(gentle, upbeat music) >> Live from the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE, at AWs re:Invent 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsors Amazon and Trend Micro. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we are here live at Amazon Web Services re:Invent 2014, this is theCUBE, our flagship program, where we go out to the events and extract synth from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the Founder of SiliconANGLE, I'm joined with my co-host Stu Miniman from wikibon.org, our next guest is James Hamilton, who is Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, back again, second year in a row, he's a celebrity! Everyone wants his autograph, selfies, I just tweeted a picture with Stu, welcome back! >> Thank you very much! I can't believe this is a technology conference. (laughs) >> So Stu's falling over himself right now, because he's so happy you're here, and we are too, 'cause we really appreciate you taking the time to come on, I know you're super busy, you got sessions, but, always good to do a CUBE session on kind of what you're workin' on, certainly amazing progress you've done, we're really impressed with what you guys've done other this last year or two, but this year, the house was packed. Your talk was very well received. >> Cool. >> Every VC that I know in enterprise is here, and they're not tellin' everyone, there's a lot of stuff goin' on, the competitors are here, and you're up there in a whole new court, talk about the future. So, quickly summarize what you talked about in your session on the first day. What was the premise, what was the talks objective, and what was some of the key content? >> Gotcha, gotcha. My big objective was the cloud really is fundamentally different, this is not another little bit of nomenclature, this is something that's fundamentally different, it's going to change the way our industry operates. And what I wanted to do was to step through a bunch of examples of innovations, and show how this really is different from how IT has been done for years gone by. >> So the data center obviously, we're getting quotes after quotes, obviously we're here at the Amazon show so the quotes tend to be skewed towards this statement, but, I'm not in the data center business seems to be the theme, and, people generally aren't in the data center business, they're doing a lot of other things, and they need the data centers to run their business. With that in mind, what are the new innovations that you see coming up, that you're working on, that you have in place, that're going to be that enabler for this new data center in the cloud? So that customers can say hey, you know, I just want to get all this baggage off my back, I just run my business agile and effectively. Is it the equipment, is it the software, is it the chips? What're you doing there from an innovation standpoint? >> Yeah, what I focused on this year, and I think it's a couple important areas are networking, because there's big cost problems in networking, and we've done a lot of work in that area that we think is going to help customers a lot; the second one's database, because databases, they're complicated, they're the core of all applications, when applications run into trouble, typically it's the database at the core of it, so those are the two areas I covered, and I think that's two of the most important areas we're working right now. >> So James, we've looked back into people that've tried to do this services angle before, networking has been one of the bottlenecks, I think one of the reasons XSBs failed in the '90s, it was networking and security, grid computing, even to today. So what is Amazon fundamentally doing different today, and why now is it acceptable that you can deliver services around the world from your environment? What's different about networking today? >> It's a good question. I think it's a combination of private links between all of the regions, every major region is privately linked today. That's better cost structure, better availability, lower latency, scaling down to the data center level we run all custom Amazon designed gear, all custom Amazon designed protocol stacks. And why is that important? It's because cost of networking is actually climbing, relative to the rest of compute, and so, we need to do that in order to get costs under control and actually continue to be able to draw up costs. Second thing is customers need more networking-- more networking bandwidth per compute right now, it's, East/West is the big focus of the industry, because more bandwidth is required, we need to invest more, fast, that's why we're doing private gear. >> Yeah, I mean, it's some fascinating statistics, it's not just bandwidth, you said you do have up to 25 terabytes per second between nodes, it's latency and jitter that are hugely important, especially when you go into databases. Can you talk about just architecturally, what you do with availability zones versus if I'm going to a Google or a Microsoft, what does differentiate you? >> It is a little bit different. The parts that are the same are: every big enterprise that needs highly available applications is going to run those applications across multiple data centers, that's, so-- The way our system works is you choose the region to get close to your users, or to get close to your customers, or to be within a jurisdictional boundary. From down below the region, normally what's in a region is a data center, and customers usually are replicating between two regions. What's different in the Amazon solution, is we have availability zones within region; each availability zone is actually at least one data center. Because we have multiple data centers inside the same region it enables customers to do realtime, synchronous replication between those data centers. And so if they choose to, they can run multi-region replication just like most high end applications do today, or, they can run within an AZ, synchronous multiplication to multiple data centers. The advantage of that, is it takes less administrative complexity, if there's a failure, you never lose a transaction, where in multi-region replication, it has to be asynchronous because of the speed of light. >> Yeah, you-- >> Also, there's some jurisdictional benefits too, right? Say Germany, for instance, with a new data center. >> Yep. Yeah, many customers want to keep their data in region, and so that's another reason why you don't necessarily want to replicate it out in order to get that level of redundancy, you want to have multiple data centers in region, 100% correct >> So, how much is it that you drive your entire stack yourself that allows you to do this, I think about replication solutions, you used SRDF