(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's AWS RE:Invent 2022 Coverage. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Got a great lineup here, Itamar Ankorion SVP Technology Alliance at Qlik and Peter McDonald, vice President, cloud partnerships and business development Snowflake. We're going to talk about bringing SAP data to life, for joint Snowflake, Qlik and AWS Solution. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, great meeting you John. >> Just to get started, introduce yourselves to the audience, then going to jump into what you guys are doing together, unique relationship here, really compelling solution in cloud. Big story about applications and scale this year. Let's introduce yourselves. Peter, we'll start with you. >> Great. I'm Peter MacDonald. I am vice president of Cloud Partners and business development here at Snowflake. On the Cloud Partner side, that means I manage AWS relationship along with Microsoft and Google Cloud. What we do together in terms of complimentary products, GTM, co-selling, things like that. Importantly, working with other third parties like Qlik for joint solutions. On business development, it's negotiating custom commercial partnerships, large companies like Salesforce and Dell, smaller companies at most for our venture portfolio. >> Thanks Peter and hi John. It's great to be back here. So I'm Itamar Ankorion and I'm the senior vice president responsible for technology alliances here at Qlik. With that, own strategic alliances, including our key partners in the cloud, including Snowflake and AWS. I've been in the data and analytics enterprise software market for 20 plus years, and my main focus is product management, marketing, alliances, and business development. I joined Qlik about three and a half years ago through the acquisition of Attunity, which is now the foundation for Qlik data integration. So again, we focus in my team on creating joint solution alignment with our key partners to provide more value to our customers. >> Great to have both you guys, senior executives in the industry on theCUBE here, talking about data, obviously bringing SAP data to life is the theme of this segment, but this reinvent, it's all about the data, big data end-to-end story, a lot about data being intrinsic as the CEO says on stage around in the organizations in all aspects. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing as from a company standpoint. Snowflake and Qlik and the solutions, why here at AWS? Peter, we'll start with you at Snowflake, what you guys do as a company, your mission, your focus. >> That was great, John. Yeah, so here at Snowflake, we focus on the data platform and until recently, data platforms required expensive on-prem hardware appliances. And despite all that expense, customers had capacity constraints, inexpensive maintenance, and had limited functionality that all impeded these organizations from reaching their goals. Snowflake is a cloud native SaaS platform, and we've become so successful because we've addressed these pain points and have other new special features. For example, securely sharing data across both the organization and the value chain without copying the data, support for new data types such as JSON and structured data, and also advance in database data governance. Snowflake integrates with complimentary AWS services and other partner products. So we can enable holistic solutions that include, for example, here, both Qlik and AWS SageMaker, and comprehend and bring those to joint customers. Our customers want to convert data into insights along with advanced analytics platforms in AI. That is how they make holistic data-driven solutions that will give them competitive advantage. With Snowflake, our approach is to focus on customer solutions that leverage data from existing systems such as SAP, wherever they are in the cloud or on-premise. And to do this, we leverage partners like Qlik native US to help customers transform their businesses. We provide customers with a premier data analytics platform as a result. Itamar, why don't you talk about Qlik a little bit and then we can dive into the specific SAP solution here and some trends >> Sounds great, Peter. So Qlik provides modern data integration and analytics software used by over 38,000 customers worldwide. Our focus is to help our customers turn data into value and help them close the gap between data all the way through insight and action. We offer click data integration and click data analytics. Click data integration helps to automate the data pipelines to deliver data to where they want to use them in real-time and make the data ready for analytics and then Qlik data analytics is a robust platform for analytics and business intelligence has been a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for over 11 years now in the market. And both of these come together into what we call Qlik Cloud, which is our SaaS based platform. So providing a more seamless way to consume all these services and accelerate time to value with customer solutions. In terms of partnerships, both Snowflake and AWS are very strategic to us here at Qlik, so we have very comprehensive investment to ensure strong joint value proposition to we can bring to our mutual customers, everything from aligning our roadmaps through optimizing and validating integrations, collaborating on best practices, packaging joint solutions like the one we'll talk about today. And with that investment, we are an elite level, top level partner with Snowflake. We fly that our technology is Snowflake-ready across the entire product set and we have hundreds of joint customers together and with AWS we've also partnered for a long time. We're here to reinvent. We've been here with the first reinvent since the inaugural one, so it kind of gives you an idea for how long we've been working with AWS. We provide very comprehensive integration with AWS data analytics services, and we have several competencies ranging from data analytics to migration and modernization. So that's our focus and again, we're excited about working with Snowflake and AWS to bring solutions together to market. >> Well, I'm looking forward to unpacking the solutions specifically, and congratulations on the continued success of both your companies. We've been following them obviously for a very long time and seeing the platform evolve beyond just SaaS and a lot more going on in cloud these days, kind of next generation emerging. You know, we're seeing a lot of macro trends that are going to be powering some of the things we're going to get into real quickly. But before we get into the solution, what are some of those power dynamics in the industry that you're seeing in trends specifically that are impacting your customers that are taking us down this road of getting more out of the data and specifically the SAP, but in general trends and dynamics. What are you hearing from your customers? Why do they care? Why are they going down this road? Peter, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I'll go ahead and start. Thanks. Yeah, I'd say we continue to see customers being, being very eager to transform their businesses and they know they need to leverage technology and data to do so. They're also increasingly depending upon the cloud to bring that agility, that elasticity, new functionality necessary to react in real-time to every evolving customer needs. You look at what's happened over the last three years, and boy, the macro environment customers, it's all changing so fast. With our partnerships with AWS and Qlik, we've been able to bring to market innovative solutions like the one we're announcing today that spans all three companies. It provides a holistic solution and an integrated solution for our customer. >> Itamar let's get into it, you've been with theCUBE, you've seen the journey, you have your own journey, many, many years, you've seen the waves. What's going on now? I mean, what's the big wave? What's the dynamic powering this trend? >> Yeah, in a nutshell I'll call it, it's all about time. You know, it's time to value and it's about real-time data. I'll kind of talk about that a bit. So, I mean, you hear a lot about the data being the new oil, but it's definitely, we see more and more customers seeing data as their critical enabler for innovation and digital transformation. They look for ways to monetize data. They look as the data as the way in which they can innovate and bring different value to the customers. So we see customers want to use more data so to get more value from data. We definitely see them wanting to do it faster, right, than before. And we definitely see them looking for agility and automation as ways to accelerate time to value, and also reduce overall costs. I did mention real-time data, so we definitely see more and more customers, they want to be able to act and make decisions based on fresh data. So yesterday's data is just not good enough. >> John: Yeah. >> It's got to be down to the hour, down to the minutes and sometimes even lower than that. And then I think we're also seeing customers look to their core business systems where they have a lot of value, like the SAP, like mainframe and thinking, okay, our core data is there, how can we get more value from this data? So that's key things we see all the time with customers. >> Yeah, we did a big editorial segment this year on, we called data as code. Data as code is kind of a riff on infrastructure as code and you start to see data becoming proliferating into all aspects, fresh data. It's not just where you store it, it's how you share it, it's how you turn it into an application intrinsically involved in all aspects. This is the big theme this year and that's driving all the conversations here at RE:Invent. And I'm guaranteeing you, it's going to happen for another five and 10 years. It's not stopping. So I got to get into the solution, you guys mentioned SAP and you've announced the solution by Qlik, Snowflake and AWS for your customers using SAP. Can you share more about this solution? What's unique about it? Why is it important and why now? Peter, Itamar, we'll start with you first. >> Let me jump in, this is really, I'll jump because I'm excited. We're very excited about this solution and it's also a solution by the way and again, we've seen proven customer success with it. So to your point, it's ready to scale, it's starting, I think we're going to see a lot of companies doing this over the next few years. But before we jump to the solution, let me maybe take a few minutes just to clarify the need, why we're seeing, why we're seeing customers jump to do this. So customers that use SAP, they use it to manage the core of their business. So think order processing, management, finance, inventory, supply chain, and so much more. So if you're running SAP in your