's got to be addressable so I think this is a stake in the ground for the next five to ten years of a massive shift from increasing the DevOps mission to add a layer making that manageable multiple databases he's totally right on that it's not one database if you want time series for real-time graph for you know network constructs it's pick your database you know that shouldn't be it inhibitor at all I think the data story is real that's the top story in my mind the data future what that's going to enable and then the outpost is just a continuation of Amazon realizing that the center of the cloud is not the end game it's just the center of gravity and I think you gonna start to see edge become really huge I mean I count ten into ten purpose-built databases now and jesse was unequivocal he said you gotta have the right database tool for the right job you're seeing the same thing with their machine learning and AI tools it's been shocking dozens and dozens of services each with their own sort of unique primitives that give you that flexibility and so where you can disagree with the philosophy but their philosophy is very clear we're gonna go very granular and push a lot of stuff out there I think there's two bits at play there that I can see you know I think you're right on the data thing and something that people don't quite realize is that modern data analysis is programming like it's code your data scientists know how to code so there was a lot of talk there about notebooks going in there like they love their notebooks they love using different frameworks to solve different problems and they need to be able to use for this one I need tens of flow for another one I might need MX net yeah so if you couple that that idea that we need to it's all about the data and you couple that with developers and AWS knows developers really really well so you've got modern enterprises lot wanting to do more with the data that they have the age or business problem of I've got all this information I need to process I need to do be out bi I need to do data analysis and you couple that with the Pala that iws has with developers I think it's a pretty strong story then you know in my interview with Jesse I asked him the question and I stole the line from Steve Moe Mulaney from aviatrix you take the tea out of cloud native it's cloud naive and I think what I've been seeing is a lot of customers have been naive about what cloud is and it's actually been buying IT and so they really don't are not sensitive to the capabilities message so I asked Jeff see I'm like you got these capabilities that's cool if you want to go to the store and buy everything or look at everything and buy what you want and construct and transform check no problem I buy that however some customers just want a package solution and Amazon has not always been great on having something packaged for customers so he kind of addressed that and this might be an Achilles heel for Amazon as Microsoft has such entrenched sales sales presence that they might be pushing a solution that frankly customers might not care about capabilities we did see one bit where there was a little bit of a nudge towards is fees and and systems integrators and I think that that really for me is there needs to be a lot more work done by Amazon there because that's what Enterprise me enterprise is used to dealing with systems integrators that will help them to use the raw materials that ados provides to solve that promote you said there are two segments of developers and customers one that wants all the low level building blocks and others want simpler faster results with abstractions aka packaging so they're going down the road but again they're not shy don't like hey we're just going to continue to build we're not going to try to move off our trajectory they're gonna stay with adding more power and frankly some digs at snowflake I fought with red shift and I thought the dig to the kubernetes community with we code our own stuff wink wink we don't have to slow down was a nice jab at the CN CF I thought because he's saying hey you know what we're not in committees deciding features which is the customers and implementing them so a kind of a jab well sure that's gonna rapid a I would say the snowflake is sort of a copycat separating compute from stores that's what snowflakes has been doing forever but he did take direct jabs at IBM Oracle and obviously Microsoft with with Windows so I like to see that you know usually Jessie doesn't do that it's good take the gloves so much so many announcements out there you got to go to silk and angled comm will have all the stories but one of the top stories coming into the reinvent that we didn't hear anything about but if you squint through and connect the dots on Jessie's keynote it is pretty evident what the strategy is and that's multi-cloud so I'll see multi-cloud is a word that Amazon is not using at all onstage as you can tell they don't really they're in well they're one cloud they don't really care about the other clouds but their customers do so guys multi cloud is a legit conversation how they get multi cloud is debatable acquisition sprawl by the end of the day multiple clouds is reality I think Jessie was kind of predicting and laying down some early narratives around the multi cloud story by saying hey we have more capabilities we're faster we're doing more stuff so I think he's trying to cede the base on the concept of hey if you want to go look at other clouds try to go apples to apples NIT that other than that he didn't really address at all multi-cloud what do you guys think about multi cloud yeah what it's pretty much that if you're gonna have multiple clouds at least one of them's gonna be AWS so they're gonna get some of your money if we came a bi can't get all your money I'll get at least get some of your money that's reasonable but I think part of the multi cloud conversation is that enterprises are actually trying to clarify their existing way of doing things so cloud isn't a destination it's not like a it's not a physical location it's a state of mind it's a way of operating things an enterprise that that's that's the transformation part that enterprises are trying to do so transform the way that they operate themselves to be more cloud like so part of the multi cloud piece I think that people are kind of missing is well it's not just Amazon or some of its competitors its existing on-site infrastructure and making that into a cloud which i think is where something like outpost becomes a really strong proposition and I've said a million times multiplied cloud is more of a symptom than it is a strategy that'll start to change they will see an equilibrium there you know right cloud for the right job but today it's a problem that CIOs are asked being asked to clean up the crime scene all right let's wrap up by summarizing the keynote each of you guys give me your take on I'll start I think this was a inflection point for AWS and Jesse in the sense of they now know they have to go the next gen loud it's Amazon enterprise it's data it's outpost it's all these things it's truly next-gen I think this is going to be all about data it's all gonna be about large-scale infrastructure and data scaling and with edge and outpost I think is really an amazing move for them in the sense that's gonna probably put in motion another five to ten years of continuing architectural reshipping and I think that if you're not born in the cloud or reborn in the cloud you're gonna be naive to the fact that you're not gonna have the capabilities to be success when I think that's going to be an opportunity for entrepreneurs and for companies pivoting into enterprises so I think this goes will go might go down as one of the most pax keynotes but I think it'll look back as one of the instrumental transitions for Amazon so I think he did a good job beginning and to rush 30 announcements in three hours marathon but overall I thought he did a great job I think I would agree Jesse always does a good job he's giving a message to you know CEOs as opposed to the CIO and he had two CEOs on stage I thought there was quite a gap between you know that message of transformation and then sort of geeking out on all the new services so there's still some work to be done there but I think it's a lot of developers in the audience I'm seeing them tell your boss to get on the train it's a very hard keynote to serve both audiences but so it's a start but there's a lot of work to be done there Justin yeah I agree with that I think this is probably one of the first keynotes maybe last year but certainly this year there's like AWS is very serious about enterprise and is trying to talk to enterprise a lot more than it ever has it still talks to developers but we didn't see anywhere near as much interesting in kind of the startup ecosystem it's like no no cloud is for serious companies doing serious work and I think that we're just going to see Amazon talking about that more and more and more because that's where all the money is yeah next-generation cloud new architectures all about the enterprise guys this is the cube opening day for three days of wall-to-wall coverage keynote analysis from Andy Jessie and Amazon Andy Jessie will be on Thursday at 3 o'clock we got a lot of top Amazon executives will who'll help us open and unpack all these to make mega announcements stay with us for more cube coverage and go to Silicon angle comm cube net for the videos be back back after this short break [Music]