as an example. I worked for that, I worked for EMC for 10 years, and just doing a two site replication is challenging, >> It's hard. >> A multi site is differently, you guys, six data centers and availabilities on a bungee, you fundamentally have a different way of handling replication. >> We do, the strategy inside Amazon is to say multi-region replication is great, but because of the latency between regions, they're a long way apart, and the reality of speed of light, you can't run synchronous. If data centers are relatively close together in the same region, the replication can be done synchronously, and what that means is if there's a failure anywhere, you lose no transactions. >> Yeah. So, there was a great line you had in your session yesterday, that networking has been anti-Moore's law when it comes to pricing. Amazon is such a big player, everybody watches what you do, you buy from the ODMs, you're changing the supply chain. What's your vision as to where networking needs to go from a supply chain and equipment standpoint? >> Networking needs to be the same place where servers went 20 years ago, and that is: it needs to be on a Moore's law curve where, as we get more and more transistors on a chip, we should get lower and lower costs in a server, we should get lower and lower costs in a network. Today, an ASIC is always, which is the core of the router, is always around the same price. Each generation we add more ports to that, and so effectively we got a Moore's law price improvement happening where that ASIC stays the same price, you just keep adding ports. >> So, I got to jump in and ask ya about Open Compute, last year you said it's good I guess, I'm a fan, but we do our own thing, still the case? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Still the case, okay doing your own thing, and just watching Open Compute which is a like a fair for geeks. >> Open Compute's very cool, the thing is, what's happening in our industry right now is hyper-specialization, instead of buying general purpose hardware that's good for a large number of customers, we're buying hardware that's targeted to a specific workload, a specific service, and so, we're not--I love what happens with Open Compute, 'cause you can learn from it, it's really good stuff, but it's not what we use; we want to target our workloads precisely. >> Yeah, that was actually the title of the article I wrote from everything I learned from you last year was: hyper-specialization is your secret sauce, so. You also said earlier this week that we should watch the mobile suppliers, and that's where service should be in the future, but I heard a, somebody sent me a quote from you that said: unfortunately ARM is not moving quite fast enough to keep up with where Intel's going, where do you see, I know you're a fan of some of the chip manufacturers, where's that moving? >> What I meant with watch ARM and understanding where servers are going, sorry, not ARM, watch mobile and understand where servers is going is: power became important in mobile, power becomes important in servers. Most functionalities being pulled up on chip, on mobile, same thing's happening in server land, and so-- >> What you're sayin' is mobile's a predictor >> Predicting. >> of the trends in the data center, >> Exactly, exactly right. >> Because of the challenges with the form factor. >> It's not so much the form factor, but the importance of power, and the importance of, of, well, density is important as well, so, it turns out the mobile tends to be a few years ahead, but all the same kinds of innovations that show up there we end up finding them in servers a few years later. >> Alright, so James, we've been, at Wikibon have a strong background in the storage world, and David Floyer our CTO said: one of the biggest challenges we had with databases is they were designed to respond to disk, and therefore there were certain kind of logging mechanisms in place. >> It's a good point. >> Can you talk a little bit about what you've done at Amazon with Aurora, and why you're fundamentally changing the underlying storage for that? >> Yeah, Aurora is applying modern database technology to the new world, and the new world is: SSDs at the base, and multiple availability zones available, and so if you look closely at Aurora you'll see that the storage engine is actually spread over multiple availability zones, and, what was mentioned in the keynote, it's a log-structured store. Log-structured stores work very very nicely on SSDs, they're not wonderful choices on spinning magnetic media. So this, what we're optimized for is SSDs, and we're not running it on spinning disk at all. >> So I got to ask you about the questions we're seeing in the crowd, so you guys are obviously doing great on the scale side, you've got the availability zones which makes a lot of sense certainly the Germany announcement, with the whole Ireland/EU data governance thing, and also expansion is great. But the government is moving fast into some enterprises, >> It's amazing. >> And so, we were talking about that last night, but people out there are sayin' that's great, it's a private cloud, the governments implementing a private cloud, so you agree, that's a private cloud or is that a public-- >> (laughing) It's not a private cloud; if you see Amazon involved, it's not a private cloud. Our view of what we're good at, and the advantages cloud brings to market are: we run a very large fleet of servers in every region, we provide a standard set of services in all those regions, it's completely different than packaged software. What the CIA has is another AWS region, it happens to be on their site, but it is just another AWS region, and that's the way they want it. >> Well people are going to start using that against you guys, so start parsing, well if it's private, it's only them then it's private, but there's some technicalities, you're clarifying that. >> It's definitely not a private cloud, the reason why we're not going to get involved with doing private clouds is: product software is different, it's innefficient, when you deliver to thousands of customers, you can't make some of the optimizations that we make. Because we run the same thing everywhere, we actually have a much more reliable product, we're innovating more quickly, we just think it's a different world. >> So James, you've talked a lot that scale fundamentally changes the way you architect and build things; Amazon's now got over a billion customers, and it's got so many services, just adding more and more, Wikibon, actually Dave Vellante, wrote a post yesterday said that: we're trying to fundamentally change the economic model for enterprise IT, so that services are now like software, when Microsoft would print an