company, that data creates a great opportunity for you to drive innovation and modernization. So what we see customers want to do, they want to do more with their data and more means they want to take SAP with non-SAP data and use it together to drive new insights. They want to use real-time data to drive real-time analytics, which they couldn't do to date. They want to bring together descriptive with predictive analytics. So adding machine learning in AI to drive more value from the data. And naturally they want to do it faster. So find ways to iterate faster on their solutions, have freedom with the data and agility. And I think this is really where cloud data platforms like Snowflake and AWS, you know, bring that value to be able to drive that. Now to do that you need to unlock the SAP data, which is a lot of also where Qlik comes in because typical challenges these customers run into is the complexity, inherent in SAP data. Tens of thousands of tables, proprietary formats, complex data models, licensing restrictions, and more than, you have performance issues, they usually run into how do we handle the throughput, the volumes while maintaining lower latency and impact. Where do we find knowledge to really understand how to get all this done? So these are the things we've looked at when we came together to create a solution and make it unique. So when you think about its uniqueness, because we put together a lot, and I'll go through three, four key things that come together to make this unique. First is about data delivery. How do you have the SAP data delivery? So how do you get it from ECC, from HANA from S/4HANA, how do you deliver the data and the metadata and how that integration well into Snowflake. And what we've done is we've focused a lot on optimizing that process and the continuous ingestion, so the real-time ingestion of the data in a way that works really well with the Snowflake system, data cloud. Second thing is we looked at SAP data transformation, so once the data arrives at Snowflake, how do we turn it into being analytics ready? So that's where data transformation and data worth automation come in. And these are all elements of this solution. So creating derivative datasets, creating data marts, and all of that is done by again, creating an optimized integration that pushes down SQL based transformations, so they can be processed inside Snowflake, leveraging its powerful engine. And then the third element is bringing together data visualization analytics that can also take all the data now that in organizing inside Snowflake, bring other data in, bring machine learning from SageMaker, and then you go to create a seamless integration to bring analytic applications to life. So these are all things we put together in the solution. And maybe the last point is we actually took the next step with this and we created something we refer to as solution accelerators, which we're really, really keen about. Think about this as prepackaged templates for common business analytic needs like order to cash, finance, inventory. And we can either dig into that a little more later, but this gets the next level of value to the customers all built into this joint solution. >> Yeah, I want to get to the accelerators, but real quick, Peter, your reaction to the solution, what's unique about it? And obviously Snowflake, we've been seeing the progression data applications, more developers developing on top of Snowflake, data as code kind of implies developer ecosystem. This is kind of interesting. I mean, you got partnering with Qlik and AWS, it's kind of a developer-like thinking real solution. What's unique about this SAP solution that's, that's different than what customers can get anywhere else or not? >> Yeah, well listen, I think first of all, you have to start with the idea of the solution. This are three companies coming together to build a holistic solution that is all about, you know, creating a great opportunity to turn SAP data into value this is Itamar was talking about, that's really what we're talking about here and there's a lot of technology underneath it. I'll talk more about the Snowflake technology, what's involved here, and then cover some of the AWS pieces as well. But you know, we're focusing on getting that value out and accelerating time to value for our joint customers. As Itamar was saying, you know, there's a lot of complexity with the SAP data and a lot of value there. How can we manage that in a prepackaged way, bringing together best of breed solutions with proven capabilities and bringing this to market quickly for our joint customers. You know, Snowflake and AWS have been strong partners for a number of years now, and that's not only on how Snowflake runs on top of AWS, but also how we integrate with their complementary analytics and then all products. And so, you know, we want to be able to leverage those in addition to what Qlik is bringing in terms of the data transformations, bringing data out of SAP in the visualization as well. All very critical. And then we want to bring in the predictive analytics, AWS brings and what Sage brings. We'll talk about that a little bit later on. Some of the technologies that we're leveraging are some of our latest cutting edge technologies that really make things easier for both our partners and our customers. For example, Qlik leverages Snowflakes recently released Snowpark for Python functionality to push down those data transformations from clicking the Snowflake that Itamar's mentioning. And while we also leverage Snowpark for integrations with Amazon SageMaker, but there's a lot of great new technology that just makes this easy and compelling for customers. >> I think that's the big word, easy button here for what may look like a complex kind of integration, kind of turnkey, really, really compelling example of the modern era we're living in, as we always say in theCUBE. You mentioned accelerators, SAP accelerators. Can you give an example of how that works with the technology from the third party providers to deliver this business value Itamar, 'cause that was an interesting comment. What's the example? Give an example of this acceleration. >> Yes, certainly. I think this is something that really makes this truly, truly unique in the industry and again, a great opportunity for customers. So we kind talked earlier about there's a lot of things that need to be done with SP data to turn it to value. And these accelerator, as the name suggests, are designed to do just that, to kind of jumpstart the process and reduce the time and the risk involved in such project. So again, these are pre-packaged templates. We basically took a lot of knowledge, and a lot of configurations, best practices about to get things done and we put 'em together. So think about all the steps, it includes things like data extraction, so already knowing which tables, all the relevant tables that you need to get data from in the contexts of the solution you're looking for, say like order to cash, we'll get back to that one. How do you continuously deliver that data into Snowflake in an in efficient manner, handling things like data type mappings, metadata naming conventions and transformations. The data models you build all the way to data mart definitions and all the transformations that the data needs to go through moving through steps until it's fully analytics ready. And then on top of that, even adding a library of comprehensive analytic dashboards and integrations through machine learning and AI and put all of that in a way that's in pre-integrated and tested to work with Snowflake and AWS. So this is where again, you get this entire recipe that's ready. So take for example, I think I mentioned order to cash. So again, all these things I just talked about, I mean, for those who are not familiar, I mean order to cash is a critical business process for every organization. So especially if you're in retail, manufacturing, enterprise, it's a big... This is where, you know, starting with booking a sales order, following by fulfilling the order, billing the customer, then managing the accounts receivable when the customer actually pays, right? So this all process, you got sales order fulfillment and the billing impacts customer satisfaction, you got receivable payments, you know, the impact's working capital, cash liquidity. So again, as a result this order to cash process is a lifeblood for many businesses and it's critical to optimize and understand. So the solution accelerator we created specifically for order to cash takes care of understanding all these aspects and the data that needs to come with it. So everything we outline before to make the data available in Snowflake in a way that's really useful for downstream analytics, along with dashboards that are already common for that, for that use case. So again, this enables customers to gain real-time visibility into their sales orders, fulfillment, accounts receivable performance. That's what the Excel's are all about. And very similarly, we have another one for example, for finance analytics, right? So this will optimize financial data reporting, helps customers get insights into P&L, financial risk of stability or inventory analytics that helps with, you know, improve planning and inventory management, utilization, increased efficiencies, you know, so in supply chain. So again, these accelerators really help customers get a jumpstart and move faster with their solutions. >> Peter, this is the easy button we just talked about, getting things going, you know, get the ball rolling, get some acceleration. Big part of this are the three companies coming together doing this. >> Yeah, and to build on what Itamar just said that the SAP data obviously has tremendous value. Those sales orders, distribution data, financial data, bringing that into Snowflake makes it easily accessible, but also it enables it to be combined with other data too, is one of the things that Snowflake does so well. So you can get a full view of the end-to-end process and the business overall. You know, for example, I'll just take one, you know, one example that, that may not come to mind right away, but you know, looking at the impact of weather conditions on supply chain logistics is relevant and material and have interest to our customers. How do you bring those different data sets together in an easy way, bringing the data out of SAP, bringing maybe other data out of other systems through Qlik or through Snowflake, directly bringing data in from our data marketplace and bring that all together to make it work. You know, fundamentally organizational silos and the data fragmentation exist otherwise make it really difficult to drive modern analytics projects. And that in turn limits the value that our customers are getting from SAP data and these other data sets. We want to enable that and unleash. >> Yeah, time for value. This is great stuff. Itamar final question, you know, what are customers using this? What do you have? I'm sure you have customers examples already using the solution. Can you share kind of what these examples look like in the use cases and the value? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Happy to. We have customers across different, different sectors. You see manufacturing, retail, energy, oil and gas, CPG. So again, customers in those segments, typically sectors typically have SAP. So we have customers in all of them. A great example is like Siemens Energy. Siemens Energy is a global provider of gas par services. You know, over what, 28 billion, 30 billion in revenue. 90,000 employees. They operate globally in over 90 countries. So they've used SAP HANA as a core system, so it's running on premises, multiple locations around the world. And what they were looking for is a way to bring all these data together so they can innovate with it. And the thing is, Peter mentioned earlier, not just the SAP data, but also bring other data from other systems to bring it together for more value. That includes finance data, these logistics data, these customer CRM data. So they bring data from over 20 different SAP systems. Okay, with Qlik data integration, feeding that into Snowflake in under 20 minutes, 24/7, 365, you know, days a year. Okay, they get data from over 20,000 tables, you know, over million, hundreds of millions of records daily going in. So it is a great example of the type of scale, scalability, agility and speed that they can get to drive these kind of innovation. So that's a great example with Siemens. You know, another one comes to mind is a global manufacturer. Very similar scenario, but you know, they're using it for real-time executive reporting. So it's more like feasibility to the production data as well as for financial analytics. So think, think, think about everything from audit to texts to innovate financial intelligence because all the data's coming from SAP. >> It's a great time to be in the data business again. It keeps getting better and better. There's more data coming. It's not stopping, you know, it's growing so fast, it keeps coming. Every year, it's the same story, Peter. It's like, doesn't stop coming. As we wrap up here, let's just get customers some information on how to get started. I mean, obviously you're starting to see the accelerators, it's a great program there. What a great partnership between the two companies and AWS. How can customers get started to learn about the solution and take advantage of it, getting more out of their SAP data, Peter? >> Yeah, I think the first place to go to is talk to Snowflake, talk to AWS, talk to our account executives that are assigned to your account. Reach out to them and they will be able to educate you on the solution. We have packages up very nicely and can be deployed very, very quickly. >> Well gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on. Appreciate the conversation. Great overview of the partnership between, you know, Snowflake and Qlik and AWS on a joint solution. You know, getting more out of the SAP data. It's really kind of a key, key solution, bringing SAP data to life. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you John. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage here at RE:Invent 2022. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's AWS RE:Invent 2022 Coverage. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Got a great lineup here, Itamar Ankorion SVP Technology Alliance at Qlik and Peter McDonald, vice President, cloud partnerships and business development Snowflake. We're going to talk about bringing SAP data to life, for joint Snowflake, Qlik and AWS Solution. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, great meeting you John. >> Just to get started, introduce yourselves to the audience, then going to jump into what you guys are doing together, unique relationship here, really compelling solution in cloud. Big story about applications and scale this year. Let's introduce yourselves. Peter, we'll start with you. >> Great. I'm Peter MacDonald. I am vice president of Cloud Partners and business development here at Snowflake. On the Cloud Partner side, that means I manage AWS relationship along with Microsoft and Google Cloud. What we do together in terms of complimentary products, GTM, co-selling, things like that. Importantly, working with other third parties like Qlik for joint solutions. On business development, it's negotiating custom commercial partnerships, large companies like Salesforce and Dell, smaller companies at most for our venture portfolio. >> Thanks Peter and hi John. It's great to be back here. So I'm Itamar Ankorion and I'm the senior vice president responsible for technology alliances here at Qlik. With that, own strategic alliances, including our key partners in the cloud, including Snowflake and AWS. I've been in the data and analytics enterprise software market for 20 plus years, and my main focus is product management, marketing, alliances, and business development. I joined Qlik about three and a half years ago through the acquisition of Attunity, which is now the foundation for Qlik data integration. So again, we focus in my team on creating joint solution alignment with our key partners to provide more value to our customers. >> Great to have both you guys, senior executives in the industry on theCUBE here, talking about data, obviously bringing SAP data to life is the theme of this segment, but this reinvent, it's all about the data, big data end-to-end story, a lot about data being intrinsic as the CEO says on stage around in the organizations in all aspects. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing as from a company standpoint. Snowflake and Qlik and the solutions, why here at AWS? Peter, we'll start with you at Snowflake, what you guys do as a company, your mission, your focus. >> That was great, John. Yeah, so here at Snowflake, we focus on the data platform and until recently, data platforms required expensive on-prem hardware appliances. And despite all that expense, customers had capacity constraints, inexpensive maintenance, and had limited functionality that all impeded these organizations from reaching their goals. Snowflake is a cloud native SaaS platform, and we've become so successful because we've addressed these pain points and have other new special features. For example, securely sharing data across both the organization and the value chain without copying the data, support for new data types such as JSON and structured data, and also advance in database data governance. Snowflake integrates with complimentary AWS services and other partner products. So we can enable holistic solutions that include, for example, here, both Qlik and AWS SageMaker, and comprehend and bring those to joint customers. Our customers want to convert data into insights along with advanced analytics platforms in AI. That is how they make holistic data-driven solutions that will give them competitive advantage. With Snowflake, our approach is to focus on customer solutions that leverage data from existing systems such as SAP, wherever they are in the cloud or on-premise. And to do this, we leverage partners like Qlik native US to help customers transform their businesses. We provide customers with a premier data analytics platform as a result. Itamar, why don't you talk about Qlik a little bit and then we can dive into the specific SAP solution here and some trends >> Sounds great, Peter. So Qlik provides modern data integration and analytics software used by over 38,000 customers worldwide. Our focus is to help our customers turn data into value and help them close the gap between data all the way through insight and action. We offer click data integration and click data analytics. Click data integration helps to automate the data pipelines to deliver data to where they want to use them in real-time and make the data ready for analytics and then Qlik data analytics is a robust platform for analytics and business intelligence has been a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for over 11 years now in the market. And both of these come together into what we call Qlik Cloud, which is our SaaS based platform. So providing a more seamless way to consume all these services and accelerate time to value with customer solutions. In terms of partnerships, both Snowflake and AWS are very strategic to us here at Qlik, so we have very comprehensive investment to ensure strong joint value proposition to we can bring to our mutual customers, everything from aligning our roadmaps through optimizing and validating integrations, collaborating on best practices, packaging joint solutions like the one we'll talk about today. And with that investment, we are an elite level, top level partner with Snowflake. We fly that our technology is Snowflake-ready across the entire product set and we have hundreds of joint customers together and with AWS we've also partnered for a long time. We're here to reinvent. We've been here with the first reinvent since the inaugural one, so it kind of gives you an idea for how long we've been working with AWS. We provide very comprehensive integration with AWS data analytics services, and we have several competencies ranging from data analytics to migration and modernization. So that's our focus and again, we're excited about working with Snowflake and AWS to bring solutions together to market. >> Well, I'm looking forward to unpacking the solutions specifically, and congratulations on the continued success of both your companies. We've been following them obviously for a very long time and seeing the platform evolve beyond just SaaS and a lot more going on in cloud these days, kind of next generation emerging. You know, we're seeing a lot of macro trends that are going to be powering some of the things we're going to get into real quickly. But before we get into the solution, what are some of those power dynamics in the industry that you're seeing in trends specifically that are impacting your customers that are taking us down this road of getting more out of the data and specifically the SAP, but in general trends and dynamics. What are you hearing from your customers? Why do they care? Why are they going down this road? Peter, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I'll go ahead and start. Thanks. Yeah, I'd say we continue to see customers being, being very eager to transform their businesses and they know they need to leverage technology and data to do so. They're also increasingly depending upon the cloud to bring that agility, that elasticity, new functionality necessary to react in real-time to every evolving customer needs. You look at what's happened over the last