>>Hey guys, welcome back to the cubes. Continuous coverage day, one of AWS and re-invent live that's right live in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin. Pleased to be here. We are running actually one of the industry's most important hybrid tech events with AWS this year, and it's huge ecosystem of partners. We have two lives dots, two remote studios over 100 guests on the program. We'll be talking about the next decade in cloud innovation. I'm pleased to welcome back one of our alumni and a new guest to the program. Savina Joyce Sabina, Joseph GM of technology partners at AWS joins me as well as Scott Owen, the VP of business development and global channels at air slate, guys. Welcome to the program. Thank you for having us. It's a great to be here. Live happy. Fantastic. Let's go ahead and give the audience an overview of your roles. Sabina. We'll start with you. And then Scott will go to you. >>Great to see you again, Lisa general manager for technology partnerships globally out of the Americas, and we also help partners out of EMEA and APAC grow their business in the Americas. >>Awesome. Scott goes, I'd give, give us an overview of air slate and then your role. You will. >>You bet. Uh, so, uh, air slate, we have two offerings on the AWS marketplace or e-signature offering, which is sign now and then our no-code workflow automation, which we're really excited to bring on the marketplace. I lead our business development, uh, in channels organization for the company global partnership with AWS. Uh, we're very excited about it. >>Talk to me about some of the challenges that the tools that you just mentioned, what challenges are those solving for customers in any industry? So, >>Oh, the biggest challenges right now, obviously we are in a COVID environment and, and companies are trying to drive automation optimization, especially for remote workers to today. And so part of our solutions is obviously solving that in a very, very big way on a global basis as well. >>What are some of the key trends that you're seeing? We've seen so much flux on change in the last 20 months, but what are some of the key trends, especially as it relates to workforce productivity with those work from anywhere environments still persisting, >>It's still persisting. And I'd say the challenge is we're in a hybrid mode where you have both, you know, coming to the office, not coming to the office, but still very remote, just a last week's announcement of a new variant, for example, forcing everybody back out of the office, back into a remote environment. So flexibility, uh, around supporting that hybrid workforce is key. >>And of course here we are at a hybrid event. There are people here at a lot of them in person, but there's also a lot of content that's going on virtually for those folks that weren't quite comfortable coming back to an in-person event. But let's talk about savings about how AWS has been helping joint customers with air slate through the pandemic over the last 20 months as we saw this scatter. And now this work from this hybrid kind of work environment. Yeah. So, >>So I, Scott mentioned, right, that customers are really looking for business solutions. I did have some rapidly increased the last 20 months. We are really, we've been really working together to help both workers and businesses adapt to this remote environment. And customers are looking for simple and cost effective solutions anywhere from, you know, improving and automating their business workflows with e-signature solutions, all the way to complex processes with no code capabilities and air slate does a great job of providing these solutions for our customers. >>Some of the things from a business automation perspective that are critical these days is anything contactless talking about. E-signatures for example, it's, that's really became table stakes in the last 20 months. It's not talk to me about how you would from a biz-dev lens. Describe the partnership that air slate has with AWS. >>Yeah. For our company, it is the most strategic partnership that we have and it's all the way from our board level to our executive leadership team all the way through, throughout our organization end to end it's our most strategic partnership. >>And the things that we know and love about AWS that we've talked about with Sabina is their customer first focus, their customer obsession from a cultural perspective, is there alignment there with air Slate's culture, >>A hundred percent. And one of the cool things about the AWS partner program, which we're in a high echelon period, is the focus on the customer. The customer can reduce their EDP commit by buying solutions like ourselves on the AWS marketplace, as well as the AWS account executives are also paid and incented to sell our solution as well. So it's a one plus one equals three scenario. >>That's a good scenario. One plus one plus three. So be it, talk to me about the evolution. How long have you guys been partnering with air slate? And talk to me about the evolution of the partnership. >>Yeah. We've been working together for a few years now, but I would say the last 15 months, we've really accelerated that partnership again because of customer need and really built out high velocity Cosell motions. We made available to our slate, our partnership resources, both from commercial and public sector to scale the sales motion. As Scott mentioned, they're available in marketplace and they're also part of our ISV accelerate program, which means that our sales teams are incented to work with air slate, to close opportunities. And the key is all of this has led to 250% increase in customer wins year to date as compared to 2020. So that really speaks volumes with the partnership and the need that we are solving for our customers. >>Amazing, amazing growth, 250% in, in a year's period during a pandemic, that's massive, but we saw the acceleration of cloud adoption of digital transformation and this dependence on SAS and cloud for our business lives, our daily lives, our consumer lives. That was really absolutely critical. So Scott, from your perspective, what are some of the key aspects of the AWS relationship that you think really contribute to that success and that big metric that we just met? >>Yeah, absolutely. Well, the metric is driven by the partner programs. When you have a customer that can buy on the marketplace, reduce their EDP commit. You've got account executives that are incented to resell us, but for us, we have really great leadership support around the globe. We've created joint KPIs of which we all have stacked hands on and said, here's the KPIs we want to deliver as a joint partnership. And we're delivering those, which is creating these results as well. Can you share >>Some of those KPIs even at a high level? >>Yes. A lot of them are what, uh, opportunities in our renewal base can we bring into the ado, uh, UWS, uh, ecosystem, if you will. Um, as well as in nearly every deal that we're in, we're asking, is this an AWS customer? Is it a Greenfield opportunity for AWS and bring in the associated teams together to close that opportunity, >>Scott, about some of the business outcomes, the benefits that your joint customers are achieving, leveraging the power of this partnership? >>Absolutely well there's enormous cost savings in the solutions that we bring to the table creates the optimization