extra disk it didn't cost anything. When you're building your environment, is there more strain on your environment for adding that next thousand customers or that next big service or, did it just, do you have the substrate built that's going to help it grow for the future? >> It's a good question, it varies on the service. Usually what happens is we get better year over year over year, and what we find is, once you get a service to scale, like S3 is definitely at scale, then growth, I won't say it's easy, but it's easier to predict because you're already on a large base, and we already know how to do it fairly well. Other services require a lot more thought on how to grow it, and end up being a lot more difficult. >> So I got some more questions for ya, go on to some of the personal questions I want to ask you. Looking at this booth right here, it's Netflix guys right there, I love that service, awesome founder, just what they do, just a great company, and I know they're a big customer. But you mentioned networks, so at the Google conference we went to, Google's got some chops, they have a developer community rockin' and rollin', and then it's pretty obvious what they're doin', they're not tryin' to compete with Amazon because it's too much work, but they're goin' after the front end developer, Rails, whatnot, PHP, and really nailing the back end transport, you see it appearing, really going after to enable a Netflix, these next generation companies, to have the backbone, and not be reliant on third party networks. So I got to ask you, so as someone who's a tinkerer, a mechanic if you will of the large scale stuff, you got to get rid of that middleman on the network. What's your plans, you going to do peering? Google's obviously telegraphing they're comin' down that road. Do you guys meet their objective? Same product, better, what's your strategy? >> Yeah, it's a great question. The reason why we're running private links between our regions is the same reason that Google is, it's lower cost, that's good, it's much, much lower latency, that's really good, and it's a lot less jitter, and that's extremely important, and so it's private links, peering, customers direct connecting, that's all the reality of a modern cloud. >> And you see that, and do you have to build that in? Almost like you want to build your own chips, I'd imagine on the mobile side with the phone, you can see that, everyone's building their own chips. You got to have your own network stuff. Is that where you guys see the most improvement on the network side? Getting down to that precise hyper-specialized? >> We're not doing our own chips today, and we don't, in the networking world, and we don't see that as being a requirement. What we do see as a requirement is: we're buying our own ASICs, we're doing our own designs, we're building our own protocol stack; that's delivering great value, and that is what's deployed, private networking's deployed in all of our data centers now >> Yeah, I mean, James I wonder, you must look at Google, they do have an impressive network, they've got the undersea cables, is there anything you, that you look at them and saying: we need to move forward and catch up to them on certain, in certain pieces of the network? >> I don't think so, I think when you look at any of the big providers, they're all mature enough that they're doing, at that level, I think what we do has to be kind of similar. If private links are a better solution, then we're all going to do it, I mean. >> It makes a lot of sense, 'cause it, the impact on inspection, throttling traffic, that just creates uncertainty, so. I'm a big fan, obviously, of that direction. Alright, now a personal question. So, in talking to your wife last night, getting to know you over the years here, and Stu is obviously a big fan. There's a huge new generation of engineers coming into the market, Open Compute, I bring that up because it's such a great initiative, you guys obviously have your own business reasons to do your own stuff, I get that. But there's a whole new culture of engineering coming out, a new home brew computer club is out there forming right now my young son makes his own machines, assembling stuff. So, you're an inspiration to that whole group, so I would like you to share just some commentary to this new generation, what to do, how to approach things, what you've learned, how do you come over, on top of failure, how do you resolve that, how do you always grow? So, share some personal perspective. >> Yeah, it's an interesting question. >> I know you're humble, but, yeah. >> Interesting question. I think being curious is the most important thing possible, if anybody ever gets an opportunity to meet somebody that's the top of any business, a heart surgeon, a jet engine designer, an auto mechanic, anyone that's in the top of their business is always worth meeting 'cause you can always learn from them. One of the cool things that I find with my job is: because it spans so many different areas, it's amazing how often I'll pickup a tidbit one day talking to an expert sailor, and the next day be able to apply that tidbit, or that idea, solving problems in the cloud. >> So just don't look for your narrow focus, your advice is: talk to people who are pros, in whatever their field is, there's always a nugget. >> James a friend of mine >> Stay curious! >> Steve Todd, he actually called that Venn diagram innovation, where you need to find all of those different pieces, 'cause you're never going to know where you find the next idea. So, for the networking guys, there's a huge army of CCIEs out there, some have predicted that if you have the title administrator in your name, that you might be out of a job in five years. What do you recommend, what should they be training on, what should they be working toward to move forward to this new world? >> The history of computing is one of the-- a level of abstraction going up, never has it been the case those jobs go away, the only time jobs have ever gone away is when someone stated a level of abstraction that just wasn't really where the focus is. We need people taking care of systems, as the abstraction level goes up, there's still complexity, and so, my recommendation is: keep learning, just keep learning. >> Alright so I got to ask you, the big picture now, ecosystems out here, Oracle, IBM, these big incumbents, are looking at Amazon, scratching their head sayin': it's hard for us to change our business to compete. Obviously you guys are pretty clear in your positioning, what's next, outside of the current situation, what do you look at that needs to be built out, besides the network, that you see coming around the corner? And you don't have to reveal any secrets, just, philosophically, what's