three years, and boy, the macro environment customers, it's all changing so fast. With our partnerships with AWS and Qlik, we've been able to bring to market innovative solutions like the one we're announcing today that spans all three companies. It provides a holistic solution and an integrated solution for our customer. >> Itamar let's get into it, you've been with theCUBE, you've seen the journey, you have your own journey, many, many years, you've seen the waves. What's going on now? I mean, what's the big wave? What's the dynamic powering this trend? >> Yeah, in a nutshell I'll call it, it's all about time. You know, it's time to value and it's about real-time data. I'll kind of talk about that a bit. So, I mean, you hear a lot about the data being the new oil, but it's definitely, we see more and more customers seeing data as their critical enabler for innovation and digital transformation. They look for ways to monetize data. They look as the data as the way in which they can innovate and bring different value to the customers. So we see customers want to use more data so to get more value from data. We definitely see them wanting to do it faster, right, than before. And we definitely see them looking for agility and automation as ways to accelerate time to value, and also reduce overall costs. I did mention real-time data, so we definitely see more and more customers, they want to be able to act and make decisions based on fresh data. So yesterday's data is just not good enough. >> John: Yeah. >> It's got to be down to the hour, down to the minutes and sometimes even lower than that. And then I think we're also seeing customers look to their core business systems where they have a lot of value, like the SAP, like mainframe and thinking, okay, our core data is there, how can we get more value from this data? So that's key things we see all the time with customers. >> Yeah, we did a big editorial segment this year on, we called data as code. Data as code is kind of a riff on infrastructure as code and you start to see data becoming proliferating into all aspects, fresh data. It's not just where you store it, it's how you share it, it's how you turn it into an application intrinsically involved in all aspects. This is the big theme this year and that's driving all the conversations here at RE:Invent. And I'm guaranteeing you, it's going to happen for another five and 10 years. It's not stopping. So I got to get into the solution, you guys mentioned SAP and you've announced the solution by Qlik, Snowflake and AWS for your customers using SAP. Can you share more about this solution? What's unique about it? Why is it important and why now? Peter, Itamar, we'll start with you first. >> Let me jump in, this is really, I'll jump because I'm excited. We're very excited about this solution and it's also a solution by the way and again, we've seen proven customer success with it. So to your point, it's ready to scale, it's starting, I think we're going to see a lot of companies doing this over the next few years. But before we jump to the solution, let me maybe take a few minutes just to clarify the need, why we're seeing, why we're seeing customers jump to do this. So customers that use SAP, they use it to manage the core of their business. So think order processing, management, finance, inventory, supply chain, and so much more. So if you're running SAP in your company, that data creates a great opportunity for you to drive innovation and modernization. So what we see customers want to do, they want to do more with their data and more means they want to take SAP with non-SAP data and use it together to drive new insights. They want to use real-time data to drive real-time analytics, which they couldn't do to date. They want to bring together descriptive with predictive analytics. So adding machine learning in AI to drive more value from the data. And naturally they want to do it faster. So find ways to iterate faster on their solutions, have freedom with the data and agility. And I think this is really where cloud data platforms like Snowflake and AWS, you know, bring that value to be able to drive that. Now to do that you need to unlock the SAP data, which is a lot of also where Qlik comes in because typical challenges these customers run into is the complexity, inherent in SAP data. Tens of thousands of tables, proprietary formats, complex data models, licensing restrictions, and more than, you have performance issues, they usually run into how do we handle the throughput, the volumes while maintaining lower latency and impact. Where do we find knowledge to really understand how to get all this done? So these are the things we've looked at when we came together to create a solution and make it unique. So when you think about its uniqueness, because we put together a lot, and I'll go through three, four key things that come together to make this unique. First is about data delivery. How do you have the SAP data delivery? So how do you get it from ECC, from HANA from S/4HANA, how do you deliver the data and the metadata and how that integration well into Snowflake. And what we've done is we've focused a lot on optimizing that process and the continuous ingestion, so the real-time ingestion of the data in a way that works really well with the Snowflake system, data cloud. Second thing is we looked at SAP data transformation, so once the data arrives at Snowflake, how do we turn it into being analytics ready? So that's where data transformation and data worth automation come in. And these are all elements of this solution. So creating derivative datasets, creating data marts, and all of that is done by again, creating an optimized integration that pushes down SQL based transformations, so they can be processed inside Snowflake, leveraging its powerful engine. And then the third element is bringing together data visualization analytics that can also take all the data now that in organizing inside Snowflake, bring other data in, bring machine learning from SageMaker, and then you go to create a seamless integration to bring analytic applications to life. So these are all things we put together in the solution. And maybe the last point is we actually took the next step with this and we created something we refer to as solution accelerators, which we're really, really keen about. Think about this as prepackaged templates for common business analytic needs like order to cash, finance, inventory. And we can either dig into that a little more later, but this gets the next level of value to the customers all built into this joint solution. >> Yeah, I want to get to the accelerators, but real quick, Peter, your reaction to the solution, what's unique about it? And obviously Snowflake, we've been seeing the progression data applications, more developers developing on top of Snowflake, data as code kind of implies developer ecosystem. This is kind of interesting. I mean, you got partnering with Qlik and AWS, it's kind of a developer-like thinking real solution. What's unique about this SAP solution that's, that's different than what customers can get anywhere else or not? >> Yeah, well listen, I think first of all, you have to start with the idea of the solution. This are three companies coming together to build a holistic solution that is all about, you know, creating a great opportunity to turn SAP data into value this is Itamar was talking about, that's really what we're talking about here and there's a lot of technology underneath it. I'll talk more about the Snowflake technology, what's involved here, and then cover some of the AWS pieces as well. But you know, we're focusing on getting that value out and accelerating time to value for our joint customers. As Itamar was saying, you know, there's a lot of complexity with the SAP data and a lot of value there. How can we manage that in a prepackaged way, bringing together best of breed solutions with proven capabilities and bringing this to market quickly for our joint customers. You know, Snowflake and AWS have been strong partners for a number of years now, and that's not only on how Snowflake runs on top of AWS, but also how we integrate with their complementary analytics and then all products. And so, you know, we want to be able to leverage those in addition to what Qlik is bringing in terms of the data transformations, bringing data out of SAP in the visualization as well. All very critical. And then we want to bring in the predictive analytics, AWS brings and what Sage brings. We'll talk about that a little bit later on. Some of the technologies that we're leveraging are some of our latest cutting edge technologies that really make things easier for both our partners and our customers. For example, Qlik leverages Snowflakes recently released Snowpark for Python functionality to push down those data transformations from clicking the Snowflake that Itamar's mentioning. And while we also leverage Snowpark for integrations with Amazon SageMaker, but there's a lot of great new technology that just makes this easy and compelling for customers. >> I think that's the big word, easy button here for what may look like a complex kind of integration, kind of turnkey, really, really compelling example of the modern era we're living in, as we always say in theCUBE. You mentioned accelerators, SAP accelerators. Can you give an example of how that works with the technology from the third party providers to deliver this business value Itamar, 'cause that was an interesting comment. What's the example? Give an example of this acceleration. >> Yes, certainly. I think this is something that really makes this truly, truly unique in the industry and again, a great opportunity for customers. So we kind talked earlier about there's a lot of things that need to be done with SP data to turn it to value. And these accelerator, as the name suggests, are designed to do just that, to kind of jumpstart the process and reduce the time and the risk involved in such project. So again, these are pre-packaged templates. We basically took a lot of knowledge, and a lot of configurations, best practices about to get things done and we put 'em together. So think about all the steps, it includes things like data extraction, so already knowing which tables, all the relevant tables that you need to get data from in the contexts of the solution you're looking for, say like order to cash, we'll get back to that one. How do you continuously deliver that data into Snowflake in an in efficient manner, handling things like data type mappings, metadata naming conventions and transformations. The data models you build all the way to data mart definitions and all the transformations that the data needs to go through moving through steps until it's fully analytics ready. And then on top of that, even adding a library of comprehensive analytic