that we talked about, that they need. It's also driving that digital transformation, any company, any size in order to survive has to move digitally into this new space. And we believe that the two offerings we bring to the marketplace can solve that for them. >>That's one of the things that we saw, there's definitely some silver linings that have come out of the last 20 I'm losing count 22 months, something like that. And nothing like that, right. A time to value is absolutely critical. Let's talk about now go to market Sydney and going back over to you, how does AWS support partners like air slate, um, and taking the solutions to market? You talked about the marketplace, but talk to me about that from a strategic perspective. Yes. >>So one of the things we are very focused on is creating business automation solutions, especially for industry verticals across automotive, telecommunications, healthcare, life sciences, and air slate really has solutions that help address all of the horizontal use cases and the vertical use cases, which means then we can focus our demand generation activities and actually help both our direct sales team and also our channel partners really, really scale. So again, it's kudos to Scott and the air slate team in order to be able to really scale this partnership, but most importantly help our customers through these really tough times in the past 20 months. >>And it's, uh, uh, you mentioned that with the Omicron Darion variant being announced just in the last week, of course, these challenging times persist in this uncertainty persists to it's important to have partnerships, but I also imagine Scott from your, from your perspective, being able to show transparency to the customers that you're really one team, you know, with AWS, with your channel partners. Talk to me a little bit about that. What does customers actually see and feel >>While we're excited, especially around the ecosystem piece is for example, in the last few months, we've been able to activate 35 of AWS's largest channel partners, uh, due to the fact that we are in this hand, stacked KPI go to market together. And so the ecosystem of AWS, it's the trusted partner of almost every customer. And we are trying to advantage ourselves with that trusted relationship, bringing a set of solutions that helps drive the customer's outcome. >>You mentioned an important word there, Scott, that trust that is critical for every company that is becoming a data company. If they haven't become a data company by now, they're probably not going to be around much longer. Talk to me about from a trust perspective, what that means for your customers to be able to adopt these solutions, automate their businesses, allow their folks to work from anywhere and have that trust and this solid partnership and technology. >>Well, and that's the benefit of the AWS partnership. When you think of security, reliability, our entire offering basis completely on the AWS infrastructure. So we bring that trust of you can trust that the technology that it's sitting on, you can trust that it's secure, that's reliable, and we're bringing a set of solutions that drives those customer outcomes, which is cost savings, optimizations, et cetera. That combination is a win-win out there. >>And that outcome spaced focus is critical. What are some of the things Scott that folks can learn at air Slate's booth this week at reinvent for those folks that are here in person and those folks that are attending virtually >>Great question. I love that question first and foremost, both offerings are on the AWS marketplace, but we're the only e-signature offering on the marketplace. And we're the only end to end workflow automation offering on the marketplace as well. So again, uh, important to note we're on that AWS marketplace, AEs from AWS can take advantage of that end. Customers can take advantage of that. Uh, and we take advantage of it just to the, our great go to market partnership. >>We're going to mark great, good to market partnership, but also I'm hearing a pretty significant differentiator being the only ones in the marketplace with those. Talk to me about how that, I mean, one, one more question. How does that facilitate like customer conversations? I imagine that's a huge differential >>Here's is a significant different traitor to us obviously, but again, it's the power of one. Plus one equals three in the partnership, we brought a set of solutions that the customer needs. We do it on the AWS marketplace and AWS infrastructure that we sit on that creates that trust factor that you mentioned. >>I have to add, right? That air slate and team, when they saw that they were the first right, they embraced that and they broke ground and they listed on marketplace and that's paying off for them. >>Very smart. Well guys, congratulations on your joint success. Your go to market strategy seems brilliant, and we look forward to hearing many more successful years from airside and AWS together. Thank you for your insights. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Pleasure. You were great for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from AWS. Reinvent the leader in global alive tech coverage.

>> Announcer: From Sand Hill Road in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, presenting the People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. (bright electronic music) >> Everyone, welcome to this special CUBE conversation. We're here at Sand Hill Road at Mayfield Fund. This is theCUBE, co-creation of the People First Network content series. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Our next guest, Yuvi Kochar, who's the Data-centric Digital Transformation Strategist at GameStop. Variety of stints in the industry, going in cutting-edge problems around data, Washington Post, comScore, among others. You've got your own practice. From Washington, DC, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you, thanks for hosting me. >> This is a awesome conversation. We were just talking before we came on camera about data and the roles you've had over your career have been very interesting, and this seems to be the theme for some of the innovators that I've been interviewing and were on the People First is they see an advantage with technology, and they help companies, they grow companies, and they assist. You did a lot of different things, most notably that I recognized was the Washington Post, which is on the mainstream conversations now as a rebooted media company with a storied, historic experience from the Graham family. Jeff Bezos purchased them for a song, with my opinion, and now growing still, with the monetization, with subscriber base growing. I think they're number one in subscribers, I don't believe, I believe so. Interesting time for media and data. You've been there for what, how many years were you at the Washington Post? >> I spent about 13 years in the corporate office. So the Washington Post company was a conglomerate. They'd owned a lot of businesses. Not very well known to have owned Kaplan, education company. We owned Slate, we owned Newsweek, we owned TV stations and now they're into buying all kinds of stuff. So I was involved with a lot of varied businesses, but obviously, we were in the same building with the Washington Post, and I had front row seat to see the digital transformation of the media