your vision there? >> I think our strategy is maybe a little bit, definitely a little bit different from some of the existing, old-school providers. One is: everyone's kind of used to, Amazon passes on value to customers. We tend to be always hunting and innovating and trying to lower costs, and passing on the value to customers, that's one thing. Second one is choice. I personally choose to run my XQL because I like the product I think it's very good value, some of our customers want to run Oracle, some of our customers want to run my XQL, and we're absolutely fine doing that, some people want to run SQL server. And so, the things that kind of differentiate us is: enterprise software hasn't dropped prices, ever, and that's just the way we were. Enterprise software is not about choice, we're all about choice. And so I think those are the two big differences, and I think those ones might last. >> Yeah, that's a good way to look at that. Now, back to the IT guy, let's talk about the CIO. Scratchin' his head sayin': okay, I got this facilities budget, and it's kind of the-- I talked to once CIO, hey says: I spend more time planning meetings around facilities, power, and cooling, than anything else on innovation, so. They have challenges here, so what's your advice, as someone who's been through a lot of engineering, a lot of large scale, to that team of people on power and cooling to really kind of go to the next level, and besides just saying okay throw some pots out there, or what not, what should they be doing, what's their roadmap? >> You mean the roadmap for doing a better job of running their facilities? >> Yeah, well there's always pressure for density, there's power's a sacred (laughs) sacred resource right now, I mean power is everything, power's the new oil, so, power's driving everything, so, they have to optimize for that, but you can't generate more power, and space, so, they want smaller spaces, and more efficiency. >> The biggest gains that are happening right now, and the biggest innovations that have been happening over the last five years in data centers is mostly around mechanical systems, and driving down the cost of cooling, and so, that's one odd area. Second one is: if you look closely at servers you'll see that as density goes up, the complexity and density of cooling them goes up. And so, getting designs that are optimized for running at higher temperatures, and certified for higher temperatures, is another good step, and we do both. >> So, James, there's such a diverse ecosystem here, I wonder if you've had a chance to look around? Anything cool outside of what Amazon is doing? Whether it's a partner, some startup, or some interesting idea that's caught your attention at the show. >> In fact I was meeting with western--pardon me, Hitachi Data Systems about three days ago, and they were describing some work that was done by Cycle Computing, and several hundred thousand doors-- >> We've had Cycle-- >> Jason came on. >> Oh, wow! >> Last year, we, he was a great guest. >> No, he was here too, just today! >> Oh, we got him on? Okay. >> So Hitachi's just, is showing me some of what they gained from this work, and then he showed me his bill, and it was five thousand six hundred and some dollars, for running this phenomenally big, multi-hundred thousand core project, blew me away, I think that's phenomenal, just phenomenal work. >> James, I really appreciate you coming in, Stu and I really glad you took the time to spend with our audience and come on theCUBE, again a great, pleasurable conversation, very knowledgeable. Stay curious, and get those nuggets of information, and keep us informed. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, James Hamilton, Distinguished Engineer at Amazon doing some great work, and again, the future's all about making it smaller, faster, cheaper, and passing those costs, you guys have a great strategy, a lot of your fans are here, customers, and other engineers. So thanks for spending time, this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, we'll be right back after this short break. 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>> A cube at DMC World twenty fourteen is brought to you by D. M. C. Redefine, see innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing brocade. Say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. >> Welcome back to the Cube. This silken angle TVs live wall to wall Coverage of DMC World twenty fourteen here in the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas. We've got three days to stage is over eighty guests. Lots of practitioners, execs, business leaders got a special segment. I'm bringing you today, bringing onto two thirds of the geek whispers, podcasts, Those in the story for the virtual ization and Claude Communities. No art is to guess. Well, let me introduce it's John Troyer, who's making his debut as the founder of tech reckoning. >> Thanks for having me. >> And we've got Amy Lewis influence marketing from Cisco. Name is your first time on the Cube, so, you know, welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having me on. >> All right, so So, guys, you know, we've been to a lot of conferences way we've hung out with, You know, the various influencers bloggers. It's changed a lot. This is my twelfth year coming M. C World. If you had told me twelve years ago some of things I'd be doing at this show, I wouldn't have believed you. I mean, I was one of the guys in a polo that only got out of out of the office once a year to give a presentation and, you know, talks in people about some cool tak um, and you know, social media is one of those things that, you know turn my career. Eleven. So you know what? Let's have a conversation about what's going on in the industry with kind of community influences and everything. John, maybe you could start us often. You know, Maybe if it leads in tow your new gigs? >> Sure, sure, on one on one, and things have changed. On the other hand, the same dynamics are playing out. Buying the buying cycle has changed. The buying process has changed. Customers are looking much more to their peers and not to traditional media analysts. Marketing folks, they can't find more ads. You can't send out more E mail. So what do you do? You need to get part of the conversation. We've been saying that for five or ten years, that's actually happened. Now the folks that were early on into the blogging space have turned themselves into communicators as well as technologists. We've seen, you know, their careers have have gone and all sorts of interesting places, for instance, you. But I think now that even we could talk about his art Is blogging dead? But I think now we're seeing it. We're seeing social media not as a