dashboards and integrations through machine learning and AI and put all of that in a way that's in pre-integrated and tested to work with Snowflake and AWS. So this is where again, you get this entire recipe that's ready. So take for example, I think I mentioned order to cash. So again, all these things I just talked about, I mean, for those who are not familiar, I mean order to cash is a critical business process for every organization. So especially if you're in retail, manufacturing, enterprise, it's a big... This is where, you know, starting with booking a sales order, following by fulfilling the order, billing the customer, then managing the accounts receivable when the customer actually pays, right? So this all process, you got sales order fulfillment and the billing impacts customer satisfaction, you got receivable payments, you know, the impact's working capital, cash liquidity. So again, as a result this order to cash process is a lifeblood for many businesses and it's critical to optimize and understand. So the solution accelerator we created specifically for order to cash takes care of understanding all these aspects and the data that needs to come with it. So everything we outline before to make the data available in Snowflake in a way that's really useful for downstream analytics, along with dashboards that are already common for that, for that use case. So again, this enables customers to gain real-time visibility into their sales orders, fulfillment, accounts receivable performance. That's what the Excel's are all about. And very similarly, we have another one for example, for finance analytics, right? So this will optimize financial data reporting, helps customers get insights into P&L, financial risk of stability or inventory analytics that helps with, you know, improve planning and inventory management, utilization, increased efficiencies, you know, so in supply chain. So again, these accelerators really help customers get a jumpstart and move faster with their solutions. >> Peter, this is the easy button we just talked about, getting things going, you know, get the ball rolling, get some acceleration. Big part of this are the three companies coming together doing this. >> Yeah, and to build on what Itamar just said that the SAP data obviously has tremendous value. Those sales orders, distribution data, financial data, bringing that into Snowflake makes it easily accessible, but also it enables it to be combined with other data too, is one of the things that Snowflake does so well. So you can get a full view of the end-to-end process and the business overall. You know, for example, I'll just take one, you know, one example that, that may not come to mind right away, but you know, looking at the impact of weather conditions on supply chain logistics is relevant and material and have interest to our customers. How do you bring those different data sets together in an easy way, bringing the data out of SAP, bringing maybe other data out of other systems through Qlik or through Snowflake, directly bringing data in from our data marketplace and bring that all together to make it work. You know, fundamentally organizational silos and the data fragmentation exist otherwise make it really difficult to drive modern analytics projects. And that in turn limits the value that our customers are getting from SAP data and these other data sets. We want to enable that and unleash. >> Yeah, time for value. This is great stuff. Itamar final question, you know, what are customers using this? What do you have? I'm sure you have customers examples already using the solution. Can you share kind of what these examples look like in the use cases and the value? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Happy to. We have customers across different, different sectors. You see manufacturing, retail, energy, oil and gas, CPG. So again, customers in those segments, typically sectors typically have SAP. So we have customers in all of them. A great example is like Siemens Energy. Siemens Energy is a global provider of gas par services. You know, over what, 28 billion, 30 billion in revenue. 90,000 employees. They operate globally in over 90 countries. So they've used SAP HANA as a core system, so it's running on premises, multiple locations around the world. And what they were looking for is a way to bring all these data together so they can innovate with it. And the thing is, Peter mentioned earlier, not just the SAP data, but also bring other data from other systems to bring it together for more value. That includes finance data, these logistics data, these customer CRM data. So they bring data from over 20 different SAP systems. Okay, with Qlik data integration, feeding that into Snowflake in under 20 minutes, 24/7, 365, you know, days a year. Okay, they get data from over 20,000 tables, you know, over million, hundreds of millions of records daily going in. So it is a great example of the type of scale, scalability, agility and speed that they can get to drive these kind of innovation. So that's a great example with Siemens. You know, another one comes to mind is a global manufacturer. Very similar scenario, but you know, they're using it for real-time executive reporting. So it's more like feasibility to the production data as well as for financial analytics. So think, think, think about everything from audit to texts to innovate financial intelligence because all the data's coming from SAP. >> It's a great time to be in the data business again. It keeps getting better and better. There's more data coming. It's not stopping, you know, it's growing so fast, it keeps coming. Every year, it's the same story, Peter. It's like, doesn't stop coming. As we wrap up here, let's just get customers some information on how to get started. I mean, obviously you're starting to see the accelerators, it's a great program there. What a great partnership between the two companies and AWS. How can customers get started to learn about the solution and take advantage of it, getting more out of their SAP data, Peter? >> Yeah, I think the first place to go to is talk to Snowflake, talk to AWS, talk to our account executives that are assigned to your account. Reach out to them and they will be able to educate you on the solution. We have packages up very nicely and can be deployed very, very quickly. >> Well gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on. Appreciate the conversation. Great overview of the partnership between, you know, Snowflake and Qlik and AWS on a joint solution. You know, getting more out of the SAP data. It's really kind of a key, key solution, bringing SAP data to life. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you John. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage here at RE:Invent 2022. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Well, welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. We're here joined by Ian buck, general manager and vice president of accelerated computing at Nvidia I'm. John Ford, your host of the QB. And thanks for coming on. So in video, obviously, great brand congratulates on all your continued success. Everyone who has does anything in graphics knows the GPU's are hot and you guys get great brand great success in the company, but AI and machine learning was seeing the trend significantly being powered by the GPU's and other systems. So it's a key part of everything. So what's the trends that you're seeing, uh, in ML and AI, that's accelerating computing to the cloud. Yeah, >>I mean, AI is kind of drape bragging breakthroughs innovations across so many segments, so many different use cases. We see it showing up with things like credit card, fraud prevention and product and content recommendations. Really it's the new engine behind search engines is AI. Uh, people are applying AI to things like, um, meeting transcriptions, uh, virtual calls like this using AI to actually capture what was said. Um, and that gets applied in person to person interactions. We also see it in intelligence systems assistance for a contact center, automation or chat bots, uh, medical imaging, um, and intelligence stores and warehouses and everywhere. It's really, it's really amazing what AI has been demonstrated, what it can do. And, uh, it's new use cases are showing up all the time. >>Yeah. I'd love to get your thoughts on, on how the world's evolved just in the past few years, along with cloud, and certainly the pandemics proven it. You had this whole kind of full stack mindset initially, and now you're seeing more of a horizontal scale, but yet enabling this vertical specialization in applications. I mean, you mentioned some of those apps, the new enablers, this kind of the horizontal play with enablement for specialization, with data, this is a huge shift that's going on. It's been happening. What's your reaction to that? >>Yeah, it's the innovations on two fronts. There's a horizontal front, which is basically the different kinds of neural networks or AIS as well as machine learning techniques that are, um, just being invented by researchers for, uh, and the community at large, including Amazon. Um, you know, it started with these convolutional neural networks, which are great for image processing, but as it expanded more recently into, uh, recurrent neural networks, transformer models, which are great for language and language and understanding, and then the new hot topic graph neural networks, where the actual graph now is trained as a, as a neural network, you have this underpinning of great AI technologies that are being adventure around the world in videos role is try to productize that and provide a platform for people to do that innovation and then take the next step and innovate vertically. Um, take it, take it and apply it to two particular field, um, like medical, like healthcare and medical imaging applying AI, so that radiologists can have an AI assistant with them and highlight different parts of the scan. >>Then maybe troublesome worrying, or requires more investigation, um, using it for robotics, building virtual worlds, where robots can be trained in a virtual environment, their AI being constantly trained, reinforced, and learn how to do certain activities and techniques. So that the first time it's ever downloaded into a real robot, it works right out of the box, um, to do, to activate that we co we are creating different vertical solutions, vertical stacks for products that talk the languages of those businesses, of those users, uh, in medical imaging, it's processing medical data, which is obviously a very complicated large format data, often three-dimensional boxes in robotics. It's building combining both our graphics and simulation technologies, along with the, you know, the AI training capabilities and different capabilities in order to run in real time. Those are, >>Yeah. I