industry. >> John: Yeah, we-- >> And how we responded. >> Yeah, I want to dig into that because I think that illustrates kind of a lot what's happening now, we're seeing with cloud computing. Obviously, Cloud 1.0 and the rise of Amazon public cloud. Clearly, check, done that, a lot of companies, startups go there. Why would you provision a data center? You're a startup, you're crazy, but at some point, you can have a data center. Now, hybrid cloud's important. Devops, the application development market, building your own stack, is shifting now. It seems like the old days, but upside down. It's flipped around, where applications are in charge, data's critical for the application, infrastructure's now elastic. Unlike the old days of here's your infrastructure. You're limited to what you can run on it based on the infrastructure. >> Right. >> What's your thoughts on that? >> My thoughts are that, I'm a very, as my title suggests, data-centric person. So I think about everything data first. We were in a time when cloud-first is becoming old, and we are now moving into data-first because what's happening in the marketplace is the ability, the capability, of data analytics has reached a point where prediction, in any aspect of a business, has become really inexpensive. So empowering employees with prediction machines, whether you call them bots, or you call them analytics, or you call them machine learning, or AI, has become really inexpensive, and so I'm thinking more of applications, which are built data-out instead of data-in, which is you build process and you capture data, and then you decide, oh, maybe I should build some reporting. That's what we used to do. Now, you need to start with what's the data I have got? What's the data I need? What's the data I can get? We were just talking about, everybody needs a data monetization strategy. People don't realize how much asset is sitting in their data and where to monetize it and how to use it. >> It's interesting. I mean, I got my computer science degree in the 80s and one of the tracks I got a degree in was database, and let's just say that my main one was operating system. Database was kind of the throwaway at that time. It wasn't considered a big field. Database wasn't sexy at all. It was like, database, like. Now, if you're a database, you're a data guru, you're a rock star. The world has changed, but also databases are changing. It used to be one centralized database rules the world. Oracle made a lot of money with that, bought all their competitors. Now you have open source came into the realm, so the world of data is also limited by where the data's stored, how the data is retrieved, how the data moves around the network. This is a new dynamic. How do you look at that because, again, lagging in business has a lot to do with the data, whether it's in an application, that's one thing, but also having data available, not necessarily in real time, but if I'm going to work on something, I want the data set handy, which means I can download it or maybe get real-time. What's your thoughts on data as an element in all that moving around? >> So I think what you're talking about is still data analytics. How do I get insights about my business? How do I make decisions using data in a better way? What flexibility do I need? So you talk about open source, you think about MongoDB and those kind of databases. They give you a lot of flexibility. You can develop interesting insights very quickly, but I think that is still very much thinking about data in an old-school kind of way. I think what's happening now is we're teaching algorithms with data. So data is actually the software, right? So you get an open source algorithm. I mean Google and everybody else is happy to open source their algorithms. They're all available for free. But what, the asset is now the data, which means how you train your algorithm with your data, and then now, moving towards deploying it on the edge, which is you take an algorithm, you train it, then you deploy it on the edge in an IoT kind of environment, and now you're doing decision-making, whether it's self-driving cars, I mean those are great examples, but I think it's going down into very interesting spaces in enterprise, which is, so we have to all think about software differently because, actually, data is a software. >> That's an interesting take on it, and I love that. I mean I wrote a blog post in 2007 when we first started playing with the, in looking at the network effects on social media and those platforms was, I wrote a post, it was called Data is the New Development Kit. Development kit was what people did back then. They had a development kit and they would download stuff and then code, but the idea was is that data has to be part of the runtime and the compilation of, as software acts, data needs to be resident, not just here's a database, access it, pull it out, use it, present it, where data is much more of a key ingredient into the development. Is that kind of what you're getting at? >> Yes. >> Notion of-- >> And I think we're moving from the age of arithmetic-based machines, which is we put arithmetic onto chips, and we then made general-purpose chips, which were used to solve a huge amount of problems in the world. We're talking about, now, prediction machines on a chip, so you think about algorithms that are trained using data, which are going to be available on chips. And now you can do very interesting algorithmic work right on the edge devices, and so I think a lot of businesses, and I've seen that recently at GameStop, I think business leaders have a hard time understanding the change because we have moved from process-centric, process automation, how can I do it better? How can I be more productive? How can I make better decisions? We have trained our business partners on that kind of thinking, and now we are starting to say, no, no, no, we've got something that's going to help you make those decisions. >> It's interesting, you mentioned GameStop. Obviously, well-known, my sons are all gamers. I used to be a gamer back before I had kids, but then, can't keep up anymore. Got to be on that for so long, but GameStop was a retail giant in gaming. Okay, when they had physical displays, but now, with online, they're under pressure, and I had interviewed, again, at an Amazon event, this Best Buy CIO, and he says, "We don't compete with price anymore. "If they want to buy from Amazon, no problem, "but our store traffic is off the charts. "We personalize 50,000 emails a day." So personalization became their strategy, it was a data strategy. This is a user experience, not a purchase decision. Is this how you guys are thinking about it at GameStop? >> I think retail, if you look at the segment per se, personalization, Amazon obviously led the way, but it's obvious that personalization is key to attract the customer. If I don't know what games you play, or if I don't know what video you watched a little while ago, about which game, then I'm not offering you the product that you are most prone or are looking for or what you want to buy, and I think that's why personalization is key. I think that's-- >> John: And data drives that, and data drives that. >> Data drives that, and for personalization, if you look at retail, there's customer information. You need to know the customer. You need to know, understand the customer