trade or a practice practice, but simply a tool set that we all use. So that's all I'm saying is it's a It's more of a it spread throughout our organization. Not so much in one tiny niche, right? >> Yeah, Jonah, I love that point. I I I've been preaching for a bunch of years that this is an important skill, something you have to have their wonderful tools. But you've been doing community for a lot longer than Social Media has been around, and, you know, so it's peace, Amy, your influence marketing. What would please way out on this? >> Yeah, I chose the title, actually myself on purpose. To say it's not just social media, think social Media is very important, but like John was saying that to me is a set of tools. They're important platforms or important communications channels, but influencers the people who between the term citizen analysts they are unpaid analyst. But people are very passionate about technology, and they want to write on block and share, really engage their community. That's an important group of people. It's a really a buying center, and we have to find new ways to address them. So community is more important than >> ever. Citizen analysts thought, Let's focus that >> some of the >> people you know, I say some people goto event and they get it, get it, get wined and dined and they get to, you know, write about a bunch of stuff I'm like, you know you're better than journalists, you know, you'll You know you do some really good stuff and sometimes it's a little bit too friendly to the people that are doing it. So you know where do you see the role of kind of the press? You know, the analyst and the influencer? >> It's a great question I've been checking. We need to abstract the or chart. It is. It is a complicated question, but I think the traditional presses really trained and rightfully so in giving us that neutrality. So that is still a very important role. I think the analysts are paid Tio Tio, analyze particular sets, etcetera. They have nation specialty. I think the citizen analyst is interesting because they are what you don't know about the neutrality. But you do know that there are people who roll up their sleeves and really touched the technology. So that becomes a very interesting set because they really care about the technology Kazakh but could become their problem if they don't, you know, raise our voice and sort of engaged with technology and let the community know what, what the new trends are, what they need, what business needs. Our etcetera gives us a really applied version, the PR in the e R outside. >> Don't you want to comment on matter? >> I mean, these are the folks that they lose their jobs if they picked the wrong technology. So they have much more. Their discussions have it. They have more skin in the game. >> Aye, that's right. If you've got the practitioner, you know whether it be the end user sometime times it's the you know channel guy that they do that that's good, You know? What about the people inside the corporations that are also using these? >> I'm super bullish about the use of employees as advocates and evangelists in our community, both for technical education. And for the commercial part of our conversation in the enterprise space, we don't sell solutions with Russia. Your hair's a pressure and very nice calm. Give me a call. We sell it with relationships with people. I've been working on the social media since it existed, I suppose. And what we've seen over and over again is the social channels are really great for getting the word out. But without that personal component, it's like just handing out brochures. So you need your employees out there. You need your employees talking to folks. You need your employees without their representing your brand, just like they would have an event. I've seen that at something. On one hand, it's something that's so trivial that we all agree it's true. On the other hand, I don't. I think a lot of people are just realizing that now. >> So, John, you know, there's some some big companies, you know, creative certification programs to do some of this. There's some companies that just, you know, sign everybody up and, you know, it could be kind of an echo chamber or things like that. You know what? What do you see in these days? To kind of help out. You know the community >> well. There's a lot of software and a lot of programmatic things you could do. Those may be useful in terms of organizing you. It comes down to the people in the culture of the company and help much. You trust your people to go out. I think the best thing we can do is sit up platform for folks to be able to, to communicate. I think that's actually what Amy does really well at Cisco. >> X. It's, um I always talk about influence marketing as being people, platforms in content. And so I agree. I think that we sorted out some of the platform issues as we've learned about social media and grew up with it. I think that we are still working out the people in the content side and what's appropriate, how we can join together and do that and how we can creates a mute platforms may be using the tools of social tio to drive the conversation forward. >> All right. So, I mean, I got one for you. You know, how do we balance the kind of creation of information and kind of the community and fund? I mean, you do a lot of fun event you've got, you know, awful club this week. You've got, you know, bacon, stack and B bacon and bacon. I e I mean, I can't keep track of you, deport vacants and everything. And, you know, there'd be some executives here that would be like that, That social stuff. And they're playing games and things like that. So how do we balance kind of attic business value and greeting, you know, value to the community. And, you know, having fun in building community. >> No, it's a great question. A couple of years ago, I got a text in the middle of the night that said, Please explain to me how the bacon is a marketing play. Please explain this and you know, I need a power point slide. So if you've never had to explain, be bacon on the power points, I for that challenge out to everyone. But I think in the last couple of years people started to see it more and more as we're, uh, we're similar to the sales role, and that's how we've sort of changed the language. So I perform a sales like function, except I don't carry a quota. So it is about building the relationship like John was saying, and it is about balancing fun with your intent. So I think that if you create a fun environment, if you create an openness and willingness to listen, then the good things will follow. So you form the relationships of people. You open up their ability to create content with you because they don't feel under attack. They're ready to