>> Voiceover: Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's The Cube, covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Inforum. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Terry Wise. He is the Vice President of Alliances for AWS. Thanks so much for coming on the program again. >> It's great to be here, yeah, thanks. >> So we are now a few years into this relationship with Infor. Where are we? Put things in perspective for us. >> Oh it's a great question. I think in some respects, this is arguably the most mature and strategic relationship we have. We've been working with Infor for, I've been at Amazon now nine years, and a better part of my nine years, we've been working with Infor, you know. In the early days it was awesome, before Infor bought the company. And, they've always done a great job of pushing us to be more enterprise-centric, more innovative in our platform and services. So it's very mature from that perspective. But I'd say, also at the same time, we're just entering a whole new days. We'd like to call it Day One at Amazon. If you look at some of the things that Charles and the team announced today with Coleman, and some of the new functionality and the growth of the cloud, I mean, we really are still at the early stages of this relationship, which is exciting. >> You know what's interesting to me Terry is, you know, Andy always talks about the fly wheel. He was, sort of, the first to use that terminology. And I was sitting in the endless meeting yesterday, and Infor was going through its architecture. And I just saw a lot of fly wheel in there. I mean, there is DynamoDB in there. I certainly saw S3. I think there was Kinesis, in terms of time series stuff. I think I saw Redshift in there. And so I wonder if you could talk about how this company, specifically, but generally, how people are leveraging net fly wheel of innovation to drive value for their customers. >> Yeah. And again, I think this goes back to the relationship we've had with Infor for so many years. Cloud is not just about cheap computing storage. It's really about platform and innovation that comes from that platform. And, you know, and partners and customers, like Infor, that have been with us a while, and they've got the skillsets internally, they've got great vision for how they want to take their customers with application functionality. They're really ripe to be able to take advantage of all the innovative platform services we build. Kinesis, Lambda for serverless computing. We're talking about some neat things around Edge. You heard Charles and Duncan today talk about Lex and some of the AI capabilities we have that are underpinning Coleman and some other new offerings. So they really are, kind of, the poster child for adopting our new services and driving innovation on top of our platform for their customer base. >> So where, if you can, look into your crystal ball a little bit. Where will we be a year from now, three years from now, with these technologies? >> So if I look out a year, I think, you know, rapid global expansion. You know, we're long past in many respects, sort of the, the early questions around cloud. Is it secure? Is it cost-effective? Is it robust and reliable? We're really past that if I look out across the globe. And now it's a question of how can we help enterprises adapt faster. And that's really, probably, the single biggest question I get from enterprise customers is, "This is great. Help me move quickly." And I think one of the neat things about the Infor relationship is, because they've packaged all of this innovation, into a set of business applications, they're actually helping customers move to the cloud quite a bit faster, and get that great value prop of cost efficiency, security, innovation, et cetera. Looking out three years, I think Duncan and the team did a very nice job today talking about the interaction ad user experience of how you're going to engage with business software moving forward. It's going to be very voice-driven. It's going to be predictive in nature so it's actually going to tell you what you need to think about versus going to a terminal or even a mobile device. So much left to do in that space. But I really do think, you know, three years from now, machine-learning won't be a buzz word, nor will artificial intelligence. It'll just be a bigger part of our daily lives. >> We were talking to Chip Coyle a little bit about trying to debunk some of the myths in cloud, specifically Amazon cloud. And I mentioned Oracle, saying that core enterprise apps really aren't going to the cloud, that's why you need Oracle. And they've got a strategy to do that, you've seen it. But then you going to see Infor, 55% of their business is in your cloud. They look like core enterprise apps. So is it, my question is, help us debunk that myth. But is it narrowly confined to companies like Infor, or are there examples of others? I mean, certainly there are companies, you guys have unbelievable logo chart. But when you peel back the onion, many of those apps are cloud-native or emerging apps. Those core of enterprise apps, we're seeing it from Infor. I wonder if you can add some color to that and are there other examples? >> Absolutely, I mean, I think there's others in the market that may be uncomfortable with the change that's happening with cloud, and therefore might be incented to try to slow that down. But I will say, the vast majority of all software companies we're engaging with are moving mission-critical enterprise apps to AWS. Some built natively in SaaS, like Infor is done. Others that are enabling, certifying their applications, SAP is another good example. You can kind of go across the stack, Adobe, AutoDesk, Siemens PLM, for product lifecycle management. And if you think about, you know, that's putting companies' core IP, the product development into the cloud to take