preferences, but then there's the product, and you need to marry the two. And that's where personalization comes into play. >> So I'll get your thoughts. You have, obviously, a great perspective on how tech has been built and now working on some real cutting-edge, clear view on what the future looks like. Totally agree with you, by the way, on the data. There's kind of an old guard/new guard, kind of two sides of the street, the winners and the losers, but hey, look, I think the old guard, if they don't innovate and become fresh and new and adopt the modern things that need to attract the new expectations and new experiences from their customers, are going to die. That being said, what is the success formula, because some people might say, hey, I'm data-driven. I'm doing it, look at me, I'm data. Well, not really. Well, how do you tell if someone's really data-driven or data-centric? What's the difference? Is there a tell sign? >> I think when you say the old guard, you're talking about companies that have large assets, that have been very successful in a business model that maybe they even innovated, like GameStop came up with pre-owned games, and for the longest of times, we've made huge amount of revenue and profit from that segment of our business. So yes, that's becoming old now, but I think the most important thing for large enterprises at least, to battle the incumbent, the new upstarts, is to develop strategies which are leveraging the new technologies, but are building on their existing capability, and that's what I drive at GameStop. >> And also the startups too, that they were here in a venture capital firm, we're at Mayfield Fund, doing this program, startups want to come and take a big market down, or come in on a narrow entry and get a position and then eat away at an incumbent. They could do it fast if they're data-centric. >> And I think it's speed is what you're talking about. I think the biggest challenge large companies have is an ability to to play the field at the speed of the new upstarts and the firms that Mayfield and others are investing in. That's the big challenge because you see this, you see an opportunity, but you're, and I saw that at the Washington Post. Everybody went to meetings and said, yes, we need to be digital, but they went-- >> They were talking. >> They went back to their desk and they had to print a paper, and so yes, so we'll be digital tomorrow, and that's very hard because, finally, the paper had to come out. >> Let's take us through the journey. You were the CTO, VP of Technology, Graham Holdings, Washington Post, they sold it to Jeff Bezos, well-documented, historic moment, but what a storied company, Washington Post, local paper, was the movie about it, all the historic things they've done from a reporting and journalism standpoint. We admire that. Then they hit, the media business starts changing, gets bloated, not making any money, online classifieds are dying, search engine marketing is growing, they have to adjust. You were there. What was the big, take us through that journey. >> I think the transformation was occurring really fast. The new opportunities were coming up fast. We were one of the first companies to set up a website, but we were not allowed to use the brand on the website because there was a lot of concern in the newsroom that we are going to use or put the brand on this misunderstood, nearly misunderstood opportunity. So I think it started there, and then-- >> John: This is classic old guard mentality. >> Yes, and it continued down because people had seen downturns. It's not like media companies hadn't been through downturns. They had, because the market crashes and we have a recession and there's a downturn, but it always came back because-- >> But this was a wave. I mean the thing is, downturns are economic and there's business that happens there, advertisers, consumption changes. This was a shift in their user base based upon a technology wave, and they didn't see it coming. >> And they hadn't ever experienced it. So they were experiencing it as it was happening, and I think it's very hard to respond to a transformation of that kind in a very old-- >> As a leader, how did you handle that? Give us an example of what you did, how you make your mark, how do you get them to move? What were some of the things that were notable moments? >> I think the main thing that happened there was that we spun out washingtonpost.com. So it became an independent business. It was actually running across the river. It moved out of the corporate offices. It went to a separate place. >> The renegades. >> And they were given-- >> John: Like Steve Jobs and the Macintosh team, they go into separate building. >> And we were given, I was the CTO of the dotcom for some time while we were turning over our CTO there, and we were given a lot of flexibility. We were not held accountable to the same level. We used the, obviously, we used-- >> John: You were running fast and loose. >> And we were, yes, we had a lot of flexibility and we were doing things differently. We were giving away the content in some way. On the online side, there was no pay wall. We started with a pay wall, but advertising kind of was so much more lucrative in the beginning, that the pay wall was shut down, and so I think we experimented a lot, and I think where we missed, and a lot of large companies miss, is that you need to leave your existing business behind and scale your new business, and I think that's very hard to do, which is, okay, we're going to, it's happening at GameStop. We're no longer completely have a control of the market where we are the primary source of where, you talk about your kids, where they go to get their games. They can get the games online and I think-- >> It's interesting, people are afraid to let go because they're so used to operating their business, and now it has to pivot to a new operating model and grow. Two different dynamics, growth, operation, operating and growing. Not all managers have that growth mindset. >> And I think there's also an experience thing. So most people who are in these businesses, who've been running these businesses very successfully, have not been watching what's happening in technology. And so the technology team comes out and says, look, let me show you what we can do. I think there has to be this open and very, very candid discussion around how we are going to transform-- >> How would you talk about your peer, developed peers out there, your peers and other CIOs, and even CISOs on the security side, have been dealing with the same suppliers over, and in fact, on the security side, the supplier base is getting larger. There's more tools coming out. I mean who wants another tool? So platform, tool, these are big decisions being made around companies, that if you want to be data-centric, you want to be a data-centric model, you got to understand platforms, not just buying tools. If you buy a hammer, they will look like a nail, and you have so many hammers, what version, so platform discussions come in. What's your thoughts on this? Because this is a cutting-edge topic we've been talking about with a lot of senior engineering leaders around Platform 2.0 coming, not like a classic platform to... >> Right, I think that each organization has to leverage or build their, our stack on top of commodity platforms. You talked about AWS or Azure