>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2017, presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Hey, welcome back to the CUBE. We are live on day one of AWS re:Invent 2017. This is their sixth event, our fifth time here with the CUBE. I'm Lisa Martin, along with Justin Warren, my co-host. There are upwards of 40,000 plus, I've heard even 50,000 people are here, incredible three day event. And we are excited to be joined by another guest from BMC, Daniel Nelson, AVP of Product Management, Security, Compliance and Automation, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me, I'm excited to be here. >> We're excited to have you here. So one of the things that I'd love to understand is when you talk to customers who are in the enterprise, on this journey to cloud as you know, that term is used a lot, what are some of the biggest challenges that they face knowing they have no choice but to do this? What are some of the biggest challenges that they face that BMC can help to mitigate on this journey? >> Oh, I'd be happy, absolutely. So one of the things about us is that for the past twenty years, we've been helping large enterprises help keep their environment secure, fully automated, be able to have greater efficiencies within their data centers. And as our customers are transitioning to a multi-cloud world, everything that they had to do back at the data center, they still have to do in the public cloud, it still has to be compliant, it still has to be secure, it still has to be governed. And so what we help our customers do is to make that transformation and be able to bring together those two worlds so while they currently are looking as a goal to use AWS, use public cloud, use private cloud, they still have to manage their internal systems and be able to provide one platform to do that is what BMC's all about. >> Yeah, I've been a longtime user of BMC products, back in the day, you know Control-M and some of the things-- >> Still a great product, lots of people use it. >> Absolutely, it was a great product and we used it a lot. So I know that BMC has that rich history and experience of being able to automate things, particularly in scale, so how is that translating across into the world of cloud? 'Cause to me it actually seems like it's basically the same problem. >> Oh, and it is, absolutely. So what it used to be, scale was the measure of number of servers that you have. Now it's much more number of applications that you have, the number of developers you have, the number of configurations you have to keep in touch with, the number of policies you have to enforce, so the scale problem's exactly the same, just the physical mechanism of what's scaling has changed and that is an added complexity to it. >> Yeah, so given that level of similarity and what you've been able to translate from the inside world across into the cloud, what is it that's different? What is the thing that people are struggling with and the customers are really challenged by in this journey to cloud? >> Well, in one word it's speed. So everything that you had to do in the past was at a particular cadence. And so if you're releasing applications once a year, once every six months, even once a quarter, there was a certain amount of slack in the system where if something went wrong, you had time to adjust, you had time to keep up with it. Well now that you're down to hours, minutes, sometimes even seconds, pushing out code all the time, updating your applications all the time, you can't operate, it's beyond human scale and so that's where things like automation being able to tie back to your core systems, be able to have all that automated governance control really helps, you know, all of our customers. >> Speed is one of the things that AWS has done extremely well continuing to-- what? Last year I think it was 1,017 new features and services. This year it's over 1,100 already and you know, Andy Jassy has been very vocal about speed and customer focus is what's helping them. So with that focus on speed and accelerating pace of innovation, how is BMC alike AWS in getting what customers need faster than your competitors? >> You know, absolutely. And so what AWS does really well is providing the core preeminence that the underlying, you know, building blocks of what you need and allowing you to assemble those very quickly to have you realize your own vision and your own dreams. What we do very well is keeping some guardrails on those building blocks and making sure that, you know, we've seen it all over the place. One developer makes a mistake and suddenly, you've got a data breach. Uh, you know, one piece of code doesn't get updated the way it should be or you have a password in GitHub somewhere and now all of a sudden, you know, all your data's out there and you're on the front page of Wall Street Journal. What we help our customers do is to keep out of that news and into the news of satisfying their customers and going fast. So while AWS helps you build things really quickly, we help you do that in the right way, that keeps you safe, keeps you compliant, and keeps you you know, within the normal, corporate governance. >> So what's your favorite example of a customer