mean, it's just so cutting edge. It's so relevant. I mean, I think one of the things you mentioned about the neural networks, specifically, the graph neural networks, I mean, we saw, I mean, just to go back to the late two thousands, you know, how unstructured data or object store created, a lot of people realize that the value out of that now you've got graph graph value, you got graph network effect, you've got all kinds of new patterns. You guys have this notion of graph neural networks. Um, that's, that's, that's out there. What is, what is a graph neural network and what does it actually mean for deep learning and an AI perspective? >>Yeah, we have a graph is exactly what it sounds like. You have points that are connected to each other, that established relationships and the example of amazon.com. You might have buyers, distributors, sellers, um, and all of them are buying or recommending or selling different products. And they're represented in a graph if I buy something from you and from you, I'm connected to those end points and likewise more deeply across a supply chain or warehouse or other buyers and sellers across the network. What's new right now is that those connections now can be treated and trained like a neural network, understanding the relationship. How strong is that connection between that buyer and seller or that distributor and supplier, and then build up a network that figure out and understand patterns across them. For example, what products I may like. Cause I have this connection in my graph, what other products may meet those requirements, or also identifying things like fraud when, when patterns and buying patterns don't match, what a graph neural networks should say would be the typical kind of graph connectivity, the different kind of weights and connections between the two captured by the frequency half I buy things or how I rate them or give them stars as she used cases, uh, this application graph neural networks, which is basically capturing the connections of all things with all people, especially in the world of e-commerce, it's very exciting to a new application, but applying AI to optimizing business, to reducing fraud and letting us, you know, get access to the products that we want, the products that they have, our recommendations be things that, that excited us and want us to buy things >>Great setup for the real conversation that's going on here at re-invent, which is new kinds of workloads are changing. The game. People are refactoring their business with not just replatform, but actually using this to identify value and see cloud scale allows you to have the compute power to, you know, look at a note on an arc and actually code that. It's all, it's all science, all computer science, all at scale. So with that, that brings up the whole AWS relationship. Can you tell us how you're working with AWS before? >>Yeah. 80 of us has been a great partner and one of the first cloud providers to ever provide GPS the cloud, uh, we most more recently we've announced two new instances, uh, the instance, which is based on the RA 10 G GPU, which has it was supports the Nvidia RTX technology or rendering technology, uh, for real-time Ray tracing and graphics and game streaming is their highest performance graphics, enhanced replicate without allows for those high performance graphics applications to be directly hosted in the cloud. And of course runs everything else as well, including our AI has access to our AI technology runs all of our AI stacks. We also announced with AWS, the G 5g instance, this is exciting because it's the first, uh, graviton or ARM-based processor connected to a GPU and successful in the cloud. Um, this makes, uh, the focus here is Android gaming and machine learning and France. And we're excited to see the advancements that Amazon is making and AWS is making with arm and the cloud. And we're glad to be part of that journey. >>Well, congratulations. I remember I was just watching my interview with James Hamilton from AWS 2013 and 2014. He was getting, he was teasing this out, that they're going to build their own, get in there and build their own connections, take that latency down and do other things. This is kind of the harvest of all that. As you start looking at these new new interfaces and the new servers, new technology that you guys are doing, you're enabling applications. What does, what do you see this enabling as this, as this new capability comes out, new speed, more, more performance, but also now it's enabling more capabilities so that new workloads can be realized. What would you say to folks who want to ask that question? >>Well, so first off I think arm is here to stay and you can see the growth and explosion of my arm, uh, led of course, by grab a tiny to be. I spend many others, uh, and by bringing all of NVIDIA's rendering graphics, machine learning and AI technologies to arm, we can help bring that innovation. That arm allows that open innovation because there's an open architecture to the entire ecosystem. Uh, we can help bring it forward, uh, to the state of the art in AI machine learning, the graphics. Um, we all have our software that we released is both supportive, both on x86 and an army equally, um, and including all of our AI stacks. So most notably for inference the deployment of AI models. We have our, the Nvidia Triton inference server. Uh, this is the, our inference serving software where after he was trained to model, he wanted to play it at scale on any CPU or GPU instance, um, for that matter. So we support both CPS and GPS with Triton. Um, it's natively integrated with SageMaker and provides the benefit of all those performance optimizations all the time. Uh, things like, uh, features like dynamic batching. It supports all the different AI frameworks from PI torch to TensorFlow, even a generalized Python code. Um, we're activating how activating the arm ecosystem as well as bringing all those AI new AI use cases and all those different performance levels, uh, with our partnership with AWS and all the different clouds. >>And you got to making it really easy for people to use, use the technology that brings up the next kind of question I want to ask you. I mean, a lot of people are really going in jumping in the big time into this. They're adopting AI. Either they're moving in from prototype to production. There's always some gaps, whether it's knowledge, skills, gaps, or whatever, but people are accelerating into the AI and leaning into it hard. What advancements have is Nvidia made to make it more accessible, um, for people to move faster through the, through the system, through the process? >>Yeah, it's one of the biggest challenges. The other promise of AI, all the publications that are coming all the way research now, how can you make it more accessible or easier to use by more people rather than just being an AI researcher, which is, uh, uh, obviously a very challenging and interesting field, but not one that's directly in the business. Nvidia is trying to write a full stack approach to AI. So as we make, uh, discover or see these AI technologies come available, we produce SDKs to help activate them or connect them with developers around the world. Uh, we have over 150 different STKs at this point, certain industries from gaming to design, to life sciences, to earth scientist. We even have stuff to help simulate quantum computing. Um, and of course all the, all the work we're doing with AI, 5g and robotics. So, uh, we actually just introduced about 65 new updates just this past month on all those SDKs. Uh, some of the newer stuff that's really exciting is the large language models. Uh, people are building some amazing AI. That's capable of understanding the Corpus of like human understanding, these language models that are trained on literally the continent of the internet to provide general purpose or open domain chatbots. So the customer is going to have a new kind of experience with a computer or the cloud. Uh, we're offering large language, uh, those large language models, as well as AI frameworks to help companies take advantage of this new kind of technology. >>You know, each and every time I do an interview with Nvidia or talk about Nvidia my kids and their friends, they first thing they said, you get me a good graphics card. Hey, I want the best thing in their rig. Obviously the gaming market's hot and known for that, but I mean, but there's a huge software team behind Nvidia. This is a well-known your CEO is always talking about on his keynotes, you're in the software business. And then you had, do have hardware. You were integrating with graviton and other things. So, but it's a software practices, software. This is all about software. Could you share kind of more about how Nvidia culture and their cloud culture and specifically around the scale? I mean, you, you hit every, every use case. So what's the software culture there at Nvidia, >>And it is actually a bigger, we have more software people than hardware people, people don't often realize this. Uh, and in fact that it's because of we create, uh, the, the, it just starts with the chip, obviously building great Silicon is necessary to provide that level of innovation, but as it expanded dramatically from then, from there, uh, not just the Silicon and the GPU, but the server designs themselves, we actually do entire server designs ourselves to help build out this infrastructure. We consume it and use it ourselves and build our own supercomputers to use AI, to improve our products. And then all that software that we build on top, we make it available. As I mentioned before, uh, as containers on our, uh, NGC container store container registry, which is accessible for me to bus, um, to connect to those vertical markets, instead of just opening up the hardware and none of the ecosystem in develop on it, they can with a low-level and programmatic stacks that we provide with Kuda. We believe that those vertical stacks are the ways we can help accelerate and advance AI. And that's why we make as well, >>Ram a little software is so much easier. I want to get that plug for, I think it's worth noting that you guys are, are heavy hardcore, especially on the AI side. And it's worth calling out, uh, getting back to the customers who are bridging that gap and getting out there, what are the metrics they should consider as they're deploying AI? What are success metrics? What does success look like? Can you share any insight into what they should be thinking about and looking at how they're doing? >>Yeah. Um, for training, it's all about time to solution. Um, it's not the hardware that that's the cost, it's the opportunity that AI can provide your business and many, and the productivity of those data scientists, which are developing, which are not easy to come by. So, uh, what we hear from customers