or whatever cloud you use, and you take all their platform capability and services that they offer, but then on top of that, you structure your own platform with your vertical capabilities, which become your differentiators, which is what you take to market. You enable those for all your product lines, so that now you are building capability, which is a layer on top of, and the commodity platforms will continue to bite into your platform because they will start offering capabilities that earlier, I remember, I started at this company called BrassRing, recruitment automation. One of the first software-as-a-service companies, and I, we bought a little company, and the CTO there had built a web server. It was called, it was his name, it was called Barrett's Engine. (chuckles) And so-- >> Probably Apache with something built around it. >> So, in those days, we used to build our own web servers. But now today, you can't even find an engineer who will build a web server. >> I mean the web stack and these notions of just simple Web 1.0 building blocks of change. We've been calling it Cloud 2.0, and I want to get your thoughts on this because one of the things I've been riffing on lately is this, I remember Marc Andreessen wrote the famous article in Wall Street Journal, Software is Eating the World, which I agree with in general, no debate there, but also the 10x Engineer, you go into any forum online, talking about 10x Engineers, you get five different opinions, meaning, a 10x Engineer's an engineer who can do 10 times more work than an old school, old classical engineer. I bring this up because the notion of full stack developer used to be a real premium, but what you're talking about here with cloud is a horizontally scalable commodity layer with differentiation at the application level. That's not full stack, that's half stack. So you think the world's kind of changing. If you're going to be data-centric, the control plane is data. The software that's domain-specific is on top. That's what you're essentially letting out. >> That's what I'm talking about, but I think that also, what I'm beginning to find, and we've been working on a couple of projects, is you put the data scientists in the same room with engineers who write code, write software, and it's fascinating to see them communicate and collaborate. They do not talk the same language at all. >> John: What's it like? Give us a mental picture. >> So a data scientist-- >> Are they throwing rocks at each other? >> Well, nearly, because the data scientists come from the math side of the house. They're very math-oriented, they're very algorithm-oriented. Mathematical algorithms, whereas software engineers are much more logic-oriented, and they're thinking about scalability and a whole lot of other things, and if you think about, a data scientist develops an algorithm, it rarely scales. You have to actually then hand it to an engineer to rewrite it in a scalable form. >> I want to ask you a question on that. This is why I got you and you're an awesome guest. Thanks for your insights here, and we'll take a detour into machine learning. Machine learning really is what AI is about. AI is really nothing more than just, I love AI, it gets people excited about computer science, which is great. I mean my kids talk about AI, they don't talk about IoT, which is good that AI does that, but it's really machine learning. So there's two schools of thought on machine. I call it the Berkeley school on one end, not Berkeley per se but Berkeley talks about math, machine learning, math, math, math, and then you have other schools of thought that are on cognition, that machine learning should be more cognitive, less math-driven, spectrum of full math, full cognition, and everything in between. What's your thoughts on the relationship between math and cognition? >> Yeah, so it's interesting. You get gray hair and you kind of move up the stack, and I'm much more business-focused. These are tools. You can get passionate about either school of thought, but I think that what that does is you lose sight of what the business needs, and I think it's most important to start with what are we here trying to do, and what is the best tool? What is the approach that we should utilize to meet that need? Like the other day, we were looking at product data from GameStop, and we know that the quality of data should be better, but we found a simple algorithm that we could utilize to create product affinity. Now whether it's cognition or math, it doesn't matter. >> John: The outcome's the outcome. >> The outcome is the outcome, and so-- >> They're not mutually exclusive, and that's a good conversation debate but it really gets to your point of does it really matter as long as it's accurate and the data drives that, and this is where I think data is interesting. If you look at folks who are thinking about data, back to the cloud as an example, it's only good as what you can get access to, and cybersecurity, the transparency issue around sharing data becomes a big thing. Having access to the data's super important. How do you view that for, as CIOs, and start to think about they're re-architecting their organizations for these digital transformations. Is there a school of thought there? >> Yes, so I think data is now getting consolidated. For the longest time, we were building data warehouses, departmental data warehouses. You can go do your own analytics and just take your data and add whatever else you want to do, and so the part of data that's interesting to you becomes much more clean, much more reliable, but the rest, you don't care much about. I think given the new technologies that are available and the opportunity of the data, data is coming back together, and it's being put into a single place. >> (mumbles) Well, that's certainly a honeypot for a hacker, but we'll get that in a second. If you and I were doing a startup, we say, hey, let's, we've got a great idea, we're going to build something. How would we want to think about the data in terms of having data be a competitive advantage, being native into the architecture of the system. I'll say we use cloud unless we need some scale on premise for privacy reasons or whatever, but we would, how would we go to market, and we have an app, as apps defined, great use case, but I want to have extensibility around the data, I don't want to foreclose any future options, How should I think about my, how should we think about our data strategy? >> Yes, so there was a very interesting conversation I had just a month ago with a friend of mine who's working at a startup in New York, and they're going to build a solution, take it to market, and he said, "I want to try it only in a small market "and learn from it," and he's going very old school, focus groups, analytics, analysis, and I sat down, we sat at Grand Central Station, and we talked about how, today, he should be thinking about capturing the data and letting the data tell him what's working and what's not working, instead of trying to find focus groups and find very small data points to make big decisions. He should actually utilize the target, the POC market, to capture data and get ready for scale because if you want to go national after having run a test in... >> Des Moines, Iowa. >> Part of New York or wherever, then you need to already have built the data capability to scale that business