>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. Welcome back to Las Vegas. You're watching the Cube's coverage of UI Path Forward. Five. We reach cruising altitude on day two. Christina Seacrest is here. She's the process Artificial intelligence and automation GPS automation leader at ey. And Bob PCIs, executive director for Intelligent Automation for the state of Tennessee. Folks, welcome to the cube. Thank you for Adam. >>Good >>To have you. Okay, I don't know if I messed up that title, Christina, but it's kind of interesting. You got process, you got ai, you got automation, you got gps. What's your role? >>I have a lot of rules, so thank you for that. Yeah, so my focus is first and foremost automation. So how do you get things like UI path into our clients, but also I focus specifically in our government and public sector clients. So sled specifically. So state local education. So that's why I'm here with the state of Tennessee. And then we also like to take it beyond automation. So how do you bring an artificial intelligence and all the technologies that come with that. So really full end to end spectrum of >>Automation. So Bob, when you think about the sort of the, the factors that are driving your organization of, how did you describe that, Those sort of external factors that inform your strategy. What, what's, what are the catalysts for how you determine to deploy technology? >>Well, it was primarily that we know tendency has a tendency to provide good customer service, but we want to get to a great status best in class, if you will. And we had an external advisory review where it said, Hey, you know, we could make automation to improve our customer experience. And so that was like a directive of the, the state leaders to go across the board and automate all processes statewide, starting with the 23 executive agencies. >>So where's the focus from that standpoint? Is it on just providing better interfaces to your constituents, your customers? Is it cutting costs or you actually have more budget to invest? Kind of a combination of >>Those? Yeah, so it's, it's really both qualitative and quantitative, right? So quantitative is where we're able to reduce hours and therefore we can redirect people to more less mundane work, if you will. And then qualitative is where we're able to reduce the errors, improve data quality, reduce cycle time for our citizens, you know, when they're making requests, et cetera. So it's, I think it's a combination of both of those quantitative and qualitative metrics that we are mandated in, in micromanaged, quite frankly to, to bring, make those >>Numbers. So I'm from Massachusetts, when I go to a a mass.gov website, I say, all this was done in the 1990s and you could just see where the different stovepipes were, were. But then every now and then you'll hit one and you'll say, Wow, okay, this is up to, it's such a great experience. And then the flip side of that is you want your employees to be happy and not have to do all this mundane work so you can retain the best people. You don't have to. So you're living that in, in state and, and local. So where did you start your automation journey? What role did EY play? Let's go. Yeah, >>Sure. So I, I, I think the thought for process automation was probably three or four years ago, but then we started the program about 18 months ago and there was a lot of, let's say behind the scenes work before we could bring EY in, you know, like what resources was I gonna have in, in the state that were gonna help me address all of the agency simultaneously, right? Cuz normally you'll see a project that'll do be more siloed across the state and say, we're gonna do this agency, we're gonna do this division. Well, you have 40 other agencies that are, you know, the momentum is it's just gonna fall, it wayside. So how we looked at it was let's blanket it and go across all 23 agencies at the same time, you know, identify common processes that are used across 40 divisions, for example, right? >>So, so what we basically did is we procured the software, you know, did the contracts, and then it was really about, I designed, I'm gonna say a multistream approach where they were, we could run multiple work streams, independent define all the architectures, required dev tests, production, the disaster recovery at the same time in parallel developed the center of excellence, the operation model, the processes, methodologies. And the third one was, let's go out to a few divisions, business administration, health, you know, health, human resources, and be able to do a process inventory to see what was there. And then based on that, there's all this theory of well let's do a proof of concept. Let's do a proof of technology, let's do apply. Well, the bottom line is rpa technology's been around for a long time. It's proven there's nothing to prove. But really what was important to prove before we decided to go, you know, full tilt was, you know, develop a proof of perceived business value. >>Are we gonna bring in the, the business value, the hours and the qu qualitative metrics that is expected by our ex executive team, The leadership, we were able to do that, you know, with the help of help of ey, we built out the prototypes and we got the green light to go forward, got ey to start, and then we just basically went pedal to the metal. We had our foundation already defined. We built up the architecture in less than one to two months. Now, in, in a public sector or private sector, it's just not heard of, right? But we have a tendency with EYs technical team, myself, we look around the, the road around the rock instead, the rock in the road, right? So we ended up coming up with a very unique, very easy to easy to handle architecture that was very scalable. And then were able to hit the ground running and deploy in production by December where head of >>Was EY involved in the whole, you know, dev test production, dr. Center of excellence, the, the process inventory or did you bring them in? Did you kind of do that internally then bring EY in for the proof of >>Value? EY was actually awarded the contract for soup to nuts, basically the first phase, which was those four work streams I told you about. And they worked with myself and the state of Tennessee infrastructure architecture teams. We needed to get these things defined and signed off the architecture so we could expedite getting them built out. And then they, and they basically ran all four work streams, you know, the process, inventory, the prototype, the, the proof of perceived business value, the building out the center of excellence, working with myself. And, and this wasn't just us in a, a vacuum, we ended up having to, I mean, I could do the strategy, I could do the technology and I could said the roadmap and all the good stuff, but we had to actually meet with a lot of the state or tendency organizations on change management. How do we end up putting this process or an automation in the middle of the, the normal traditional process, right? So there was a lot of interaction there and getting their feedback and then tweaking our operational model based on feedback from the state of Tennessee. So it was all very collective collaborative. I think that would be the keyword is collaborative and then building out everything. So then, and then we ended up going to the next way where they knew so much and we were, we had such a tight timeframe that we continued with ey. >>So Christina, Bob mentioned center of excellence a couple of times in the state of Tennessee, but then beyond state of Tennessee, other organizations you've worked with in this space, what's the relationship between center of excellence and this thing we've been hearing about over the last couple of days, the citizen developer has that been, has, has, has that been leveraged in the state of Tennessee? Bob, have you seen that leveraged in other places? Christina? What's that relationship look like? >>Yeah, so we don't leverage that, that model yet we have centralized model and there's reasons for that. So we don't end up having maverick's, runoff runoffs have one off, have, you know, have a a UI path version or down this division or have another RPA tool in another division, right? So then all of a sudden we're, we have a maintenance nightmare. Manageability nightmare. So we basically, you know, I I I negotiate an ELA with UI path, so therefore if anyone wants to go do another automation on another division, or they would basically follow our model, our design, our coe, our quality gates. We we're the gatekeepers to bring into production. >>Got it. Now, yeah. Now Christina, what's your perspective? Because I can imagine Nashville and Memphis might have very different ideas about a lot of things. Yeah. Little Tennessee reference there, but what, what, what about what, what about other places are you, are you seeing the citizen developer leveraged in, in some kinds of places more than others or >>What? Yeah. Yeah. And that's part of, because of the foundation we're building. Yeah. So we laid, you know, when, when Bob talks about the first phase of eight weeks, that was amazingly fast, even in that's ridiculous. Spoke about it to say you're gonna lay these four foundations. I was excited, like, I was like, wow, this, this is a very serious client. They wanna go fast and they wanna get that momentum, but the AUM was laid out so we could propel ourselves. So we are at 40 automations right now. We're in the works of creating 80 more automations in this next year. We'll be at 120 really quickly. The AUM is critical. And I will say at a client, I've, I've worked with over 50 clients on automation programs. The way state of Tennessee treats the aom and they abide by it, it is the living document of how you go and go fast. Got it. And the one thing I would say is it's also allowed us to have such immense quality. So I always talk about you put in forward, you put in another 80, we're at 98% uptime on all our automations, meaning they don't go down. And that's because of the AOM we set up. And the natural progression is going to be how do you take it to citizen developer? How do you take it to, we call, you know, process automation plus, >>But methodically, methodically, not just throwing it out at the beginning and, and hoping the chaos >>Works. Exactly. Exactly. And >>The ratio of of bots to automations, is that one to one or you have automation? Oh no, the single bot is doing multiple. So how many bots are you talking about? >>We're doing, Bob, you're gonna answer this better than I will, but the efficiency is amazing. We've been pushing that. >>So our ratio now, cause we have a high density architecture we put in is four bots, excuse me, four processes. The one bot and four bots, The one virtual machine EC two server. Right? So it's four to one, four to one. Now what we're going to get by next summer, we'll do more analysis. We'll probably get the six to one, six to one that's made serious shrinkage of our footprint from a machine, you know, management perspective from 60 down to seven right now we're gonna add the next chunk. We add another 80 automations in FIS gear 24. We're only gonna add two more bot, two more servers. Right? So that's only 10 running like close to 200 bucks. >>And, and is doing this on prem in the cloud? >>No, our, the architecture's fully >>Oh, cloud based >>Ct. Yeah. So we use UiPath SAS model. Yeah. Right. So that handles the orchestrator, the attended bots, all the other tooling you need automation hub, process minor et etc. Etc. Cetera. And then on the state side in aws we have, we use unattended bots, cert bots that have to go down into the legacy systems, et cetera. And they're sitting on EC two instances. >>Was there, was there a security not hole that you had to get through internally? What was that like? >>No, actually we, we, we were lock and step with the security team on this. I mean, there are some standards and templates and you know, what we had to follow, you know, but they're doing an assessment every single release, they do assessments on little bots, what systems it's activating or are accessing, et cetera. The data, because you have fedra data of FTI data, you know, in the public sector to make sure we're not touching it. >>Do you guys golf? >>I do, yeah. Not Well, yes, >>If you mean I I like golf but not don't golf well, but so you know what, what a mulligan is. If you had a Mulligan right, for the state of Tennessee, what'd you learn? What would you do differently? You know, what are some of the gotchas you see maybe Christina in, in other customers and then maybe specifically state of Tennessee, >>Right? I would say, you know, it is the intangibles. So when we talk about our clients that go fast and go big, like state of Tennessee, it's because that, that we call it phase zero that gets done that Bob did. It's about making sure you've got the sponsorship. So we've got executive sponsorship all the way up. You've got amazing stakeholder engagement. So you're communicating the value of what we're trying to do. And you're, you're showing them the value. We have been really focused on the return on investment and we'll talk a little bit about that, but it's how do you make sure that when you do, you know, states are different with those agencies, you have such an opportunity to maximize return on investment if you do it right, because you're not talking about automation in one agency, you're talking it across multiple agencies. We call that the multiplier effect. And that's huge. And if you understand that and how to actually apply that, the value you get is amazing. So I, I don't, I can't say there's a mulligan here, Bob, you may think of some, I know on other clients, if you don't line up your stakeholders and you don't set the expectations early on, you meander and you may get five, six automations in over the year. You know, when I go to clients and say, we're doing 40, we're doing 80, they're like, >>Wow, that's the, but that's the bottom line. Gotcha. Is if you, if you want to have an operational impact and have multiple zeros, you gotta go through that process that you said up front. >>Exactly. A >>Anything you do differently, Bob? >>Well, I I what I do differently, I mean, I think, I mean we, we did get executive sponsorship, you know, and in one area, but we still have to go out to all the 23 agencies and get, and bring awareness and kind of like set the hook to bring 'em in, right? Bring 'em to the, to the, to the lake. Right. And, and I think if, if it was more of a blanket top down, getting every agency to agree to, you know, in investigate automation, it would've been a lot easier. So we're, we're, we're getting it done. We've gone through 13 agencies already and less than a year, all of our releases are sprinkling across multiple agencies. So it's not like a silo. I'll look at that. Everyone at every agency is being impacted. So I think that's great. But I, I think our, our Mueller now is just trying to make sure we have enough backlog to do the next sprints. >>Is it, you know, the ROI on these initiatives is, is, is so clear and so fast. Is it self-funding? Is there gain sharing or do you just give business, give money back to the state and have to scramble for more? Do you get to, you know, get a lick off that cone? >>Unfortunately we don't, but I, I, I try to see if we could get some property like, nah, we don't do that. It's all cost, cost based. But, but our ROI is very attractive, I think for, for doing a whole state, you know, transformation. I think our ROI is three and a half to four years. Right. And that's pretty mind blowing. Even if you look at private sector or, I, I think some of the, the key things which people are noticing, even though we're in public sector, we're we are very nimble. This project is extremely nimble. We've had people come in, exactly, we need this, so we're gonna get penalized. Okay, knock it out in four hours, four days. Right? So it's that nimbleness that you just don't hear of even in private sector or public sector. And we're just able to do that for all the collaboration we do across ey, across myself and across all the other organizations that I, that I kind of drag along or what have, >>What do you, what do you, do you see any limits to the opportunities here? I mean, is this a decade long opportunity? Is you have that much runway >>Or that's just not my dna, so we're gonna, we're gonna probably do it like in four years, but Well, when >>You say do it, I mean, will you be done at that point? Or do you see the weight, >>Look at, you know, we could boil the ocean and I think this is one of the reasons why we're successful is we could boil the ocean and and be, it will be 10 attended 20 year program. Yeah. Okay. Or we looked at it, we had some of EY guys look at it and say, I said, what's the 25 80 rule? Meaning, you know, give me, So if we had 500 processes, tell me how many processes will gimme 80% of the hours. And it was 125, it was a 25 80 rule. I said, that's what we're doing it, we're doing, we're gonna do the 80% of the hours quantifiably. Now when we're done with that pass, then we'll have those other ones that are bringing 20% of the hours, that's when we might be bringing citizens in. That's what we're bringing state workers in. But at that same time, we will be going back in the wave and doing advanced ai. Right. Or advance ia, in other words. So right now we do rpa, ocr, icr, but you know, there's NL ml nps, there's virtual agents and stuff. So that's like the wave we're gonna do through the ones we've already gone through. Got it. Right. So it'll probably be a two or three wave or iterations. >>Cool. Guys, thanks so much for coming into the cube. Great story. Really appreciate you taking us through it. Thank you so much for having us. You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson. The Dave ante. We back at UI path forward five from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Keep it right there.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are theCUBE. We are the leader in live tech coverage. I'm joined by Landon Cook. He is a director of Customer Service for the State of Tennessee. It's your first time on theCUBE. You're going to live it. >> Okay, great, I hope so. Brand new. >> So, you're a director of Customer Service, before the cameras were rolling, we were talking. Does every state have such a department? >> Not exactly, and even in our department, the idea of customer service being a focal point and the creation of an office for us, it's all brand new. So, my office of customer service didn't even exist until five years ago, and I've had one predecessor in that time. And this all came from a new focus and state government on the Customer Service Delivery Model. And usually we had been focused on federal rules and regulations, audit findings, always being good stewards of taxpayers dollars, but service delivery hadn't come from the mouth of the governor, usually itself. So, this is all pretty new for us, and from peers I talk with in other areas, I may have a contact who is maybe the lead of customer service in their area, but the idea of an office that exclusively exists to improve customer service throughout our department, and eventually throughout the state, I believe we're in new territory here. >> So this is really the baby of your governor, Bill Haslam, who has really said he wanted, what was it, Customer Focus Government. So what does that mean? >> So, Customer Focus Government started right after Governor Haslam came to office, in 2011. The idea behind it, he created an initiative, and he stated that our goal was to provide the best possible customer service, at the lowest possible cost. And again, that may not seem that new in many industries, but in state government, state operations, that was kind of ground breaking. And that's what's led to us talking, actually, about the customer experience, the agent experience, and how can we actually redefine customer service in government? And my department, we are one of 47 state agencies. In my department, I talked just briefly about the history, going back there five years, and you see this slowly popping up in all these different departments, and the idea is that we're all going to, at some point, be able to come together and deliver customer service as a state, instead of as each individual department. We're actually going to be able to share the scope of services, and really tailor service delivery to each citizen's need through a log in portal, there's all sorts of stuff we talk about now that's brand new, I'm sorry. >> So it's helping citizens do their citizenship duties. So this is helping them register to vote, registering at the DMV, getting fishing licenses, building permits, that kinds of thing. So, how do you do it? How do you service now? >> So, we're babies, here. So ServiceNow is, the new CSM solution, for the entire enterprise, for the state of Tennessee. My department, the Department of Human Services, we are the pilot agency for all those 47 I described. And we're about seven months in, so it's all been pretty fresh for us. But how this works right now, is we're using it primarily for inquiry management, phone calls, emails, web forms and chat, things people typically think of as customer service. And so, what we're doing with service now, and we started very carefully, very small, we had a very tiny pilot to start with, but once we launched, after October, we very quickly realized that ServiceNow was so collaborative and cooperative with us, and they were just as engaged in our success as we were, that we were building a partnership with CSM. It's kind of new to ServiceNow, too, right? So, it was new to us, new to them, and we're really kind of intertwining and growing together here. Even though we're using it, just now, for inquiry management and typical customer service delivery, once our department has it fully integrated through all of our various, we have 12 divisions just within our department, once we have it integrated there, we're going to take that model, and we're going to go to other state agencies. We've actually already had, there are three other state agencies that are probably going to be joining on board, if they haven't already. This has been a very fast standup for us. And we're going to, eventually it's going to go from, "Well, wow, DHS delivers great customer service," and then instead, DHS is partnering with the Department of Health to deliver customer service to people who need it. And we'll start, slowly, just putting everyone together so in the future citizens of Tennessee can just ask for assistance with something, and the state knows what they need, and the state knows how to deliver it, and can do all that assignment and sharing in the responsibilities behind the scenes, through ServiceNow. >> Anything you can do to improve the DMV experience. So, I mean, that is the thing. You're trying to make people's lives easier, better, simpler, more streamlined, but what was Haslam's goal? What was his impetus for starting this? >> You know, that's actually a hard one for me to say. I've gathered that, you know, he came from a corporate background. I think he had a different perspective on customer service than what is typical of state government. So he brought something new along with all of his prior experience. And I think he was the first who really made it a priority, because I think he understood that the expectation of the customer is different nowadays, and it's different today than it was yesterday and last year, and it's always growing and changing. And people of my generation, and the generation following me, they're always expecting something to be simpler, faster, and more based on their needs, right? And we, state agencies, have been so slow to react, we still use a log of legacy systems, before we launched with ServiceNow, all of our inquiry management was through Excel spreadsheets and Outlook emails. Those are great tools, but their not designed for CSM. And so, we had done a really deep dive within DHS and within state government, to look at okay, where does customer service need to be focused on? Is it the people? It's not the people, we found out very quickly we have passionate people in the state of Tennessee. It's not the processes, because people are doing what they can, but we needed a tool. So, with Governor Haslam's initiative, and our understanding that we had to find a tool to better deliver service, we came on to ServiceNow, just a year ago. So, I've been smiling ever since. I feel it in my face. >> You're a good advertisement. So, what are some of the improvements that you have seen? >> Even when we were doing just our pilot phase, we launched on October 2nd, and I was talking with a lot of people from ServiceNow then, and from the governor's office, and they said, "Try "to get a snapshot of the before, "and be sure to compare it with the snapshot of afterwards." So I figured two months would be actually sufficient, and we were still in our kind of test and pilot stages, but we knew pretty quickly we wanted to continue on with ServiceNow. So, the two months prior, we were averaging inquiry assignment time, so if you filled out an application or you submitted an inquiry to my unit, the Office of Customer Service, the amount of time it would take to get from the time you submitted it, to a person in the field, or in program, who could actually help with it, that was taking about 36 hours average. Some were faster, some were slower, some reached up to three days, and that's not even a resolution. Sometimes that's just for us to even acknowledge that we got it, that someone's working on it. Afterwards, I looked at those two months following, so October and November, and we were at like eight or nine minute average. And it's because, we knew we wanted something enterprise wide, but we didn't quite anticipate the difference that workflow management would provide us. So all the parts that normally were all these handoffs, and I looked at it last Friday, it was 100 seconds. You know, we've entered new measurement criteria, every time I go back and look at it. >> So it's lightening speed, lightening fast changes. >> Yes, and our resolution time on this has come right on board along side that. We've cut it down to about 30% of what it used to be. We're able to just do our jobs faster, so we can get back to what people coming to DHS to do is, they come here to serve, they come here to try to help people, and this has taken away all that administrative responsibility, so we can do what we're actually good at. >> Well, we're going to look forward to hearing what it is, next year at Knowledge19. Thanks so much for joining us, Landon it was great having you on theCUBE >> I appreciate it >> I'm Rebecca Knight. We'll have more from ServiceNow Knowledge18, and theCUBE's live coverage just after this. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Live on the floor in San Francisco for AWS Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Here for the next two days getting all the action back in person. We're at AWS re:Invent, a few months ago. Now we're back, events are coming back and we're happy to be here with theCUBE. Bring all the action, also virtual, we have a hybrid cube. Check out theCUBE.net, siliconangle.com for all the coverage. After the event we've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, Director of Solutions Architecture with Innovation Solutions, the booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, I'm glad to be here. >> So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee, we were chatting before you came on camera. It's great that be back to events. >> It's amazing, this is the first summit I've been to in what two, three years. >> It's awesome, we'll be at the AWS Summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and the big story this year is as developers look at cloud going, distributed computing you got on-premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything, Dev sec Ops, everyone kind of sees that, you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the game is pretty much laid out, and the edge is with the action is. You guys are number one premier partner at SMB for edge. >> That's right. >> Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and what you do. >> That's right, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around especially the edge public cloud. For us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. We are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it-- >> Give an example. >> Example would be Panama. We have a customer there that needs to deploy some financial tech, data and compute is legally required to be in Panama but they love AWS, and they want to deploy AWS services in region. So they've taken EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and snowball in region, inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >> You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering AWS since 2013 with theCUBE about their events, and we watched the progression. Andy Jassy was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam Slepsky is in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't want to say trying to avoid. Of course Amazon listens to customers, they work backwards from the customers, we all know that. But the real issue is they're bread and butters, EC2 and S3. And then now they got tons of services, and the cloud is obviously successful, and we're seeing that. But the edge brings up a whole nother level. >> It does. >> Computing. >> It does. >> That's not set centralized in the public cloud. Now they got regions, so what is the issue with the edge? What's driving the behavior? Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, operational technologies and IT merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got 5G, so it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS? >> Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best Outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers, on location or in the field like with media companies. >> Outpost is interesting, we always used to rip on theCUBE 'cause it's basically Amazon in a box pushed in the data center, running native, all this stuff. But now cloud native operations are becoming the standard. You're starting to see some standard, Deepak Singh's group is doing some amazing work with opensource, Raul's team on the AI side. Obviously you got Swam who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, Outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did Outpost do its job? 'Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say Outpost? >> Yeah, I think Outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at Outpost really consider, do I want to invest in this hardware? Do I want to have this Outpost in my data center? Do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were not a good fit for Outposts, they weren't a good fit in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're going to meet you where you are with 5G. We're going to meet you where you are with wavelength. We're going to meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about Outposts and it's really increased, we can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up Outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment and it's increasing the speed of adoption for sure. >> All right so you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. Innovative as that, you have the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and doing that outside of the availability zone and regions for AWS. Customers in these new areas that you're helping out are, they want cloud, they want to have modernization, modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI all part of that. What's the main product or gap that you're filling for AWS outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key? Is it they don't have a footprint? Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap, why are you so successful? >> So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on what's making them money as a business. They want to focus on their applications. They want to focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS you take the infrastructure you take some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, we help manage the AWS environment. We help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware, that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. >> So basically you guys are basically building AWS edges? >> Matthew: Correct. >> For companies. >> Matthew: Correct. >> Mainly because the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's low latency type requirements, and then they still work with the regions, it's all tied together, is that how it works? >> And our customers, even the ones in the edge they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone because we're always going to have a failback scenario. If we're going to deploy FinTech in the Caribbean we're going to talk about hurricanes. And we're going to talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >> All right so I got to ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, now, I won't say underserved but developing areas where you now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that requirement. It makes total sense, we're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's an outlier, it's actually growing. >> Matthew: Yeah. >> There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama. And you mentioned FinTech in the islands, there are a lot of web three happening. What's your view on the web three world right now relative? >> We have some customers actually deploying crypto especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's top of my mind right now, we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. So it's up and coming. I have some personal views that crypto is still searching for a use case. And I think it's searching a lot and we're there to help customers search for that use case. But crypto as a to technology lives really well on the AWS edge. And we're having more and more people talk to us about that. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and putting them out there on-- >> It's interesting. I mean, first of all we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little projects going on. But if you go talk to all the crypto people they say, look we do a smart concept. We use the blockchain. It's a lot of overhead. It's not really very technical already but it's a cultural shift but there's underserved use cases around use of money but they're all using the blockchain just for smart contracts, for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. They all, don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service. Well, what happened if decentralized? >> Yeah, and that's a conversation. >> It's a performance issue. >> Yeah and it's a cost issue and it's a development issue. So I think more and more as some of these currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on AWS and what does it look like to build decentralized applications but with AWS hardware and services. >> All right so take me through a use case of a customer, Matthew, around the edge. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer. Hey, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my app. And I also want all the benefits of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I want to migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer? >> Yeah big thing is industrial manufacturing. That's one of the best use cases. Inside industrial manufacturing we can pull in many of the AWS edge services, we can bring in private 5G so that all the equipment inside that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5G. It's better than wifi for the industrial space. When we take computing down to that industrial area because we want to do pre-processing on the data. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with regular commercially available hardware, running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Inside of that manufacturing plant, we can do pre-processing on things coming out of the robotics depending on what we're manufacturing, right? And then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back to the AWS availability zone, the standard-- >> John: For data lake, or whatever. >> To the data lake, yeah data lake house, whatever it might be. And we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. But a lot of that just in time business decisions, just in time manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's one of the best use cases that we're seeing. >> And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on theCUBE for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. But also compute, going to the data that saves that cost on the data transfer but also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching, don't move the data unless you have to, but there's new things are developing. So I want to ask you what new are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything, right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever the use case, retail, whatever it is. But now what does that change in the core cloud? There's a system element here, what's the new pattern? >> There's actually an organizational element as well. Because once you have to start making the decision do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. So not only are you changing your architecture you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. So now you say, okay, this can take place here. And maybe this decision can wait. And then how do I visualize that? >> By the way, it could be a bot too, doing the work for management. >> Yeah, exactly. >> You got observability going right. But you got to change the database architecture in the backs. There's new things developing. You've got more benefit. >> There are, there are. And we have more and more people that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about, customers are starting to talk about throwing away data. For the past maybe decade, it's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. >> I mean, this is a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this but the one pattern we're seeing come of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps. Actually is not the case. You look at Databrick, Snowflake and other successes out there. And even Time Series Data which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retraining their machine learning algorithms. >> Matthew: Yep. >> So as data becomes code, as we call it in our last showcase, we did, a whole event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training, things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw it away. It's not just business benefits. There's all kinds of new scale. >> There are. And we have many customers that are running petabyte level. They're essentially data factories on premises, right? They're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay we could analyze this in the cloud. We could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to the AWS cloud or we can run computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data, transition those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS, run 'em through machine learning. And we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >> So I got to end the segment on a kind of a fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, AWS cloud, and skydiving instructor. How does that all work together? What does this mean? You jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump out? >> Kind of, so I was-- >> You jumped out? >> I was teaching skydiving before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a skydiving instructor. I was teaching skydiving. And I heard out of the corner of my ear a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about storing data and how his customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, hey, this is what I went to school for. I'd love to, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So I started and the first day there we had a discussion, EC2 had just come out and-- >> This is amazing. >> Yeah and so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And that totally revolutionized that business, that led to, that guy actually still owns skydiving airport. But through all of that and through being an on premises migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud. And now it feels like almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and apply those lessons in those services to on premises. >> It's such a great story, is going to, the whole growth mindset, pack your own parachute. >> Matthew: Exactly. >> The cloud in the early days was pretty much will the chute open? >> Matthew: Yeah. >> It was pretty much you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you jump out a plane you got to make sure that parachute is going to open. >> And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was still, maybe it does still feel like that to some people. But it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when-- >> It's pretty much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. But a lot of this cutting edge stuff is like jumping out of an airplane. You got the right equipment. You got to do the right things. >> Exactly. >> John: Matthew, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. >> Thanks for having me, thank you. >> Okay theCUBE's here live in San Francisco for AWS Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We'll be at AWS Summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look at this calendar for all theCUBE action at theCUBE.net. We'll be right back with our next segment after this break. 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More bottoms up and have more technical early adopters. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software and it starts with great technical founders with great products and great bottoms of emotions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background, super smart, but Myer of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is all companies there's no, I mean, consumer is enterprise now, everything is what was once a niche. No, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. <laugh> but remember, like right now there's also a tech and VC conference in Miami <laugh> and it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, >>Ts is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. >>Well, and, and I think all of us here that are, uh, may maybe students of history and have been involved in open source in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three >>Movement. The hype is definitely one web three. Yeah. >>But, >>But you know, >>For sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east of Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case now? And maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many measures over, uh, $500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30% a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast, well, >>Let's get, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant <laugh> but there's also the hype of like the web three, for instance, but you know, for, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Luman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, higher, a direct sales force and SAS kind of crushed that now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS is snowflake assassin or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, they own all my data and you know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of common across all successful startups and the overall adoption of technology. Um, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually like growth, right. They're one and the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving growth. >>You just pull the product >>Through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this, but maybe started with open source where users were contributors, you know, contributors were users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing. It's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the, and they're really the, the beneficiaries and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a gen Xer technically. So for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I have what been saying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit digital hippie revolution, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one other group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. You, we hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>During the mainframe days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home group. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on. Well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal it'll trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion yeah. Around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source, one example of that religion. Some people will say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? Yeah. It's so it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily caring >>About data. Data drives all decision making. Let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've been a VC for many years, but you also have the founder entrepreneurial mindset, but you can get empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of it's about believing in the person. So faking it till you make it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. >>Oh, AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur. Right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, so somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story, and I still think that that's important, right. It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. Yeah. But having said that you're right. The proof is in the pudding, right. At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it gonna it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in the new economy that we live in, really, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative of because their product begins exactly >>The volume you back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song is the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, like the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with. Right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the it's gotta speak to the, >>Speak to the user, but let me ask a question now that for the people watching, who are maybe entrepreneurial entre, preneurs, um, masterclass here in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine with you an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do, do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think something will become. Right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way. And we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be the, of more likely somebody is gonna align with your vision and, and wanna invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I, you gotta >>Show the >>Path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision. Uh, if you have the same vision, you can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle. The journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the latest trends because it's over before you can get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living, we'll say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. <laugh> so you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going in this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but some times it happens in six months. Sometimes it takes six years. Sometimes it takes 16 years. Uh, >>What's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Bel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There's three big trends that we invest in. And the they're the only things we do day in, day out one is the explosion and open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen, an alwa timeline >>Happening forever. >>But, uh, it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's, it's one big, massive wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now, a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally, it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is underinvested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a dessert do over, right? I mean, do we need you do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cybersecurity as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is run $150 billion. And it still is a fraction of what we're, >>What we're and national security even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital that's >>Right. You mean arguably, right? I mean, arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say, you gotta love your firm. Love. You're doing we're big supporters, your mission. Congratulations on your entrepreneurial venture. And, uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cuban. Uh, absolutely not. Certainly EU maybe even north Americans in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for helping me on the show. >>Guess be VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California. After this short break, stay with us. Everyone. Welcome to the cue here. Live in San Francisco. K warn you for AWS summit 2022 we're live we're back with events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube. Got a great guest here, Justin Kobe owner, and CEO of innovative solutions. Their booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us the story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. >>Yeah. <laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to mid-size businesses that are moving to the cloud, or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control security, compliance, all the good stuff that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is, but now we have offices down in Austin, Texas, up in Toronto, uh, Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago. And it's been a great ride. >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by a of us. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization, but obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? >>Yeah. It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small mids to size business. They're all trying to understand how to leverage technology better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech is really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're of like, listen, we gotta move to the cloud or we move some things to the cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then so, uh, progressively working through a modernization strategy is always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to mid-size businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. And they want to get set up. But the, the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is not it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem. And you guys solve >>In the SMB space. The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and our hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with, to technology staff that has traditional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether that's, we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to yeah. Feel like, listen, at the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's on primer in the cloud, I just want know that I'm doing that way. That helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. Good. >>How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I think there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start down your journey in one way and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's a, gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning, the projects that early, not worrying about it, you got it mean most people don't abandon stuff cuz they're like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. >>And they get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. >>Yeah. Frog and boiling water, as we used to say, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean, this, this is a dynamic. That's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you guys come in. I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talked to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did Andy jazzy announcer Adam? You know, the 5,000 announcement or whatever. They did huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just processes. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are >>Values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to midsize business leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a 10 a company in the process of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning they know that we have their back and we're the safety net. So when a customer is saying, right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand and dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going in alone. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say your high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attacks. If you have a partner that's offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products, uh, that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own. It, it would cost 'em a four, >>The training alone would be insane. A risk factor. I mean the cost. Yes, absolutely opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018. When, uh, when we, he made the decision to go all in on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious, it wasn't requirement. It still isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front >>Desk and she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I >>Love it. It's >>Amazing. >>But I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get >>The right people with. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point out SMBs and businesses in general, small and large it staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the buildout, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner, SMB, do I get to ROI? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cyber security issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one in the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Like critical issues. >>This is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about this, >>That's, that's what, at least a million in loading, if not three or more Just to get that app going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side. No. And they remind AI and ML. >>That's right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It it's incredibly difficult. And the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll do all that exactly. In the it department. >>Exactly. >>So like, can we just call up, uh, you know, our old vendor that's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like it, >>But that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I was a business owner starting a business today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. It's something that we talk about every, with every one of our small to mid-size >>Businesses. So just, I want get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative yeah. Award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, I was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduced other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. Yeah. I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months than I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at RT long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2000 and I was like, Hey, I'm growing the value of this business. And who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years? What do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner. But if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that were gonna also buy the business with me. >>And they were the owners, no outside capital, >>None zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons. They all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like, if we're own, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015 and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an earn out process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the BI cuz they cared very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting all going all in on the cloud was important for us. And we haven't looked back. >>And at that time, the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly the, uh, and those kinds of big enterprises. The GA I don't wanna say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to midsize business to migrate completely to the cloud is as infrastructure was considered, that just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing where the, a lot of our small to midsize business customers, they wanted to leverage cloud based backup, or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration. The, the Microsoft suite to the cloud. And a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on AWS at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plugin for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating into the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customer is not to be cash strapped and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so they can modernize. So >>Like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers and being empathetic to where they are in their journey. >>And that's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable win that's right. Seeing the value and ING down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate >>It. Thank you very much for having me. >>Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We're back with more great coverage for two days after this short break >>Live on the floor in San Francisco for Aus summit. I'm John for host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the actual back in person we're at AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube. Bring all the action. Also virtual. We have a hybrid cube, check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. >>So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to be back through events. It's >>Amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to, to in what two, three >>Years. That's awesome. We'll be at the, uh, a AWS summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and the big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything devs sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Benet, he's got cloud native. So the, the game is pretty much laid out. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's >>Right. Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions. The at our around, especially the edge public cloud for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give >>An example, >>Uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech data and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running or FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering Aw since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam slaps in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't wanna say trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listens to the customer. They work backwards from the customer. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does >>Computing. >>It >>Does. That's not centralized in the public cloud now they got regions. So what is the issue with the edge what's driving? The behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got five GM having. So it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data in is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always use the riff on the cube, uh, cause it's basically Amazon in a box, pushed in the data center, running native, all this stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of becoming standard. You're starting to see some standard. Deepak syncs group is doing some amazing work with opensource Raul's team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my datas center, do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outpost. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone now happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment. And it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. Right? So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. That's right. Innovative. Does that get the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in these new areas that you're helping out are they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is that they don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on what's making them money as a business. They wanna focus on their applications. They wanna focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and a AWS. You take the infrastructure, you take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. Uh, we help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. So >>Basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it >>Works? Right. And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy fin in the Caribbean, we're gonna talk about hurricanes. And we're gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that, that requirement. It makes total sense. We're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's a, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech. And in, in the islands there a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming. Uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a, uh, technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure, because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on >>It's interesting. I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, project going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart contract, we use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead and it's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain just for like smart contracts, for instance, or certain transactions. And they go to Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service. Well, what happened to decentralized? >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance issue. Yeah. And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through, uh, a use case of a customer Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my a, I also want all the benefit of the cloud. So I want the modern, and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer. >>Yeah. Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up, they don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with a regular commercially available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Inside of that manufacturing plant, we can do pre-procesing on things coming out of the robotics, depending on what we're manufacturing. Right. And then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard >>For data, data lake, or whatever, >>To the data lake. Yeah. Data lake house, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but a lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just time manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going to the data that saves that cost yeah. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data unless you have to. Um, but those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever, the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? There's a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe, maybe this decision can wait. Right. And then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot tube doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture on the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about customers are starting to talk about throwing away data. Uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And well, >>I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session this, but the one pattern we're seeing come of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retrain their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes co as we call it in our last showcase, we did a whole whole an event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw away. It's not just business benefits. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. There >>Are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are running petabyte level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a, kind of a, um, fun, I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, Aus cloud, and skydiving instructor. How does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? >>Yeah. Uh, I, >>You jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump >>Out kind of. So I was, you jumped out. I was teaching Scott eing, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a Scott I instructor. Uh, I was teaching Scott eing and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and how his customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, I started in the first day there, we had a, and, uh, EC two had just come out <laugh> um, and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that, and through being in on premises, migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services to premises. >>So it's such a great story. You know, I was gonna, you know, you know, the, the, the, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early days was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, uh, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and I, maybe it does still feel like that to some people, right. Yeah. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting stuff like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You guys, the right equipment, you gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Matthew, thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here, lot in San Francisco for AWS summit, I'm John for your host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look at this calendar for all the cube, actually@thecube.net. We'll right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube, a summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John furry host of the cube. We'll be at the, a us summit in New York city this summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco getting all coverage, what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dos car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor and a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you, Pam. Cool. How are you? Good. >>How are you? >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah so give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? First >>Of all, thank you for having me. We're back to be business with you never while after. Great to see you. Um, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. Um, we have raised close to a hundred million there. Uh, the investors are people like nor west Menlo, true ventures, coast, lo ventures, Ram Shera, and all those people, all known guys that Antibe chime Paul Mayard web. So a whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley vs are involved. >>And has it gone? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISR is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and ServiceNow to take it to the next stage? Well, >>I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, and Dave Valenti as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh>, >>You know, >>You >>Get, the comment is fun to talk to you though. >>You get the commentary, you, your, your finger on the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud out scale. You predicted that we talked about in the cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing Docker just raised a hundred million on our $2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from an enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control, plane emerging, AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded observability there's 10 million observability companies. Data is the key. This is what's your angle on this. What's your take. Yeah, >>No, look, I think I'll give you the view that I see, right? I, from my side, obviously data is very clear. So the things that room system of record that you and me talked about, the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud native, it'll be called AI. NA NA is a new buzzword and using the AI for customer service, it operations. You talk about observability. I call it AI ops, applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and AI service desk. What needs to be helped desk with ServiceNow BMC <inaudible> you see a new ALA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflows, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with AI workflows. So you'll see AI going >>Off is RPA a company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI S one will be at their event this summer? Um, or is it a product company? I mean, I mean, RPA is almost, should be embedded in everything. >>It's a feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company also, but that automation should be a, in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NA and AI NATO it'll become automation. NA yeah. And that's your thinking. >>It's almost interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kind having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle and it was software was action. Now you have all kinds of workflows abstractions everywhere. Right? So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed or they integrated. I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So don't about the databases become all polyglot databases. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area, like, as you were talking about, it should be part of ServiceNow. It should be part of ISRA, like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see MuleSoft and Salesforce buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies could cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also will have an automation as a layer <inaudible> inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind us, you got the expo hall. You got, um, we're back to vents, but you got, you know, am Clume Ove, uh, Dynatrace data dog, innovative all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right. Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Deibel later today. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen, we know all the, the VCs. What does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation. Cloud's bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's. Yes. Basically. Data's everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders, how Amazon created the startups 15 years back, everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be is people don't just build on Amazon. They're gonna build it on top of snowflake. Companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake. Right? So I see my old boss flagman try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer. Right? So I think that's the next level of <inaudible> trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis of a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your Mo is what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in, in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last reinvent, coined the term super cloud, right? He's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage, and guys, Charles Fitzgerald out there who we like was kind of shitting on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get it. Like, yeah, I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> cause he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Now. They say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist. And, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. It >>Is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer. Remember the middle layer pass will be snowflake so I can build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer if I really need to size build it on force.com Salesforce. Yeah. Right. So I think that's where you'll see. So >>Basically the, if you're an entrepreneur, the, the north star in terms of the, the outcome is be a super cloud. >>It is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. Yeah. >>Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales, the snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think they had Redshift. Amazon has got Redshift. Um, but Snowflake's a big customer in the, they're probably paying AWS, I think big bills too. So >>Joe on very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-optation will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with, uh, snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouses or data layer. So I think depending on the application use case, you have to use each of the above. I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that it comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, you know, foreclose, your, you that's right with some sort of internal hack. Uh, but I think, I think the general question that I have is that I, I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point, when does the rising tide stop and do the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth? So >>I think it's growth. You call it cloud scale, you invented the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's as long as there more movement from on, uh, OnPrem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations. It helpless, even the customer service service now and, uh, ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go >>Made. I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers are practitioners, not suppliers to the more market, feel free to text me or DMing. The next question's really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products, cuz you know, the big enterprises now and you know, small, medium, large and large enterprise are all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean I'm seeing some stuff, but why don't get your thoughts on that? What, >>No, it is. If I growing by or 2007 or eight, when I used to talk to you back then and Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or 1% today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a CIO or line of business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. >>Yeah. And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I reference the URL cause it's like, there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solutions that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there. Um, and goes back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure is code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share >>Yourself a lot of first is I see the AIOP solutions in the future should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app Dyna, right? Dynatrace, all this solution. We will go future towards predict to proactive solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service desk. Customers are give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can them, but I gotta train them, modify them, tweak them, make them >>Better, >>Make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to big data days back in 2009, you know, >>Look at, look how much data Rick has grown. >>It is. They doubled the >>Key cloud air kinda went private. So good stuff, man. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking at that growing customers and my customers are some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk McAfee, uh, grand to so all the top customers, um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on predict is one area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service. >>Great stuff, man. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of Aish summit 2022. And we're gonna be at Aus summit in San, uh, in New York in the summer. So look for that on this calendar, of course go to eight of us, startups.com. I mentioned that it's decipher all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This the cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back, little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit in new York's coming in the summer. We'll be there too with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the groove psych to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're can see a lot of virtual cube outta hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economists with bill group. He's the founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank >>You. Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe is shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at mark, Andrew's been doing a lot of shit posting lately. All a billionaires are shit hosting, but they don't know how to do it. Like they're not >>Doing it right? So there's something opportunity there. It's like here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a midsize island, do begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. >>This shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on this side I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what is shit posting? >>It's more or less talking about the world of enter prize technology, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream. But it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a jackass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, coupons coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you see the growth of cloud native Amazon's of all the Adams, especially new CEO. Andy's move on to be the chief of all Amazon. Just so I'm the cover of was it time met magazine? Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything. These folks do. They're they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble imagining the logistics. It takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. And it's, it's sprawling immense that dominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. >>Well, there's a lot of force for good conversations. Seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to port eight of us is trying to portray themselves as you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. <laugh> either way, sounds like more exciting. Like I better >>Have a replacement ready <laugh> I, in case something goes wrong on the track, highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in east sports with other people in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and videographic card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. >>Oh, it's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going on in your world. I know you have a lot of great success. We've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter, check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's the blowback, any blowback late? Has there been uptick? What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's high. I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They must not have heard me it. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do >>That. We should do that. Actually. I think you're people would call in, oh, >>I, I think >>I guarantee we had that right now. People would call in and say, Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised about anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the >>Customer. You know, I always joke with Dave Alane about how John Fort's always at, uh, um, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0, 0 5, or we can't call, we >>Have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And then there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented SU sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish. That's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their >>Producting. So they're going in different directions. When they named Amazon Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonused on number of words, they can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, session manager is a great one. I love the service ridiculous name. They have a systems manager, parameter store, which is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage your parameter store does not. It's fun. >>What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination >>Of gots. You got EMR, you got EC two, you got S3 SQS. Well, RedShift's not an acronym you >>Gets is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation, they >>Shook up bean stock or is that still around? Oh, >>They never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, well, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it, but while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it. John three <laugh>. Okay. Simple BV still haunts our dreams. >>I, I actually got an email on, I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C twos were being deprecated and I got an email I'm I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me? Just like, give me something else. All right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you, is that like, okay. So as Amazon better in some areas where do they need more work in your opinion? Because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database Snowflake's got out database service. So Redshift, snowflake data breach is out there. So you got this co-op petition. Yes. How's that going? And what do you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with, and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want. And they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multicloud. Cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word multicloud. Um, a lot of people though saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word. Like multicloud sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multicloud? >>Multiple single >>Cloudant loves that term. Yeah. >>You know, you're building in multiple single points of failure, do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about my multi-cloud either as the industry leader, let's talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective. It doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of forms. Some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on, but my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. >>Yeah, course. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question cause I know you we've been, you know, fellow journeyman and the, and the cloud journey going to all the events and then the pandemic hit. We now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna gonna end. Certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations. Community's gonna emerge. You've got a pretty big community growing and it's growing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing or just big changes you've seen with the pandemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece, come in, you're commentating, you're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck build group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, funny, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who can pony up two grand and a week in Las Vegas and get to Las Vegas from wherever they happen to be by moving virtually suddenly it, it embraces the reality that talent is evenly. Distributed. Opportunity is not. And that means that suddenly these things are accessible to a wide swath of audience and potential customer base and the rest that hadn't been invited to the table previously, it's imperative that we not lose that. It's nice to go out and talk to people and have people come up and try and smell my hair from time to time, I smelled delightful. Let me assure you. But it was, but it's also nice to be. >>I have a product for you if you want, you know? Oh, >>Oh excellent. I look forward to it. What is it? Pudding? Why not? <laugh> >>What else have you seen? So when accessibility for talent. Yes. Which by the way is totally home run. What weird things have happened that you've seen? Um, that's >>Uh, it's, it's weird, but it's good that an awful lot of people giving presentation have learned to tighten their message and get to the damn point because most people are not gonna get up from a front row seat in a conference hall, midway through your Aing talk and go somewhere else. But they will change a browser tab and you won't get them back. You've gotta be on point. You've gotta be compelling if it's going to be a virtual discussion. Yeah. >>And you turn off your iMessage too. >>Oh yes. It's always fun in the, in the meetings when you're ho to someone and their colleague is messaging them about, should we tell 'em about this? And I'm sitting there reading it and it's >>This guy is really weird. Like, >>Yes I am and I bring it into the conversation and then everyone's uncomfortable. It goes, wow. Why >>Not? I love when my wife yells at me over I message. When I'm on a business call, like, do you wanna take that about no, I'm good. >>No, no. It's better off. I don't the only entire sure. It's >>Fine. My kids text. Yeah, it's fine. Again, that's another weird thing. And, and then group behavior is weird. Now people are looking at, um, communities differently. Yes. Very much so, because if you're fatigued on content, people are looking for the personal aspect. You're starting to see much more of like yeah. Another virtual event. They gotta get better. One and two who's there. >>Yeah. >>The person >>That's a big part of it too is the human stories are what are being more and more interesting. Don't get up here and tell me about your product and how brilliant you are and how you built it. That's great. If I'm you, or if I wanna work with you or I want to compete with you or I want to put on my engineering hat and build it myself. Cause why would I buy anything? That's more than $8. But instead, tell me about the problem. Tell me about the painful spot that you specialize in. Yeah. Tell me a story there. >>I, I think >>That gets a glimpse in a hook and makes >>More, more, I think you nailed it. Scaling storytelling. Yes. And access to better people because they don't have to be there in person. I just did a thing. I never, we never would've done the queue. We did. Uh, Amazon stepped up in sponsors. Thank you, Amazon for sponsoring international women's day, we did 30 interviews, APAC. We did five regions and I interviewed this, these women in Asia, Pacific eight, PJ, they call for in this world. And they're amazing. I never would've done those interviews cuz I never, would've seen 'em at an event. I never would've been in pan or Singapore, uh, to access them. And now they're in the index, they're in the network. They're collaborating on LinkedIn. So a threads are developing around connections that I've never seen before. Yes. Around the content. >>Absolutely >>Content value plus and >>Effecting. And that is the next big revelation of this industry is going to realize you have different companies. And, and I Amazon's case different service teams all competing with each other, but you have the container group and you have the database group and you have the message cuing group. But customers don't really want to build things from spare parts. They want a solution to a problem. I want to build an app that does Twitter for pets or whatever it is I'm trying to do. I don't wanna basically have to pick and choose and fill my shopping cart with all these different things. I want something that's gonna basically give me what I'm trying to get as close to turnkey as possible. Moving up the stack. That is the future. And just how it gets here is gonna be >>Well we're here at Corey Quinn, the master of the master of content here in the a ecosystem. Of course we we've been following up from the beginning. His great guy, check out his blog, his site, his newsletter screaming podcast. Corey, final question for, uh, what are you here doing? What's on your agenda this week in San Francisco and give a plug for the duck build group. What are you guys doing? I know you're hiring some people what's on the table for the company. What's your focus this week and put a plug in for the group. >>I'm here as a customer and basically getting outta my cage cuz I do live here. It's nice to actually get out and talk to folks who are doing interesting things at the duck bill group. We solved one problem. We fixed the horrifying AWS bill, both from engineering and architecture, advising as well as negotiating AWS contracts because it turns out those things are big and complicated. And of course my side media projects last week in aws.com, we are, it it's more or less a content operation where I in my continual and ongoing love affair with the sound of my own voice. >><laugh> and you're good. It's good content it's on, on point fun, Starky and relevant. So thanks for coming to the cube and sharing with us. Appreciate it. No >>Thank you button. >>You. Okay. This the cube covers here in San Francisco, California, the cube is back going to events. These are the summits, Amazon web services summits. They happen all over the world. We'll be in New York and obviously we're here in San Francisco this week. I'm John fur. Keep, keep it right here. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Okay. Welcome back everyone. This's the cubes covers here in San Francisco, California, we're live on the show floor of AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube and remember AWS summit in New York city coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. And of course reinvent the end of the year for all the cube coverage on cloud computing and AWS two great guests here from the APN global APN Sege chef Jenko and Jeff Grimes partner lead Jeff and Sege is doing partnerships global APN >>AWS global startup program. Yeah. >>Okay. Say that again. >>AWS. We'll start >>Program. That's the official name. >>I love >>It too long, too long for me. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, >>Of course. >>Appreciate it. Tell us about what's going on with you guys. What's the, how was you guys organized? You guys we're obviously we're in San Francisco bay area, Silicon valley, zillions of startups here, New York. It's got another one we're gonna be at tons of startups. A lot of 'em getting funded, big growth and cloud big growth and data secure hot in all sectors. >>Absolutely. >>So maybe, maybe we could just start with the global startup program. Um, it's essentially a white glove service that we provide to startups that are built on AWS. And the intention there is to help identify use cases that are being built on top of AWS. And for these startups, we want to pro vibe white glove support in co building products together. Right. Um, co-marketing and co-selling essentially, um, you know, the use cases that our customers need solved, um, that either they don't want to build themselves or are perhaps more innovative. Um, so the, a AWS global startup program provides white glove support. Dedicat at headcount for each one of those pillars. Um, and within our program, we've also provided incentives, programs go to market activities like the AWS startup showcase that we've built for these startups. >>Yeah. By the way, AWS startup, AWS startups.com is the URL, check it out. Okay. So partnerships are key. Jeff, what's your role? >>Yeah. So I'm responsible for leading the overall effort for the AWS global startup program. Um, so I've got a team of partner managers that are located throughout the us, uh, managing a few hundred startup ISVs right now. <laugh> >>Yeah, you got a >>Lot. We've got a lot. >>There's a lot. I gotta, I gotta ask a tough question. Okay. I'm I'm a startup founder. I got a team. I just got my series a we're grown. I'm trying to hire people. I'm super busy. What's in it for me. Yeah. What do you guys bring to the table? I love the white glove service, but translate that what's in it for what do I get out of it? What's >>A story. Good question. I focus, I think. Yeah, because we get, we get to see a lot of partners building their businesses on AWS. So, you know, from our perspective, helping these partners focus on what, what do we truly need to build by working backwards from customer feedback, right? How do we effectively go to market? Because we've seen startups do various things, um, through trial and error, um, and also just messaging, right? Because oftentimes partners or rather startups, um, try to boil the ocean with many different use cases. So we really help them, um, sort of laser focus on what are you really good at and how can we bring that to the customer as quickly as possible? >>Yeah. I mean, it's truly about helping that founder accelerate the growth of their company, right. And there's a lot that you can do with AWS, but focus is truly the key word there because they're gonna be able to find their little piece of real estate and absolutely deliver incredible outcomes for our customers. And then they can start their growth curve there. >>What are some of the coolest things you've seen with the APN that you can share publicly? I know you got a lot going on there, a lot of confidentiality. Um, but you know, we're here a lot of great partners on the floor here. I'm glad we're back at events. Uh, a lot of stuff going on digitally with virtual stuff and, and hybrid. What are some of the cool things you guys have seen in the APN that you can point to? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can point to few, you can take them. So, um, I think what's been fun over the years for me personally, I came from a startup brand sales at an early stage startup and, and I went through the whole thing. So I have a deep appreciation for what these guys are going through. And what's been interesting to see for me is taking some of these early stage guys, watching them progress, go public, get acquired and see that big day mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, and being able to point to very specific items that we help them to get to that point. Uh, and it's just a really fun journey to watch. >>Yeah. I, and part of the reason why I really, um, love working at the AWS, uh, global startup program is working with passionate founders. Um, I just met with a founder today that it's gonna, he's gonna build a very big business one day, um, and watching them grow through these stages and supporting that growth. Um, I like to think of our program as a catalyst for enterprise is sort of scale. Yeah. Um, and through that we provide visibility, credibility and growth opportunities. >>Yeah. A lot, a lot of partners too. What I found talking to staff founders is when they have that milestone, they work so hard for it. Whether it's a B round C round Republic or get bought. Yeah. Um, then they take a deep breath and they look back at wow, what a journey it's been. So it's kind of emotional for sure. But still it's a grind. Right? You gotta, I mean, when you get funding, it's still day one. You don't stop. It's no celebrate, you got a big round or valuation. You still gotta execute >>And look it's hypercompetitive and it's brutally difficult. And our job is to try to make that a little less difficult and navigate those waters. Right. Where ever everyone's going after similar things. >>Yeah. And I think as a group element too, I observe that startups that I, I meet through the APN has been interesting because they feel part of AWS. Yeah, totally. As a group of community, as a vibe there. Um, I know they're hustling, they're trying to make things happen. But at the same time, Amazon throws a huge halo effect. I mean, that's a huge factor. I mean, you guys are the number one cloud in the business, the growth in every sector is booming. Yeah. And if you're a startup, you don't have that luxury yet. And look at companies like snowflake that built on top of AWS. I mean, people are winning by building on AWS. >>Yeah. And our, our, our program really validates their technology first. So we have, what's all the foundation's technical review that we put all of our startups through before we go to market. So that when enterprise customers are looking at startup technology, they know that it's already been vetted. And, um, to take that a step further and help these partners differentiate, we use programs like the competency programs, the DevOps competencies, the security competency, which continues to help, um, provide sort of a platform for these startups, help them differentiate. And also there's go to market benefits that are associated with that. >>Okay. So let me ask the, the question that's probably on everyone's mind, who's watching, certainly I asked this a lot. There's a lot of companies startups out there who makes the cut, is there a criteria cut? It's not like it's sports team or anything, but like sure. Like there's activate program, which is like, there's hundreds of thousands of startups out there. Not everyone is at the APN. Right? Correct. So ISVs again, that's a whole nother, that's a more mature partner that might have, you know, huge market cap or growth. How, how do you guys focus? How do you guys focus? I mean, you got a good question, you know, thousand flowers blooming all the time. Is there a new way you guys are looking at it? I know there's been some talk about restructure or, or new focus. What's the focus. >>Yeah. It's definitely not an easy task by any means. Um, but you know, I recently took over this role and we're really trying to establish focus areas, right. So obviously a lot of the ISVs that we look after are infrastructure ISVs. That's what we do. Uh, and so we have very specific pods that look after different type of partners. So we've got a security pod, we've got a DevOps pod, we've got core infrastructure, et cetera. And really, we're trying to find these ISVs that can solve, uh, really interesting AWS customer. >>You guys have a deliberate, uh, focus on these pillars. So what infrastructure, >>Security, DevOps, and data and analytics, and then line of business >>Line, business line business, like web >>Marketing, business apps, >>Owner type thing. Exactly. >>Yeah, exactly. >>So solutions there. Yeah. More solutions and the other ones are like hardcore. So infrastructure as well, like storage back up ransomware kind of stuff, or, >>Uh, storage, networking. >>Okay. Yeah. The classic >>Database, et cetera. Right. >>And so there's teams on each pillar. >>Yep. So I think what's, what's fascinating for the startups that we cover is that they've got, they truly have support from a build market sell perspective, right. So you've got someone who's technical to really help them get the technology, figured out someone to help them get the marketing message dialed and spread, and then someone to actually do the co-sell, uh, day to day activities to help them get in front of customers. >>Probably the number one request that we always ask for Amazon is can wish that sock report, oh, download it on the console, which we use all the time. <laugh> exactly. But security's a big deal. I mean, you know, ask the res are evolving, that role of DevOps is taking on dev SecOps. Um, I, I can see a lot of customers having that need for a relationship to move things faster. Do you guys provide like escalation or is that a part of a service or that not part of, uh, uh, >>Yeah, >>So the partner development manager can be an escalation for absolutely. Think of that. 'em as an extension of your business inside of AWS. >>Great. And you guys, how is that partner managers, uh, measure >>On those three pillars? Right. Got it. Are we billing, building valuable use cases? So product development go to market, so go to market activities, think blog, posts, webinars, case studies, so on and so forth. And then co-sell not only are we helping these partners win their current opportunities that they are sourcing, but can we also help them source net new deals? Yeah. Right. That's very, >>I mean, top asked from the partners is get me in front of customers. Right. Um, not an easy task, but that's a huge goal of ours to help them grow their top line. >>Right. Yeah. In fact, we had some interviews here on the cube earlier talking about that dynamic of how enterprise customers are buying. And it's interesting, a lot more POCs. I have one partner here that you guys work with, um, on observability, they got a huge POC with capital one mm-hmm <affirmative> and the enterprises are engaging the star ups and bringing them in. So the combination of open source software enterprises are leaning into that hard and bringing young growing startups in mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yep. So I could see that as a huge service that you guys can bring people in. >>Right. And they're bringing massively differentiated technology to the table. The challenge is they just might not have the brand recognition. The, at the big guys have mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so that's, our job is how do you get that great tech in front of the right situations? >>Okay. So my next question is about the show here, and then we'll talk globally. So here in San Francisco sure. You know, Silicon valley bay area, San Francisco bay area, a lot of startups, a lot of VCs, a lot of action. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so probably a big market for you guys. Yeah. So what's exciting here in SF. And then outside of SF, you guys have a global pro, have you see any trends that are geography based or is it sure areas more mature? There's certain regions that are better. I mean, I just interviewed a company here. That's doing, uh, a AWS edge really well in these cases. It's interesting that these, the partners are filling a lot of holes and gaps in the opportunities with a AWS. So what's exciting here. And then what's the global perspective. >>Yeah, totally. So obviously see a ton of partners from the bay area that we support. Um, but we're seeing a lot of really interesting technology come out of AMEA specifically. Yeah. Uh, and making a lot of noise here in the United States, which is great. Um, and so, you know, we definitely have that global presence and, and starting to see super differentiated technology come out of those regions. >>Yeah. Especially Tel Aviv. Yeah. >>Amy and real quick before you get into surge. It's interesting. The VC market in, in Europe is hot. They've got a lot of unicorns coming in. We've seen a lot of companies coming in. They're kind of rattling their own, you know, cage right now. Hey, look at us. Let's see if they crash, you know, but we don't see that happening. I mean, people have been predicting a crash now in, in the startup ecosystem for least a year. It's not crashing. In fact, funding's up. >>Yeah. The pandemic was hard on a lot of startups for sure. Yeah. Um, but what we've seen is many of these startups, they, as quickly as they can grow, they can also pivot as, as, as well. Um, and so I've actually seen many of our startups grow through the demo because their use cases are helping customers either save money, become more operationally efficient and provide value to leadership teams that need more visibility into their infrastructure during a pandemic. >>It's an interesting point. I talked to Andy jazzy and Adam Celski both say the same thing during the pandemic. Necessity's the mother of all invention. Yep. And startups can move fast. So with that, you guys are there to assist if I'm a startup and I gotta pivot cuz remember iterate and pivot, iterate and pivot. So you get your economics, that's the playbook of the ventures and the models. >>Exactly. How >>Do you guys help me do that? Give me an example of what me through. Pretend me, I'm a start up. Hey, I'm on the cloud. Oh my God. Pandemic. They need video conferencing. Hey cube. Yeah. What do I need? Search? What, what do >>I do? That's a good question. First thing is just listen. Yeah. I think what we have to do is a really good job of listening to the partner. Um, what are their needs? What is their problem statement? Where do they want to go at the end of the day? Um, and oftentimes because we've worked with, so how many successful startups that have come out of our program, we have, um, either through intuition or a playbook determined what is gonna be the best path forward and how do we get these partners to stop focusing on things that will eventually, um, just be a waste of time. Yeah. And, or not provide, or, you know, bring any fruit to the table, which, you know, essentially revenue. >>Well, we love startups here in the cube because one, um, they have good stories, they're oil and cutting edge, always pushing the envelope and they're kind of disrupting someone else. Yeah. And so they, they have an opinion. They don't mind sharing on camera. So love talking to startups. We love working with you guys on our startups. Showcases startups.com. Check out AWS startups.com and she got the showcase. So is, uh, final word. I'll give you guys the last word. What's the bottom line bumper sticker for AP globe. The global APN program summarize the opportunity for startups, what you guys bring to the table and we'll close it out. Totally. We'll start >>With you. Yeah. I think the AWS global startup programs here to help companies truly accelerate their business full stop. Right. And that's what we're here for. Love it. >>It's a good way to, it's a good way to put it. Dato yeah. >>All right. Thanks for coming out. Thanks John. Great to see you love working with you guys. Hey, startups need help. And the growing and huge market opportunities, the shift cloud scale data engineering, security infrastructure, all the markets are exploding in growth because of the digital transformation of realities here, open source and cloud. I'll making it happen here in the cube in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, your host. Thanks for >>Watching Cisco, John. >>Hello and welcome back to the Cube's live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, two days of coverage, AWS summit, 2022 in New York city coming up this summer will be there as well. Events are back. The cube is back of course, with the cube virtual cube hybrid, the cube.net. Check it out a lot of content this year more than ever a lot more cloud data cloud native, modern applic is all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, Cub alumni, uh, CEO of observe Inc in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data observability, Jeremy. Great to see you. Thanks. >>Coming on. Always great to come and talk to you on the queue, man. It's been been a few years, so, >>Um, well you, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, uh, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability Smith hot area, but also you've been a senior executive president of Dell EMC. Um, 11 years ago you had a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. Um, yeah. And it's here, you predicted it 11 years ago. Um, look around it's cloud meets big data. >>Yeah. I mean the, the cloud thing I think, you know, was, was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for, for sort of catching that bus early, um, you know, we, we were on the, the, the bus early and, and I think it was only inevitable. Like, you know, if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you, you could find out things you could never possibly imagine. >>So you're close to a lot of companies that we've been covering deeply snowflake, obviously you involved, uh, at the board level, the other found, you know, the people there, uh, cloud, you know, Amazon, you know, what's going on here? Yeah. You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, uh, chief of observ, Inc, which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data engineering, large scale integrations, um, data as code integrating into applications. I mean, it's a whole nother world developing, like you see with snowflake, it means snowflakes is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's your, what's this wave we're on what's how would you describe the wave? >>Well, a couple of things, I mean, people are, I think right in more software than, than ever before are why? Because they've realized that if, if you don't take your business online and offer a service, then you become largely irrelevant. And so you you've got a whole set of new applications. I think, I think more applications now than any point. Um, not, not just ever, but the mid nineties, I always looked at as the golden age of application development. Now, back then people were building for windows. Well, well now they're building for things like AWS is now the platform. Um, so you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data. And the, you know, there's sort of the transactions, you know, what you bought today are something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry, all the exhaust fumes. And I think people really are realizing that their differentiation is not so much their application. It's their understanding of the data. Can, can I understand who my best customers are, what I sell today. If people came to my website and didn't buy, then why not? Where did they drop off all of that? They wanna analyze. And, and the answers are all in the data. The question is, can you understand it >>In our last startup showcase, we featured data as code one of the insights that we got out of that, and I wanna get your opinion on our reaction to is, is that data used to be put into a data lake and turns into a data swamp or throw into the data warehouse. And then we'll do some queries, maybe a report once in a while. And so data, once it was done, unless it was real time, even real time was not good anymore after real time. That was the old way. Now you're seeing more and more, uh, effort to say, let's go look at the data, cuz now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once mm-hmm <affirmative> they're iterating. Yeah. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting. Yeah, that's a Silicon valley story. That's like how startups work, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have another, this data concept that's now yeah. Part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole, this whole new cycle of >>Yeah. >>Data being reused and repurposed and figured out and yeah, >>Yeah. I'm a big fan of, um, years ago. Uh, uh, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee at the MIT C cell labs I spent time with and he, he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look I'm I'm. He said I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you have enough data, you can answer any question. And, and this is going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and, and certainly, you know, research is on the forefront. But I think, you know, starting to see that mindset of the, the sort of MIT research be mainstream, you know, in enterprises, they they're realizing that. Yeah, it is about the data. You know, if I can better understand my data better than my competitor, then I've got an advantage. And so the question is is, is how, what, what technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to, to allow me to do that. >>So let's talk about observing you the CEO of, okay. Given you've seen the ways before you're in the front lines of observability, which again is in the center of all this action what's going on with the company. Give a quick minute to explain, observe for the folks who don't know what you guys do. What's the company doing? What's the funding status, what's the product status and what's the customer status. Yeah. >>So, um, we realized, you know, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago that, um, look, the way people are building applications is different. They they're way more functional. They change every day. Uh, but in some respects they're a lot more complicated. They're distributed. They, you know, microservices architectures and when something goes wrong, um, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not gonna fly because you had SA so much change going into production on a daily basis. It was hard to tell like where the problem was. And so we thought, okay, it's about time. Somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and all the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot and make sense of the problems that they're seeing. So, I mean, that's observability, it's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was a guy called, uh, Rudolph like, like everything in tech, you know, it's, it's a reinvention of something from years gone by. >>Um, there's a guy called, um, Rudy Coleman in 1960s coiner term and, and, and the term was being able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for, uh, the best part of four years now. Um, it took us three years just to build the product. I think, I think what people don't appreciate these days often is the barrier to entry in a lot of these markets is quite high. You, you need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. Um, so yeah, this last year we, we, we did our first year selling, uh, we've got about 40 customers now. Um, we just we've got great investors for the hill ventures. Uh, I mean, Mike SP who was, you know, the, the guy who was the, really, the first guy in it snowflake and the, the initial investor were fortunate enough to, to have Mike and our board. And, um, you know, part of the observed story is closely knit with snowflake all of that time with your data, you know, we, we store in there. >>So I want to get, uh, yeah. Pivot to that. Mike SP snowflake, Jeremy Burton, the cube kind of, kind of same thinking this idea of a super cloud or what snowflake became. Yeah. Snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of snowflake. Yeah. So that's become an entrepreneurial story that we think that to go big in the cloud, you can have a cloud on a cloud, uh, like as Jerry, Jerry Chan and Greylock calls it, castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you, you're doing some stuff with snowflake. So as a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a snowflake or an AWS, because again, you gotta go where the data is. You need all the data. >>Yeah. So >>What's your take on that? I mean, >>Having enough gray hair now, um, you know, again, in tech, I think if you wanna predict the future, look at the past. And, uh, you know, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a, a smaller company called Oracle and an Oracle was the database company. And, uh, their, their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms, one, one windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operating system was the platform. And, and then that was the, you know, ecosystem that you would compete on top of. And then there were companies like SAP that built applications on top of Oracle. So then wind the clock forward 25 years gray hairs. <laugh> the platform, isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, you know, Google cloud. I gotta probably look around if I say that in. Yeah, >>It's okay. Columbia, but hyperscale. Yeah. CapX built out >>That is the new platform. And then snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generated data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. And I think they they've done an amazing job are doing for the, I'd say, say the, the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world, you know, way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and, and of course my ambition would be, look, if, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of snowflake, uh, as, as they were on top of Oracle, then, then we'd probably be quite happy, >>Happy. So you're building on top of snowflake, >>We're building on top of snowflake a hundred percent. And, um, you know, I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that that's a risk. You're >>Still on the board. >>Yeah. I'm still on the board. Yeah. That's a risk I'm prepared to take. I am more on snowing. >>It sounds well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board, then you'll know what's going on. Okay. No, yeah. Serious one. But the, this is a real dynamic. It is. It's not a one off its >>Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS is in order of magnitude, more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so I've believe the opportunity for folks like snowflake and, and folks like observe it. It's an order of magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old world. >>Yeah. And I think this is really, I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you gotta be on a platform. Yeah. >>It's quite easy >>Or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how seats were at that table left >>Well value migrates up over time. So, you know, when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, you know, rack space and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure, a service platform as a service. My, my old, uh, um, employee EMC, we had pivotal, you know, pivotal was a platform as a service. Don't hear so much about it these days, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to, to like extract, uh, a real business, you gotta move up, you gotta add value, you gotta build databases, then you gotta build applications. So >>It's interesting. Moving from the data center of the cloud was a dream for starters within if the provision, the CapEx. Yeah. Now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on, on top of that, you got snowflake. Now you got on top of that. >>The assumption is almost that compute and storage is free. I know it's not quite free. Yeah. It's almost free, but you can, you know, as an application vendor, you think, well, what can I do if I assume compute and storage is free, that's the mindset you've gotta get >>Into. And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm gonna get a series us multiple of value in what I'm paying. Yeah. Most people don't even blanket their Avis pills unless they're like massively huge. Yeah. Then it's a repatriation question or whatever discount question, but for most startups or any growing company, the Amazon bill should be a small factor. >>Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, um, ask me, uh, like, look you build in on snowflake. Um, you, you know, you, you, you're gonna be, you're gonna be paying their money. How, how, how, how does that work with your business model? If you're paying their money, you know, do, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. I, we could build a database as well and observe, but then I've got half the development team working on something that will never be as good as snowflake. And so we made the call early on that. No, no, we, we want a eight above the database. Yeah. Right. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and, and the same is true of something like Amazon, like, like snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >>Yeah. And what's interesting is that Dave <inaudible> and I have been pointing this out and he's obviously a more on snowflake. I've been looking at data bricks, um, and the same dynamics happening, the proof is the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, if you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and data bricks it's exploding. Right. I mean, the shows are selling out the floor. Space's book. That's the old days at VMware. Yeah. The old days at AWS. >>Well, and for snowflake and, and any platform from VI, it's a beautiful thing because, you know, we build on snowflake and we pay them money. They don't have to sell to us. Right. And we do a lot of the support. And so the, the economics work out really, really well. If you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of >>Ecosystems. Yeah. And then also you get, you get a, um, a trajectory of, uh, economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of snowflake integrations, right. New product, you're scaling a step function with them. >>Yeah. I mean, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. Right. When I, when I, when I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had, we had one petabyte customer. And, and so at observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so been able to rely on a platform that can manage that is inve >>You know, well, Jeremy great conversation. Thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. Uh, we got a couple minutes left, um, put a plug in for observe. What do you guys know? You got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your, your, your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You getting in traction. >>Yeah. Yeah. Scales >>Around the corner. Sounds like, are you, is that where you are scale? >>We've got a big that that's when coming up in two or three weeks, we've got, we've got new funding, um, which is always great. Um, the product is, uh, really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, you know, which is at which point can you just start hiring salespeople? And the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. Um, we've got about 40 SaaS companies that run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, uh, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting, um, enterprise type customers. We're, we're, you know, F five networks we're POC in right now with capital one, we got some interest in news around capital one coming up. I, I can't share too much, but it's gonna be exciting. And, and like I said, so hill continue to, to, >>I think capital one's a big snowflake customer as well. Right. >>They were early in one of the things that attracted me to capital one was they were very, very good with snowflake early on. And, and they put snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. And, and today that, that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts, >>Capital, one, very innovative cloud, obviously Atos customer, and very innovative, certainly in the CISO and CIO, um, on another point on where you're at. So you're, Prescale meaning you're about to scale, >>Right? >>So you got POCs, what's that trajectory look like? Can you see around the corner? What's, what's going on? What's on, around the corner. That you're, that you're gonna hit this straight and narrow and, and gas it fast. >>Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the key thing for us is we gotta get the product. Right. Um, the nice thing about having a guy like Mike Pfizer on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage. His questions that the board are always about, like is the product, right? Is the product right? Is the product right? Have you got the product right? And cuz we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and, and the revenue will take care of itself. Yeah. So right now all the attention is on the product. Um, the, this year, the exciting thing is we we're, we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that by in the day you could do with the new relics and AppDynamics, the last generation of, of APM tools, you're gonna be able to do that within observe. And we've already got the logs and the metrics capability in there. So for us this year is a big one, cuz we sort of complete the trifecta, you know, the, the >>Logs, what's the secret sauce observe. What if you had the, put it into a, a, a sentence what's the secret sauce? >>I, I, I think, you know, an amazing founding engineering team, uh, number one, I mean, at the end of the day, you have to build an amazing product and you have to solve a problem in a different way. And we've got great long term investors and, and the biggest thing our investors give is it actually, it's not just money. It gives us time to get the product, right. Because if we get the product right, then we can get the growth. >>Got it. Final question. While I got you here, you've been on the enterprise business for a long time. What's the buyer landscape out there. You got people doing POCs on capital one scale. So we know that goes on. What's the appetite at the buyer side for startups and what are their requirements that you're seeing? Uh, obviously we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their, this restructure. So, so a lot of happening in cloud, what's the criteria. How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >>Yeah. I mean, enterprises, they know they've gotta spend money transforming the business. I mean, this was, I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but, um, what, what we were saying five years ago is happening. Um, everybody needs to figure out a way to take their business to this digital world. Everybody has to do it. So the nice thing from a startup standpoint is they know at times they need to risk or, or take a bet on new technology in order to, to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that a have money, uh, B it prepared to take risks and it's, it's a race against time to you'll get their, their offerings in this, a new digital footprint. >>Final, final question. What's the state of AWS. Where do you see them going next? Obviously they're continuing to be successful. How does cloud 3.0, or they always say it's day one, but it's more like day 10, but what's next for Aw. Where do they go from here? Obviously they're doing well. They're getting bigger and bigger. Yeah, >>Better. It's an amazing story. I mean, you know, we're, we're on AWS as well. And so I, I think if they keep nurturing the builders and the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They, they have an early leads. And if you look at where, you know, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the, in the late nineties, it was, they stopped, uh, really caring about developers in the folks who were building on top of their ecosystem. In fact, they started buying up their ecosystem and competing with people in their ecosystem. And I see with AWS, they, they have an amazing headstart and if they did more, you know, if they do more than that, that's, what's gonna keep this juggernaut rolling for many years to come. >>Yeah. They got the Silicon and got the stack. They're developing Jeremy Burton inside the cube, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called observing in the middle of all the action on the board of snowflake as well. Um, great startup. Thanks for coming on the cube. Always a pleasure. Okay. Live from San Francisco. It's to cube. I'm John for your host. Stay with us more coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. >>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here live in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cubes cube coverage of AWS summit 2022 here in San Francisco. We're all the developers are the bay air at Silicon valley. And of course, AWS summit in New York city is coming up in the summer. We'll be there as well. SF and NYC cube coverage. Look for us. Of course, reinforcing Boston and re Mars with the whole robotics, AI. They all coming together. Lots of coverage stay with us today. We've got a great guest from Bel VC. John founding partner, entrepreneurial venture is a venture firm. Your next act, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Good to see you, man. I feel like it's been forever since we've been able to do something in person. Well, >>I'm glad you're here because we run into each other all the time. We've known each other for over decade. Um, >>It's been at least 10 years, >>At least 10 years more. And we don't wanna actually go back as bring back the old school web 1.0 days. But anyway, we're in web three now. So we'll get to that in a second. We, >>We are, it's a little bit of a throwback to the path though, in my opinion, >>It's all the same. It's all distributed computing and software. We ran each other in cube con. You're investing in a lot of tech startup founders. Okay. This next level, next gen entrepreneurs have a new makeup and it's software. It's hardcore tech in some cases, not hardcore tech, but using software to take an old something old and make it better new, faster. So tell us about Bel what's the firm. I know you're the founder, uh, which is cool. What's going on. Explain >>What you, I mean, you remember I'm a recovering entrepreneur, right? So of course I, I, >>No, you're never recovering. You're always entrepreneur >>Always, but we are also always recovering. So I, um, started my first company when I was 24. If you remember, before there was Facebook and friends, there was instant messaging. People were using that product at work every day, they were creating a security vulnerability between their network and the outside world. So I plugged that hole and built an instant messaging firewall. It was my first company. The company was called IM logic and we were required by Symantec. Uh, then spent 12 years investing in the next generation of software companies, uh, early investor in open source companies and cloud companies and spent a really wonderful years, uh, at a firm called NEA. So I, I feel like my whole life I've been either starting enterprise software companies or helping founders start enterprise software companies. And I'll tell you, there's never been a better time than right now to start an enterprise software company. >>So, uh, the passion for starting a new firm was really a recognition that founders today that are starting an enterprise software company, they, they tend to be, as you said, a more technical founder, right? Usually it's a software engineer or a builder mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, they are building that are serving a slightly different market than what we've traditionally seen in enterprise software. Right? I think traditionally we've seen it buyers or CIOs that have agendas and strategies, which, you know, purchase software that is traditionally bought and sold tops down. But you know, today I think the most successful enterprise software companies are the ones that are built more bottoms up and have more technical early adopters. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software. And it starts with great technical founders with great products and great bottoms of motions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background. You're super smart admire of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is, is all companies there's no, I mean, consumer is enterprise now. Everything is what was once a niche, not, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. But remember, like right now, there's also a giant tech in VC conference in Miami <laugh> and it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, well, >>MFTs is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. >>Well, and, and I think all of us here that are of may, maybe students of his stream have been involved in open source in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three >>Movement. The hype is definitely web >>Three. Yeah. But, >>But you know, >>For sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east to Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case and maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many measures over, uh, $500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30 a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast >>Let's getting, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant <laugh> but there's also the hype of like the web three, for instance, but you know, for, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Lutman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, hire a direct sales force and sass kind of crushed that now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS? Is snowflake a SAS or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, and they own all my data. And you know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of commonalities across all six of startups and the overall adoption of technology. Uh, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually user like growth, right. They're one in the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving. >>You just pull the product >>Through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this movement may be started with open source where users were contributors, you know, contributors were users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing and it's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the users. And they're really the, the offic and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a gen Xer technically. So for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I've, I've been saying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit a digital hippie Revolut, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one of group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. We hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>During the mainframe days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home brew club. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on like, well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source. One example of that religion. Some people say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? It's, it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily. I mean, >>The data drives all decision making. Let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've been a VC for many years, but you also have the founder entrepreneurial mindset, but you can empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of is about believing in the first. So faking it till you make it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. Oh, >>AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur, right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story. And I still think that that's important, right. It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. Yeah. But having said that you're right. The proof is in the pudding, right. At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it's gonna, it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in this new economy, that're, we live in really, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative because their product begin for exactly >>The volume you back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song is the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, like the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with for right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the it's gotta speak to the, >>Exactly. Speak to the user. But let me ask a question now that for the people watching, who are maybe entrepreneurial entre entrepreneurs, um, masterclass here is in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur to come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine. Whether you're an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think will become, right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way, and we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be, the more likely somebody is gonna to align with your vision and, and want to invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I, you gotta show the path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision. Uh, if you have the same vision, you can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle of the journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the, the latest trends because it's over before you even get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living will say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. So you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but sometimes it happens ins six months. Sometimes it takes six years. Sometimes it takes 16 years. Uh, >>What's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Tebel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There there's three big trends that we invest in. And then the, the only things we do day in day out one is the explosion at open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen an alwa timeline happening forever, but it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's its one big mass of wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is underinvested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a do over, right? I mean, do we need a do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cyber security as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole like economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is around 150 billion and it still is a fraction of what >>We're, what we're and even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital >>That's right. You mean arguably, right. Arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say you gotta love your firm. Love who you're doing. We're big supporters of your mission. Congrat is on your entrepreneurial venture. And uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cuban. Uh, >>Absolutely >>Not. Certainly EU maybe even north America's in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for helping me on the show. >>Des bell VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California, after the short break, stay with us. Hey everyone. Welcome to the cue here. Live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022 we're live we're back with events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, 80% summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube. Got a great guest here. Justin Colby, owner and CEO of innovative solutions they booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us the story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. Yeah. >><laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to midsize businesses that are moving to the cloud or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control, cost, security, compliance, all the good stuff, uh, that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is. But now we have offices down in Austin, Texas up in Toronto, uh, Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago. And it's been a great ride. >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by AWS. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization and obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? Yeah. >>It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small to mid-size business. I'll try and understand how to leverage technology better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech is really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're like, listen, we gotta move to the out or we move some things to the cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then, uh, progressively working through a modernization strategy is always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to midsize businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. They want to get set up. But the, the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is. And it's not, it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem you guys solve >>The SMB space. The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and are hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with technology staff that has additional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether that's, we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to, yeah, they're like, listen, the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's OnPrem or in the cloud. I just want to know that I'm doing that in a way that helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. Good. >>How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I think there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start the, on your journey in one way, and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's a, gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning, the projects that early and not worrying about it, you got it. I mean, most people don't abandon stuff cuz they're like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. >>And they get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. Yeah. >>Frog and boiling water as we used to say so, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean this, this is a dynamic that's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you guys come in. I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talk to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did Andy jazzy announcer Adam, you know, five, a thousand announcement or whatever they did with huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just product. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are >>The values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to mid-size business, leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a tech company in the pro of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning know that we have their back and we're the safety net. So when a customer is saying, all right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going on loan. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say you're high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attack. If you have a partner that's offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own, it would cost 'em a fortune. If >>It's training alone would be insane. A risk factor not mean the cost. Yes, absolutely. Opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. Yeah. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018, when, uh, when we made the decision to go all on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious decision. It wasn't requirement isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front desk >>And she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I >>Love it. It's amazing. So I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get the right >>People involved. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point about SMBs and BIS is in general, small and large. It staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the build out, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner or SMB, do I get the why? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cyber security issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one in the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Like critical issues. This >>Is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about this, that's, >>That's what, at least a million in bloating, if not three or more Just to get that going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side now. Yeah. No. And nevermind AI and ML. That's >>Right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It's incredibly difficult. And the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll do all that exactly. In the it department. >>Exactly. >>Like, can we just call up, uh, you know, our old vendor that's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like >>It, >>But that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I were a business owner starting a business today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. And it's something that we tell, talk about every, with every one of our small to mid-size >>Businesses. So just, I wanna get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative yeah. Award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, I was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduce other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. And I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months that I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at RT long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2010 and I was like, Hey, on the value of this business and who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years, what do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner, but if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that were gonna also buy into the business with me. >>And they were the owners, no outside capital, none >>Zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons, they all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like if we're owners, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015, and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an early now process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the business, cuz they cared very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting going all in on the cloud was important for us and we haven't looked back. >>And at that time the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly. And those kinds of big enterprises, the GA I don't wanna say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to mid-size business, to migrate completely to the cloud as, as infrastructure was considered. That just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing where a lot of our small to mid-size as customers, they wanted to leverage cloud-based backup or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration, the Microsoft suite to the cloud. And a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on AWS at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is it the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plug in for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking to migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating to the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customers not to be cash strap and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so that they can modernize. >>So like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers and being empathetic to where they are in their journey. >>And that's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable wind. That's right. Seeing the value and Ling down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much for having me. >>Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We're back with more great coverage for two days after this short break, >>Live on the floor and see San Francisco for a AWS summit. I'm John ferry, host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the action we're back in person. We're at a AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back. Events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube. Bring all the action. Also virtual. We have a hybrid cube. Check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad to be >>Here. So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to have to be back through events. >>It's amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to and what two, three years. >>It's awesome. We'll be at the UHS summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and a big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything dev sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the game is pretty much laid out mm-hmm <affirmative> and the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's right. >>Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around, especially the edge public cloud for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give an example, uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, it's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering a, since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam's in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't wanna say trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listen to the customers. They work backwards from the customer. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does computing. It >>Does. That's not centralized in the public cloud now they got regions. So what is the issue at the edge what's driving the behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see that the data at the edge, you got 5g having. So it's pretty obvious, but there's a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation where today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always used to riff on the cube cause it's basically Amazon and a box pushed in the data center, running native, all the stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of becoming standard. You're starting to see some standard Deepak syncs. Group's doing some amazing work with open source Rauls team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW, he was giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my data center, do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outposts. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere or in your VMware environment. And it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. Right? So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. That's right. Innovative as that you get the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in, in these new areas that you're helping out are, they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is it. They don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on, what's making them money as a business. They want on their applications. They want to focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS, you take the infrastructure. You take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. Uh, we help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping of these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. So >>Basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it works? Right. >>And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy FinTech in the Caribbean, we talk about hurricanes and we're gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where you now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that, that required. It makes total sense. We're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech. And in, in the islands there a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what's your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming a, uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a, uh, technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure, because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on it's >>Interesting. I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, projects going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart concept. We use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead and it's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain, just for this like smart contracts for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service, but what happened to decentralized. >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance issue. Yeah. And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through, uh, a use case of a customer, um, Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud. Um, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my ad. And I also want all the benefit of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer. Yeah. >>Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment inside that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with, uh, regular commercial available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Uh, inside of that manufacturing plant, uh, we can do pre-procesing on things coming out of the, uh, the robotics that depending on what we're manufacturing, right. Uh, and then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard for >>Data, data lake, or whatever, to >>The data lake. Yeah. Data lake house, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but a lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just in time, manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going to the data that saves that cost yep. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data, unless you have to, um, those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever, the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? This is a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud out? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe maybe decision can wait. Right? Yeah. Uh, and then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot too, doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture on the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are. And, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about customers are starting to talk about throwing away data, uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And >>Well, I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this, but the one pattern was income of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retrain their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes code, as we call it our lab showcase, we did a whole, whole, that event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw away. It's not just business benefits. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. There >>Are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are run petabyte level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, uh, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to the AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a kind of a, um, fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, a cloud and skydiving instructor. <laugh> how does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? Yeah. >>Uh, you >>Jumped out a plane and got a job. You, you got a customer to jump out >>Kind of. So I was jump, I was teaching Scott eing, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a Scott I instructor. Yeah. Uh, I was teaching Scott eing and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and, and how his cus customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, uh, I was living in a tent in the woods teaching scout. I think I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, uh, I started in the first day there, uh, we had a, a discussion, uh, EC two, just come out <laugh> um, and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that and through being an on premises migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services to >>It's. So it's such a great story, you know, I was gonna, you know, you know, the, the, the, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early day was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, um, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and I, maybe it does still feel like that to some people. Right. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days, AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's pretty much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting edge stuff, like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You guys, the right equipment, you gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Matthew, thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here live and San Francisco for summit. I'm John Forry host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. look@thiscalendarforallthecubeactionatthecube.net. We'll be right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube a be summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John fury host to the cube. We'll be at the eight of his summit in New York city. This summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco, getting all the coverage what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dudes, car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor and a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you, sir. Chris. Cool. How are, are you >>Good? How are you? >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah. So give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? First >>Of all, thank you for having me back to be business with you. Never great to see you. Um, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. Um, we have raised close to a hundred million there. Uh, the investors are people like Norwes Menlo, Tru ventures, coast, lo ventures, Ram Sheam and all those people, all well known guys. The Andy Beckel chime, Paul Mo uh, main web. So a whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley VCs are involved >>And has it come? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISR is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk, uh, the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and ServiceNow to take it to the next stage? >>Well, I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, Dave Valenti as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a GE, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh> >>You know who you >>Get to call this fun to talk. You though, >>You got the commentary, you, your, your finger on the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud scale. You predicted that we talked about on cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing DACA just raised a hundred million on a 2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from an enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control, plane emerging, AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded, observability there's 10 million observability companies. Data is the key. What's your angle on this? What's your take. Yeah, >>No, look, I think I'll give you the view that I see right from my side. Obviously data is very clear. So the things that remember system of recorded you and me talked about the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud NA it'll be called AI, NA AI native is a new buzzword and using the AI customer service it operations. You talk about observability. I call it, AIOps applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and service desk. What needs to be helped us with ServiceNow BMC G you see a new ELA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflow, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with a AI workflows. So you'll see AI going >>Off is RPA a company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI pass? One will be at their event this summer? Um, is it a product company? I mean, I mean, RPA is almost, should be embedded in everything. It's >>A feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company, or, but that automation should be embedded in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NA and AI NATO it'll become automation. NA yeah. And that's your thinking. >>It's almost interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kinda having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it. It was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle, and it was software abstraction. Now you have all, all kinds of workflows, abstractions everywhere. So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed or they integrated. I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So don't about the databases become called poly databases. Yeah. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area like you were talking about. It should be part of service. Now it should be part of ISRA, like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see MuleSoft and Salesforce buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies, cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also have an automation as a layer <inaudible> inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind us, you've got the expo hall. We got, um, we're back to vents, but you got, you know, AMD, Clum, Ove, uh, Dynatrace data, dog, innovative, all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right. Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Bel later today. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen. We know all the, the VCs. What does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation, clouds bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's code. Yes. Basically data is everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders of Amazon created the startups 15 years back. Everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be is people don't just build on Amazon. They're going to build it on top of snowflake. Companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake. Right? So I see my old boss flagman try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer. Right? So I think that's in the of, <inaudible> trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your moat is, what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last reinvent, coined the term super cloud, right? He's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage. And guys like Charles Fitzgeral out there, who we like was kind of shit on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get it. Like, yeah. I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> if he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Yes. Now they say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist. And, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. >>It is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer. Remember the middle layer pass will be snowflake. So can build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer. If I really need to size, I'll build it on four.com Salesforce. So I think that's where you'll see. So >>Basically if you're an entrepreneur, the north star in terms of the outcome is be a super cloud. >>It is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. >>Yeah. Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales? The snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think got Redshift. Amazon has got red, um, but Snowflake's a big customer. They're probably paying AWS think big bills too. >>So John, very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-option will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with, uh, snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouse as a data layer. So I think depending on the application use case, you have to use each of the above. I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, You know, foreclose your value that's right. But some sort of internal hack, but I think, I think the general question that I have is that I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point. When does the rising tide stop >>And >>Do the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth cycle? I >>Think it's growth. You call it cloud scale. You invented the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's, as long as there are more movement from on, uh, OnPrem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations. It helpless, even the customer service service now and, uh, ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go made. >>I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers or practitioners, not suppliers to the market, feel free to, to XME or DMing. Next question's really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products. Cause you know, the big enterprises now and, you know, small, medium, large, and large enterprise are all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or a growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean I'm seeing some stuff, but why don't we get your thoughts on that? What, no, it is. >>If I remember going back to our 2007 or eight, it, when I used to talk to you back then when Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or 1% today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a CIO line business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can double in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. >>Yeah. And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I reference the URL cause it's like, there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solutions that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting left for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there, um, and gives back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure as code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share >>Yourself? No, I have a lot of thoughts that plus I see AIOP solutions in the future should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app Dyna, right? Dynatrace, all this solution will go future towards to proactive solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service that customers are give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can come the best algorithm, but I gotta train them, modify them, tweak them, make them better, make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to our big data days back in 2009, you know, >>Look at, look how much data bricks has grown. >>It is uh, double, the key >>Cloud kinda went private, so good stuff. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking at that growing customers and my customers are some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk, Mac of fee, uh, grandchildren, all the top customers. Um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on predict S one area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service, >>Great stuff, man. Doing great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of 80 summit, 2022. And we're gonna be at 80 summit in San, uh, in New York and the summer. So look for that on this calendar, of course go to eight of us, startups.com. I mentioned that it's a site for all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This to cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back a little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit new York's coming in the summer. We'll be there too with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the groove, psyched to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're gonna see a lot of virtual cube, a lot of hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economists with duck, bill groove, he founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe as shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at Mark's been doing a lot of shit posting lately, all a billionaires are shit posting, but they don't know how to do it. Like they're not >>Doing it right. Something opportunity there. It's like, here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a mid-size island to begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. This >>Shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on the other side, I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what is shit posting? >>It's more or less talking about the world of enterprise tech, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream. But it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a jackass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, coupons coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you can see the growth of cloud native Amazons, all, all the Adams let see new CEO, Andy move on to be the chief of all. Amazon just saw him. The cover of was it time magazine. Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything these folks do. They they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble imagining the logistics. It takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. It's, it's sprawling, immense that dominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. Well, >>There's a lot of force for good conversations, seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to port and he was trying to portray themselves as you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now it same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. Either way, sounds like more exciting >>Replacement ready <laugh> in case something goes wrong. I, the track highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in e-sports with other, in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and video graphics card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. >>Oh, it's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going in your world. I know you have a lot of great success. We've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter. Check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's back any blow back late there been uptick. What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's high. I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They must not have heard me it. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do that. >>We should do that. Actually. I think sure would call in. Oh, I, >>I think >>Chief, we had that right now. People would call in and say, Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the customer. >>You know, I always joke with Dave ante about how John Fort's always at, uh, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0 5, or we can't, >>We have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish. That's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their >>Producting, they're going in different directions. When they named Amazon Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonused on a number of words. They can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, session manager is a great one. I love the service, ridiculous name. They have systems manager, parameter store, which is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage your parameter store does not. It's >>Fun. What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination of you >>Got Ks. You got EMR, you got EC two. You got S three SQS. Well, Redshift the on an acronym, you >>Gots is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation. >>They still up bean stalk. Or is that still around? Oh, >>They never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, wow, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it. But while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it. John three <laugh>. >>Okay. >>Simple BV still haunts our dreams. >>I, I actually got an email. I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C two S were being deprecated and I got an email I'm like, I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me just like, give me something else. Right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you is that like, okay. So as Amazon gets better in some areas, where do they need more work in your opinion? Because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database, Snowflake's got a database service. So Redshift, snowflake database is, so you got this co-op petition. Yes. How's that going? And what are you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with Amazon and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want and they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multi-cloud cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word. Multi-cloud um, a lot of people are saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word, like multi sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multi-cloud >>Multiple single points? >>Dave loves that term. Yeah. >>Yeah. You're building in multiple single points of failure. Do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about multi-cloud either as the industry leader, talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective, it doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of forms. Some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on context. But my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing, because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. Yeah. >>Cool. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question, cause I know you, we you've been, you know, fellow journeymen and the, and the cloud journey going to all the events and then the pandemic hit where now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna gonna end. Certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations. Community's gonna emerge. You got a pretty big community growing and it's throwing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing, or just big chain angels. You've seen with the pandemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece, come in, you're commentating. You're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck bill group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, fun, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who can pony up two grand and a week in Las Vegas and get to Las Vegas from wherever they happen to be by moving virtually suddenly it, it embraces the reality that talent is even distributed. Opportunity is not. And that means that suddenly these things are accessible to a wide swath of audience and potential customer base and the rest that hadn't been invited to the table previously, it's imperative that we not lose that. It's nice to go out and talk to people and have people come up and try and smell my hair from time to time, I smell delightful. Let make assure you, but it was, but it's also nice to be. >>I have a product for you if you want, you know. >>Oh, excellent. I look forward to it. What is it putting? Why not? <laugh> >>What else have you seen? So when accessibility for talent, which by the way is totally home run. What weird things have happened that you've seen? Um, that's >>Uh, it's, it's weird, but it's good that an awful lot of people giving presentations have learned to tighten their message and get to the damn point because most people are not gonna get up from a front row seat in a conference hall, midway through your Aing talk and go somewhere else. But they will change a browser tab and you won't get them back. You've gotta be on point. You've gotta be compelling if it's going to be a virtual discussion. >>Yeah. And also turn off your IMEs too. >>Oh yes. It's always fun in the, in the meetings when you're talking to someone and their co is messaging them about, should we tell 'em about this? And I'm sitting there reading it and it's >>This guy is really weird. Like, >>Yes I am and I bring it into the conversation and then everyone's uncomfortable. It goes, wow. >>Why not? I love when my wife yells at me over I message. When I'm on a business call, like, do you wanna take that about no, I'm good. >>No, no. It's better off. I don't. No, the only encourager it's fine. >>My kids. Excellent. Yeah. That's fun again. That's another weird thing. And, and then group behavior is weird. Now people are looking at, um, communities differently. Yes. Very much so, because if you're fatigued on content, people are looking for the personal aspect. You're starting to see much more of like yeah. Another virtual event. They gotta get better. One and two who's there. >>Yeah. >>The person >>That's a big part of it too is the human stories are what are being more and more interesting. Don't get up here and tell me about your product and how brilliant you are and how you built it. That's great. If I'm you, or if I wanna work with you or I want to compete with you, or I wanna put on my engineering hat and build it myself. Cause why would I buy anything? That's more than $8. But instead, tell me about the problem. Tell me about the painful spot that you specialize in. Tell me a story there. >>I, I >>Think that gets a glimpse in a hook and >>Makes more, more, I think you nailed it. Scaling storytelling. Yes. And access to better people because they don't have to be there in person. I just did it thing. I never, we never would've done the queue. We did. Uh, Amazon stepped up in sponsors. Thank you, Amazon for sponsoring international women's day, we did 30 interviews, APAC. We did five regions and I interviewed this, these women in Asia, Pacific eight, PJ, they called for in this world. And they're amazing. I never would've done those interviews cuz I never, would've seen 'em at an event. I never would've been in Japan or Singapore to access them. And now they're in the index. They're in the network. They're collaborating on LinkedIn. So a threads are developing around connections that I've never seen before. Yes. Around the content, >>Absolutely >>Content value plus >>The networking. And that is the next big revelation of this industry is going to realize you have different companies. And in Amazon's case, different service teams, all, all competing with each other, but you have the container group and you have the database group and you have the message cuing group. But customers don't really want to build things from spare parts. They want a solution to a problem. I want to build an app that does Twitter for pets or whatever it is I'm trying to do. I don't wanna basically have to pick and choose and fill my shopping cart with all these different things. I want something that's gonna give me what I'm trying to get as close to turnkey as possible. Moving up the stack. That is the future. And just how it gets here is gonna be >>Well we're here with Corey Quinn, the master of the master of content here in the a ecosystem. Of course we we've been following up in the beginnings. Great guy. Check out his blog, his site, his newsletter screaming podcast. Cory, final question for you. Uh, what do you hear doing what's on your agenda this week in San Francisco and give a plug for the duck build group. What are you guys doing? I know you're hiring some people what's on the table for the company. What's your focus this week and put a plug in for the group. >>I'm here as a customer and basically getting outta my cage cuz I do live here. It's nice to actually get out and talk to folks who are doing interesting things at the duck build group. We solve one problem. We fixed the horrifying AWS bill, both from engineering and architecture, advising as well as negotiating AWS contracts because it turns out those things are big and complicated. And of course my side media projects last week in aws.com, we are, it it's more or less a content operation where I indulge my continual and ongoing law of affair with the sound of my own voice. >><laugh> and you good. It's good content. It's on, on point fun, Starky and relevant. So thanks for coming to the cube and sharing with us. Appreciate it. No, thank you. Fun. You. Okay. This the cube covers here in San Francisco, California, the cube is back at to events. These are the summits, Amazon web services summits. They happen all over the world. We'll be in New York and obviously we're here in San Francisco this week. I'm John furry. Keep, keep it right here. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Okay. Welcome back everyone. This's the cubes covers here in San Francisco, California, we're live on the show floor of AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube and remember AWS summit in New York city coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. And of course reinvent the end of the year for all the cube coverage on cloud computing and AWS. The two great guests here from the APN global APN se Jenko and Jeff Grimes partner leader, Jeff and se is doing partnerships global APN >>AWS global startup program. Yeah. >>Okay. Say that again. >>AWS global startup program. >>That's the official name. >>I love >>It too long, too long for me. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, of course. Appreciate it. Tell us about what's going on with you guys. What's the, how was you guys organized? You guys we're obviously were in San Francisco bay area, Silicon valley, zillions of startups here, New York. It's got another one we're gonna be at tons of startups. Lot of 'em getting funded, big growth and cloud big growth and data security, hot and sectors. >>Absolutely. >>So maybe, maybe we could just start with the global startup program. Um, it's essentially a white glove service that we provide to startups that are built on AWS. And the intention there is to help identify use cases that are being built on top of AWS. And for these startups, we want to provide white glove support in co building products together. Right. Um, co-marketing and co-selling essentially, um, you know, the use cases that our customers need solved, um, that either they don't want to build themselves or are perhaps more innovative. Um, so the, a AWS global startup program provides white glove support, dedicated headcount for each one of those pillars. Um, and within our program, we've also provided incentives, programs go to market activities like the AWS startup showcase that we've built for these startups. >>Yeah. By the way, start AWS startups.com is the URL, check it out. Okay. So partnerships are key. Jeff, what's your role? >>Yeah. So I'm responsible for leading the overall F for, for the AWS global startup program. Um, so I've got a team of partner managers that are located throughout the us, uh, managing a few hundred startup ISVs right now. <laugh> >>Yeah, I got >>A lot. We've got a lot. >>There's a lot. I gotta, I gotta ask the tough question. Okay. I'm I'm a startup founder. I got a team. I just got my series a we're grown. I'm trying to hire people. I'm super busy. What's in it for me. Yeah. What do you guys bring to the table? I love the white glove service, but translate that what's in it. What do I get out of it? What's >>A good story. Good question. I focus, I think. Yeah, because we get, we get to see a lot of partners building their businesses on AWS. So, you know, from our perspective, helping these partners focus on what, what do we truly need to build by working backwards from customer feedback, right? How do we effectively go to market? Because we've seen startups do various things, um, through trial and error, um, and also just messaging, right? Because oftentimes partners or rather startups, um, try to boil the ocean with many different use cases. So we really help them, um, sort of laser focus on what are you really good at and how can we bring that to the customer as quickly as possible? >>Yeah. I mean, it's truly about helping that founder accelerate the growth of their company. Yeah. Right. And there's a lot that you can do with AWS, but focus is truly the key word there because they're gonna be able to find their little piece of real estate and absolutely deliver incredible outcomes for our customers. And then they can start their growth curve there. >>What are some of the coolest things you've seen with the APN that you can share publicly? I know you got a lot going on there, a lot of confidentiality. Um, but you know, we're here lot of great partners on the floor here. I'm glad we're back at events. Uh, a lot of stuff going on digitally with virtual stuff and, and hybrid. What are some of the cool things you guys have seen in the APN that you can point to? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can point to few, you can take them. Sure. So, um, I think what's been fun over the years for me personally, I came from a startup, ran sales at an early stage startup and, and I went through the whole thing. So I have a deep appreciation for what these guys are going through. And what's been interesting to see for me is taking some of these early stage guys, watching them progress, go public, get acquired, and see that big day mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, and being able to point to very specific items that we help them to get to that point. Uh, and it's just a really fun journey to watch. >>Yeah. I, and part of the reason why I really, um, love working at the AWS, uh, global startup program is working with passionate founders. Um, I just met with a founder today that it's gonna, he's gonna build a very big business one day, um, and watching them grow through these stages and supporting that growth. Um, I like to think of our program as a catalyst for enterprise sort of scale. Yeah. Um, and through that we provide visibility, credibility and growth opportunities. >>Yeah. A lot, a lot of partners too. What I found talking to staff founders is when they have that milestone, they work so hard for it. Whether it's a B round C round Republic or get bought. Yeah. Um, then they take a deep breath and they look back at wow, what a journey it's been. So it's kind of emotional for sure. Yeah. Still it's a grind. Right? You gotta, I mean, when you get funding, it's still day one. You don't stop. It's no celebrate, you got a big round or valuation. You still gotta execute >>And look it's hypercompetitive and it's brutally difficult. And our job is to try to make that a little less difficult and navigate those waters right. Where everyone's going after similar things. >>Yeah. I think as a group element too, I observe that startups that I, I meet through the APN has been interesting because they feel part of AWS. Yeah, totally. As a group of community, as a vibe there. Um, I know they're hustling, they're trying to make things happen. But at the same time, Amazon throws a huge halo effect. I mean, that's a huge factor. I mean, yeah. You guys are the number one cloud in the business, the growth in every sector is booming. Yeah. And if you're a startup, you don't have that luxury yet. And look at companies like snowflake, they're built on top of AWS. Yeah. I mean, people are winning by building on AWS. >>Yeah. And our, our, our program really validates their technology first. So we have, what's called a foundation's technical review that we put all of our startups through before we go to market. So that when enterprise customers are looking at startup technology, they know that it's already been vetted. And, um, to take that a step further and help these partners differentiate, we use programs like the competency programs, the DevOps compet, the, the security competency, which continues to help, um, provide sort of a platform for these startups, help them differentiate. And also there's go to market benefits that are associated with that. >>Okay. So let me ask the, the question that's probably on everyone's mind, who's watching. Certainly I asked this a lot. There's a lot of companies startups out there who makes the, is there a criteria? Oh God, it's not like his sports team or anything, but like sure. Like there's activate program, which is like, there's hundreds of thousands of startups out there. Not everyone is at the APN. Right? Correct. So ISVs again, that's a whole nother, that's a more mature partner that might have, you know, huge market cap or growth. How do you guys focus? How do you guys focus? I mean, you got a good question, you know, a thousand flowers blooming all the time. Is there a new way you guys are looking at it? I know there's been some talk about restructure or, or new focus. What's the focus. >>Yeah. It's definitely not an easy task by any means. Um, but you know, I recently took over this role and we're really trying to establish focus areas, right. So obviously a lot of the fees that we look after our infrastructure ISVs, that's what we do. Uh, and so we have very specific pods that look after different type of partners. So we've got a security pod, we've got a DevOps pod, we've got core infrastructure, et cetera. And really we're trying to find these ISVs that can solve, uh, really interesting AWS customer challenges. >>So you guys have a deliberate, uh, focus on these pillars. So what infrastructure, >>Security, DevOps, and data and analytics, and then line of business >>Line of business line, like web marketing >>Solutions, business apps, >>Business, this owner type thing. Exactly. >>Yeah, exactly. >>So solutions there. Yeah. More solutions and the other ones are like hardcore. So infrastructure as well, like storage, backup, ransomware of stuff, or, >>Uh, storage, networking. >>Okay. Yeah. The classic >>Database, et cetera. Right. >>And so there's teams on each pillar. >>Yep. So I think what's, what's fascinating for the startup that we cover is that they've got, they truly have support from a build market sell perspective. Right. So you've got someone who's technical to really help them get the technology, figured out someone to help them get the marketing message dialed and spread, and then someone to actually do the co-sell, uh, day to day activities to help them get in front of customers. >>Probably the number one request that we always ask for Amazon is can we waste that sock report? Oh, download it, the console, which we use all the time. Exactly. But security's a big deal. I mean, you know, SREs are evolving, that role of DevOps is taking on dev SecOps. Um, I, I could see a lot of customers having that need for a relationship to move things faster. Do you guys provide like escalation or is that a part of a service or not, not part of a, uh, >>Yeah, >>So the partner development manager can be an escalation point. Absolutely. Think of them as an extension of your business inside of AWS. >>Great. And you guys how's that partner managers, uh, measure >>On those three pillars. Right. Got it. Are we billing, building valuable use cases? So product development go to market, so go to market activities, think blog, posts, webinars, case studies, so on and so forth. And then co-sell not only are we helping these partners win their current opportunities that they are sourcing, but can we also help them source net new deals? Yeah. Right. That's >>Very important. I mean, top asked from the partners is get me in front of customers. Right. Um, not an easy task, but that's a huge goal of ours to help them grow their top >>Line. Right. Yeah. In fact, we had some interviews here on the cube earlier talking about that dynamic of how enterprise customers are buying. And it's interesting, a lot more POCs. I have one partner here that you guys work with, um, on observability, they got a huge POC with capital one mm-hmm <affirmative> and the enterprises are engaging the startups and bringing them in. So the combination of open source software enterprises are leaning into that hard and bringing young growing startups in mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yep. So I could see that as a huge service that you guys can bring people in. >>Right. And they're bringing massively differentiated technology to the table. Mm-hmm <affirmative> the challenge is they just might not have the brand recognition that the big guys have. And so that it's our job is how do you get that great tech in front of the right situations? >>Okay. So my next question is about the show here, and then we'll talk globally. So here in San Francisco sure. You know, Silicon valley bay area, San Francisco bay area, a lot of startups, a lot of VCs, a lot of action. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so probably a big market for you guys. Yeah. So what's exciting here in SF and then outside SF, you guys have a global program, you see any trends that are geography based or is it sure areas more mature? There's certain regions that are better. I mean, I just interviewed a company here that's doing, uh, AWS edge really well in these cases. It's interesting that these, the partners are filling a lot of holes and gaps in the opportunities with AWS. So what's exciting here. And then what's the global perspective. >>Yeah, totally. So obviously a ton of partners, I, from the bay area that we support. Um, but we're seeing a lot of really interesting technology coming out of AMEA specifically. Yeah. Uh, and making a lot of noise here in the United States, which is great. Um, and so, you know, we definitely have that global presence and, and starting to see super differentiated technology come out of those regions. >>Yeah. Especially Tel Aviv. Yeah. >>Amy real quick, before you get in the surge. It's interesting. The VC market in, in Europe is hot. Yeah. They've got a lot of unicorns coming in. We've seen a lot of companies coming in. They're kind of rattling their own, you know, cage right now. Hey, look at us. We'll see if they crash, you know, but we don't see that happening. I mean, people have been projecting a crash now in, in the startup ecosystem for at least a year. It's not crashing. In fact, funding's up. >>Yeah. The pandemic was hard on a lot of startups for sure. Yeah. Um, but what we've seen is many of these startups, they, as quickly as they can grow, they can also pivot as, as, as well. Um, and so I've actually seen many of our startups grow through the pandemic because their use cases are helping customers either save money, become more operationally efficient and provide value to leadership teams that need more visibility into their infrastructure during a pandemic. >>It's an interesting point. I talked to Andy jazzy and Adam Leski both say the same thing during the pandemic necessity, the mother of all invention. Yep. And startups can move fast. So with that, you guys are there to assist if I'm a startup and I gotta pivot cuz remember iterate and pivot, iterate and pivot. So you get your economics, that's the playbook of the ventures and the models. >>Exactly. How >>Do you guys help me do that? Give me an example of walk me through, pretend me I'm a startup. Hey, I am on the cloud. Oh my God. Pandemic. They need video conferencing. Hey cube. Yeah. What do I need? Surge? What, what do I do? >>That's a good question. First thing is just listen. Yeah. I think what we have to do is a really good job of listening to the partner. Um, what are their needs? What is their problem statement and where do they want to go at the end of the day? Um, and oftentimes because we've worked with so many successful startups, they have come out of our program. We have, um, either through intuition or a playbook, determined what is gonna be the best path forward and how do we get these partners to stop focusing on things that will eventually, um, just be a waste of time yeah. And, or not provide, or, you know, bring any fruit to the table, which, you know, essentially revenue. >>Well, we love star rights here in the cube because one, um, they have good stories. They're oil and cutting edge, always pushing the envelope and they're kind of disrupting someone else. Yeah. And so they have an opinion. They don't mind sharing on camera. So love talking to startups. We love working with you guys on our startup showcases startups.com. Check out AWS startups.com and you got the showcases, uh, final. We I'll give you guys the last word. What's the bottom line bumper sticker for AP the global APN program. Summarize the opportunity for startups, what you guys bring to the table and we'll close it out. Totally start >>With you. Yeah. I think the AWS global startup program's here to help companies truly accelerate their business full stop. Right. And that's what we're here for. I love it. >>It's a good way to, it's a good way to put it Dito. >>Yeah. All right, sir. Thanks for coming on. Thanks John. Great to see you love working with you guys. Hey, startups need help. And the growing and huge market opportunities, the shift cloud scale data engineering, security infrastructure, all the markets are exploding in growth because of the digital transformation of the realities here. Open source and cloud all making it happen here in the cube in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, your host. Thanks for watching >>John. >>Hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, two days of coverage, AWS summit, 2022 in New York city. Coming up this summer, we'll be there as well at events are back. The cube is back of course, with the cube virtual cube hybrid, the cube.net, check it out a lot of content this year, more than ever, a lot more cloud data cloud native, modern applic is all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, Cub alumni, uh, CEO of observe Inc in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data observability Jeremy. Great to see you. Thanks >>Always great to come and talk to you on the queue, man. It's been been a few years, so, >>Um, well you, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, uh, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability hot area, but also you've been a senior executive president of Dell, uh, EMC, uh, 11 years ago you had a, a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. Um, yeah. And it's here. You predicted it 11 years ago. Um, look around it's cloud meets big data. >>Yeah. I mean the, the cloud thing I think, you know, was, was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for, for, for sort of catching that bus out, um, you know, we, we were on the, the, the bus early and, and I think it was only inevitable. Like, you know, if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you, you could find out things you could never possibly imagine. >>So you're close to a lot of companies that we've been covering deeply. Snowflake obviously are involved, uh, the board level, you know, the founders, you know, the people there cloud, you know, Amazon, you know, what's going on here? Yeah. You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, uh, chief of observ, Inc, which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data engineering, large scale integrations, um, data as code integrating into applic. I mean, it's a whole nother world developing, like you see with snowflake, it means snowflake is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's your, what's this wave we're on what's how would you describe the wave? >>Well, a couple of things, I mean, people are, I think riding more software than, than ever fall. Why? Because they've realized that if, if you don't take your business online and offer a service, then you become largely irrelevant. And so you you've got a whole set of new applications. I think, I think more applications now than any point. Um, not, not just ever, but the mid nineties, I always looked at as the golden age of application development. Now back then people were building for windows. Well, well now they're building for things like AWS is now the platform. Um, so you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data and the, you know, the sort of the transactions, you know, what you bought today or something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry data, all the exhaust fumes. And I think people really are realizing that their differentiation is not so much their application. It's their understanding of the data. Can, can I understand who my best customers are, what I sell today. If people came to my website and didn't buy, then I not, where did they drop off all of that they wanna analyze. And, and the answers are all in the data. The question is, can you understand it >>In our last startup showcase, we featured data as code. One of the insights that we got out of that I wanna get your opinion on our reaction to is, is that data used to be put into a data lake and turns into a data swamp or throw into the data warehouse. And then we'll do some query, maybe a report once in a while. And so data, once it was done, unless it was real time, even real time was not good anymore after real time. That was the old way. Now you're seeing more and more, uh, effort to say, let's go look at the data cuz now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once mm-hmm <affirmative> they're iterating. Yeah. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting. Yeah, that's a Silicon valley story. That's like how startups work, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have another, this data concept that's now yeah. Part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole, this whole new cycle of >>Yeah. >>Data being reused and repurposed and figured out and >>Yeah, yeah. I'm a big fan of, um, years ago. Uh, uh, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee at the MIT C cell labs I spent time with and he, he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look I'm I'm. He said I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you, of enough data, you can answer any question. And, and this is going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and, and certainly, you know, research is on the forefront. But I, I think, you know, starting to see that mindset of the, the sort of MIT research be mainstream, you know, in enterprises, they they're realizing that yeah, it is about the data. You know, if I can better understand my data better than my competitor than I've got an advantage. And so the question is is, is how, what, what technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to, to allow me to do that. So >>Let's talk about observing you the CEO of, okay. Given you've seen the wave before you're in the front lines of observability, which again is in the center of all this action what's going on with the company. Give a quick minute to explain, observe for the folks who don't know what you guys do. What's the company doing? What's the funding status, what's the product status and what's the customer status. Yeah. >>So, um, we realized, you know, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago that, um, look, the way people are building applications is different. They they're way more functional. They change every day. Uh, but in some respects they're a lot more complicated. They're distributed. They, you know, microservices architectures and when something goes wrong, um, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not gonna fly because you had SA so much change going into production on a daily basis. It was hard to tell like where the problem was. And so we thought, okay, it's about time. Somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and all the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot and make sense of the problems that they're seeing. So, I mean, that's observability, it's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was a guy called, uh, Rudolph like, like everything in tech, you know, it's, it's a reinvention of, of something from years gone by. >>But, um, there's a guy called, um, Rudy Coleman in 1960s, kinder term. And, and, and the term was been able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for, uh, the best part of the all years now. Um, it took us three years just to build the product. I think, I think what people don't appreciate these days often is the barrier to entry in a lot of these markets is quite high. You, you need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. Um, so yeah, this last year we, we, we did our first year selling, uh, we've got about 40 customers now. <affirmative> um, we just we've got great investors for the hill ventures. Uh, I mean, Mike SP who was, you know, the, the guy who was the, really, the first guy in it snowflake and the, the initial investor were fortunate enough to, to have Mike on our board. And, um, you know, part of the observed story yeah. Is closely knit with snowflake because all of that time data know we, we still are in there. >>So I want to get, uh, >>Yeah. >>Pivot to that. Mike Pfizer, snowflake, Jeremy Burton, the cube kind of, kind of same thinking this idea of a super cloud or what snowflake became snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of snowflake. Yeah. So that's become an entrepreneurial story that we think that to go big in the cloud, you can have a cloud on a cloud, uh, like as Jerry, Jerry Chan and Greylock calls it castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you're doing some stuff with snowflake. So a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a snowflake or an AWS, because again, you gotta go where the data is. You need all the data. >>Yeah. So >>What's your take on that? >>I mean, having enough gray hair now, um, you know, again, in tech, I think if you wanna predict the future, look at the past. And, uh, you know, to many years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a, a smaller company called Oracle and an Oracle was the database company. And, uh, their, their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms, one, one windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operator and system was the platform. And, and then that was the, you know, ecosystem that you would compete on top of. And then there were companies like SAP that built applications on top of Oracle. So then wind the clock forward 25 years gray hairs. <laugh> the platform, isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, you know, Google cloud. I gotta probably look around if I say that in. Yeah. It's >>Okay. But hyperscale, yeah. CapX built out >>That is the new platform. And then snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generator data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. And I think they they've done an amazing job doing for the, I'd say, say the, the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world, you know, way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and, and of course my ambition would be, look, if, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of snow snowflake, uh, as, as they were on top of Oracle, then, then we'd probably be quite happy. >>So you're building on top of snowflake. >>We're building on top of snowflake a hundred percent. And, um, you know, I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that that's a risk. You >>Still on the board. >>Yeah. I'm still on the board. Yeah. That that's a risk I'm prepared to take <laugh> I am long on snowflake you, >>Well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board, then you'll know what's going on. Okay. No know just doing, but the, this is a real dynamic. It is. It's not a one off it's. >>Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS is an order of magnitude more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so I believe the opportunity for folks like snowflake and folks like observe it's an order of magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old >>World. Yeah. And I think this is really, I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you gotta be on a platform. Yeah. >>It's quite >>Easy or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how many seats are at that table left. >>Well, value migrates up over time. So, you know, when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, you know, Rackspace and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure, a service platform as a service, my, my old, uh, um, employee EMC, we had pivotal, you know, pivotal was a platform as a service. You don't hear so much about it, these, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to, to like extract, uh, a real business, you gotta move up, you gotta add value, you gotta build databases, then you gotta build applications. So >>It's interesting. Moving from the data center of the cloud was a dream for starters. Cause then if the provision, the CapEx, now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on top of that, you got snowflake you on top of that, the >>Assumption is almost that compute and storage is free. I know it's not quite free. Yeah. It's >>Almost free, >>But, but you can, you know, as an application vendor, you think, well, what can I do if I assume compute and storage is free, that's the mindset you've gotta get into. >>And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm gonna get a serious, multiple of value in what I'm paying. Yeah. Most people don't even blanket their Avis pills unless they're like massively huge. Yeah. Then it's a repatriation question or whatever discount question, but for most startups or any growing company, the Amazon bill should be a small factor. >>Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, um, ask me like, look, you're building on snowflake. Um, you, you know, you are, you are, you're gonna be, you're gonna be paying their money. How, how, how, how does that work with your business model? If you're paying them money, you know, do, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. I, we could build a database as well in observe, but then I've got half the development team working on in that will never be as good as snowflake. And so we made the call early on that. No, no, we, we wanna innovate above the database. Yeah. Right. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and, and the same is true of something like Amazon, like, like snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >>Yeah. And what's interesting is that Dave <inaudible> and I have been pointing this out and he's actually more on snowflake. I I've been looking at data bricks, um, and the same dynamics happening, the proof is the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, if you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and data bricks it's exploding. Right. I mean, the shows are selling out the floor. Space's book. That's the old days at VMware. Yeah. The old days at AWS >>One and for snowflake and, and any platform provider, it's a beautiful thing. You know, we build on snowflake and we pay them money. They don't have to sell to us. Right. And we do a lot of the support. And so the, the economics work out really, really well. If you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of ecosystems. >>Yeah. And then also you get, you get a, um, a trajectory of, uh, economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of snowflake integrations, right. New products. You're scaling that function with the, >>Yeah. I mean, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. Right. When I, when I, when I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had, we had one petabyte customer. And, and so at observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so been able to rely on a platform that can manage that is invaluable, >>You know, but Jeremy Greek conversation, thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. Uh, we got a couple minutes left. Um, put a plug in for observe. What do you guys, I know you got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your, your, your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You getting traction. Yeah. >>Yeah. >>Scales around the corner. Sounds like, are you, is that where you are scale? >>Got, we've got a big announcement coming up in two or weeks. We've got, we've got new funding, um, which is always great. Um, the product is, uh, really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, you know, which is at which point can you just start hiring salespeople? And the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. Um, we've got about 40 SaaS companies run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, uh, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting, um, enterprise type customers. We're, we're, you know, F five networks we're POC in right now with capital one, we got some interest in news around capital one coming up. I, I can't share too much, uh, but it's gonna be exciting. And, and like I saids hill continued to, to, to stick, >>I think capital one's a big snowflake customer as well. Right. They, >>They were early in one of the things that attracted me to capital one was they were very, very good with snowflake early on. And, and they put snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. Yeah. And, and today that, that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts. >>So capital one, very innovative cloud, obviously AIOS customer and very innovative, certainly in the CISO and CIO, um, on another point on where you're at. So you're, Prescale meaning you're about to scale, right? So you got POCs, what's that trick GE look like, can you see around the corner? What's, what's going on? What's on, around the corner. That you're, that you're gonna hit the straight and narrow and, and gas it >>Fast. Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the key thing for us is we gotta get the product. Right. Um, the nice thing about having a guy like Mike Pfizer on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage is questions that the board are always about, like, is the product, right? Is the product right? Is the product right? If you got the product right. And cuz we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and, and the revenue will take care of itself. Yeah. So right now all the attention is on the product. Um, the, this year, the exciting thing is we were, we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that back in the day you could do with the new lakes and, and AppDynamics, the last generation of, of APM tools, you're gonna be able to do that within observe. And we've already got the logs and the metrics capability in there. So for us, this year's a big one, cuz we sort of complete the trifecta, you know, the, the logs, >>What's the secret sauce observe. What if you had the, put it into a, a sentence what's the secret sauce? I, >>I, I think, you know, an amazing founding engineering team, uh, number one, I mean, at the end of the day, you have to build an amazing product and you have to solve a problem in a different way. And we've got great long term investors. And, and the biggest thing our investors give is actually it's not just money. It gives us time to get the product, right. Because if we get the product right, then we can get the growth. >>Got it. Final question. Why I got you here? You've been on the enterprise business for a long time. What's the buyer landscape out there. You got people doing POCs on capital one scale. So we know that goes on. What's the appetite at the buyer side for startups and what are their requirements that you're seeing? Uh, obviously we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their business restructure. So a lot happening in cloud. What's the criteria. How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >>Yeah. I mean, enterprises, they know they've gotta spend money transforming the business. I mean, this was, I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but, um, what, what we were saying five years ago is happening. Um, everybody needs to figure out out a way to take their, this to this digital world. Everybody has to do it. So the nice thing from a startup standpoint is they know at times they need to risk or, or take a bet on new technology in order to, to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that a have money, uh, B prepared to take risks and it's, it's a race against time to, you know, get their, their offerings in this. So a new digital footprint, >>Final, final question. What's the state of AWS. Where do you see them going next? Obviously they're continuing to be successful. How does cloud 3.0, or they always say it's day one, but it's more like day 10. Uh, but what's next for Aw. Where do they go from here? Obviously they're doing well. They're getting bigger and bigger. >>Yeah. They're, they're, it's an amazing story. I mean, you know, we we're, we're on AWS as well. And so I, I think if they keep nurturing the builders in the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They, they have an early leads. And if you look at where, you know, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the, in the late it was, they stopped, uh, really caring about developers and the folks who were building on top of their ecosystem. In fact, they started buying up their ecosystem and competing with people in their ecosystem. And I see with AWS, they, they have an amazing head start and if they did more, you know, if they do more than that, that's, what's gonna keep the jut rolling for many years to come. Yeah, >>They got the silicone and they got the staff act, developing Jeremy Burton inside the cube, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called observing in the middle of all the action on the board of snowflake as well. Um, great start. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Always a pleasure. >>Okay. Live from San Francisco to cube. I'm John for your host. Stay with us more coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. >>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here live in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cubes cube coverage of AWS summit 2022 here in San Francisco. We're all the developers of the bay area at Silicon valley. And of course, AWS summit in New York city is coming up in the summer. We'll be there as well. SF and NYC cube coverage. Look for us. Of course, reinforcing Boston and re Mars with the whole robotics AI thing, all coming together. Lots of coverage stay with us today. We've got a great guest from Deibel VC. John Skoda, founding partner, entrepreneurial venture is a venture firm. Your next act, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Good to see you, Matt. I feel like it's been forever since we've been able to do something in person. Well, >>I'm glad you're here because we run into each other all the time. We've known each other for over a decade. Um, >><affirmative>, it's been at least 10 years now, >>At least 10 years more. And we don't wanna actually go back as frees back, uh, the old school web 1.0 days. But anyway, we're in web three now. So we'll get to that in >>Second. We, we are, it's a little bit of a throwback to the path though, in my opinion, >><laugh>, it's all the same. It's all distributed computing and software. We ran each other in cube con you're investing in a lot of tech startup founders. Okay. This next level, next gen entrepreneurs have a new makeup and it's software. It's hardcore tech in some cases, not hardcore tech, but using software is take old something old and make it better, new, faster. <laugh>. So tell us about Deibel what's the firm. I know you're the founder, uh, which is cool. What's going on. Explain >>What you're doing. I mean, you remember I'm a recovering entrepreneur, right? So of course I, I, I, >>No, you're never recovering. You're always entrepreneur >>Always, but we are also always recovering. So I, um, started my first company when I was 24. If you remember, before there was Facebook and friends, there was instant messaging. People were using that product at work every day, they were creating a security vulnerability between their network and the outside world. So I plugged that hole and built an instant messaging firewall. It was my first company. The company was called, I am logic and we were required by Symantec. Uh, then spent 12 years investing in the next generation of our companies, uh, early investor in open source companies and cloud companies and spent a really wonderful 12 years, uh, at a firm called NEA. So I, I feel like my whole life I've been either starting enterprise software companies or helping founders start enterprise software companies. And I'll tell you, there's never been a better time than right now to start enter price software company. >>So, uh, the passion for starting a new firm was really a recognition that founders today that are starting in an enterprise software company, they, they tend to be, as you said, a more technical founder, right? Usually it's a software engineer or a builder mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, they are building products that are serving a slightly different market than what we've traditionally seen in enterprise software. Right? I think traditionally we've seen it buyers or CIOs that have agendas and strategies, which, you know, purchased software that has traditionally bought and sold tops down. But, you know, today I think the most successful enterprise software companies are the ones that are built more bottoms up and have more technical early opts. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software. And it starts with great technical founders with great products and great and emotions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background, super smart admire of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is all companies. The is no, I mean, consumer is enterprise. Now everything is what was once a niche. No, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. But remember, like right now, there's also a giant tech in VC conference in Miami <laugh> it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, >>Ts is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. Well, and, >>And I think all of us here that are, uh, maybe students of history and have been involved in, open in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three movement. >>The hype is definitely that three. >>Yeah. But, but >>You know, for >>Sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east to Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case now? And maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many men over, uh, 500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30% a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast, >>Let's getting, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant, but it's also the hype of like the web three, for instance. But you know, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Luman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, higher direct sales force and SAS kind of crushed the, at now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS? Is snowflake a SAS or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, they own all my data. You know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of commonalities across all successful startups and the overall adoption of technology. Uh, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually user like growth, right. They're one in the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving. You >>Just pull the >>Product through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this movement maybe started with open source where users were, are contributors, you know, contributors, we're users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing and it's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the users. And they're really the, the beneficiaries and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a GenXer technically, so for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I've, I've been staying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit a digital hippie revolution, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one other group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. We hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>It's the main for days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home brew club. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on. Well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source, one example of that religion. Some people will say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? It's, it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily. I mean >>The decision making, let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've made a VC for many years, but you also have the founder, uh, entrepreneurial mindset, but you can get empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of is about believing in the person. So fing, so you make, it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. Oh, >>AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur, right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story. You, I still think that that's important, right? It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. But having said that you're right, the proof is in the pudding, right? At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in this new economy that we live in, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative because their products exactly >>The volume back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song was the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with. Right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the, you know, it's gotta speak to >>The, speak to the user, but let me ask a question now that the people watching who are maybe entrepreneurial entrepreneur, um, masterclass here is in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur to come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine. Whether you're an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage, engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think something will become. Right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way, and we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be, the more likely somebody is gonna align with your vision and, and want to invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I >>Show >>The path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision, uh, have the same vision. You can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle of the journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the latest trends because it's over before you can get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living will say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. So you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but sometimes it happens in six months. Sometimes it takes six years is sometimes like 16 years. >>Uh, what's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Desel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There, there's three big trends that we invest in. And they're the, they're the only things we do day in, day out. One is the explosion and open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen and on what timeline happening >>Forever. >>But it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's, it's one big, massive wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now, a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a, a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally, it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is under invested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a dessert do over, right? I mean, do we need a do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cyber security as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is around 150 billion. And it still is a fraction of what we're, what >>We're and security even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital >>That's right. You mean arguably, right? I mean, arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say, you gotta love your firm. Love. You're doing we're big supporters of your mission. Congratulations on your entrepreneurial venture. And, uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cub gone. Uh, >>Absolutely. >>Certainly EU maybe even north America's in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for having me on >>The show. Guess bell VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California. After the short break, stay with us. Everyone. Welcome to the queue here. Live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022 we're live we're back with the events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, 80% summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube got a great guest here. Justin Coby owner and CEO of innovative solutions. Their booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us a story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. >>Yeah. <laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to midsize businesses that are moving into the cloud or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control, cost, security, compliance, all the good stuff, uh, that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is, but now we have offices down in Austin, Texas up in Toronto, uh, key Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago and it's been a great ride. It >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by AWS. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization and obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? >>Yeah. It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small to midsize business. They're trying to understand how to leverage technology. It better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech ISNT really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're like, listen, we gotta move to the cloud or we move some things to cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then, uh, progressively working through a modernization strateg, always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to midsize businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. They want get set up. But then the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is. And it's not, it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem you guys solve >>In the SMB space? The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and are hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with technology staff that has traditional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to, yeah, they're like, listen, the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's OnPrem or in the cloud. I just want to know that I'm doing that in a way that helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. >>Good. How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I, there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start down your journey in one way and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning the projects that early and not worrying about it, you got it. I mean, most people don't abandon cause like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. And >>They get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. Yeah. >>Frog and boiling water as we used to say. So, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean, this is a dynamic that's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you, I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talked to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did am jazzy announce or Adam, you know, the 5,000 announcement or whatever. They do huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just processes. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are, >>What's the values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to midsize business leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a tech company in the process of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your, or it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning they know that we have their back Andre or the safety net. So when a customer is saying, all right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going in alone. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say you're high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attack. If you have a partner, that's all offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products, uh, that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own. It, it would cost 'em a fortune. If >>Training alone would be insane, a factor and the cost. Yes, absolutely. Opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. Yeah. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018, when, uh, when we made the decision to go all in on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious decision. It wasn't requirement and still isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front desk >>And she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I love it. It's amazing. >>But I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get >>The right people involved. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point about SMBs and businesses in general, small en large, it staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the build out, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner or SMB, do I get the ROI? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cybersecurity issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one and the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Critical issues. This >>Is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about. So that's, >>That's what, at least a million in bloating, if not three or more Just to get that going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side though. Yeah. No. And nevermind AI and ML. That's >>Right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It it's incredibly difficult. And, and the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll >>Do all that >>Exactly. In it department. >>Exactly. >>Like, can we just call up, uh, you know, <laugh> our old vendor. That's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like it, but that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I was a business owner, starting a business to today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. And it's something that we talk about every, with every one of our small to midsize business. >>So just, I want to get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduce other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. And I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months that I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at R I T long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2010 and I was like, Hey, I'm growing the value of this business. And who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years? What do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner, but if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that we're gonna also buy the business with >>Me. And they were the owners, no outside capital, >>None zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons. They all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like if we're owners, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015, and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an earn out process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the business, cuz they care very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting all going all in on the cloud was important for us and we haven't looked back. >>And at that time, the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly the, uh, and those kinds of big enterprises. The game don't, won't say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to midsize business, to migrate completely to the cloud as, as infrastructure was considered. That just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing were a lot of our small to midsize business customers, they wanted to leverage cloud based backup, or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration. The, the Microsoft suite to the cloud and a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on eight at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plug in for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking to migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating to the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customers not to be cash strapped and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so that they can modernize. >>So like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers, empathetic to where they are in their journey. And >>That's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable wind. That's right. Seeing the value and doubling down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate it. Thank >>You very much for having >>Me. Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching with back with more great coverage for two days after this short break >>Live on the floor in San Francisco for 80 west summit, I'm John ferry, host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the action we're back in person. We're at AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube, bringing all the action. Also virtual, we have a hybrid cube, check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticketing off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad >>To be here. So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to have to be back through events. >>It's amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to and what two, three years. >>It's awesome. We'll be at the, uh, New York as well. A lot of developers and a big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything dev sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the, the game is pretty much laid out. Mm. And the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's right. >>Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around, especially the edge public cloud out for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give >>An example, >>Uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech data and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering Aw since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and then became the CEO. Now Adam Slosky is in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to, I don't wanna say, trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listen to customers. They work backwards from the customers. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does >>Computing. It >>Does. >>That's not central lies in the public cloud. Now they got regions. So what is the issue with the edge what's driving? The behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got five GM having. So it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the <affirmative> what's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over fit 15 AWS edge services, and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always used to riff on the cube, uh, cuz it's basically Amazon in a box, pushed in the data center, uh, running native, all the stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of become standard. You're starting to see some standard Deepak sings group is doing some amazing work with open source Rauls team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see low the zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my data center, do I wanna manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outpost. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment and it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. Innovative does that. You have the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in, in these new areas that you're helping out are they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their available ability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is it. They don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on, what's making them money as a business. They wanna focus on their applications. They want focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS, you take the infrastructure. You take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. We help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company, we have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. >>So basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it works? Right. >>And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy FinTech in the Caribbean, we're gonna talk about hurricanes and gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where now have data, you have applications that are tapping into that, that requirement. It makes total sense. We're seeing across the board. So it's not like it's, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech in, in the islands. There are a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what's your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto underly parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming. Uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a tech technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on it's >>Interesting. And I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, projects going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart contract, we use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead. It's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain, just for this like smart contracts for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service, but what happened to decent centralized. >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance. >>Yeah. >>And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through a, a use case of a customer, um, Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud. Um, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my a and I also want all the benefits of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the good this of the cloud. What's the answer. Yeah. >>Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment inside that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with, uh, regular commercially available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Uh, inside of that manufacturing plant, uh, we can do pre-processing on things coming out of the, uh, the robotics that depending on what we're manufacturing, right. Uh, and then we can take the, those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard >>For data lake or whatever, >>To the data lake. Yeah. Data Lakehouse, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but I'll lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just in time, manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going of the data that saves that cost yep. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data unless you have to. Um, but those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you, what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacture, industrial, whatever the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? There's a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe, maybe this decision can wait. Yeah. Uh, and then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot tube doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture in the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are. And, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about out. Customers are starting to talk about throwing away data, uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And well, >>I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this, but the one pattern we're seeing of the past year is that throwing away data's bad, even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retraining their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes code, as we call it in our last showcase, we did a whole whole event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw it away. It's not just business better. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. >>There are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are running pay Toby level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, uh, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move Aytes of data to the AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a kind of a, um, fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background, OnPrem architect, Aus cloud, and skydiving instructor. <laugh> how does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? Yeah. >>Uh, you >>Jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump out >>Kind of. So I was, you jumped out. I was teaching having, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a sky. I instructor, uh, I was teaching skydiving and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and, and how his customers are working. And he can't find an enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, uh, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, uh, I started and the first day there, uh, we had a, a discussion, uh, EC two had just come out <laugh> and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that, and through being in on premises, migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services tore >>It's. So it's such a great story, you know, was gonna, you know, you know, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early days was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, uh, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and maybe it does still feel like that to some people. Right. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting edge stuff, like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You got the right equipment. You gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Yeah. Thanks for coming. You really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here live in San Francisco for eight of us summit. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look up this calendar for all the cube, actually@thecube.net. We'll right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube a be summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John fury host of the cube. We'll be at the eighties summit in New York city this summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco, getting all the coverage what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dos car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor in a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you. Cool. How are you? Good. >>How hello you. >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah. So give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? >>First of all, thank you for having me. We're back to be business with you, never after to see you. Uh, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. We have raised close to a hundred million there. The investors are people like Norwes Menlo ventures, coastal ventures, Ram Shera, and all those people, all well known guys. And Beckel chime Paul me Mayard web. So whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley VCs are involved >>And has it gone? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISRA is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk, uh, the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and service now to take you to the next stage? Well, >>I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, Dave LAN as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh> >>You know, who does >>You, >>You >>Get the call fund to talk to you though. You >>Get the commentary, your, your finger in the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud scale. You predicted that we talked about in the cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing Docker just raised a hundred million on a $2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control plan? Emerging AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded, observability there's 10 billion observability companies. Data is the key. This is what's your end on this. What's your take. >>Yeah, look, I think I'll give you the few that I see right from my side. Obviously data is very clear. So the things that rumor system of recorded you and me talked about the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud native, it'll be called AI. NA AI enable is a new buzzword and using the AI for customer service. It, you talk about observability. I call it, AIOps applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and AI services. What used to be desk with ServiceNow BMC GLA you see a new ALA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflows, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with AI workflows. So you, you see AI going >>Off is RPA. A company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI S one will be at their event this summer? Um, is it a product company? I mean, or I mean, RPA is, should be embedded in everything. It's a >>Feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company also, but that automation should be embedded in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NATO and AI. They it'll become automation data. Yeah. And that's your, thinking's >>Interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kinda having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle, and it was software abstraction. Now you have all kinds of workflows, abstractions everywhere. So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed. Are they integrated? I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So remember the databases became called polyglot databases. Yeah. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area like you, you were talking about, it should be part of service. Now it should be part of ISRA. Like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see it MuleSoft and sales buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies, cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also have an automation as a layer embedded inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind, as you got the XPO hall got, um, we're back to vis, but you got, you know, AMD, Clum, Dynatrace data, dog, innovative, all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right? Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Deibel later. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen, we know all the, the VCs, what does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation. Cloud's bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's code. Yes. Basically. Data's everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders of Amazon created the startups 15 years back. Everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be people don't just build on Amazon. They're going to build it on top of snow. Flake companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake, right? So I see my old boss playing ment, try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer, right? So I think that's the next level of companies trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your moat is, what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last re invent, coined the term super cloud, right? It's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You're starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage. And guys like Charles Fitzgeral out there, who we like was kind of hitting on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get him. Like, yeah, I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> cause he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Yes. Now they say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist and, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. >>It is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer room. The middle layer pass will be snowflake. So I cannot build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer if I really need to size, I'll build it on force.com Salesforce. Yeah. Right. So I think that's where you'll >>See. So basically the, the, if you're an entrepreneur, the, the north star in terms of the, the outcome is be a super cloud. It >>Is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. Yeah. >>Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales, the snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think got Redshift. Amazon has got Redshift. Um, but snowflake big customer. The they're probably paying AWS big, >>I >>Think big bills too. >>So John, very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-option will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with the snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouse as a data layer. So I think depending on the use case you have to use each of the above, I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, you know, foreclose your value. That's right. With some sort of internal hack, but I've think, I think the general question that I have is that I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point, when does the rising tide stop and the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth cycle? I >>Think it's growth. You call it closed skill you the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's as long as there more movement from on, uh, on-prem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations, it helpless. Even the customer service service. Now the ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go made. >>I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers are practitioners, not suppliers to the market. Feel free to text me or DMing. Next question is really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products. Cause you know, the big enterprises now and you know, small, medium, large, and large enterprise, they're all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean seeing some stuff, but why don't we get your thoughts on that? What it >>Is you, if I remember going back to our 2007 or eight, when I used to talk to you back then when Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or one person today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a C I will line our business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can double in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. Yeah. >>And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I, I reference the URL causes like there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solution that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting left for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there. Um, and goes back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure as code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share? >>I, a lot of thoughts that Fu I see the AI op solutions in the futures should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app dynamic, right? Dynatrace, all this solution will go future towards predict to pro so solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service that customers give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can give the best algorithm, but I gotta train them, modify them, make them better, make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to big data days back in 2009, you know that >>Look at, look how much data bricks has grown. >>It is doubled. The key cloud >>Air kinda went private, so good stuff. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking year that growing customers and my customers, or some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk, McAfee, uh, grand <inaudible>. So all the top customers, um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on, predict ours. One area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service, >>Great stuff, man. Doing great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of a us summit 2022. And we're gonna be at Aus summit in San, uh, in New York in the summer. So look for that on the calendar, of course, go to a us startups.com. That's a site for all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This the cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back, little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit in new York's coming in the summer. We'll be two with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the Groove's psych to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're gonna see a lot of virtual cube outta hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economist with duck bill groove, he's the founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe is shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at mark, Andrew's been doing a lot of shit posting lately. All a billionaires are shit posting, but they don't know how to do it. They're >>Doing it right. There's something opportunity there. It's like, here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a mid-size island to begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. >>This shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on this side I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what, what is shitposting >>It's more or less talking about the world of enterprise technology, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream, but it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a Jack ass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, Cuban coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you see the growth of cloud native Amazon's evolving Atos, especially new CEO. Andy move on to be the chief of all. Amazon just saw him the cover of was it time magazine. Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything. These folks do. They're they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble. Imagine the logistics, it takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. And it's, it's sprawling immense, the nominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. >>Well, there's a lot of force for good conversations. Seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to a, is trying to portray themselves, you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now it's same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car, our driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. Either way, it sounds like more exciting. Like they >>Better have a replacement ready in case something goes wrong on the track, highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula, the one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in e-sports with other people in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and video graphics card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. Oh, >>It's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting it into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going on in your world. I know you have a lot of great SA we've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter. Check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's the blowback, any blowback late leads there been tick? What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's hi, I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They not have heard me. It. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do that. >>We should do that. Actually. I think sure would call in. Oh, I, I >>Think >>I guarantee if we had that right now, people would call in and Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the customer. >>You know, I always joke with Dave Avante about how John Fort's always at, uh, um, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0, 0 5, or we can't, we >>Have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And then there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish, but that's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their product >>They're going in different directions. When they named Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonus on number of words, they can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, a session manager is a great one. I love the service ridiculous name. They have a systems manager, parameter store with is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage through parameter store does not. It's fun. >>What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination of you >>Got Ks. You got EMR, you got EC two. You got S three SQS. Well, RedShift's not an acronym. You got >>Gas is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation, >>They still got bean stock or is that still >>Around? Oh, they never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, wow, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it. But while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it, John. >>Okay. >>Simple BV still haunts our >>Dreams. I, I actually got an email on, I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C twos were being deprecated and I got an email I'm like, I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me just like, gimme something else. Right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you is that like, okay, so as Amazon gets better in some areas where do they need more work? And you, your opinion, because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database Snowflake's got out database service. So, you know, Redshift, snowflake database is out there. So you've got this optician. Yes. How's that going? And what are you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with Amazon and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want. And they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multi-cloud cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word. Multi-cloud um, a lot of people are saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word. Like multicloud sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multicloud? >>Multiple single >>Loves that term. Yeah. >>You're building in multiple single points of failure. Do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the, the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about multi-cloud either as the industry leader, let's talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective. It doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on context. But my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. >>Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question cause I know you we've been, you know, fellow journey mean in the, in the cloud journey, going to all the events and then the pandemic hit where now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna end, certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations community's gonna emerge. You've got a pretty big community growing and it's growing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing, or just big changes you've seen with the pan endemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece come in, you're commentating, you're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck bill group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, funny, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who >>Can pony. >>Hello and welcome back to the live cube coverage here in San Francisco, California, the cube live coverage. Two days, day two of a summit, 2022 Aish summit, New York city coming up in summer. We'll be there as well. Events are back. I'm the host, John fur, the Cub got great guest here. Johnny Dallas with Ze. Um, here is on the queue. We're gonna talk about his background. Uh, little trivia here. He was the youngest engineer ever worked at Amazon at the age. 17 had to get escorted into reinvent in Vegas cause he was underage <laugh> with security, all good stories. Now the CEO of company called Z know DevOps kind of focus, managed service, a lot of cool stuff, Johnny, welcome to the cube. >>Thanks John. Great. >>So tell a story. You were the youngest engineer at AWS. >>I was, yes. So I used to work at a company called Bebo. I got started very young. I started working when I was about 14, um, kind of as a software engineer. And when I, uh, it was about 16. I graduated out of high school early, um, working at this company Bebo, still running all of the DevOps at that company. Um, I went to reinvent in about 2018 to give a talk about some of the DevOps software I wrote at that company. Um, but you know, as many of those things were probably familiar with reinvent happens in a casino and I was 16. So was not able to actually go into the, a casino on my own. Um, so I'd have <inaudible> security as well as casino security escort me in to give my talk. >>Did Andy jazzy, was he aware of >>This? Um, you know, that's a great question. I don't know. <laugh> >>I'll ask him great story. So obviously you started a young age. I mean, it's so cool to see you jump right in. I mean, I mean you never grew up with the old school that I used to grew up in and loading package software, loading it onto the server, deploying it, plugging the cables in, I mean you just rocking and rolling with DevOps as you look back now what's the big generational shift because now you got the Z generation coming in, millennials on the workforce. It's changing like no one's putting and software on servers. Yeah, >>No. I mean the tools keep getting better, right? We, we keep creating more abstractions that make it easier and easier. When I, when I started doing DevOps, I could go straight into E two APIs. I had APIs from the get go and you know, my background was, I was a software engineer. I never went through like the CIS admin stack. I, I never had to, like you said, rack servers, myself. I was immediately able to scale. I was managing, I think 2,500 concurrent servers across every Ables region through software. It was a fundamental shift. >>Did you know what an SRE was at that time? >>Uh, >>You were kind of an SRE on >>Yeah, I was basically our first SRE, um, was familiar with the, with the phrasing, but really thought of myself as a software engineer who knows cloud APIs, not a SRE. All >>Right. So let's talk about what's what's going on now as you look at the landscape today, what's the coolest thing that's going on in your mind in cloud? >>Yeah, I think the, I think the coolest thing is, you know, we're seeing the next layer of those abstraction tools exist and that's what we're doing with Z is we've basically gone and we've, we're building an app platform that deploys onto your cloud. So if you're familiar with something like Carku, um, where you just click a GitHub repo, uh, we actually make it that easy. You click a GI hub repo and it will deploy on ALS using a AWS tools. So, >>Right. So this is Z. This is the company. Yes. How old's the company about >>A year and a half old now. >>All right. So explain what it does. >>Yeah. So we make it really easy for any software engineer to deploy on a AWS. It's not SREs. These are the actual application engineers doing the business logic. They don't really want to think about Yamo. They don't really want to configure everything super deeply. They want to say, run this API on S in the best way possible. We've encoded all the best practices into software and we set it up for you. Yeah. >>So I think the problem you're solving is that there's a lot of want be DevOps engineers. And then they realize, oh shit, I don't wanna do this. Yeah. And some people want to do it. They loved under the hood. Right. People love to have infrastructure, but the average developer needs to actually be as agile on scale. So that seems to be the problem you solve. Right? >>Yeah. We, we, we give way more productivity to each individual engineer, you know? >>All right. So let me ask you a question. So let me just say, I'm a developer. Cool. I build this new app. It's a streaming app or whatever. I'm making it up cube here, but let's just say I deploy it. I need your service. But what happens about when my customers say, Hey, what's your SLA? The CDN went down from this it's flaky. Does Amazon have, so how do you handle all that SLA reporting that Amazon provides? Cuz they do a good job with sock reports all through the console. But as you start getting into DevOps <affirmative> and sell your app, mm-hmm <affirmative> you have customer issues. How do you, how do you view that? Yeah, >>Well, I, I think you make a great point of AWS has all this stuff already. AWS has SLAs. AWS has contract. Aw has a lot of the tools that are expected. Um, so we don't have to reinvent the wheel here. What we do is we help people get to those SLAs more easily. So Hey, this is AWS SLA as a default. Um, Hey, we'll fix you your services. This is what you can expect here. Um, but we can really leverage S's reliability of you. Don't have to trust us. You have to trust ALS and trust that the setup is good there. >>Do you handle all the recovery or mitigation between, uh, identification say downtime for instance? Oh, the server's not 99% downtime. Uh, went down for an hour, say something's going on? And is there a service dashboard? How does it get what's the remedy? Do you have a, how does all that work? >>Yeah, so we have some built in remediation. You know, we, we basically say we're gonna do as much as we can to keep your endpoint up 24 7 mm-hmm <affirmative>. If it's something in our control, we'll do it. If it's a disc failure, that's on us. If you push bad code, we won't put out that new version until it's working. Um, so we do a lot to make sure that your endpoint stay is up, um, and then alert you if there's a problem that we can't fix. So cool. Hey S has some downtime, this thing's going on. You need to do this action. Um, we'll let you know. >>All right. So what do you do for fun? >>Yeah, so, uh, for, for fun, um, a lot of side projects. <laugh> uh, >>What's your side hustle right now. You got going on >>The, uh, it's >>A lot of tools playing tools, serverless. >>Yeah, painless. A lot of serverless stuff. Um, I think there's a lot of really cool WAM stuff as well. Going on right now. Um, I love tools is, is the truest answer is I love building something that I can give to somebody else. And they're suddenly twice as productive because of it. Um, >>It's a good feeling, isn't it? >>Oh yeah. There's >>Nothing like tools were platforms. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know, the expression, too many tools in the tool. She becomes, you know, tools for all. And then ultimately tools become platforms. What's your view on that? Because if a good tool works and starts to get traction, you need to either add more tools or start building a platform platform versus tool. What's your, what's your view on a reaction to that kind of concept debate? >>Yeah, it's a good question. Uh, we we've basically started as like a, a platform. First of we've really focused on these, uh, developers who don't wanna get deep into the DevOps. And so we've done all of the pieces of the stacks. We do C I C D management. Uh, we do container orchestration, we do monitoring. Um, and now we're, spliting those up into individual tools so they can be used. Awesome in conjunction more. >>All right. So what are some of the use cases that you see for your service? It's DevOps basically nano service DevOps. So people who want a DevOps team, do clients have a DevOps person and then one person, two people what's the requirements to run >>Z. Yeah. So we we've got teams, um, from no DevOps is kind of when they start and then we've had teams grow up to about, uh, five, 10 men DevOps teams. Um, so, you know, as is more infrastructure people come in because we're in your cloud, you're able to go in and configure it on top you're we can't block you. Uh, you wanna use some new AWS service. You're welcome to use that alongside the stack that we deploy >>For you. How many customers do you have now? >>So we've got about 40 companies that are using us for all of their infrastructure, um, kind of across the board, um, as well as >>What's the pricing model. >>Uh, so our pricing model is we, we charge basically similar to an engineering salary. So we charge a monthly rate. We have plans at 300 bucks a month, a thousand bucks a month, and then enterprise plan for >>The requirement scale. Yeah. So back into the people cost, you must have her discounts, not a fully loaded thing, is it? >>Yeah, there's a discounts kind of asking >>Then you pass the Amazon bill. >>Yeah. So our customers actually pay for the Amazon bill themselves. So >>Have their own >>Account. There's no margin on top. You're linking your, a analyst account in, um, got it. Which is huge because we can, we are now able to help our customers get better deals with Amazon. Um, got it. We're incentivized on their team to drive your costs down. >>And what's your unit main unit of economics software scale. >>Yeah. Um, yeah, so we, we think of things as projects. How many services do you have to deploy as that scales up? Um, awesome. >>All right. You're 20 years old now you not even can't even drink legally. <laugh> what are you gonna do when you're 30? We're gonna be there. >>Well, we're, uh, we're making it better, better, >>Better the old guy on the queue here. <laugh> >>I think, uh, I think we're seeing a big shift of, um, you know, we've got these major clouds. ALS is obviously the biggest cloud and it's constantly coming out with new services, but we're starting to see other clouds have built many of the common services. So Kubernetes is a great example. It exists across all the clouds and we're starting to see new platforms come up on top that allow you to leverage tools for multiple times. At the same time. Many of our customers actually have AWS as their primary cloud and they'll have secondary clouds or they'll pull features from other clouds into AWS, um, through our software. I think that's, I'm very excited by that. And I, uh, expect to be working on that when I'm 30. <laugh> awesome. >>Well, you gonna have a good future. I gotta ask you this question cuz uh, you know, I always, I was a computer science undergrad in the, in the, and um, computer science back then was hardcore, mostly systems OS stuff, uh, database compiler. Um, now there's so much compi, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> how do you look at the high school college curriculum experience slash folks who are nerding out on computer science? It's not one or two things. You've got a lot of, lot of things. I mean, look at Python, data engineering and emerging as a huge skill. What's it, what's it like for college kids now and high school kids? What, what do you think they should be doing if you had to give advice to your 16 year old self back a few years ago now in college? Um, I mean Python's not a great language, but it's super effective for coding and the datas were really relevant, but it's, you've got other language opportunities you've got tools to build. So you got a whole culture of young builders out there. What should, what should people gravitate to in your opinion and stay away from or >>Stay away from? That's a good question. I, I think that first of all, you're very right of the, the amount of developers is increasing so quickly. Um, and so we see more specialization. That's why we also see, you know, these SREs that are different than typical application engineering. You know, you get more specialization in job roles. Um, I think if, what I'd say to my 16 year old self is do projects, um, the, I learned most of my, what I've learned just on the job or online trying things, playing with different technologies, actually getting stuff out into the world, um, way more useful than what you'll learn in kind of a college classroom. I think classroom's great to, uh, get a basis, but you need to go out and experiment actually try things. >>You know? I think that's great advice. In fact, I would just say from my experience of doing all the hard stuff and cloud is so great for just saying, okay, I'm done, I'm banning the project. Move on. Yeah. Cause you know, it's not gonna work in the old days. You have to build this data center. I bought all this, you know, people hang on to the old, you know, project and try to force it out there. Now you >>Can launch a project now, >>Instant gratification, it ain't working <laugh> or this is shut it down and then move on to something new. >>Yeah, exactly. Instantly you should be able to do that much more quickly. Right. So >>You're saying get those projects and don't be afraid to shut it down. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that? Do you agree with that? >>Yeah. I think it's ex experiment. Uh, you're probably not gonna hit it rich on the first one. It's probably not gonna be that idea is the genius idea. So don't be afraid to get rid of things and just try over and over again. It's it's number of reps >>That'll win. I was commenting online. Elon Musk was gonna buy Twitter, that whole Twitter thing. And someone said, Hey, you know, what's the, I go look at the product group at Twitter's been so messed up because they actually did get it right on the first time. And we can just a great product. They could never change it because people would freak out and the utility of Twitter. I mean, they gotta add some things, the added button and we all know what they need to add, but the product, it was just like this internal dysfunction, the product team, what are we gonna work on? Don't change the product so that you kind of have there's opportunities out there where you might get the lucky strike right outta the gate. Yeah. Right. You don't know. >>It's almost a curse too. It's you're not gonna hit curse Twitter. You're not gonna hit a rich the second time too. So yeah. >><laugh> Johnny Dallas. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Give a plug for your company. Um, take a minute to explain what you're working on. What you're look looking for. You hiring funding. Customers. Just give a plug, uh, last minute and kind the last word. >>Yeah. So, um, John Dallas from Ze, if you, uh, need any help with your DevOps, if you're a early startup, you don't have DevOps team, um, or you're trying to deploy across clouds, check us out z.com. Um, we are actively hiring. So if you are a software engineer excited about tools and cloud, or you're interested in helping getting this message out there, hit me up. Um, find us on z.co. >>Yeah. LinkedIn Twitter handle GitHub handle. >>Yeah. I'm the only Johnny on a LinkedIn and GitHub and underscore Johnny Dallas underscore on Twitter. All right. Um, >>Johnny Dallas, the youngest engineer working at Amazon, um, now 20 we're on great new project here in the cube. Builders are all young. They're growing into the business. They got cloud at their, at their back it's tailwind. I wish I was 20. Again, this is a I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. Thanks. >>Welcome >>Back to the cubes. Live coverage of a AWS summit in San Francisco, California events are back, uh, ADAS summit in New York cities. This summer, the cube will be there as well. Check us out there lot. I'm glad we have events back. It's great to have everyone here. I'm John furry host of the cube. Dr. Matt wood is with me cube alumni now VP of business analytics division of AWS. Matt. Great to see you. Thank >>You, John. Great to be here. >>Appreciate it. I always call you Dr. Matt wood, because Andy jazzy always says Dr. Matt, we >>Would introduce you on the he's the one and only the one and >>Only Dr. Matt wood >>In joke. I love it. >>Andy style. And I think you had walkup music too on, you know, >>Too. Yes. We all have our own personalized walk. >>So talk about your new role. I not new role, but you're running up, um, analytics, business or AWS. What does that consist of right now? >>Sure. So I work, I've got what I consider to be the one of the best jobs in the world. Uh, I get to work with our customers and, uh, the teams at AWS, uh, to build the analytics services that millions of our customers use to, um, uh, slice dice, pivot, uh, better understand their day data, um, look at how they can use that data for, um, reporting, looking backwards and also look at how they can use that data looking forward. So predictive analytics and machine learning. So whether it is, you know, slicing and dicing in the lower level of, uh Hado and the big data engines, or whether you're doing ETR with glue or whether you're visualizing the data in quick side or building models in SageMaker. I got my, uh, fingers in a lot of pies. >>You know, one of the benefits of, uh, having cube coverage with AWS since 2013 is watching the progression. You were on the cube that first year we were at reinvent 2013 and look at how machine learning just exploded onto the scene. You were involved in that from day one is still day one, as you guys say mm-hmm <affirmative>, what's the big thing now. I mean, look at, look at just what happened. Machine learning comes in and then a slew of services come in and got SageMaker became a hot seller, right outta the gate. Mm-hmm <affirmative> the database stuff was kicking butt. So all this is now booming. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that was the real generational changeover for <inaudible> what's the perspective. What's your perspective on, yeah, >>I think how that's evolved. No, I think it's a really good point. I, I totally agree. I think for machine machine learning, um, there was sort of a Renaissance in machine learning and the application of machine learning machine learning as a technology has been around for 50 years, let's say, but, uh, to do machine learning, right? You need like a lot of data, the data needs to be high quality. You need a lot of compute to be able to train those models and you have to be able to evaluate what those mean as you apply them to real world problems. And so the cloud really removed a lot of the constraints. Finally, customers had all of the data that they needed. We gave them services to be able to label that data in a high quality way. There's all the compute. You need to be able to train the models <laugh> and so where you go. >>And so the cloud really enabled this Renaissance with machine learning, and we're seeing honestly, a similar Renaissance with, uh, with data, uh, and analytics. You know, if you look back, you know, five, 10 years, um, analytics was something you did in batch, like your data warehouse ran a analysis to do, uh, reconciliation at the end of the month. And then was it? Yeah. And so that's when you needed it, but today, if your Redshift cluster isn't available, uh, Uber drivers don't turn up door dash deliveries, don't get made. It's analytics is now central to virtually every business and it is central to every virtually every business is digital transformation. Yeah. And be able to take that data from a variety of sources here, or to query it with high performance mm-hmm <affirmative> to be able to actually then start to augment that data with real information, which usually comes from technical experts and domain experts to form, you know, wisdom and information from raw data. That's kind of, uh, what most organizations are trying to do when they kind of go through this analytics journey. It's >>Interesting, you know, Dave LAN and I always talk on the cube, but out, you know, the future and, and you look back, the things we were talking about six years ago are actually happening now. Yeah. And it's not a, a, a, you know, hyped up statement to say digital transformation. It actually's happening now. And there's also times where we bang our fist on the table, say, I really think this is so important. And Dave says, John, you're gonna die on that hill <laugh>. >>And >>So I I'm excited that this year, for the first time I didn't die on that hill. I've been saying data you're right. Data as code is the next infrastructure as code mm-hmm <affirmative>. And Dave's like, what do you mean by that? We're talking about like how data gets and it's happening. So we just had an event on our 80 bus startups.com site mm-hmm <affirmative>, um, a showcase with startups and the theme was data as code and interesting new trends emerging really clearly the role of a data engineer, right? Like an SRE, what an SRE did for cloud. You have a new data engineering role because of the developer on, uh, onboarding is massively increasing exponentially, new developers, data science, scientists are growing mm-hmm <affirmative> and the, but the pipelining and managing and engineering as a system. Yeah. Almost like an operating system >>And as a discipline. >>So what's your reaction to that about this data engineer data as code, because if you have horizontally scalable data, you've gotta be open that's hard. <laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative> and you gotta silo the data that needs to be siloed for compliance and reasons. So that's got a very policy around that. So what's your reaction to data as code and data engineering and >>Phenomenon? Yeah, I think it's, it's a really good point. I think, you know, like with any, with any technology, uh, project inside an organization, you know, success with analytics or machine learning is it's kind of 50% technology and then 50% cultural. And, uh, you have often domain experts. Those are, could be physicians or drug experts, or they could be financial experts or whoever they might be got deep domain expertise. And then you've got technical implementation teams and it's kind of a natural often repulsive force. I don't mean that rudely, but they, they just, they don't talk the same language. And so the more complex the domain and the more complex the technology, the stronger that repulsive force, and it can become very difficult for, um, domain experts to work closely with the technical experts, to be able to actually get business decisions made. And so what data engineering does and data engineering is in some cases team, or it can be a role that you play. >>Uh, it's really allowing those two disciplines to speak the same language it provides. You can think of it as plumbing, but I think of it as like a bridge, it's a bridge between like the technical implementation and the domain experts. And that requires like a very disparate range of skills. You've gotta understand about statistics. You've gotta understand about the implementation. You've gotta understand about the, it, you've gotta understand and understand about the domain. And if you could pull all of that together, that data engineering discipline can be incredibly transformative for an organization, cuz it builds the bridge between those two >>Groups. You know, I was advising some, uh, young computer science students at the sophomore junior level, uh, just a couple weeks ago. And I told 'em, I would ask someone at Amazon, this questions I'll ask you since you're, you've been in the middle of of it for years, they were asking me and I was trying to mentor them on. What, how do you become a data engineer from a practical standpoint, uh, courseware projects to work on how to think, um, not just coding Python cause everyone's coding in Python mm-hmm <affirmative> but what else can they do? So I was trying to help them and I didn't really know the answer myself. I was just trying to like kind of help figure it out with them. So what is the answer in your opinion or the thoughts around advice to young students who want to be data engineers? Cuz data scientists is pretty clear in what that is. Yeah. You use tools, you make visualizations, you manage data, you get answers and insights and apply that to the business. That's an application mm-hmm <affirmative>, that's not the, you know, sta standing up a stack or managing the infrastructure. What, so what does that coding look like? What would your advice be to >>Yeah, I think >>Folks getting into a data engineering role. >>Yeah. I think if you, if you believe this, what I said earlier about like 50% technology, 50% culture, like the, the number one technology to learn as a data engineer is the tools in the cloud, which allow you to aggregate data from virtually any source into something which is incrementally more valuable for the organization. That's really what data engineering is all about. It's about taking from multiple sources. Some people call them silos, but silos indicates that the, the storage is kind of fungible or UND differentiated. That that's really not the case. Success requires you to really purpose built well crafted high performance, low cost engines for all of your data. So understanding those tools and understanding how to use 'em, that's probably the most important technical piece. Um, and yeah, Python and programming and statistics goes along with that, I think. And then the most important cultural part, I think is it's just curiosity. >>Like you want to be able to, as a data engineer, you want to have a natural curiosity that drives you to seek the truth inside an organization, seek the truth of a particular problem and to be able to engage, cuz you're probably, you're gonna have some choice as you go through your career about which domain you end up in, like maybe you're really passionate about healthcare. Maybe you're really just passionate about your transportation or media, whatever it might be. And you can allow that to drive a certain amount of curiosity, but within those roles, like the domains are so broad, you kind of gotta allow your curiosity to develop and lead, to ask the right questions and engage in the right way with your teams. So because you can have all the technical skills in the world, but if you're not able to help the team's truths seek through that curiosity, you simply won't be successful. >>We just had a guest on 20 year old, um, engineer, founder, Johnny Dallas, who was 16 when he worked at Amazon youngest engineer at >>Johnny Dallas is a great name by the that's fantastic. It's his real name? >>It sounds like a football player. Rockstar. I should call Johnny. I have Johnny Johnny cube. Uh it's me. Um, so, but he's young and, and he, he was saying, you know, his advice was just do projects. >>Yeah. That's get hands on. >>Yeah. And I was saying, Hey, I came from the old days though, you get to stand stuff up and you hugged onto the assets. Cause you didn't wanna kill the cause you spent all this money and, and he's like, yeah, with cloud, you can shut it down. If you do a project that's not working and you get bad data, no one's adopting it or you don't want like it anymore. You shut it down. Just something >>Else. Totally >>Instantly abandoned it. Move onto something new. >>Yeah. With progression. Totally. And it, the, the blast radius of, um, decisions is just way reduced, gone. Like we talk a lot about like trying to, you know, in the old world trying to find the resources and get the funding. And it's like, right. I wanna try out this kind of random idea that could be a big deal for the organization. I need 50 million in a new data center. Like you're not gonna get anywhere. You, >>You do a proposal working backwards, document >>Kinds, all that, that sort of stuff got hoops. So, so all of that is gone, but we sometimes forget that a big part of that is just the, the prototyping and the experimentation and the limited blast radius in terms of cost. And honestly, the most important thing is time just being able to jump in there, get fingers on keyboards, just try this stuff out. And that's why at AWS, we have part of the reason we have so many services because we want, when you get into AWS, we want the whole toolbox to be available to every developer. And so, as your ideas developed, you may want to jump from, you know, data that you have, that's already in a database to doing realtime data. Yeah. And then you can just, you have the tools there. And when you want to get into real time data, you don't just have kineses, but you have real time analytics and you can run SQL again, that data is like the, the capabilities and the breadth, like really matter when it comes to prototyping and, and >>That's culture too. That's the culture piece, because what was once a dysfunctional behavior, I'm gonna go off the reservation and try something behind my boss's back or cause now as a side hustle or fun project. Yeah. So for fun, you can just code something. Yeah, >>Totally. I remember my first Haddo project, I found almost literally a decommissioned set of servers in the data center that no one was using. They were super old. They're about to be literally turned off. And I managed to convince the team to leave them on for me for like another month. And I installed her DUP on them and like, got them going. It's like, that just seems crazy to me now that I, I had to go and convince anybody not to turn these service off, but what >>It was like for that, when you came up with elastic map produce, because you said this is too hard, we gotta make it >>Easier. Basically. Yes. <laugh> I was installing Haddo version, you know, beta nor 0.9 or whatever it was. It's like, this is really hard. This is really hard. >>We simpler. All right. Good stuff. I love the, the walk down memory lane and also your advice. Great stuff. I think culture's huge. I think. And that's why I like Adam's keynote to reinvent Adam. Lesky talk about path minds and trail blazers because that's a blast radius impact. Mm-hmm <affirmative> when you can actually have innovation organically just come from anywhere. Yeah, that's totally cool. Totally. Let's get into the products. Serverless has been hot mm-hmm <affirmative> uh, we hear a lot about EKS is hot. Uh, containers are booming. Kubernetes is getting adopted. There's still a lot of work to do there. Lambda cloud native developers are booming, serverless Lambda. How does that impact the analytics piece? Can you share the hot, um, products around how that translates? Sure, absolutely. Yeah, the SageMaker >>Yeah, I think it's a, if you look at kind of the evolution and what customers are asking for, they're not, you know, they don't just want low cost. They don't just want this broad set of services. They don't just want, you know, those services to have deep capabilities. They want those services to have as lower operating cost over time as possible. So we kind of really got it down. We got built a lot of muscle, lot of services about getting up and running and experimenting and prototyping and turning things off and turn turning them on and turning them off. And like, that's all great. But actually the, you really only most projects start something once and then stop something once. And maybe there's an hour in between, or maybe there's a year, but the real expense in terms of time and, and complexity is sometimes in that running cost. Yeah. And so, um, we've heard very loudly and clearly from customers that they want, that, that running cost is just undifferentiated to them and they wanna spend more time on their work and in analytics that is, you know, slicing the data, pivoting the data, combining the data, labeling the data, training their models, uh, you know, running inference against their models, uh, and less time doing the operational pieces. >>So is that why the servers focus is there? >>Yeah, absolutely. It, it dramatically reduces the skill required to run these, uh, workloads of any scale. And it dramatically reduces the UND differentiated, heavy lifting, cuz you get to focus more of the time that you would've spent on the operation on the actual work that you wanna get done. And so if you look at something just like Redshift serverless that we launched a reinvent, you know, there's a kind of a, we have a lot of customers that want to run like a, uh, the cluster and they want to get into the, the weeds where there is benefit. We have a lot of customers that say, you know, I there's no benefit for me though. I just wanna do the analytics. So you run the operational piece, you're the experts we've run. You know, we run 60 million instant startups every single day. Like we do this a lot. Exactly. We understand the operation. I >>Want the answers come on. So >>Just give the answers or just let, give me the notebook or just give the inference prediction. So today for example, we announced, um, you know, serverless inference. So now once you've trained your machine learning model, just, uh, run a few, uh, lines of code or you just click a few buttons and then yeah, you got an inference endpoint that you do not have to manage. And whether you're doing one query against that endpoint, you know, per hour or you're doing, you know, 10 million, but we'll just scale it on the back end. You >>Know, I know we got not a lot of time left, but I want, wanna get your reaction to this. One of the things about the data lakes, not being data swamps has been from what I've been reporting and hearing from customers is that they want to retrain their machine learning algorithm. They want, they need that data. They need the, the, the realtime data and they need the time series data, even though the time has passed, they gotta store in the data lake mm-hmm <affirmative>. So now the data lakes main function is being reusing the data to actually retrain. Yeah, >>That's >>Right. It worked properly. So a lot of, lot of postmortems turn into actually business improvements to make the machine learning smarter, faster. You see that same way. Do you see it the same way? Yeah, >>I think it's, I think it's really interesting. No, I think it's really interesting because you know, we talk it's, it's convenient to kind of think of analytics as a very clear progression from like point a point B, but really it's, you are navigating terrain for which you do not have a map and you need a lot of help to navigate that terrain. Yeah. And so, you know, being, having these services in place, not having to run the operations of those services, being able to have those services be secure and well governed, and we added PII detection today, you know, something you can do automatically, uh, to be able to use their, uh, any unstructured data run queries against that unstructured data. So today we added, you know, um, text extract queries. So you can just say, well, uh, you can scan a badge for example, and say, well, what's the name on this badge? And you don't have to identify where it is. We'll do all of that work for you. So there's a often a, it's more like a branch than it is just a, a normal, uh, a to B path, a linear path. Uh, and that includes loops backwards. And sometimes you gotta get the results and use those to make improvements further upstream. And sometimes you've gotta use those. And when you're downstream, you'll be like, ah, I remember that. And you come back and bring it all together. So awesome. It's um, it's, uh, uh, it's a wonderful >>Work for sure. Dr. Matt wood here in the queue. Got just take the last word and give the update. Why you're here. What's the big news happening that you're announcing here at summit in San Francisco, California, and update on the, the business analytics >>Group? Yeah, I think, you know, one of the, we did a lot of announcements in the keynote, uh, encouraged everyone to take a look at that. Uh, this morning was Swami. Uh, one of the ones I'm most excited about, uh, is the opportunity to be able to take, uh, dashboards, visualizations. We're all used to using these things. We see them in our business intelligence tools, uh, all over the place. However, what we've heard from customers is like, yes, I want those analytics. I want their visualization. I want it to be up to date, but you know, I don't actually want to have to go my tools where I'm actually doing my work to another separate tool to be able to look at that information. And so today we announced, uh, one click public embedding for quick side dashboards. So today you can literally, as easily as embedding a YouTube video, you can take a dashboard that you've built inside, quick site cut and paste the HTML, paste it into your application and that's it. That's all you have to do. It takes seconds and >>It gets updated in real time. >>Updated in real time, it's interactive. You can do everything that you would normally do. You can brand it like this is there's no power by quick site button or anything like that. You can change the colors, make it fit in perfectly with your, with your applications. So that's sitting incredibly powerful way of being able to take a, uh, an analytics capability that today sits inside its own little fiefdom and put it just everywhere. It's, uh, very transformative. >>Awesome. And the, the business is going well. You got the serverless and your tailwind for you there. Good stuff, Dr. Matt with thank you. Coming on the cube >>Anytime. Thank >>You. Okay. This is the cubes cover of eight summit, 2022 in San Francisco, California. I'm John host cube. Stay with us with more coverage of day two after this short break.

>>mhm. Here live in Washington D. C. For two days of wall to wall coverage. I'm john for your host of the cube. Got two great guests here, constant Thompson V. P. Of diversity equity inclusion program at a core american council of renewable energy and Blair Anderson, director of public policy industries at AWS. Thanks for coming on the cube. Thanks for having us. So first of all, big announcement on stage max Peterson, head of public sector announced some big news with a core. Tell us what it >>is. Well we are going to be partnered with amazon to do a supply chain study on how we can best diversify the renewable energy supply chain. So we're actually gonna have baseline data on where we should start to be able to create a program that's going to be a model for the renewable energy industry on how to develop and support the success of black women and bipac owned um firms. So >>this program that you're running accelerate accelerate your programs and membership tell more has it worked? And why the successes having, what is amazon's relationship with it Besides funding? Is there other things you can talk about? >>Yeah. So accelerate wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for people like Shannon Kellogg with a W. S. Um who about a year ago after the George Floyd murders said, you know, what are we doing as a core? He sits on our board um in this area and we had to say nothing. So um Shannon. And a group of leaders got together and workshop this idea. Let's create a membership program for women and minority owned businesses so that they can be successful in renewable energy. Let's pick a cohort and let's do whether it takes to make them successful. Everything from introducing them to business connects, to mentoring them to even legal services for them. >>Well, yeah, this is like an interesting dynamic. Remember Andy Jassy was on stage when he was the ceo of a W S a year ago, I kind of was preaching, you hate that, I said that word, but preaching to the audience build, build, build, there's an entrepreneurship, public sector vibe going on right now, very entrepreneurial across every industry. I mean, this is a real thing that's going on. >>Yeah, so we're super excited about this opportunity, the work that core has done to lead on this program for the last year, especially with Constance coming in, becoming the leader has kind of been able to take this idea that she mentioned that AWS was kind of a founding member at the genesis of it about a year ago. She's taking this idea that many of these folks put on paper And been able to turn it into a really hard substantive efforts to move it forward. So we've been able to have great conversations with many of these 15 companies that have been brought into the program and start building a relationship with them. I think, as you have seen around a WS like we believe strongly in innovation and creativity. the renewable energy industry is very similarly there is a lot of kind of thinking big and innovative spirit that needs to take place in that space and having the diversity at all levels of these companies is kind of an important component to be able to move that entrepreneurship forward. >>You know, cost is one of the things that we've been reporting on until getting on the cube is right in the wheelhouse of what you're doing is a cultural change happening. And that cultural change with amazon and cloud computing is causing structural changes which are opportunities like radical structural changes. So that means old incumbent, the old guard as you guys call it, this can be replaced not because people hate them because they're inadequate. So you start to see this kind of mindset shift, entrepreneurial, impact oriented I can make a change but actually I can level up pretty quick because the people in charge don't know cloud, I mean I hate to put it bluntly like that, but if you're not on that edge, if you're not not on that wave, your driftwood. >>Yeah. You know it's funny you say that I like to call it, our members are making systemic disruptions to the system in a very equitable way, meaning our members are in communities like Chicago Jackson Tennessee there in the north end of texas, they are in um everywhere and they're in the communities, making these systemic disruptions to the way things happen, the way we talk about renewable energy to the way we deploy solar, they're making those kind of changes. So to your point they're doing it, we have to catch up to them because they're already out there, they're moving their entrepreneurial, >>it's like, it's like there's a class of entrepreneurship and evolving and it's like everyone's got the pedigree, this or that knowledge is knowledge and you can apply it in software, you could be shrink wrapped software you put on the shelves called shelf where no successful inventory, give it back cloud computing. If you're not successful. Like right now it's not working. So if you don't have results, no one bought it, it must not work. So it's easy to identify what's working. Yes, so that eliminates a lot of dogma, a lot of weird blocking. It's true, this is a democratization of >>absolutely, I think you're talking about transparency and transparency is one of the tenets of inclusion. If you're truly doing things to be inclusive, transparent and that's where you see the changes, that's exactly what you're talking >>about data driven. That's one thing I love about this data world data is now part of like how apps are built, it's not like a database, then you go fetch a file data is now transparently available. If you know what to look for it if it's available. So the whole old silo mentality, this is one of the amazon strength blair you guys are doing. So I have to ask how is this translating out in the public policy world because you know, when you can make this kind of change quicker, you're gonna have some wins under your belt. Yeah, you gotta double down on those. I >>think, I think there's a lot of transformation we're talking about in this conversation. You take kind of one of the missions we're talking about here, which is around clean energy and the expansion of clean energy, Aws and Amazon. We have procured 10 gigawatts of renewable power and making us the largest corporate procure globally, to kind of put that in maybe a little bit more approachable context, that's the equivalent of powering 2.5 million homes. Um and there's still farther to go to be able to meet that kind of think big that is happening in the industry right now, you have to have a broad, diverse industry to be able to reach all those communities to be, have kind of all types of different leaders in it, because we need everybody at the table both for the industry, but also for the communities that are being served. >>What does sustainability mean to you? Because this is a core focus, I know the energy things huge, but it's not obvious to some people, but it's getting better. What are the what's the core 10ets behind the sustainability strategy? >>Yeah, no, I think there's a lot of different ways you can take a stab at that for us. It's uh probably most uh out there in the public that people talk about is our climate pledge. This is kind of a um goal that we've set to be uh net zero carbon by 2040 which is 10, 10 years ahead of the paris Climate change within that. There are components of that that are related to electric vehicles, clean energy, renewable energy procurement, carbon offset programs around the world. I think throughout all of that is kind of coming back to, as you said, with sustainability and approaching climate change as a as an issue that needs a comprehensive holistic approach to talk >>about some of the stories and the members that you have because is the recruiting strategy climate change? Or is there another like how do you because renewable energy could be a no brainer, but how to get people excited? Like save the world. What's the what's the what's the, what are people aligning with then? What's their reaction? So, >>You know, it's very simply the way we see with our members, most of our members, 87% of them are in the solar area. Many of them when we talk about sustainability, how can people live their lives in a way where they save money on their energy bills? How can communities understand how they can harness their own renewable energy, make a little money from that, but also live their lives in a very peaceful, sustainable, peaceful, sustainable way. Right, so that's part of it as an example, a couple of examples is that we have um 548 capital is a member company. And keep in mind that these are early startup companies. 5 48 capital is in Chicago and their models started off with we want all homes in our communities and these are places in the hood, some of them um son text works with people, it works with spanish speaking customers solely in texas where they explain to them the benefits of renewable energy. They explain the benefits of a sustainability and what it is. I mean that's so that's kind of what we're looking >>at here is just kind of show up and just kind of telling the truth >>exactly and show them the benefits that they've kind of not been leading on. Actually. The other thing is that this is about economics. So this renewable energy movement that we're going through is about economics. It is a it's our next wave of being able to ensure americans are able to live lives in a in a way that's meaningful economic. >>Well you've got visibility on the unit economics event good energy. There's also a community angle. >>Yes, absolutely. >>About some of those stories around the community response to this idea, wow this actually is gettable. Yeah, we >>solar is one of our members and it's owned by the first female community solar own company out of. She's out of Baltimore but she has a solar farm here in D. C. And what she did was was engaged churches in how can you get involved in this renewable energy movement? How can you save money? How can you create a community around around this work? We sold as an example of that um son text, I have to mention them again. They speak with they work with only spanish speaking customers who had no clue about this and who are now making having their lives live better because of it, >>you know, affecting change is hard now you've got a tailwind with structural change in systemic opportunities there. What are the blockers? What are the blockers right now? Is an awareness, is it participation community? >>I'm sorry, it's your show and I've >>interrupted, you know, >>we talk about entrepreneurs in the space, particularly women and those from bipod communities. The first thing that you'll hear is they'll say we don't have access to capital people. The terms around getting capital to start up are tough and their barriers there's so that's one the second is awareness and that's awareness of introducing them to companies that might want to do business with them. So that's something that's a benefit for a core occurs. Members are all people who touch every renewable energy transaction from the finances to the developers to the to the buyers. So this is what makes it unique. So what we're doing with accelerate is breaking down the barriers of access to capital by introducing them to people who can potentially support their work but also introducing them to companies that can help them be a part of their supply chain, which is why the study that max announced is amazing because we're going to be able to have baseline data on what, what are the demographics of the supply chain in the renewable energy and what can we do about it? And we're gonna scale accelerate to be a model for the industry >>and that's the transparency angle. Get the baseline, understand this is classic Amazonian thinking, get the baseline, raise the bar, >>you can see why you get >>so OK, so a lot of great stories, how do people get involved? Obviously amazon is taking the lead leadership role here. What can people do to get involved? >>So if you want to support the program as amazon is a corn dot org accelerate or Thompson at a core dot org. That's my email address. If you'd like to become a member company and accelerate program will be opening up applications towards the latter part of this year november december again a core dot org slash accelerate >>renewable energy. What's the coolest thing you've seen so far in your programme around neutral energy um, could be story, it could be people story could be tech story. What's the coolest thing you've seen spot there? Yeah, you really did. You >>know, I think we have a company called clear look, that's a member there out of Jackson Tennessee and they're actually working with retailers are renewable energy credits to create, to create renewable energy farms in their area. And I, what I think is so cool is that she's disrupting the way that you go about using renewable energy credits. Clear loop dot org. Look them >>up in the new york times. Had a story. I'm just reading California other areas. We have a high density of electric vehicles, it's training the power grid. So this idea of coming in, come back is what it's not sure yet. It's not, this is kind of where it's going. So okay, what's the cool thing you've seen? >>No, for me, I've just enjoyed kind of, I've enjoyed the journey. I think the moment for me where I could see that this was real and this was going to be a impactful program constants organized. It's called a speed dating, a virtual speed dating for us with about eight different companies and it was fascinating to get on, spend some time being able to interact with eight different companies. Um, who we probably would not have ever had kind of introduction to before in the past either. They didn't know how to get in touch with us. We didn't know how to get in touch with them and it kind of opens your eyes to all the different ways. People are approaching this problem and starts the executives who I had in these colors. You can see their wheels spinning the ideas sparking of oh there's some cool ideas here. There's something new that we could do. We should explore further. Nothing I can announce at the moment but lots of lots of good uh I'm >>sure the baseline max got baseline studies. I'm sure there will be a lot of doubling down opportunities on success or not success because you want to have the data, you know what to work on. Its true cause a great mission. I'm really impressed. Congratulations. Thank you announcement and love the programme. Thank you. Take a minute to give a plug anyone or public >>thanks Shannon Kellogg. Shannon was really behind it. He's a member of our board represents a W. S. And was really behind, we gotta do something. It's got to be unique and it's got to be something intentional. And here we are today I want to give a >>great opportunity. Thanks for coming in, appreciate it. Thank you for having more cube coverage here from Washington D. C. Amazon web services, public Sector summit. An event in person where people are face to face. This is great stuff is the cube right back after this short break. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm

>>from around the globe. It's the cube with >>Digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual were not yet in real life. We're doing another remote interviews with two great guests cube alumni of course, I'm john for your host of the cube. We've got Jason McGee, IBM fellow VP and CTO of IBM cloud platform and octavian Tennessee. Senior Vice president Hybrid Cloud Engineering at Netapp. Both cube alumni. It's great to see you both. Thanks for coming on. Thank >>you. Great to be here. Thanks for having us. >>So we were just talking before we came on camera that you know what it feels like. We've had this conversation, you know, a long time ago we have Hybrid cloud has been on a trajectory for both of you guys many times on the cube. So now it's mainstream, it's here in the real world, everyone gets it. It's not, there's no real debate now. Multi cloud, that's that. People are debating that. Which means that's right around the corner. So Hybrid cloud is here and now, um, Jason this is really the focus and this is also brings together Netapp in your partnership and talk about the relationship first with hybrid cloud. >>Yeah, I mean, you know, look, we've talked to a number of times together I think in the industry, uh, maybe, maybe a few years ago people were debating whether Hybrid cloud was a real thing. We don't have that conversation anymore. I think, um, you know, enterprises today, especially maybe in the face of Covid and kind of how we work differently now realize that their cloud journey is going to be a mix of on prem and off premise systems. Probably going to be a mix of multiple public cloud providers, um, and what they're looking for now is how do I do that and how do I manage that hybrid environment? How do I have a consistent platform across the different environments I want to operate in. Um, and then how do I get more and more of my work into those environments? And it's been interesting. I think the first, the first waves of cloud, we're infrastructure centric and externally application focused, they were easier things. And now we're moving into more mission critical, more state fel more data oriented workloads. And that brings with it new challenges on where applications run and and how we leverage the club >>Octavia. You guys had a great relationship with IBM over the years, uh, data centric company that it has always been great engineering team. You're on the cloud. Hybrid cloud engineering. What's the current status of the relationship? Give us an update on how the it's vectoring into the hybrid clouds this year? Senior Vice President. Hybrid cloud engineering. >>Well, so first of all, I want to recognize 20 years of a successful partnership with IBM I think uh that happened. IBM have been companies that have embraced digital transformation and technology trends to enable that digital transformation for our customers. And we've been very successful. I think there is a very strong um joint hydrochloric value proposition for customers. Netapp storage and data services complement what IBM does in terms of products and solutions, both for on premise deployments in the cloud. I think together we can build more complete solutions solutions that span data mobility to the governance for the new workloads that Jason has talked about. >>And how are some of the customer challenges that you're seeing? Obviously software defined networking, software defined storage, uh, deVOps has now turned into Deb's sec ops. So you have now that program ability requirement with four dynamic applications, application driven infrastructure, all these buzzwords point to one thing the infrastructure has to be resilient and respond to the applications. >>Yeah, I would say uh infrastructure, you know, will continue to be uh you know, top of mind for everybody whether they're building a private uh you know, cloud or whether there um you know, trying to leverage, you know, something like IBM cloud, I think people want to consume, you know, infrastructure is an A P I I think they want simplicity, you know, security, I I think they want to manage their cost, you know very well. I think we're very proud to be partnering with IBM cloud to build such capabilities. >>Jason what's how are you guys help on some of these customers as they look at new things and sometimes retrofitting and re factoring previous stuff don't transforming but also innovating at the same time as a lot of that going on. What are you guys doing to help with the Hybrid challenges? >>Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a lot of dimensions of that problem, but the one that that I think has been kind of most interesting over the last year has been how um kind of the consumption model of public cloud, you know, api driven self service capabilities operated for you, how that consumption model is starting to spread because I think one of the challenges with hybrid and one of the challenges as customers are looking at these more mission critical data centric kind of workloads was well, I can't always move that applications of public cloud data center or I need that application to live out on the network closer to my end users out where data is being generated maybe in an IOT context. And when you had those requirements, you had to kind of switch operating models, you had to kind of move away from a public cloud service consumption model to a software deployment model. And you know, we have a common platform and things like open shift that can run everywhere. But the missing piece was how do I consume everything as a service everywhere. And so recently we launched this thing called have been brought satellite, which we've been working with the T V. And his team on on how we can actually extend the public cloud experience back into the data center out to the edge and allow people to kind of mix both locational flexibility with public consumption. When you do that, you of course running a much more diverse infrastructure environment. You have to integrate with different storage environments and you wind up with multi tier applications, you know, some stuff on the edge and some stuff in the core. And so data replication and data management start to become really interesting because you're kind of distributing your workloads across this. No complex environment. >>We've seen that relationship between compute and storage change a lot over the past decade. As the evolution goes okay, I gotta ask you this is critical path for companies. They want the storage ready infrastructure. You guys have been doing that for many, many decades party with IBM for sure. But now they're all getting a hybrid cloud big time and it's not it's attributed computing is what it is. It's an operating model. When someone asked you guys what your capabilities are, how do you answer that? In today's world? Because you have storage is well known. You got a great product, people know that, but what is net apps capabilities? When I say I'm going all in and hybrid cloud, complete changeover. >>So what we have been doing is basically rewriting a lot of our software with a few design points in mind. Um the software defined has been definitely, you know, one of the key design points. The second is the um, the hybrid cloud and the internalization of our operating system so they can run both in traditional environments as well as in the cloud. I think the last thing that we wanted to do, it's enabled the speed of scale and that has been by building um, you know, intrinsically in the, in the, in the product, both support or, and also using kubernetes as an infrastructure to achieve that agility that that scale >>talk about this data fabric vision because to me that comes up all the time in my conversations with practitioners. The number one problem that there is a problem that we're solving to solve and the conversation tends to I here was a control playing kubernetes horizontally scalable. This all points to data being available. So how do you create that availability? What does data fabric mean? What does all this mean in hybrid context? >>Well, if you if you think about it data fabric, it's a hybrid cloud, you know, concept, right. This is about enabling data governance, data mobility, data security in an environment where some of the applications will run on premises or at the edge of the smart edge and many of the, you know, perhaps data lakes and analytics, um, you know, and services rich services will be in a central locations or on many or perhaps some large, you know, data centers. So you need to have, you know, the type of, you know, capabilities, data services, you know, to enable that mobility, that governments governance, that that security across this continuum that spans the edge the core and the cloud, >>Jason, you mentioned satellite before. Cloud satellite. Can you go into more detail on it? I know it's kind of a new product, uh what is that about? And tell me what's the benefits and why does it exist and what problems does it solve? >>Yeah. So so in the most simple terms, cloud satellite is the capability to extend iBMS public cloud into on prem infrastructure infrastructure at the edge or in a multi cloud context to other public cloud infrastructures. And so you can consume all the services in the public cloud that you need to to build your application of open shift as a service databases. Deb tools, aI capabilities. Instead of being limited to only being able to consume those services in IBM's cloud regions, you can now add your private data center or add your metro provider or add your AWS or Azure account and now consume those services consistently across all those environments. Um and that really allows you to kind of combine the benefits of public ill with kind of location independence, you see in hybrid and let's solve new problems like, you know, it's really interesting, we're seeing like a I and data being a primary driver. I need my application to live in a certain country or to live next to my mainframe or to live like you know in a metro because all of my, I'm doing like video analytics on a bunch of cameras and I'm not going to stream all that data back to halfway across the country to some cloud region and so lets you extend out in that way and when you do that of course you now move the cloud into a more diverse infrastructure environment. And so like we've been working with Netapp on, how do we then expose um Netapp storage into this environment when I'm running in the data center where I'm running at the edge and I need to store that data replicate the data, secure it. Well how do I kind of plug those two things together? I think john at the beginning you kind of alluded to this idea of you know, things are becoming more application centric, Right? And we're trying to run an I. T. Architecture that's more centered around the application well by combining um clouds, knowledge of kind of where everything is running with a common platform like open shift with a kubernetes aware data fabric in storage layer, you really can achieve that. You can have an application centric kind of management that spans those environments. >>Yeah, I want to come back to that whole impact on I. T. Because this has come up as a major theme here. Think that the I. T. Transformation is going to be more about cloud scale but I want to get octavian on the satellite on Netapp role and how you complement that. How do you guys fit in? He just mentioned that you guys are playing with clouds satellite, obviously this was like an operating model, How does that fit in? >>Um simply put we extend and enable the capabilities that uh IBM satellite uh you know, platform provides, I think Jason referred to the storage aspects um and you know what we are doing, it's enabling not only storage but rich data services around tearing based on temperature or you know, replicated snapshots or you know, capabilities around, you know cashing, you know, high availability encryption and and so forth. So we believe that our our technology integrates very well with red hat open shift um and uh the kubernetes aspect enable the application mobility and in that translation of really distributed computing at scale, you know from you know from the traditional data center um to the edge and uh you know to the massive hubs that IBM is building, >>you know, I gotta say but watching you guys worked together for many decades now and and covering you with the queue for the past 10 years or 11 years now um been a great partnership. I gotta say one thing that's obviously too obvious to me and our team and mainly mainly the world is now you got a new Ceo over at IBM you have a cloud focus that's on unwavering Arvin loves the cloud. We all know that um ecosystems are changing with that. You have already had a big ecosystem and partnerships now it seems to be moving to a level where you gotta have that ecosystem really thrive in the cloud. So I guess we'll use the last couple of minutes if you guys don't mind explaining how the IBM Netapp relationship in the new context of this new partnership, new ecosystem or a new kind of world helps customers and how you guys are working together. >>Yeah, I mean I could start, I mean I think you're right that that cloud is all about platforms and about kind of the overall environment, people operating in the ecosystem is really critical and I think things like satellite have given us new ways to work together. I mean I'd be a minute up, as we said, I've been working together for a long time. We rely on them a lot in our public cloud, for example in our storage tiers but with with the kind of idea of distributed cloud and the boundaries of public cubs spreading to all these new environments. Those are just new places where we can build really interesting, valuable integrations for our clients so that they can deal with day to deal with these more complex apps, you know, in all the places that they exist. So I think it's gonna actually really exciting um to kind of leverage that opportunity to find new ways to work together and and uh and deliver solutions to our clients >>Octavia, >>I would say that data is the ecosystem and we all know that there is more data right now being created outside of the traditional data center, beat in the cloud or at the edge. Um so our mission is, you know, to enable that, you know, hybrid cloud or or that uh, you know, data mobility um and enable, you know, persistence rich data, you know, storage services, whatever data is being created. I think IBM's new satellite platform um you know, comes in and broadens the aperture of people being able to consume IBM services at the edge and or or the remote office. And I think that's very exciting. >>You guys are both experts and solely seasoned executives. Devops DEP sec ops, DEV data Ops whatever you wanna call, data's here. Ecosystems guys, thanks for coming on the key. Really appreciate the insight. >>Thank you. Thank >>you. Okay. IBM think cute coverage jOHN for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.