share. And again, it's it's kind of a magical formula. Be nice and create opportunity. >> Yeah, so >> I think we'll part of it's a generational ship. I think part of it a generational shift and part of it is a temperamental she So tradition again, going back to sales traditional enterprise sales. You might go and play golf with somebody, cause that's what you enjoy doing for our kind of geeks. Our golf is eating bacon and talking about the duplication strategies, right? That's where we're having the most fun. So it's It's just it's same sort of thing. Just a shift in generations. >> Yeah, I wonder if you know what, what role this community help in kind of careers. You know, I think you know, we're talking so much of these shows about, you know, if your storage admin. If you're networking admin and you know you're down there, you know, configuring Luns or setting up the land, you know, we're going to have a job in a couple of years because automation is gonna change. You know, how much does the community help in kind of those career paths and education? >> So, John, I think we should interview stew on this one. Should we have the geek whispers takeover. I think this is your great example. You've talked about you, you were on a career path and we hear this a lot, and when you raise your hand to volunteer, we sort of jokingly call the spokes uniforms. You both really enjoy the technology and like to communicate about it. When you raise your hand and make yourself known to the community, to your employers, to the world at large, it gives you different opportunities. And I think I don't think you go into technology really without wanting to have an evolving, exciting career. So I think that he's becoming proficient in these tools. Joining your community is an opportunity to learn from your peers to get back to your peers and to raise her profile and open yourself up to the possibility of a new opportunity or a new idea or different engagement. A new way to learn >> In today's business environment, communication is a key part of whatever you do, even if you're the guy sitting there configuring the lungs, because if you're not communicating with your teams and the application teams and the storage of network virtualization team, you're not going to succeed so I think that's an important part of it, right? Being a communicator, absolutely critical and art. Barney. >> All right, so either one of you feel free to answer, but I think back to my early days, you know, two thousand eight, I was so excited when I got invited to a couple of conferences. A blogger, you could kind of get a pass, and I would, You know, ten might take my own vacation time and usually spend that on expenses because my employer at the time didn't get it. It was this innovation conference in, like, in a New York City with four hundred people, and it was like, kind of amazing. I've seen people go to B m world on their own dime where they can get a pass. I mean, you know, it's great to see when you when you got the passion. So I guess the question I wanted to ask is, you know, with companies today, who should they be inviting? How do they do it? You know? You know. Is it you know, the blogger Or is it the, you know, empty Alexis co expert? You know, bm where be expert, you know, What? How's that? How's that changing? Or is it >> changing? Well, I think what you've seen happen over the years is something that was a little more unstructured, which was a kind of blogger relations program. Working with both customers partners, employees in your ecosystem has turned into something a little more formal. We created the V Expert program in two thousand nine to formalize what we were already doing. It's an analogy to the endless relations, press relations, investor relations, sorts of programs. So I mean, it's it's it's a little more buttoned up. It's a little more of a membership thing, but we I know both of DMC and BM where and it Cisco, Francisco champions to try to embrace all the folks that are out there blogging. I think you know, if you're a market or you need to make sure that you're keep your eyes open and you don't just talk to the people that you've gathered in your living room, Bye. You know, a lot of it's pretty easy if you're enthusiastic about technology, if you're engaged with the technology, if you put some effort into it, it's actually pretty easy to get involved with one of these programs there, there, there and there, there, fourth of people in them right there. They're not there to say the glory of the emcee and glory of Cisco and glory of'em, where they're there to help you with your career. They're there to give you tools to give you networking and, you know, hopefully get you to places like this. So I encourage everybody that that's interested in starting, you know, go ahead and get started. It's easier than you think to get involved. >> I agree with that, and I think that way want to be almost like an airline program that you'd actually want to participate. And it's sort of my job like this is a customer service activity, and I often talk about if you talk about the large pool of influencers. Maybe they haven't identified yet. Or maybe they prefer to stay independent. Or maybe they do have interest in a lot of different technologies. Me for them to engage in one of these programs, that stolen, important set of people that you have to deal with the mark, you know, and again set up these blogger days have longer briefings. But like John was saying, When you have the group of people that you name and give it a program name, this is a little bit of inside baseball if we don't talk about giving program a name and funding can follow. So if you're working in a corporate marketing environment, it's really important to explain to people that marketing structure behind what you're doing and when you treat them as a class, it gives you some advantage is you can scale out a little easier. You can provide more assets to those individuals, and it frees you up to Dio. What I love to do, which is is to really engage with those individuals and create content with them. So, >> yeah, so how is engagement these days? You know, I think back, you know, that you know, ten years ago, you talk. You know, one percent of the community would, you know, be doing almost all the contribution. Ten percent might be a little active and everybody else's lurker. You know, when we founded Wicked Bond Day, Volonte actually has on his business card that he's a one percenter which goes back to you know it. It's, you know, the one percent that causes all the trouble, the one percent that causes all all of the commotion. So, you know, with this wave, I mean, we were founded off of, you know, economics in crowd sourcing and everything else, and