in today's-- >> John: Is it a SaaS business? >> No, it's a service and-- >> So he can instrument it, just watch the data. >> And yes, but he's not thinking like that because most business people are still thinking the old way, and if you look at Uber and others, they have gone global at such a rapid pace because they're very data-centric, and they scale with data, and they don't scale with just let's go to that market and then let's try-- >> Yeah, ship often, get the data, then think of it as part of the life cycle of development. Don't think it as the old school, craft, launch it, and then see how it goes and watch it fail or succeed, and know six months later what happened, know immediately. >> And if you go data-centric, then you can turn the R&D crank really fast. Learn, test and learn, test and learn, test and learn at a very rapid pace. That changes the game, and I think people are beginning to realize that data needs to be thought about as the application and the service is being developed, because the data will help scale the service really fast. >> Data comes into applications. I love your line of data is the new software. That's better than the new oil, which has been said before, but data comes into the app. You also mentioned that app throws off data. >> Yuvi: Yes. >> We know that humans have personal, data exhaust all the time. Facebook made billions of dollars on our exhaust and our data. The role of data in and out of the application, the I/O of the application, is a new concept, you brought that up. I like that and I see that happening. How should we capture that data? This used to be log files. Now you got observability, all kinds of new words kind of coming into this cloud equation. How should people think about this? >> I think that has to be part of the design of your applications, because data is application, and you need to design the application with data in mind, and that needs to be thought of upfront, and not later. >> Yuvi, what's next for you? We're here in Sand Hill Road, VC firm, they're doing a lot of investments, you've got a great project with GameStop, you're advising startups, what's going on in your world? >> Yes, so I'm totally focused, as you probably are beginning to sense, on the opportunity that data is enabling, especially in the enterprise. I'm very interested in helping business understand how to leverage data, because this is another major shift that's occurring in the marketplace. Opportunities have opened up, prediction is becoming cheap and at scale, and I think any business runs on their capability to predict, what is the shirt I should buy? How many I should buy? What color should I buy? I think data is going to drive that prediction at scale. >> This is a legit way that everyone should pay attention to. All businesses, not just one-- >> All businesses, everything, because prediction is becoming cheap and automated and granular. That means you need to be able to not just, you need to empower your people with low-level prediction that comes out of the machines. >> Data is the new software. Yuvi, thanks so much for great insight. This is theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier here at Sand Hill Road at the Mayfield Fund, for the People First Network series. Thanks for watching. >> Yuvi: Thank you. 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live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2018 brought to you by Amazon Web Services Intel and their ecosystem partners welcome back to Las Vegas everybody I'm Dave Villeneuve my co-host David Flair you want to the cube the leader in live tech coverage this is our third day of coverage at AWS reinvent 2018 our sixth year covering this event that keeps getting bigger and bigger Dave at 53,000 people amazing place is still jam we still barely have our voices 18 Cockroft is here he's a vice president of cloud architecture and strategy very well known in the industry q Balam thanks so much for coming back on thank you yeah it's the I've been to all of the reinvents we've been far as the customer and then we've been off of one but we watched remotely and hung on every word you know back when there wasn't a lot of information about a DMS now it's like too much information to process it's gonna take us months to sort through it all but at any rate it's it's a phenomenal opportunity for us to to learn to share to inspire folks and you do with some great work talk a little bit about you know some of the fun stuff you're working on and in your current role yeah I have a few different things I do one is one part of my role as I go around the world giving keynotes AWS summits but mostly I call it doing one of Ogle's impressions his deck and I get to presented around the world so we have to digest all of this stuff into a 90-minute deck that we can take to around the world that's a you know what do you leave out there's some it's it's harder and harder every year so that's a lot of fun but the team that I run for AWS I mean recruiting and running is around open-source right and we do we sponsor various events we members of various foundations we make contributions to projects and have been helping that by hiring people from the open-source communities into AWS to help help some of the edge over service teams with their launches of open-source related projects so what I've got what's been happening this year is had like a hundred blog posts related to open source lots of tweets lots of activity lots of events like ask on all things open in coupe car so be there in a couple of weeks exciting to you guys probably again but this week there are a few of the launches where we got quite deeply involved we did a blog posts on the open source blog most at the same time as Jeff fires okay here's the service and here's the open source part of it this is how you contribute and this is what's going on so we've had some fun with that so but it was it two years ago when we first met you've just been on the job for about a month about that particular time and you laid out what you wanted to do in terms of from your previous experience about how you wanted to turn AWS into a an open-source contributor how would you rate yourself in two years I think we've made some good progress really made me a AWS was making contributions to open source but had nobody talking about it and nobody know it was nobody's job to go out and explain what we were doing so that what part of the problem two years ago it was actually more happening so most people knew about but we were just not telling the story and it said it wasn't coming across well and the culture and the culture I mean it was spotty like some parts of AWS were doing a lot of open source other parts we're kind of not really seeing it as a priority so by talking a lot more about it we kind of get a more uniform acceptance across AWC huge organized just there but Amazon as a whole we are actually telling that story the story a much broader story than just AWS and be able to bring that and get everyone go oh this i see everyone doing it so i should be doing that so it helps create the the the leadership for more teams to follow and what we've seen in with you know really the first year building the team the last year kind of getting the content flowing and getting the processes kind of working to get all the all of the different events and blog posts and out