advantage of all this agility, scale, cost-savings, et cetera. So it's been happening for a long time. Di-so is another great one, very innovative but somewhat conservative french company. They were very early on in the journey with us. And again, that's, you know, IP used to design airplanes, the things we fly around it. So it's been happening for a long time. It's accelerating. And I would say the other trend we're seeing is the companies out there that are resisting, we're hearing more and more from customers that, "Hey, that company is not helping move me to the future. Can you help me find an alternative?" So there's this big movement for enterprises to actually migrate out of legacy platforms, whether that's hardware or software, and move in to the cloud-native platforms, which are the future. >> So we see, we've been talking on The Cube for years about this whole digital transformation and how it's going to allow companies to play in different industries. Amazon, obviously. Retailer just purchased Whole Foods, getting into grocery. It's a content company. So Walmart said, "Alright, we're not going to put our stuff "in the Amazon cloud." Netflix obviously does. How do you deal with that? The obvious competitive fears of some of the customers that you have for AWS? How do you message that? And what do you tell the world? >> Sure, the first thing is, I mean, AWS, while it is part of Amazon.com, we are a separate operating group. And we've been that way since the beginning. So yeah, Amazon is a customer, just like Netflix or Nordstrom, or any of the other, you know, millions that we serve. Now a very hard customer and a very good customer. And they help drive our innovation road map. But we don't treat them any differently than we do, Netflix or the others. And part of that has to do with how we protect and secure the information that those companies put on AWS. So there's some companies out there, the one you just mentioned, that's still may be a bit uncomfortable, for whatever reasons, competitive reasons, putting information or having third parties put information related to their business on AWS. Yeah, I think that's unfortunate, I think. And it also talks about two different philosophies. We take very much a customer-centric view of the business. What's best for the customer. And if one of our partners has a better capability, we've got plenty of partners that have similar products to what we offer, but if it's the better product for the customer, we're more than happy to support that. Whereas others out there take a very competitive focus to the market. Where it's, they're watching what their competitors are doing. They're trying to head them off at the pass, or copy what their competitors are doing. In the long term, I don't think that's a fantastic strategy 'coz you're never really innovating on behalf of the customer. You're never giving them the best solution. You're actually preventing them from getting something that could be beneficial to that customer. And we just don't believe that's a long-term great business strategy for our customers and for ourselves. >> We recently saw the announcement of Amazon purchasing Whole Foods. Can you talk a little bit about this for our viewers. And talk about where, how you see the future of grocery and retail, where it's going. >> Sure, so we've announced our intention to purchase Whole Foods. It has not happenned. There's still some work to do there. But I think, you know, anytime we look at, you know, how we're going to expand, either organically or through acquisition, it's about, what are the synergies between our existing business, what the customers are looking for, and how can we create a better experience for that customer. How can we do it at scale? How can we innovate around that model? And then, you know, how can we make that a great long-term experience for the customer that ultimately drives the success and growth of our business, but also the partners that we bring in, whether again through acquisition or through third party partnership. This is kind of a, you look at this as a natural move as we look at what our customers are telling us, "Hey make it easier for us to purchase groceries and "household items." You know, and do it in a hybrid way, both, you know, combination of online and more from the physical presence. >> Terry I wonder if you could talk about, we mentioned the Edge before. And as you build out your partner strategy and the partner ecosystem. Talk more about the Edge, where it fits. Analytics at the Edge, and Amazon being the cloud, so what's your point of view on what happens at the Edge, what moves back to the cloud, the expense of moving things back to the cloud. What's your thought on that whole thing? >> Well, there's so many use cases for Edge computing. I mean, take the mining industry. You're putting huge trucks in the middle of nowhere that may have limited or very expensive connectivity. And they're capturing all kinds of, you know, information, during the natural operation of that machine. And it just makes sense that you want some level of data processing, storage, and analytics to happen on that machine. It could be a cruise ship, it could be a naval vessel, it could be an airplane. There's, you know, lots and lots of different applications there. But by doing some of that processing at the Edge, you're actually limiting the amount of data you have to send back to the central cloud. But of course, if you want to take full advantage of the analytics, you actually have to match that data with all the historical data and other real-time data that's resided in the cloud to get the result you're looking for. So it really becomes, you know, kind of this hybrid computing model. So some of it is efficiency around how much data you're sending back and forth. Some of it is just efficiency around processing, the point of data capture. Some