doing that, where they had this issue and then they came to BMC and you were able to help them to actually solve that problem; what's a great example? >> Well we obviously do a lot of business with a lot of big banks and we have one of our customers, is a very large bank, was hesitant about the cloud, was experimenting with it, and they started with just five projects and within six months that five, those five projects had ballooned up to 65 projects, and all without really governance control oversight. And then WannaCry hit and our customer was so nervous, so scared about it, that their only response was, since they didn't know what their exposure was, they just shut 'em all down, they just pulled the plug, and says, "We're not gonna do anything." And so what we did is we came in and provided them the ability to do that, to revive those innovation products, to provide the ability to build quickly, but also know where you are, how to be safe, and can continue to update, you know, your compliance and security posture with new information as it comes in. So it gives them that safety factor that they can feel safe. One of my favorite examples and one of the best metaphors I've had is one of my customers from Savience said, "You know, Daniel, look I love to go fast, but the last thing I want to do is put my problems on roller skates, like that doesn't do any good." And I was like , "That's what we're here to do. We're here to provide you, you know, those bumper rails on the bowling alley so you can go fast." >> I do love that problems on roller skates idea. >> I'm gonna use that. >> Yeah, I was feeling that one. >> Go ahead, I use it all the time. >> So you know, we talk a lot about a lot of buzzwords, a lot of hot terms, right? Uh, multi-cloud. I'm curious about what BMC is doing in multi-cloud. How does an enterprise understand what multi-cloud is? What's hybrid cloud? How do you guys help sort of break down some of these buzzwords into actions for your customers so they can be fast and competitive? >> So for me, if I were to sound out what multi-cloud really means is that you're choosing the best technology at the best price point for what the need of the business is. And sometimes that means running of the data center. And there are a lot of things in the data center that run, you know, more cheaply, more efficiently, but at a much more cost effective basis than they ever will in the cloud. And those things belong in the data center. And I think over time, you'll see the data center loads will actually increase, as well. There's some things that you have to go very quickly, you can be experimental with it, you have to have the DevOps team attached to, and the public cloud is great for those things. And then even within the public cloud space, there are things that Azure does well, there's things that AWS does well, and individual enterprises, especially large enterprises, which is our constituency, need to be able to make those choices and be able to do that for the best underlying reason of their technology. What BMC then provides you is ability to say whether it's OnPrem, whether it's in Azure, whether it's AWS, wherever you wanna run that, you know, we can provide you the controls and the compliance and the governance that you can be safe regardless. You get the same policies in place regardless of where that individual technology's targeted. >> Yeah, absolutely. And when talking with large, particularly large customers as you've point out, you only have to buy one other company and all of a sudden, you're multi-cloud. You might've decided, "You know what, we're all in on AWS." A different company that you'd buy for business reasons may have decided, "You know what, I wanna have some Azure, I wanna have some Google Cloud." It's like kaboom, you buy them and now all of a sudden, IT has this multi-cloud issue and they need someone who can help them to manage that. And really, you wanna be able to manage that in the same way across all of the different environments and I can see that that's where BMC would be really strong. >> You know, you're exactly right. Give me one of the great things, like this is a great show, and there's so many vendors and there's so much great technology here, but if you talk to Gardner or Forester or ADC or 451, one of the main things they'll tell you is you've got to have not individual tools for every individual problem, you need to have a platform in place that provides you the breadth of coverage where you have the ability to be flexible across those technologies. And that's another thing that BMC is offering in the market. >> Yeah, so one of the challenges of building that platform, though, is that you've got all of these little different silos that tend to just sort of build up all by themselves. And then when you come and try like the central IT comes along and says, "No, thall shalt use the one true solution." How do you actually provide the right level of flexibility for individual solutions that can be tailored in need, but still provide that scalability and sameness across everything that gives you those efficiencies in scale? How does BMC help you manage that? >> Well that's one of BMC's historical strongest parts