the outbound part grips getting increasing number of contributions and launches so now Corrado was a few weeks ago so it you need us launch but that was that was an example that was it's a lot a lot happened from my team from Aaron Gupta my team his a Java champion he used to be at Sun he was a worked at Red Hat on J bar so he's like he knows everybody in Java has great credibility across the Java community and he said we should launch this product in Belgium at like midnight or so you know West Coast time and let's fly in James Gosling and like to a secret like get him on stage without anyone knowing he's gonna do it and do the introduction so it's like this totally crazy idea and it came off beautifully and we even had the the you know the Oracle Java people saying nice things about it the contributions to open JDK just just a really nice example of figuring it out all that get everybody on board get everything done right and then say here's something that matters to the community that we can contribute it'll show up on the rooftop complete thanks the star power thing but mincing James to do it was a right around a lot of credit for that that particular launch but you know this is the kind of people I have on my team and we're like we're pulling them in and pointing them at okay can you help this team figure out how to take this open-source project to market now I mean that was a major contribution to the open-source community and it was just in time wasn't it but another slight view would might be that you and Oracle should have been working this out until not leaving it until the last minute but I mean we were doing this work anyway right okay we're effectively self-supporting our own version of Java or internally we were getting better performance and better sooner bug fixes on open JDK so it made a decision to just move to the open JDK dream and we were just unhooking our internal use of the of the other the other options we have home mix you know a very large organization along for you acquire lots of different versions and flavors of Java you notice this one language so we like clean it up let's get JDK 8 and 10 we're self supporting it and then we announce to our cave will support our Amazon Linux version right and the final step was like the customers were saying please just like supportive on my laptop and anywhere else I need it and the thing we didn't announce then we didn't make a big thing out and arm support we didn't we kind of it was in there by default we didn't talk about it because the ARM chips came out this week so hey and part of it was also have exactly the same version of Java now on all of the Amazon Linux is even the the Intel AMD and arm so that helps the compatibility for people kind of going well it's a different processor architectures ties together so it was all part of the thinking if you didn't want to tip your hand on the announcement this young is right ok so I think sometimes a AWS is misunderstood partly from its own doing I mean you just mentioned you contribute a lot to open-source but you never talked about it generally when AWS doesn't have something to say they don't say a lot about it so others are left to you know make the narrative you come on you've now got an open-source agenda can you just sort of summarize what that motivation is and what the objectives are well we have you know lots of different pieces of this but you have service teams saying I'm gonna launch this product and there's an open source component to it can you help and sometimes that means I hire someone in my team to specialize in that area sometimes it's just our consulting with the team we may know connecting them to the open-source community so that's one piece of it is having that if you think about CN CF in particular cloud native computing foundation that's got lots of projects if you think about the AWS service teams no one team really owns the scope of CN CF but my team has that ownership for CN CF as a whole we have the board seat position and we say ok we have the serval as people over here we've got some entertaining things over here there's some Linux kernel virtualization bits here we can reach out to lots of different teams across AWS but act as a central point where you have something about open-source you want to talk about with with AWS or Amazon even as a whole you can come to us and we'll find the right people and we'll help you make those connections so part of it is acting as an on-ramp for the sort of buffer between the internal the external concerns of the communities there's somewhere to go and partly just getting contributions out there and what we could gain criticized for not making enough contributions well we've been making more and we're making more and we'll just keep making more contributions until people give credit for it and that's that's the if you're like what's the strategy contribute more and then tell people point at it and hope the people like what we did and take the input no it's the customer driven thing right we're gonna do what our customers ask us to do and their customer community focus on the things we want to do and we've been contributing to spinnaker the the Netflix OSS project we made some serious contributions to that in the this year firecracker myths which talk about that a bit and the Robo maker that those are all areas where we've been working with firecracker is particularly interesting isn't it I mean that's a major contribution of improving the performance and capability of those micro VMs yeah can you talk about that a little bit yeah it's the baby it's interesting because it's a piece of software pretty much no one will ever see your use it's the thing you run on the bare metal but lets you run your container Dee that lets you run your container on top right well it's deep down in the guts of the system there's this piece of code but we we kind of there's a few reasons we're using it particularly in production now with its supporting some of our production use of Fargate and lambda there in the middle it's not a hundred centraal out but there's a good chunk of the capacity running on it and that's where it turns out to be useful and just to cook how long we have to get into this but if you think about a customer running a lambda function we would put create a VM with that lambda function in it if they wanted a second lambda function we put it alongside that one no the customer comes and we start a new VM for them and we start a lambda function in that VMs take a while to start up so you have cancer pre-made some sitting there waiting but these are big VMs and we're putting lots of little functions in them what what firecracker lets you do is start a separate micro VM for every function and safely put all of the customers on one machine so you start packing them in it's a much more efficient way to run your capacity our utilization of those machines supporting lambda is vastly higher than having a machine with a bunch of empty space in it that we're trying to weight running for running for the customer so it's that efficiency is the thing and then the speed of starting a VM it's a very it's a very cut-down VM so it's 125 milliseconds with just to start the VM which is incredibly fast when you think hey give me a VM on ec2 it's you know they're in kinda like 30 seconds to a few minutes like I get 12 terabyte VM takes a little