due to connectivity reasons. Some due to other. It really is kind of this interesting new extension of hybrid cloud, if you will. We're very excited about it. >> You've made some moves in that area. I mean, Snowball was, I think, you know, one of the first. And there are other sort of Edge, what I would consider Edge-like devices or solutions. How dogmatic are you about everything living in the cloud? I mean, those are steps. Should we expect, you know, increasingly extending the reach of the cloud or is it just really going to all, your world come back to the AWS clouds? >> Yeah, yeah. It'll certainly be an extension of the cloud. That's already been happening. I mean, if you look at hybrid cloud. I think we've always been a supporter of hybrid cloud if you look at our roadmap going back many, many years with virtual private cloud, with Direct Connect, with some of the newer capabilities like Snowball, and, of course, Greengrass, our Edge capabilities. We're really extending the reach out to be much more of a hybrid store. 'Coz we recognize that not all the data today exist in the cloud or AWS in the future, you know. We think most applications will run in the cloud because the value proposition is so strong across so many different dimensions. But today, there's plenty of other places we have to connect to, again to capture the data. Now, I do think the vast majority of the data that we're capturing will be either pre-processed or sent natively into AWS to create a massive data leg so that you can start to drive these innovative machine-learning and artificial intelligence applications. The predictive analytics, the algorithms. They just don't work if you don't, they don't work effectively if you don't have massive amounts of data and you continuously refresh that data so that the algorithms can continue to learn. >> I want to double click on something you said about the value. To capture most of the value, your belief is that it's going to be in the cloud, one cloud. And others obviously have different view for a variety of different reasons. I buy the cost argument. You didn't make that argument, I'm making it. The marginal cost of having a single cloud. You know, standard, how much an A it is, superior. I'll grant that. What else is there though? Is it speed? Is it innovation? Is it standardization across the base? >> The single biggest value that I hear from customers today, but they love it, they love the cheap hosting fees, the efficiency part of it, but it really is the speed and agility. It's certainly the security model as well. I would say that most, almost every organization now that we talk to, once we've had the chance to educate them, if they haven't already done so themselves, has determined that the cloud-computing security model is much more effective than they could deliver on their own. We can just invest more. We can experiment more. We can have have multiple certifications across different industries, which every customer gets to take advantage of. But I would just come back, it's the ability to move quickly whether it's moving into new market. I was just in Europe, we were talking about it. It's so volatile there right now on so many dimensions with Brexit and some of the nationalistic politics things that are happening. Potentially the opening up more of the Middle East with the sovereign wealth funds comin' into play. There's just so much opportunity that enterprises need to be able to move quickly. And if they have to go stand up a data center somewhere else, or they can't deploy the software quickly, they're at a competitive disadvantage. So the single biggest driver from what I hear from customers and what I'm seeing is agility. >> Yeah, okay, so just to clarify, I said, cost not price. But we can debate that some other time. (Terry laughs) You just came back from Europe. You mentioned Brexit. What about things like GDPR which has taken effect but the penalties go in effect May of 18. Obviously that puts a lot of pressure on the cloud provider, as well as your customers. What are you hearing in Europe? And generally and specifically GDPR. >> Yeah, I mean, I would say the regulatory environment everywhere, but specifically in Europe, continues to evolve and it's fairly fluid. We've spent many years working with the various different regulatory bodies. The Article 29 Working Party. That's actually been crafting a lot of this legislation. So we're heavily influencing, because, if you step back, people said you couldn't do cloud, but they didn't explicitly say you could. (Rebecca and Dave laugh) So, customers are meant to, "How do I interpret this?" And some, you know, like, if I look at Nel, and I look at Societe Generale, and I look at BMW, and some of, you know, our forward-leaning European customers, Siemens is another great one, who was one of the original companies to put PII in the cloud. Here's a big German company putting PII in AWS a number of years ago. So we figured out how to get, not get around, but interpret the regulations, and then also ensure that we've got the features and capabilities to make sure that they comply with those regulations. So the full audit trail, the ability to encrypt data, the ability to make sure that data storage and localization is complying with, whether it's a country-level regulation or an industry-level regulation. So we continue to spend a lot of time and effort, monitoring and influencing that. And then building the services to make sure our customers fully comply. >> Well, you've always done well with permutations and complexity and automating that, so it's going to be fun to watch. >> Rebecca: It will indeed. >> Great. >> Terry thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate it. It's been a lot of fun talking to you. >> Yeah, great, thanks, appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from Inforum just after this. (upbeat music)