of the offering, is the breadth of content, being able to support, you know, in the data center all of the different operating systems, all of the different applications. We do the same thing now by us forwarding all the different microservices within AVDS, all of the different microservices within Azure, being able to then provide that breadth of content so that the developer, himself, can choose whatever and then from a central IT standpoint, you know you've got the policies in place to be able to make sure that they're safe. Another one of my favorite expression is that developers will argue with people but they won't argue with systems. And so if you then being able to incorporate that, the compliance and control into the DevOps pipeline, into the DNAP driven-approach, where a developer does something that's outside of those guidelines and they just get an immediate response back saying, "No, I'm sorry, that's not allowed." or you know, "There's an air message in law." they're like, "Okay, well I gotta go fix that." verus being on the phone or having to go through any of that process. Developers are very argumentative about that. So what we do is be able to take that corporate IT perspective and just be able to eject it programmatically across all the different dev teams. >> I think our question we wanna pivot on the developer role for a second, you know, AWS has done a great job of attracting a lot of awareness in the developer community for a long time now. They've never really had to advertise, because this awareness was so strong, very sticky. We've seen them this year, sort of advertising, which as a marketer kinda signaled to me, interesting. We know that their massive growth rate isn't predicated upon us, you know, startups alone. That the enterprise is also a major play for AWS and they need to get to now, the CEO, the corporate board. I'm just curious, is BMC seeing in like a customer, like a large bank or an insurance company for example, where are you seeing the C-Suite help influence product development? How influential is that higher tier of management now as this transition becomes an absolute business imperative? >> Well, it's interesting because you see not only the rise of the CIO as a digital transformer within the business, you also see the CEO being more and more involved with us. And you also have the rise of the CSO. So being able to inject security into this conversation, and so you've got a monopoly of different voices that are all happening at the board level and that there's board visibility in the center of these things as well. But the board now pays attention to, "How are we developing our applications? Are they safe? Are they secure? You know, is there an existential risk to our business by the way that we're conducting ourselves from an information technology standpoint?" So those conversations are obviously happening. You know, we see them happening all the time, it's been really great for our business, because we've been working with these companies for years and years and years to help them be safe and compliant, to keep their banking licenses in order, things of that nature, and now we're just extending that to the cloud, as well. So we definitely see it and honestly, it's one of the things that we feel like is a core competitive advantage for us, is we have those relationships in place today and have for decades. >> Yeah, do you see yourselves going into customers in sort of a partnering relationship with AWS, particularly for those enterprises? I can see that, I mean IT has been wanting a seat at this table for so, so long. It's like, "Well, you've got one now. It happened to come from security which is possibly not the best introduction ever." But now that they have their seat at the table, how are you finding to manage that conversation to influence board level, which is a far different conversation than what it would be when you're talking about technical things? And even from developer land, it's like, "API's and so on", that's not really a board level conversation or is it? >> Well AWS is one of our strategic partners and so it's very easy for us to go into customers together, and be able to tell that message of, "Go safe but be fast at the same time." And so we're much more of an and-world now than an or-world, you know, that we were in the past. And the ability to make trade-offs with somebody that we all kinda took for granted, but now we really don't have that ability anymore, like we have to be all things to all people and that forces a lot of innovation. And it forces a lot of the kind of the new things that you're seeing everyday, no matter of AWS and other vendors as well. It's really an exciting time to be in information technology. >> Never a dull moment. And yeah I wanted to kinda pivot on it, symbiosis. Like how much business do you drive for AWS, but also conversely, how much does AWS sorta push BMC to innovate at their pace? >> Right, so you know, just being a AWS partner pushes you. Because you're now along for the ride and wherever they go, whatever they're doing, you know, our customers are looking at us and saying, "When do you support that? And how are you gonna support that?" You know, we want