the Cube is all about, you know, sharing information. We put it all out there. We want everybody to contribute and, you know, give that feedback. You know, How are we along now? You know that that journey to get more people involved. >> I think the opportunity is there more than ever. I think you're right. I mean, there's always gonna be a percentage of people who want to raise her hand, the class that want to give up their PTO to go to a conference that that had this other life they just can't help themselves. And so in some ways it's finding the most impassioned and giving them opportunities. But I think that with the platforms and the scale, there is a greater opportunity for people. They don't want to start their own block. For instance, one of the things we do it Cisco champions is allowed people to guess, block or allow them to come post a podcast. So I think there are more more ways to and there, you know, that's one example. There's lots of other groups that provide people again a little bit a dose of it so they might not want to run a full media company on their own. They don't wanna build Q, but they want to participate. And I think that we have so many more opportunities for them to do that that we're seeing group. >> We're seeing platform ships over the years. I think we as technologists human beings have a tendency to forget their past relatively quickly, as people have moved from the MySpace world to the Facebook Twitter world. I think actually, we're headed for I don't call it I don't want to call it post Facebook, but it certainly is. A multi platform world made >> it just like >> it's a multi device world. We're not opposed PC world in that. I think you're seeing the rise of more specialized communities. They come back again from from our from our origins back ten or twenty years ago. I think we're seeing that people want more deeper engagement along the company. A lot of the report building and kind of conversation. And hey, how are you? Goes on on Twitter. But I think people are really looking for a place where they can have a better conversation, more interaction, more lasting death that might not be on their own. Blogger in their own kind of indie web sort of style, roll your own block. But there are more and more platforms that people are making available for this kind of connection again. What was once niche eventually permeates the whole >> yes. So, you know, the concern I have is it's tough because it is so dispersed right now, you know? You know, I love Twitter, you know? Hi, I'm stew, you know, on Twitter. And I know you guys are big on it, too. And I don't love the multi platform discussion. You know, I always love when you dropped that kind information on the community. But, you know, how >> do we How do we get that >> depth? It's one of the things I always worry about is, you know, people will read the headline and, you know, just react at it and, you know, they might even share it a bunch, but they haven't read it. Uh, so how do we get that deeper engagement? Deeper understanding. I mean, you know, I always say, you know, the I'm too busy is a poor excuse because, you know, you know Michelangelo and I'd sign that many hours in the day way we did and, you know, sure they didn't have their phone buzzing all over >> the place. >> I actually think we should do less. Not more. I think I think too much information, too many channels, too many corporate channels, too many personal channels, too much bad content. The world does not need more crappy content. So whether you're a individual, blogger or marketer, I'd say just turn the dial back a little bit. Did work on better, longer pieces that add more? I think that's the only way that we can shift the conversation. >> Yeah, long for love it. Oh, no, absolutely. I still read so >> well. It's a curatorial function as well, that we have to be responsible. And that's yet one more way people can participate. We see people rise and in the community because they're really great curator Sze, because they syndicate the content in ways are interesting to others because time is of a value so that becomes a real asset. And the skill is Well, >> yeah, great. Great point. Could you know, so many times I'm like I really like to do a thousand word post on this, but, you know, sometimes all I'll come out of this show and take, you know, I did a year ago. I did it. I didn't article on the federation. You know, the ZPM were pivotal and coming out of the show, I've got a lot of new data, and I could really quickly take some photos. I've done. Takes some of the notes. I take some of the tweets and, you know, put together an order. Won't take me as long. I mean, I'll probably do it on the plane ride home. So what I wanna ask next is, you know, you guys see a lot of things out there. What coolest thing you're seeing either at a at a conference or event or you know what? What? What's catching, right? What? What's interesting? Done. >> There's a whole new side out there called Tech, right? I don't know what's cool out there again. I'm seeing multi channel multi, a lot of experiments. There's some cool stuff going on with the indie web. There's I mean, everything is mobile. I don't know. There's just a lot of places. It >> sounds like you Let's give the plug. Integrity has finally cool things and, you know, solid. But something >> like that tech reckoning is a site that's gonna bring. It's an independent site. It's not associate with any vendor. It's going to bring some of the community and enterprise community together to talk about some of these things about Where is it going as a whole? Where's technology going, where our career is going to try to help us get to whatever this you know, it is a service. Third platform, Whatever you wanna call it, where the heck were going? It looks pretty interesting, and it looks like it isn't gonna be quite the same thing. So we're trying to bring together a set of people and just tackle some of those problem and also work together and collaborate. It's so much easier with open source with cloud. With all the tools we have available, it's so cheap and easy to build new pieces of technology, not just a type of each other words online, but to actually build stuff that I'm very excited about. The power taking going far. This from open source, right? Taking the power of people to come together and build cool new stuff. That's what I would like to. >> Still, I'm just angry that you scooped Matt and I on getting to interview John first about >> tech recognition. So, Amy, you you do some cool things that some of events we talk about, the waffle bacon, you What have you seen out there that that's kind of interesting? Or, you know, how do you find some of the cool new ideas? >> Yeah, I think you