is they need a fast time to solution to allow people to prototype very quickly, to train a model to convergence, to get into production quickly, and of course, move on to the next or continue to refine it often. So in training is time to solution for inference. It's about our, your ability to deploy at scale. Often people need to have real time requirements. They want to run in a certain amount of latency, a certain amount of time. And typically most companies don't have a single AI model. They have a collection of them. They want, they want to run for a single service or across multiple services. That's where you can aggregate some of your infrastructure leveraging the trading infant server. I mentioned before can actually run multiple models on a single GPU saving costs, optimizing for efficiency yet still meeting the requirements for latency and the real time experience so that your customers have a good, a good interaction with the AI. >>Awesome. Great. Let's get into, uh, the customer examples. You guys have obviously great customers. Can you share some of the use cases, examples with customers, notable customers? >>Yeah. I want one great part about working in videos as a technology company. You see, you get to engage with such amazing customers across many verticals. Uh, some of the ones that are pretty exciting right now, Netflix is using the G4 instances to CLA um, to do a video effects and animation content. And, you know, from anywhere in the world, in the cloud, uh, as a cloud creation content platform, uh, we work in the energy field that Siemens energy is actually using AI combined with, um, uh, simulation to do predictive maintenance on their energy plants, um, and, and, uh, doing preventing or optimizing onsite inspection activities and eliminating downtime, which is saving a lot of money for the engine industry. Uh, we have worked with Oxford university, uh, which is Oxford university actually has over two, over 20 million artifacts and specimens and collections across its gardens and museums and libraries. They're actually using convenient GPS and Amazon to do enhance image recognition, to classify all these things, which would take literally years with, um, uh, going through manually each of these artifacts using AI, we can click and quickly catalog all of them and connect them with their users. Um, great stories across graphics, about cross industries across research that, uh, it's just so exciting to see what people are doing with our technology together with, >>And thank you so much for coming on the cube. I really appreciate Greg, a lot of great content there. We probably going to go another hour, all the great stuff going on in the video, any closing remarks you want to share as we wrap this last minute up >>Now, the, um, really what Nvidia is about as accelerating cloud computing, whether it be AI, machine learning, graphics, or headphones, community simulation, and AWS was one of the first with this in the beginning, and they continue to bring out great instances to help connect, uh, the cloud and accelerated computing with all the different opportunities integrations with with SageMaker really Ks and ECS. Uh, the new instances with G five and G 5g, very excited to see all the work that we're doing together. >>Ian buck, general manager, and vice president of accelerated computing. I mean, how can you not love that title? We want more, more power, more faster, come on. More computing. No, one's going to complain with more computing know, thanks for coming on. Thank you. Appreciate it. I'm John Farrell hosted the cube. You're watching Amazon coverage reinvent 2021. Thanks for watching.

(bright music) >> Well, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We're here joined by Ian Buck, general manager and vice president of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. I'm John Furrrier, host of theCUBE. Ian, thanks for coming on. >> Oh, thanks for having me. >> So NVIDIA, obviously, great brand. Congratulations on all your continued success. Everyone who does anything in graphics knows that GPU's are hot, and you guys have a great brand, great success in the company. But AI and machine learning, we're seeing the trend significantly being powered by the GPU's and other systems. So it's a key part of everything. So what's the trends that you're seeing in ML and AI that's accelerating computing to the cloud? >> Yeah. I mean, AI is kind of driving breakthroughs and innovations across so many segments, so many different use cases. We see it showing up with things like credit card fraud prevention, and product and content recommendations. Really, it's the new engine behind search engines, is AI. People are applying AI to things like meeting transcriptions, virtual calls like this, using AI to actually capture what was said. And that gets applied in person-to-person interactions. We also see it in intelligence assistance for contact center automation, or chat bots, medical imaging, and intelligence stores, and warehouses, and everywhere. It's really amazing what AI has been demonstrating, what it can do, and its new use cases are showing up all the time. >> You know, Ian, I'd love to get your thoughts on how the world's evolved, just in the past few years alone, with cloud. And certainly, the pandemic's proven it. You had this whole kind of fullstack mindset, initially, and now you're seeing more of a horizontal scale, but yet, enabling this vertical specialization in applications. I mean, you mentioned some of those apps. The new enablers, this kind of, the horizontal play with enablement for, you know, specialization with data, this is a huge shift that's going on. It's been happening. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah. The innovation's on two fronts. There's a horizontal front, which is basically the different kinds of neural networks or AIs, as well as machine learning techniques, that are just being invented by researchers and the community at large, including Amazon. You know, it started with these convolutional neural networks, which are great for image processing, but has expanded more recently into recurrent neural networks, transformer models, which are great for language and language and understanding, and then the new hot topic, graph neural networks, where the actual graph now is trained as a neural network. You have this underpinning of great AI technologies that are being invented around the world. NVIDIA's role is to try to productize that and provide a platform for people to do that innovation. And then, take the next step and innovate vertically. Take it and apply it to a particular field, like medical, like healthcare and medical imaging, applying AI so that radiologists can have an AI assistant with them and highlight different parts of the scan that may be troublesome or worrying, or require some more investigation. Using it for robotics, building virtual worlds where robots can be trained in a virtual environment, their AI being constantly trained and reinforced, and learn how to do certain activities and techniques. So that the first time it's ever downloaded into a real robot, it works right out of the box. To activate that, we are creating different vertical solutions, vertical stacks, vertical products, that talk the languages of those businesses, of those users. In medical imaging, it's processing medical data, which is obviously a very complicated, large format data, often three-dimensional voxels. In robotics, it's building, combining both our graphics and simulation technologies, along with the AI training capabilities and difference capabilities, in order to run in real time. Those are just two simple- >> Yeah, no. I mean, it's just so cutting-edge, it's so relevant. I mean, I think one of the things you mentioned about the neural networks, specifically, the graph neural networks, I mean, we saw, I mean, just go back to the late 2000s, how unstructured data, or object storage created, a lot of people realized a lot of value out of that. Now you got graph value, you got network effect, you got all kinds of new patterns. You guys have this notion of graph neural networks that's out there. What is a graph neural network, and what does it actually mean from a deep learning and an AI perspective? >> Yeah. I mean, a graph is exactly what it sounds like. You have points that are connected to each other, that establish relationships. In the example of Amazon.com, you might have buyers, distributors, sellers, and all of them are buying, or recommending, or selling different products. And they're represented in a graph. If I buy something from you and from you, I'm connected to those endpoints, and likewise, more deeply across a supply chain, or warehouse, or other buyers and sellers across the network. What's new right now is, that those connections now can be treated and trained like a neural network, understanding the relationship, how strong is that connection between that buyer and seller, or the distributor and supplier, and then build up a network to figure out and understand patterns across them. For example, what products I may like, 'cause I have this connection in my graph, what other products may meet those requirements? Or, also, identifying things like fraud, When patterns and buying patterns don't match what a graph neural networks should say would be the typical kind of graph connectivity, the different kind of weights and connections between the two, captured by the frequency of how often I buy things, or how I rate them or give them stars, or other such use cases. This application, graph neural networks, which is basically capturing the connections of all things with all people, especially in the world of e-commerce, is very exciting to a new application of applying AI to optimizing business, to reducing fraud, and letting us, you know, get access to the products that we want. They have our recommendations be things that excite us and want us to buy things, and buy more. >> That's a great setup for the real conversation that's going on here at re:Invent, which is new kinds of workloads are changing the game, people are refactoring their business with, not just re-platforming, but actually using this to identify value. And also, your cloud scale allows you to have the compute power to, you know, look at a note in an arc and actually code that. It's all science, it's all computer science, all at scale. So with that, that brings up the whole AWS relationship. Can you tell us how you're working with AWS, specifically? >> Yeah, AWS have been a great partner, and one of the first cloud providers to ever provide GPUs to the cloud. More recently, we've announced two new instances, the G5 instance, which is based on our A10G GPU, which supports the NVIDIA RTX technology, our rendering technology, for real-time ray tracing in graphics and game streaming. This