to be easing into these things and so we've had to put on ourselves, a very strict SLA that as soon as AWS gets someone new, we have to support it with our very breviated time, 'cause that's what our customers have had it and that's great 'cause it enforces us to innovate, forces us to do things in new ways and be able to you know, actually have a lot of the technologies, a lot of the processes in place that our customers, themselves are trying to emulate. So that's been wonderful. In addition to that, if you look at you know, how we're pushing AWS, AWS is definitely you know, is already in the enterprise, there's a lot of enterprises that already used us but being able to think about things from an enterprise standpoint is different than a developer bottom-up standpoint and so we've always been a lot more holistic about understanding what are the needs of the business? And especially from a C-Suite communication perspective, like how do we articulate and how do we do that well? And that's part of what we bring to the relationship. >> You mentioned a lot of customers are banks and insurance companies, I'm curious about healthcare. There's sort of an anticipation that Andy Jassy might be announcing a broader partnership with Cerner, who has 25% market share in electronic health records. Healthcare being historically slower to adopt cloud, massive security challenges there. What are you guys seeing in the healthcare space? What are some of the primary concerns there that you're helping to mitigate? >> Well so if you talk about healthcare, the first thing that everybody will talk about, especially in the IT space is HIPAA, right? So it's you know, what am I doing with my private data? If you talk about it from an AMIA perspective, you know, it's GDPR, you know, what are we gonna do about private data, how do we keep it segregated? You know, how do we not only have those mechanisms in place, but how do we ensure that they're in place, be able to prove that they are in place? And when our auditors come to us, we can provide them all that data. And that's exactly what BMC provides. So we have out of the box content for HIPAA compliance, for SOX, for PCI, for anything that you want to do. And so we can just look at your systems or they're in the data center or in the cloud, tell you exactly how they need to be configured, and then also I'll remediate them for you. So we can take that next step and provide the automation in place for you, so that you can actually then just worry about running your business. So it's a really, really interesting vertical for us to go into 'cause of our history and 'cause of our background. >> Yeah, there's gonna be so much growth in that area. I mean, even from my part of the world, down in Australia. We've got our electronic health records is a big, big thing with the whole program of work that's involved in putting that in, being able to keep that data safe, but also useful. It's gonna be a big challenge and I can only see it getting larger. >> Oh right, absolutely. And it's important for us not to lose sight that the end person we're protecting is the consumer. The end person we're protecting is the individual who that's their data, like they own that, and so it's our job and our duty to do the best we can for our customers to protect that. And ultimately, that's the value. >> Last question for you, some of the things that have come out already in the last day and a half or so, from AWS on AI, what are you seeing in terms of customers' comprehension of machine learning and what the potential is for them to truly become data driven, leveraging advanced technologies like that? >> So we're definitely in the hype cycle with AI, right? I mean and I think we all kinda know that. I think when you talk about machine learning and basing and reasoning and-- it's all part of the cape on having the data in place to do the analysis on. And so just like we saw with the data, it's like, "Oh I want big data, but then now what do I do with it?" Now, we have AI machine learning for the people that do have large data sets, they can start to do some interesting analysis, they can start to do some interesting things. But you have to have the data first, before you start to apply the actual algorithms to it. 'Cause the algorithm, you know, just give it two data points, it's not gonna be very smart. Give it two trillion and it's gonna be able to do some really interesting things. >> So what can people see and learn and touch and feel at the BMC booth here? >> So just this week, we launched a new product called policy service, which is policy and compliance for public cloud and for DevOps pipelines, so we'd love to show anybody who wants to come by a demo of that, we're very excited about it. Also it ties back to our core automation and so if you have to do something also in the data center, we can bring those two worlds together for you. >> Excellent. Well Daniel Nelson, thank you so much for joining us. You're now in the CUBE alumni. >> Alright, that's exciting, I appreciate it. >> And I'm Lisa Martin, for my co-host Justin Warren, we are live from day one of our three day coverage at AWS re:Invent 2017, stick around, we'll be right back. (techno music)