always I'm working with a really talented events team right now. And I think one of the things I've seen them sort of transform is that social is not other, you know? And we're seeing the social and this concept of community permeate and really think about our audience to really engage that core base, those those tech enthusiasts, and to see what you can do to in engage them. So I'm saying it in real life and in these community platforms. So I think that's been one of the other great trends is watching people band together and various kinds of consortiums. I won't name names, but there's a few folks outlook community. We're seeing a lot of this happen where they're sort of grouping together, and they're saying if they pull their resource is what happens, they might be able to gather enough money to go to a conference or to fund a buddy or to get a hotel room that they've got extra spaces somebody can crash. So I'm saying it's very cool, sort of stitching together opportunity and working together to learn more. So again, the combination of the platforms, using the technology and then in real life connection. >> All right, so I've been asking all the questions here. So before we wrap up, you know, Amy, anything you want, Johnny, when as me, John same, we throw it open. When Whenever >> you first signed up for your Twitter account, did you think it would lead you here because you have the best Twitter >> account? No, actually, a friend of mine for me and Steve Todd, who was blogging before I was, and he said, You know, when there's trepidation when you're gonna get published and you never know where it leads. And we were talking about this after he and I were on the stage at Radio City Music Hall right after Bill Clinton had been on because they brought the bloggers down when we were there. And it's like, Come on, you know, I'm, you know, I'm an engineer by training, you know, I've done. You know, I've done some sales. I've done engineering. I've done you no operations. Technologist is hard. So you know, some of the places the people I've met. I mean, if you just reach out to people, it still, even though there's so many people on Twitter, you know, the people that right and our authors and bloggers, If you comment or you reach out to them, a lot of them reach back. I mean, you know, I still amazed at some of the people I've met get to rub elbows with. No, just just have had a blast with him. So >> get another one. So do you think unicorns can be trained? Do you think people have to be born with the skill set, Or do you think you can be a uniformed rancher? >> No, I think I think I think they could be trained. You know, it's absolutely it's Ah, it's a tough skill set. I mean, you know, doing video is not easy. First couple of times you do it. It's different there's there's all these muscles. You know, Writing is one of those things that you know. I thought I was an okay writer, but hadn't done a lot of it. They're things you do. So try it out. And that thing I tell you, you got to stick with it for a while. I thought Twitter was pretty stupid. First Go on it. But, you know, I stuck on it for another six months and have some fun with it. No, here we are six years later and you know it is a lot and, you know, blocking of writing and blogging and everything else you know all over. I >> like the muscle memory idea. >> It's hard. You were on camera, have remember not to scratch my face. Strange. He'll set, I ask. I actually, I'm seeing a lot of interest in short form video. I know the kids are all doing it. I mean, obviously, we're doing it here. You do it. It's part of your practice. But in talking with people about our new activities, it's just so easy to take a chair. I think that's actually, even though it's been coming up for years, I think where I think that's an interesting thing >> on all right now, I'll give one of those inside tips videos. Great. Some people don't like to watch video. Yeah, broadcaster great. Some people don't like to listen to him, you know, writing's great. Some people won't read. So you know what? One of the early lessons I had is when I was, you know, being a, you know, active member on standard evangelizing of solution. I did it everywhere it you know that give presentations that shows you put it up on slide chair. You do you two videos, you blogged about it. You talk to everybody, you bet that you can everywhere. And you know, it just permeates out there. It could be a bunch of works and then there's tools that are out there. >> They're all connected events, right? I've discovered recently, and I can't believe I just realized this. But it was with the conversation with Amy on our Christmas broadcast that even though I've been part of an online group for years, I'm part of digital marketing for BM. Where for years, Uh, actually, most of my work. Half of my work is off line having my workers meeting people in person, getting to meet them and connecting that online and offline. And the synergy there is just is immense. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, other than the keynotes, my phone stays in my pocket for the most time. Unless I'm going between events. It's the in real life and nearly getting to know things. I was joking, You know, Twitter went away. Tomorrow might be a little sad, but I can connect the most. All those people, we got him on LinkedIn, Facebook and, you know, email. I still use something. Don't taking their holds. Absolutely. So you know, to wrap. I guess if you want to, just You know what people find more on your podcast. Find your website. You know Amy, Like it start? Well, >> where >> are Equus? Versace, of course. Geek hyphen whispers dot com on way, published every week. So give us a listen. See what you think. And I'm >> Matthew Brender. Sorry you couldn't join this time, but it's a lot as it were. A DMC world and you two are here in Matthew's. >> It's hard. We're going toe to toe. It's true. We're going to record with him like it's a Max headroom figure on a yes tomorrow, so and also I'm on Twitter as calms mention and I block under that same constantly dot com girls have engineers. That's true. I have engineers, unplug dot com as well. And now sixty second Tech, the short first on the popcorn version >> and I. J. Troia on Twitter and tech reckoning dot com. I went inside. >> Hey, Amy, John. Thanks so much. We We love taking the podcast. Inception. Sile inside the Cube. Look forward to seeing you lost events connecting with the community and everybody. Definitely check out their stuff. I'm at stew on Twitter with yvonne dot org's is where most of my articles go, and, of course, silicon angled on TV is where you can find all the video. Thanks for joining us. We will be back with the rest of DMC world covered.