while to boot up but you don't have to pay for it till it finished including my good things about these huge machines right how about Robo maker can you talk a little bit about that and it's important so a rubber makers interesting on the open source blog which we posted on Slate on Sunday night early on Monday morning I did an interview with Brian Goerke who's the founder of the open robotics foundation and what we've done there is it's kind of an extension of sage maker if you think about that being AI if you've got these eight where I can deploy an AI model what is the AI model I want to do it wants to read something from the real world and modified the real word so it's a read from a camera or at some of the sensor and then control motors and servos and that's what Robo maker does it wraps the intelligence you can build with sage maker with the robotic operating system that has actually a library of actuators and a library of algorithms control algorithms you've got little brain in the middle and you've got a new robot that does something and we had the the Robo racer low racing car to which where all of these things come together to make an old toy race car that we can drive around tracks which is a whole other topic we get into but what interviewed Brian on what is the history of Rose the robotic operating system where did it come from you know what is the hard thing about running in it turns out the hard thing with Rose wasn't building the robots it was simulating the robots and the simulators quite a CPU intensive job it's graphics intensive you got this virtual world you're running and VR worlds are quite intensive and getting that installed and running was the hard part so what what what robot maker is is that as the service it's this simulator is called gazebo just a funny name so gazebo as a service is the actual service that effectively were charging for with a free tier so you can play with it and then we charge you for the sort of simulation units like how much computing time you're using when the rest of it is all you know cloud9 for the front end and deployment of fleets of data to fleets the robots and updating them and managing them but they're interesting thing is this is getting into like the people that the field of the first robotic thing is high schools high school robotic competitions they're interested yeah universities are interested in a university solar so we kind of it's not just for commercial production robots it's the whole training thing we're getting into STEM education if kids like playing with robots it's like Center and we're pulling all this in so now you can go home and take these like the latest most advanced AI algorithms that used to have to be doing a PhD at Stanford to be playing with and play with your kid you know over Christmas and see what you can come up with really simplifying the whole software development side of that when you look at the Dean came in competitions we're just awesome yeah all the kids they could have gravitate to the hardware cuz they can touch the software was really hard and and and this is gonna I think take a new level is particularly enough and it's all open source yeah you can go yes oh you've got this robot there no no I pointed them somebody who's complaining that we'd done it and no it was some proprietary robot thingy with the toy cars and I pointed them at the github URL it's that you can go build this thing it's all open source you can put anything else you want on it but the robot cars robot has rolls on it the robotic operating system H maker Robo maker all combined together and they're off running races and having all having fun now you guys are both Formula one fans yeah and you guys have been having some you know profile of Formula One folks here you got the little the mini vehicle riff on that really open source but I have another like thing I'm doing on the site it turns out the over the last year or so we started looking for opportunities to do sports sponsorship with a particular focus on Europe and the rest of the world we had a few US sports where they I don't know something with balls I like I like sports with wheels so about the middle of last year like this June we announced the deal with Formula One which is a multi-part deal part of the deal was just take them to the cloud that they have some data centers stuff they were running at a space and their data center is like no they wanted to do a technology refresh so for all the reasons that everyone else is moving to cloud we moved the sports core infrastructure to cloud over some number of years right so that's a process for starting and part of that is the archive of all Formula One races it's a treasure trove like 67 years of archive of everything they've got all the videos were digitizing it we're gonna figure out what to do what you know we've got to process it to label everything anyway so that's one thing and then we went turned up it we all turned up at Silverstone in the UK at that race it was the week after the announcement and that race we have a do as logos turning up on the screen because another piece was sponsorship so we start sponsoring the core video feed that Formula One uses to the world and that's 500 million fans watch Formula One so now 500 million fans for the next few years they're going to see a dope race logos on screen around the analytical insights of what is going on in the sport the odd rear tires are overheating you went round a corner this fast here's the pit stop strategy so we brand advertising associate with a high-technology sport and analytical insights and that's why we did that deal and they get all of our technology AI a lot of help helping them migrate and then the third thing we did that I got involved with was I'd already done a few CIO summits at Formula One races along the way so I was kind of like trying to poke my way into this thing that was happening I'm not involved in sponsorship set up right so hang on if you've done that thing yet and then them so we decided to do some executive events around Formula one so we'll pick a few races we'll have some you know corporate hospitality like things but when you put a bunch of senior executives together for a few days they share they solve each other's problems and you just get out of the way and they know the people that have solved one problem will share it with the other so it's a really it's like a tiny reinvent right here everyone is sharing if you sit next to someone what problem have you sold you can find stuff out so this is a concentrated version of that and we retired it in Monza earlier this year went great amazing I mean it's fun and it you know next to the business so it finally was like can we get someone on the car on Reba okay who's in Abu Dhabi on Saturday can we get them on Sunday night for the launch for the robot slut no this is like top guy in Formula One got here from Abu Dhabi if by Wednesday morning I'm just happy that they got here yeah that was that was a huge tire cube team we've watched your career you've been somebody who you know shares his knowledge and done some great work so thank you so much for coming back in the cube like that congratulations on all your great work Andy Jesse's coming up next we're excited about that keeper right to everybody we'll be back with our next guest Andy Jesse CEO of AWS right - this short break [Music]