is our highest performance graphics enhanced application, allows for those high-performance graphics applications to be directly hosted in the cloud. And, of course, runs everything else as well. It has access to our AI technology and runs all of our AI stacks. We also announced, with AWS, the G5 G instance. This is exciting because it's the first Graviton or Arm-based processor connected to a GPU and successful in the cloud. The focus here is Android gaming and machine learning inference. And we're excited to see the advancements that Amazon is making and AWS is making, with Arm in the cloud. And we're glad to be part of that journey. >> Well, congratulations. I remember, I was just watching my interview with James Hamilton from AWS 2013 and 2014. He was teasing this out, that they're going to build their own, get in there, and build their own connections to take that latency down and do other things. This is kind of the harvest of all that. As you start looking at these new interfaces, and the new servers, new technology that you guys are doing, you're enabling applications. What do you see this enabling? As this new capability comes out, new speed, more performance, but also, now it's enabling more capabilities so that new workloads can be realized. What would you say to folks who want to ask that question? >> Well, so first off, I think Arm is here to stay. We can see the growth and explosion of Arm, led of course, by Graviton and AWS, but many others. And by bringing all of NVIDIA's rendering graphics, machine learning and AI technologies to Arm, we can help bring that innovation that Arm allows, that open innovation, because there's an open architecture, to the entire ecosystem. We can help bring it forward to the state of the art in AI machine learning and graphics. All of our software that we release is both supportive, both on x86 and on Arm equally, and including all of our AI stacks. So most notably, for inference, the deployment of AI models, we have the NVIDIA Triton inference server. This is our inference serving software, where after you've trained a model, you want to deploy it at scale on any CPU, or GPU instance, for that matter. So we support both CPUs and GPUs with Triton. It's natively integrated with SageMaker and provides the benefit of all those performance optimizations. Features like dynamic batching, it supports all the different AI frameworks, from PyTorch to TensorFlow, even a generalized Python code. We're activating, and help activating, the Arm ecosystem, as well as bringing all those new AI use cases, and all those different performance levels with our partnership with AWS and all the different cloud instances. >> And you guys are making it really easy for people to use use the technology. That brings up the next, kind of, question I wanted to ask you. I mean, a lot of people are really going in, jumping in big-time into this. They're adopting AI, either they're moving it from prototype to production. There's always some gaps, whether it's, you know, knowledge, skills gaps, or whatever. But people are accelerating into the AI and leaning into it hard. What advancements has NVIDIA made to make it more accessible for people to move faster through the system, through the process? >> Yeah. It's one of the biggest challenges. You know, the promise of AI, all the publications that are coming out, all the great research, you know, how can you make it more accessible or easier to use by more people? Rather than just being an AI researcher, which is obviously a very challenging and interesting field, but not one that's directly connected to the business. NVIDIA is trying to provide a fullstack approach to AI. So as we discover or see these AI technologies become available, we produce SDKs to help activate them or connect them with developers around the world. We have over 150 different SDKs at this point, serving industries from gaming, to design, to life sciences, to earth sciences. We even have stuff to help simulate quantum computing. And of course, all the work we're doing with AI, 5G, and robotics. So we actually just introduced about 65 new updates, just this past month, on all those SDKs. Some of the newer stuff that's really exciting is the large language models. People are building some amazing AI that's capable of understanding the corpus of, like, human understanding. These language models that are trained on literally the content of the internet to provide general purpose or open-domain chatbots, so the customer is going to have a new kind of experience with the computer or the cloud. We're offering those large language models, as well as AI frameworks, to help companies take advantage of this new kind of technology. >> You know, Ian, every time I do an interview with NVIDIA or talk about NVIDIA, my kids and friends, first thing they say is, "Can you get me a good graphics card?" They all want the best thing in their rig. Obviously the gaming market's hot and known for that. But there's a huge software team behind NVIDIA. This is well-known. Your CEO is always talking about it on his keynotes. You're in the software business. And you do have hardware, you are integrating with Graviton and other things. But it's a software practice. This is software. This is all about software. >> Right. >> Can you share, kind of, more about how NVIDIA culture and their cloud culture, and specifically around the scale, I mean, you hit every use case. So what's the software culture there at NVIDIA? >> Yeah, NVIDIA's actually a bigger, we have more software people than hardware people. But people don't often realize this. And in fact, that it's because of, it just starts with the chip, and obviously, building great silicon is necessary to provide that level of innovation. But it's expanded dramatically from there. Not just the silicon and the GPU, but the server designs themselves. We actually do entire server designs ourselves, to help build out this infrastructure. We consume it and use it ourselves, and build our own supercomputers to use AI to improve our products. And then, all that software that we build on top, we make it available, as I mentioned before, as containers on our NGC container store, container registry, which is accessible from AWS, to connect to those vertical markets. Instead of just opening up the hardware and letting the ecosystem develop on it, they can, with the low-level and programmatic stacks that we provide with CUDA. We believe that those vertical stacks are the ways we can help accelerate and advance AI. And that's why we make them so available. >> And programmable software is so much easier. I want to get that plug in for, I think it's worth noting that you guys are heavy hardcore, especially on the AI side, and it's worth calling out. Getting back to the customers who are bridging that gap and getting out there, what are the metrics they should consider as they're deploying AI? What are success metrics? What does success look like? Can you share any insight into what they should be thinking about, and looking at how they're doing? >> Yeah. For training, it's all about time-to-solution. It's not the hardware that's the cost, it's the opportunity that AI can provide to your business, and the productivity of those data scientists which are developing them, which are not easy to come by. So what we hear from customers is they need a fast time-to-solution to allow people to prototype very quickly, to train a model to convergence, to get into production quickly, and of course, move on to the next or continue to refine it. >> John Furrier: Often. >> So in training, it's time-to-solution. For inference, it's about your ability to deploy at scale. Often people need to have real-time requirements. They want to run in a certain amount of latency, in a certain amount of time. And typically, most companies don't have a single AI model. They have a collection of them they want to run for a single service or across multiple services. That's where you can aggregate some of your infrastructure. Leveraging the Triton inference server, I mentioned before, can actually run multiple models on a single GPU saving costs, optimizing for efficiency, yet still meeting the requirements for latency and the real-time experience, so that our customers have a good interaction with the AI. >> Awesome. Great. Let's get into the customer examples. You guys have, obviously, great customers. Can you share some of the use cases examples with customers, notable customers? >> Yeah. One great part about working at NVIDIA is, as technology company, you get to engage with such amazing customers across many verticals. Some of the ones that are pretty exciting right now, Netflix is using the G4 instances to do a video effects and animation content from anywhere in the world, in the cloud, as a cloud creation content platform. We work in the energy field. Siemens energy is actually using AI combined with simulation to do predictive maintenance on their energy plants, preventing, or optimizing, onsite inspection activities and eliminating downtime, which is saving a lot of money for the energy industry. We have worked with Oxford University. Oxford University actually has over 20 million artifacts and specimens and collections, across its gardens and museums and libraries. They're actually using NVIDIA GPU's and Amazon to do enhanced image recognition to classify all these things, which would take literally years going through manually, each of these artifacts. Using AI, we can quickly catalog all of them and connect them with their users. Great stories across graphics, across industries, across research, that it's just so exciting to see what people are doing with our technology, together with Amazon. >> Ian, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. A lot of great content there. We probably could go another hour. All the great stuff going on at NVIDIA. Any closing remarks you want to share, as we wrap this last minute up? >> You know, really what NVIDIA's about, is accelerating cloud computing. Whether it be AI, machine learning, graphics, or high-performance computing and simulation. And AWS was one of the first with this, in the beginning, and they continue to bring out great instances to help connect the cloud and accelerated computing with all the different opportunities. The integrations with EC2, with SageMaker, with EKS, and ECS. The new instances with G5 and G5 G. Very excited to see all the work that we're doing together. >> Ian Buck, general manager and vice president of Accelerated Computing. I mean, how can you not love that title? We want more power, more faster, come on. More computing. No one's going to complain with more computing. Ian, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate it. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. 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