>>welcome to the session. Long live swarm with containers and kubernetes everywhere we have this increasing cloud complexity at the same time that we're facing economic uncertainty and, of course, to navigate this. For most companies, it's a matter of focusing on speed and on shipping and iterating their code faster. Now. For many, Marantz is customers. That means using docker swarm rather than kubernetes to handle container orchestration. We really believe that the best way to increase your speed to production is choice, simplicity and security. So we wanted to bring you a couple of experts to talk about the state of swarm and Docker enterprise and how you can make best use of both of you. So let's get to it. Well, good afternoon or good morning, depending on where you are on and welcome to today's session. Long live swarm. I am Nick Chase. I'm head of content here at Mantis and I would like to introduce you to our two Panelists today eight of Manzini. Why don't you introduce yourself? >>I am a van CNI. I'm a solutions architect here at Moran Tous on work primarily with Docker Enterprise System. I have a long history of working with support team. Um, at what used to be Ah Docker Enterprise, part of Docker Inc. >>Yeah, Okay. Great. And Don Power. >>I, um Yeah, I'm Don Power on the docker. Captain Docker, community leader. Right now I run our Dev Ops team for Citizens Bank out of Nashville, Tennessee, and happy to be here. >>All right, Excellent. So All right, so thank you both for coming. Now, before we say anything else, I want to go ahead and kind of name the elephant in the room. There's been a lot of talk about the >>future. Yeah, that's right. Um, swarm as it stands right now, um, we have, ah, very vested interest in keeping our customers on who want to continue using swarm, functional and keeping swarm a viable alternative or complement to kubernetes. However you see the orchestration war playing out as it were. >>Okay? It's hardly a war at this point, but they do work together, and so that's >>absolutely Yeah, I I definitely consider them more of like, complimentary services, um, using the right tool for the job. Sort of sense. They both have different design goals when they were originally created and set out so I definitely don't see it as a completely one or the other kind of decision and that they could both be used in the same environment and similar clusters to run whatever workload that you have. >>Excellent. And we'll get into the details of all that as we go along. So that's terrific. So I have not really been involved in in the sort of swarm area. So set the stage for us where we kind of start out with all of this. Don I know that you were involved and so guys said, set the stage for us. >>Sure, Um I mean so I've been a heavy user of swarm in my past few roles. Professionally, we've been running containers in production with Swarm for coming up on about four years. Now, Um, in our case, we you know, we looked at what was available at the time, and of course you had. Kubernetes is your biggest contender out there, but like I just mentioned, the one of the things that really led us to swarm is it's design goals were very different than kubernetes. So Kubernetes tries to have an answer for absolutely every scenario where swarm tries to have an answer for, like, the 80% of problems or challenges will say that you might come across 80% of the workloads. Um, I had a better way of saying that, but I think I got my point across >>E Yeah, I think I think you hit the nail on the head. Um, Kubernetes in particular with the way that kubernetes itself is an a P I I believe that kubernetes was, um, you know, written as a toolkit. It wasn't really intended to be used by end users directly. It was really a way to build platforms that run containers. And because it's this really, really extensible ap I you can extend it to manage all sorts of resource is swarm doesn't have that X sensibility aspect, but what it was designed to do, it does very, very well and very easily in a very, very simple sort of way. Um, it's highly opinionated about the way that you should use the product, but it works very effectively. It's very easy to use. It's very low. Um, not low effort, but low. Ah, low barrier to entry. >>Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I was gonna touch on the same thing. It's very easy for someone to come in. Pick up swarm. You know they don't They don't have to know anything about the orchestrator on day one. Most people that are getting into this space are very familiar with Docker. Compose um, and entering from Docker compose into swarm is changing one command that you would run on the command line. >>Yeah, very, very trivial to if you are already used to building docker files using composed, organize your deployment into stacks of related components. It's trivial to turn on swarm mode and then deploy your container set to a cluster. >>Well, excellent. So answer this question for me. Is the swarm of today the same as the swarm of, you know, the original swarm. So, like when swim first started is that the same is what we have now >>it's kind of ah, complicated story with the storm project because it's changed names and forms a few times. Originally in is really somewhere around 2014 in the first version, and it was a component that you really had to configure and set up separately from Docker Ah, the way that it was structured. Ah, you would just have docker installed on a number of servers are machines in your cluster. And then you would organize them into a swarm by bringing your own database and some of the tooling to get those nodes talking to each other and to organize your containers across all of your docker engines. Ah, few years later, the swarm project was retooled and baked into the docker engine. And, um, this is where we sort of get the name change from. So originally it was a feature that we called swarm. Ah. Then the Swarm Kit project was released on Get Hub and baked directly into the engine, where they renamed it as swarm mode. Because now it is a motile option that you just turn on as a button in the docker engine and because it's already there the, um, the tuning knobs that you haven't swarm kit with regard to how what my time outs are and some of these other sort of performance settings there locked there, they're there. It's part of the opinionated set of components that builds up the docker engine is that we bring in the Swarm Kit project with a certain set of defaults and settings. And that is how it operates in today's version of Docker engine. >>Uh, okay for that, that makes sense. That makes sense. So ah, so don, I know you have pretty strong feelings about this topic, but it is swarm still viable in a world that's sort of increasingly dominated by Kubernetes. >>Absolutely. And you were right. I'm very passionate about this topic where I work. We're we're doing almost all of our production work lives on swarm we only have out of Ah, we've got something like 600 different services between three and 4000 containers. At any given point in time. Out of all of those projects, all of those services we've only run into two or three that don't kind of fit into the opinionated model of swarm. So we are running those on KUBERNETES in the same cluster using Moranis is Docker enterprise offering. But, um, no, that's a very, very small percentage of services that we didn't have an answer for in swarm with one. The one case that really gets us just about every time is scaling state full services. But you're gonna have very few staple services in most environments for things like micro service architecture, which is predominantly what we build out. Swarm is perfect. It's simple. It's easy to use you, don't you? Don't end up going for miles of yamma files trying to figure out the one setting that you didn't get exactly right? Um yeah, the other Thea the other big piece of it that way really led us to adopting it so heavily in the beginning is, you know, the overlay network. So your networks don't have to span the whole cluster like they do with kubernetes. So we could we could set up a network isolation between service A and service B, just by use using the built in overlay networks. That was a huge component that, like I said, let us Teoh adopting it so heavily when we first got started. >>Excellent. You look like you're about to say something in a >>Yeah, I think that speaks to the design goals for each piece of software. On the way that I've heard this described before is with regard to the networking piece the ah, the docker networking under the hood, um, feels like it was written by a network engineer. The way that the docker engine overlay networks communicate uses ah, VX lan under the hood, which creates pseudo V lands for your containers. And if two containers aren't on the same Dylan, there's no way they can communicate with each other as opposed to the design of kubernetes networking, which is really left to the C and I implementation but still has the design philosophy of one big, flat sub net where every I p could reach every other i p and you control what is allowed to access, what by policy. So it's more of an application focused Ah design. Whereas in Docker swarm on the overlay networking side, it's really of a network engineering sort of focus. Right? >>Okay, got it. Well, so now how does all this fit in with Docker enterprise now? So I understand there's been some changes on how swarm is handled within Docker Enterprise. Coming with this new release, >>Docker s O swarm Inside Docker Enterprise is represented as both the swarm classic legacy system that we shift way back in 2014 on and then also the swarm mode that is curly used in the docker engine. Um, the Swarm Classic back end gives us legacy support for being able to run unmanaged plane containers onto a cluster. If you were to take Docker ce right now, you would find that you wouldn't be able to just do a very basic docker run against a whole cluster of machines. You can create services using the swarms services, a p I but, um, that that legacy plane container support is something that you have to set up external swarm in order to provide. So right now, the architecture of Docker Enterprise UCP is based on some of that legacy code from about five or six years ago. Okay. Ah, that gives us ability to deploy plane containers for use cases that require it as well as swarm services for those kinds of workloads that might be better served by the built in load balancing and h A and scaling features that swarm provides. >>Okay, so now I know that at one point kubernetes was deployed within Docker Enterprise as you create a swarm cluster and then deploy kubernetes on top of swarm. >>Correct? That is how the current architecture works. >>Okay. All right. And then, um what is what is where we're going with this like, Are we supposed to? Are we going to running Swarm on top of kubernetes? What's >>the the design goals for the future of swarm within branches? Stocker Enterprise are that we will start the employing Ah, like kubernetes cluster features as the base and a swarm kit on top of kubernetes. So it is like you mentioned just a reversal of the roles. I think we're finding that, um, the ability to extend kubernetes a p I to manage resource is is valuable at an infrastructure and platform level in a way that we can't do with swarm. We still want to be able to run swarm workloads. So we're going to keep the swarm kit code the swarm kit orchestration features to run swarm services as a part of the platform to keep the >>got it. Okay, so, uh, if I'm a developer and I want to run swarm, but my company's running kubernetes what? What are my one of my options there? Well, I think >>eight touched on it pretty well already where you know, it depends on your design goals, and you know, one of the other things that's come up a few times is Thea. The level of entry for for swarm is much, much simpler than kubernetes. So I mean, it's it's kind of hard to introduce anything new. So I mean, a company, a company that's got most of their stuff in kubernetes and production is gonna have a hard time maybe looking at a swarm. I mean, this is gonna be, you know, higher, higher up, not the boots on the ground. But, um, you know, the the upper management, that's at some point, you have to pay for all their support, all of it. What we did in our approach. Because there was one team already using kubernetes. We went ahead and stood up a small cluster ah, small swarm cluster and taught the developers how to use it and how to deploy code to it. And they loved it. They thought it was super simple. A time went on, the other teams took notice and saw how fast these guys were getting getting code deployed, getting services up, getting things usable, and they would look over at what the innovation team was doing and say, Hey, I I want to do that to, uh, you know, so there's there's a bunch of different approaches. That's the approach we took and it worked out very well. It looks like you wanted to say something too. >>Yeah, I think that if you if you're if you're having to make this kind of decision, there isn't There isn't a wrong choice. Ah, it's never a swarm of its role and your organization, right? Right. If you're if you're an individual and you're using docker on your workstation on your laptop but your organization wants to standardize on kubernetes there, there are still some two rules that Mike over Ah, pose. And he's manifest if you need to deploy. Coop resource is, um if you are running Docker Enterprise Swarm kit code will still be there. And you can run swarm services as regular swarm workloads on that component. So I I don't want to I don't want people to think that they're going to be like, locked into one or the other orchestration system. Ah, there the way we want to enable developer choice so that however the developer wants to do their work, they can get it done. Um Docker desktop. Ah, ships with that kubernetes distribution bundled in it. So if you're using a Mac or Windows and that's your development, uh, system, you can run docker debt, turn on your mode and run the kubernetes bits. So you have the choices. You have the tools to deploy to either system. >>And that's one of the things that we were super excited about when they introduced Q. Burnett ease into the Docker Enterprise offering. So we were able to run both, so we didn't have to have that. I don't want to call it a battle or argument, but we didn't have to make anybody choose one or the other. We, you know, we gave them both options just by having Docker enterprise so >>excellent. So speaking of having both options, let's just say for developers who need to make a decision while should I go swarm, or should I go kubernetes when it sort of some of the things that they should think about? >>So I think that certain certain elements of, um, certain elements of containers are going to be agnostic right now. So the the the designing a docker file and building a container image, you're going to need to know that skill for either system that you choose to operate on. Ah, the swarm value. Some of the storm advantage comes in that you don't have to know anything beyond that. So you don't have to learn a whole new A p I a whole new domain specific language using Gamel to define your deployment. Um, chances are that if you've been using docker for any length of time, you probably have a whole stack of composed files that are related to things that you've worked on. And, um, again, the barrier to entry to getting those running on swarm is very low. You just turn it on docker stack, deploy, and you're good to go. So I think that if you're trying to make that choice, if you I have a use case that doesn't require you to manage new resource is if you don't need the Extensible researchers part, Ah, swarm is a great great, great viable option. >>Absolutely. Yeah, the the recommendation I've always made to people that are just getting started is start with swarm and then move into kubernetes and going through the the two of them, you're gonna figure out what fits your design principles. What fits your goals. Which one? You know which ones gonna work best for you. And there's no harm in choosing one or the other using both each one of you know, very tailor fit for very various types of use cases. And like I said, kubernetes is great at some things, but for a lot of other stuff, I still want to use swarm and vice versa. So >>on my home lab, for all my personal like services that I run in my, uh, my home network, I used storm, um, for things that I might deploy onto, you know, a bit this environment, a lot of the ones that I'm using right now are mainly tailored for kubernetes eso. I think especially some of the tools that are out there in the open source community as well as in docker Enterprise helped to bridge that gap like there's a translator that can take your compose file, turn it into kubernetes. Yeah, Mel's, um, if if you're trying to decide, like on the business side, should we standardize on former kubernetes? I think like your what? What functionality are you looking at? Out of getting out of your system? If you need things like tight integration into a ah infrastructure vendor such as AWS Azure or VM ware that might have, like plug ins for kubernetes. You're now you're getting into that area where you're managing Resource is of the infrastructure with your orchestration. AP I with kube so things like persistent volumes can talk to your storage device and carve off chunks of storage and assign those two pods if you don't have that need or that use case. Um, you know, KUBERNETES is bringing in a lot of these features that you maybe you're just not taking advantage of. Um, similarly, if you want to take advantage of things like auto scaling to scale horizontally, let's say you have a message queue system and then a number of workers, and you want to start scaling up on your workers. When your CPU hits a certain a metric. That is something that Kubernetes has built right into it. And so, if you want that, I would probably suggest that you look at kubernetes if you don't need that, or if you want to write some of that tooling yourself. Swarm doesn't have an object built into it that will do automatic horizontal scaling based on some kind of metric. So I always consider this decision as a what features are the most I available to you and your business that you need to Yep. >>All right. Excellent. Well, and, ah, fortunately, of course, they're both available on Docker Enterprise. So aren't we lucky? All right, so I am going to wrap this up. I want to thank Don Bauer Docker captain, for coming here and spending some time with us and eight of Manzini. I would like to thank you. I know that the the, uh, circumstances are less than ideal here for your recording today, but we appreciate you joining us. Um and ah, both of you. Thank you very much. And I want to invite all of you. First of all, thank you for joining us. We know your time is valuable and I want to invite you all Teoh to take a look at Docker Enterprise. Ah, follow the link that's on your screen and we'll see you in the next session. Thank you all so much. Thank you. >>Thank you, Nick.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman, this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, the virtual event. Of course, when we talk about Cloud Native we talk about Kubernetes there's a lot that's happening to modernize the infrastructure but a very important thing that we're going to talk about today is also what's happening up the stack, what sits on top of it and some of the new use cases and applications that are enabled by all of this modern environment and for that we're going to talk about artificial intelligence and machine learning or AI and ML as we tend to talk in the industry, so happy to welcome to the program. We have two first time guests joining us from Red Hat. First of all, we have Abhinav Joshi and Tushar Katarki they are both senior managers, part of the OpenShift group. Abhinav is in the product marketing and Tushar is in product management. Abhinav and Tushar thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks a lot, Stu, we're glad to be here. >> Thanks Stu and glad to be here at KubeCon. >> All right, so Abhinav I mentioned in the intro here, modernization of the infrastructure is awesome but really it's an enabler. We know... I'm an infrastructure person the whole reason we have infrastructure is to be able to drive those applications, interact with my data and the like and of course, AI and ML are exciting a lot going on there but can also be challenging. So, Abhinav if I could start with you bring us inside your customers that you're talking to, what are the challenges, the opportunities? What are they seeing in this space? Maybe what's been holding them back from really unlocking the value that is expected? >> Yup, that's a very good question to kick off the conversation. So what we are seeing as an organization they typically face a lot of challenges when they're trying to build an AI/ML environment, right? And the first one is like a talent shortage. There is a limited amount of the AI, ML expertise in the market and especially the data scientists that are responsible for building out the machine learning and the deep learning models. So yeah, it's hard to find them and to be able to retain them and also other talents like a data engineer or app DevOps folks as well and the lack of talent can actually stall the project. And the second key challenge that we see is the lack of the readily usable data. So the businesses collect a lot of data but they must find the right data and make it ready for the data scientists to be able to build out, to be able to test and train the machine learning models. If you don't have the right kind of data to the predictions that your model is going to do in the real world is only going to be so good. So that becomes a challenge as well, to be able to find and be able to wrangle the right kind of data. And the third key challenge that we see is the lack of the rapid availability of the compute infrastructure, the data and machine learning, and the app dev tools for the various personas like a data scientist or data engineer, the software developers and so on that can also slow down the project, right? Because if all your teams are waiting on the infrastructure and the tooling of their choice to be provisioned on a recurring basis and they don't get it in a timely manner, it can stall the projects. And then the next one is the lack of collaboration. So you have all these kinds of teams that are involved in the AI project, and they have to collaborate with each other because the work one of the team does has a dependency on a different team like say for example, the data scientists are responsible for building the machine learning models and then what they have to do is they have to work with the app dev teams to make sure the models get integrated as part of the app dev processes and ultimately rolled out into the production. So if all these teams are operating in say silos and there is lack of collaboration between the teams, so this can stall the projects as well. And finally, what we see is the data scientists they typically start the machine learning modeling on their individual PCs or laptops and they don't focus on the operational aspects of the solution. So what this means is when the IT teams have to roll all this out into a production kind of deployment, so they get challenged to take all the work that has been done by the individuals and then be able to make sense out of it, be able to make sure that it can be seamlessly brought up in a production environment in a consistent way, be it on-premises, be it in the cloud or be it say at the edge. So these are some of the key challenges that we see that the organizations are facing, as they say try to take the AI projects from pilot to production. >> Well, some of those things seem like repetition of what we've had in the past. Obviously silos have been the bane of IT moving forward and of course, for many years we've been talking about that gap between developers and what's happening in the operation side. So Tushar, help us connect the dots, containers, Kubernetes, the whole DevOps movement. How is this setting us up to actually be successful for solutions like AI and ML? >> Sure Stu I mean, in fact you said it right like in the world of software, in the world of microservices, in the world of app modernization, in the world of DevOps in the past 10, 15 years, but we have seen this evolution revolution happen with containers and Kubernetes driving more DevOps behavior, driving more agile behavior so this in fact is what we are trying to say here can ease up the cable to EIML also. So the various containers, Kubernetes, DevOps and OpenShift for software development is directly applicable for AI projects to make them move agile, to get them into production, to make them more valuable to organization so that they can realize the full potential of AI. We already touched upon a few personas so it's useful to think about who the users are, who the personas are. Abhinav I talked about data scientists these are the people who obviously do the machine learning itself, do the modeling. Then there are data engineers who do the plumbing who provide the essential data. Data is so essential to machine learning and deep learning and so there are data engineers that are app developers who in some ways will then use the output of what the data scientists have produced in terms of models and then incorporate them into services and of course, none of these things are purely cast in stone there's a lot of overlap you could find that data scientists are app developers as well, you'll see some of app developers being data scientist later data engineer. So it's a continuum rather than strict boundaries, but regardless what all of these personas groups of people need or experts need is self service to that preferred tools and compute and storage resources to be productive and then let's not forget the IT, engineering and operations teams that need to make all this happen in an easy, reliable, available manner and something that is really safe and secure. So containers help you, they help you quickly and easily deploy a broad set of machine learning tools, data tools across the cloud, the hybrid cloud from data center to public cloud to the edge in a very consistent way. Teams can therefore alternatively modify, change a shared container images, machine learning models with (indistinct) and track changes. And this could be applicable to both containers as well as to the data by the way and be transparent and transparency helps in collaboration but also it could help with the regulatory reasons later on in the process. And then with containers because of the inherent processes solution, resource control and protection from threat they can also be very secure. Now, Kubernetes takes it to the next level first of all, it forms a cluster of all your compute and data resources, and it helps you to run your containerized tools and whatever you develop on them in a consistent way with access to these shared compute and centralized compute and storage and networking resources from the data center, the edge or the public cloud. They provide things like resource management, workload scheduling, multi-tendency controls so that you can be a proper neighbors if you will, and quota enforcement right? Now that's Kubernetes now if you want to up level it further if you want to enhance what Kubernetes offers then you go into how do you write applications? How do you actually make those models into services? And that's where... and how do you lifecycle them? And that's sort of the power of Helm and for the more Kubernetes operators really comes into the picture and while Helm helps in installing some of this for a complete life cycle experience. A kubernetes operator is the way to go and they simplify the acceleration and deployment and life cycle management from end-to-end of your entire AI, ML tool chain. So all in all organizations therefore you'll see that they need to dial up and define models rapidly just like applications that's how they get ready out of it quickly. There is a lack of collaboration across teams as Abhinav pointed out earlier, as you noticed that has happened still in the world of software also. So we're talking about how do you bring those best practices here to AI, ML. DevOps approaches for machine learning operations or many analysts and others have started calling as MLOps. So how do you kind of bring DevOps to machine learning, and fosters better collaboration between teams, application developers and IT operations and create this feedback loop so that the time to production and the ability to take more machine learning into production and ML-powered applications into production increase is significant. So that's kind of the, where I wanted shine the light on what you were referring to earlier, Stu. >> All right, Abhinav of course one of the good things about OpenShift is you have quite a lot of customers that have deployed the solution over the years, bring us inside some of your customers what are they doing for AI, ML and help us understand really what differentiates OpenShift in the marketplace for this solution set. >> Yeah, absolutely that's a very good question as well and we're seeing a lot of traction in terms of all kinds of industries, right? Be it the financial services like healthcare, automotive, insurance, oil and gas, manufacturing and so on. For a wide variety of use cases and what we are seeing is at the end of the day like all these deployments are focused on helping improve the customer experience, be able to automate the business processes and then be able to help them increase the revenue, serve their customers better, and also be able to save costs. If you go to openshift.com/ai-ml it's got like a lot of customer stories in there but today I will not touch on three of the customers we have in terms of the different industries. The first one is like Royal Bank of Canada. So they are a top global financial institution based out of Canada and they have more than 17 million clients globally. So they recently announced that they build out an AI-powered private cloud platform that was based on OpenShift as well as the NVIDIA DGX AI compute system and this whole solution is actually helping them to transform the customer banking experience by being able to deliver an AI-powered intelligent apps and also at the same time being able to improve the operational efficiency of their organization. And now with this kind of a solution, what they're able to do is they're able to run thousands of simulations and be able to analyze millions of data points in a fraction of time as compared to the solution that they had before. Yeah, so like a lot of great work going on there but now the next one is the ETCA healthcare. So like ETCA is one of the leading healthcare providers in the country and they're based out of the Nashville, Tennessee. And they have more than 184 hospitals as well as more than 2,000 sites of care in the U.S. as well as in the UK. So what they did was they developed a very innovative machine learning power data platform on top of our OpenShift to help save lives. The first use case was to help with the early detection of sepsis like it's a life-threatening condition and then more recently they've been able to use OpenShift in the same kind of stack to be able to roll out the new applications that are powered by machine learning and deep learning let say to help them fight COVID-19. And recently they did a webinar as well that had all the details on the challenges they had like how did they go about it? Like the people, process and technology and then what the outcomes are. And we are proud to be a partner in the solution to help with such a noble cause. And the third example I want to share here is the BMW group and our partner DXC Technology what they've done is they've actually developed a very high performing data-driven data platform, a development platform based on OpenShift to be able to analyze the massive amount of data from the test fleet, the data and the speed of the say to help speed up the autonomous driving initiatives. And what they've also done is they've redesigned the connected drive capability that they have on top of OpenShift that's actually helping them provide various use cases to help improve the customer experience. With the customers and all of the customers are able to leverage a lot of different value-add services directly from within the car, their own cars. And then like last year at the Red Hat Summit they had a keynote as well and then this year at Summit, they were one of the Innovation Award winners. And we have a lot more stories but these are the three that I thought are actually compelling that I should talk about here on theCUBE. >> Yeah Abhinav just a quick follow up for you. One of the things of course we're looking at in 2020 is how has the COVID-19 pandemic, people working from home how has that impacted projects? I have to think that AI and ML are one of those projects that take a little bit longer to deploy, is it something that you see are they accelerating it? Are they putting on pause or are new project kicking off? Anything you can share from customers you're hearing right now as to the impact that they're seeing this year? >> Yeah what we are seeing is that the customers are now even more keen to be able to roll out the digital (indistinct) but we see a lot of customers are now on the accelerated timeline to be able to say complete the AI, ML project. So yeah, it's picking up a lot of momentum and we talk to a lot of analyst as well and they are reporting the same thing as well. But there is the interest that is actually like ramping up on the AI, ML projects like across their customer base. So yeah it's the right time to be looking at the innovation services that it can help improve the customer experience in the new virtual world that we live in now about COVID-19. >> All right, Tushar you mentioned that there's a few projects involved and of course we know at this conference there's a very large ecosystem. Red Hat is a strong contributor to many, many open source projects. Give us a little bit of a view as to in the AI, ML space who's involved, which pieces are important and how Red Hat looks at this entire ecosystem? >> Thank you, Stu so as you know technology partnerships and the power of open is really what is driving the technology world these days in any ways and particularly in the AI ecosystem. And that is mainly because one of the machine learning is in a bootstrap in the past 10 years or so and a lot of that emerging technology to take advantage of the emerging data as well as compute power has been built on the kind of the Linux ecosystem with openness and languages like popular languages like Python, et cetera. And so what you... and of course tons of technology based in Java but the point really here is that the ecosystem plays a big role and open plays a big role and that's kind of Red Hat's best cup of tea, if you will. And that really has plays a leadership role in the open ecosystem so if we take your question and kind of put it into two parts, what is the... what we are doing in the community and then what we are doing in terms of partnerships themselves, commercial partnerships, technology partnerships we'll take it one step at a time. In terms of the community itself, if you step back to the three years, we worked with other vendors and users, including Google and NVIDIA and H2O and other Seldon, et cetera, and both startups and big companies to develop this Kubeflow ecosystem. The Kubeflow is upstream community that is focused on developing MLOps as we talked about earlier end-to-end machine learning on top of Kubernetes. So Kubeflow right now is in 1.0 it happened a few months ago now it's actually at 1.1 you'll see that coupon here and then so that's the Kubeflow community in addition to that we are augmenting that with the Open Data Hub community which is something that extends the capabilities of the Kubeflow community to also add some of the data pipelining stuff and some of the data stuff that I talked about and forms a reference architecture on how to run some of this on top of OpenShift. So the Open Data Hub community also has a great way of including partners from a technology partnership perspective and then tie that with something that I mentioned earlier, which is the idea of Kubernetes operators. Now, if you take a step back as I mentioned earlier, Kubernetes operators help manage the life cycle of the entire application or containerized application including not only the configuration on day one but also day two activities like update and backups, restore et cetera whatever the application needs. Afford proper functioning that a "operator" needs for it to make sure so anyways, the Kubernetes operators ecosystem is also flourishing and we haven't faced that with the OperatorHub.io which is a community marketplace if you will, I don't call it marketplace a community hub because it's just comprised of community operators. So the Open Data Hub actually can take community operators and can show you how to run that on top of OpenShift and manage the life cycle. Now that's the reference architecture. Now, the other aspect of it really is as I mentioned earlier is the commercial aspect of it. It is from a customer point of view, how do I get certified, supported software? And to that extent, what we have is at the top of the... from a user experience point of view, we have certified operators and certified applications from the AI, ML, ISV community in the Red Hat marketplace. And from the Red Hat marketplace is where it becomes easy for end users to easily deploy these ISVs and manage the complete life cycle as I said. Some of the examples of these kinds of ISVs include startups like H2O although H2O is kind of well known in certain sectors PerceptiLabs, Cnvrg, Seldon, Starburst et cetera and then on the other side, we do have other big giants also in this which includes partnerships with NVIDIA, Cloudera et cetera that we have announced, including our also SaaS I got to mention. So anyways these provide... create that rich ecosystem for data scientists to take advantage of. A TEDx Summit back in April, we along with Cloudera, SaaS Anaconda showcased a live demo that shows all these things to working together on top of OpenShift with this operator kind of idea that I talked about. So I welcome people to go and take a look the openshift.com/ai-ml that Abhinav already referenced should have a link to that it take a simple Google search might download if you need some of that, but anyways and the other part of it is really our work with the hardware OEMs right? And so obviously NVIDIA GPUs is obviously hardware, and that accelerations is really important in this world but we are also working with other OEM partners like HP and Dell to produce this accelerated AI platform that turnkey solutions to run your data-- to create this open AI platform for "private cloud" or the data center. The other thing obviously is IBM, IBM Cloud Pak for Data is based on OpenShift that has been around for some time and is seeing very good traction, if you think about a very turnkey solution, IBM Cloud Pak is definitely kind of well ahead in that and then finally Red Hat is about driving innovation in the open-source community. So, as I said earlier, we are doing the Open Data Hub which that reference architecture that showcases a combination of upstream open source projects and all these ISV ecosystems coming together. So I welcome you to take a look at that at opendatahub.io So I think that would be kind of the some total of how we are not only doing open and community building but also doing certifications and providing to our customers that assurance that they can run these tools in production with the help of a rich certified ecosystem. >> And customer is always key to us so that's the other thing that the goal here is to provide our customers with a choice, right? They can go with open source or they can go with a commercial solution as well. So you want to make sure that they get the best in cloud experience on top of our OpenShift and our broader portfolio as well. >> All right great, great note to end on, Abhinav thank you so much and Tushar great to see the maturation in this space, such an important use case. Really appreciate you sharing this with theCUBE and Kubecon community. >> Thank you, Stu. >> Thank you, Stu. >> Okay thank you and thanks a lot and have a great rest of the show. Thanks everyone, stay safe. >> Thanks you and stay with us for a lot more coverage from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, the virtual edition I'm Stu Miniman and thank you as always for watching theCUBE. (soft upbeat music plays)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studios today. And obviously, what's top of the news is the coronavirus and COVID-19, and it's having a direct impact on anything where people get together. We're obviously really tied into the convention space. But we're excited to have an expert in the field coming at it from a different kind of point of view, more from the entertainment side. We'd like to welcome, calling in from Tennessee, Lauren Spahn. She is a partner for Shackelford, Bowen, McKinley, or excuse me, but yeah, McKinley & Norton. Lauren, great to see you. >> Hey there, how are ya? >> Jeff Frick: Good. So we were introduced through kind of the process of the South by Southwest cancellation. Before we get into it, tell us a little bit about kind of what you do, what type of clients do you have, who do you guys kind of represent? >> Yeah, sure, so I practice primarily in entertainment law here in Nashville. But I work with a variety of people in the music industry, whether it be artists or music festivals, record labels, publishing companies, you name it, across the US. So I do a lot of work in L.A. and New York as well. And our firm specializes in a little bit of everything, but our national hub is kind of the spearhead for the entertainment and music practice. >> So it's pretty interesting 'cause we're not so directly involved in entertainment, but we do go to a lot of conferences. And, I think, for us, the watershed moment this year was Mobile World Congress earlier this year in February, 100,000 people in Barcelona, Spain. That's a little unique because most of the main vendors are Asian in terms of all the mobile carriers and the handset tech carriers. But, you were saying before we turned the cameras on, that now the South By Southwest event cancellation is kind of sending the same shock waves if you will through the entertainment industry. >> Yeah, I mean South By Southwest obviously is a big coming together of multiple industries. You know, music, film, TV, technology, but it really was one of the first events that were canceled that impacted the music industry. And so, such a large conference to completely cancel, really just started, it was the tip of the iceberg, or I think what we are going to continue to see across the sphere in music whether its tours being canceled or music festivals that are being canceled, everything is kind of starting to ramp up, and were starting to see the effects from South By Southwest line. >> Jeff Frick: Right. So, one of the things that really is just kind of a splash of cold water, is these things are going down it just really highlights the interconnectedness of all these different parts of these events, right? whether it is the primary promoter or the primary bands in the case of South By Southwest or even the tech companies, but then there are tons and tons of secondary, third and other vendors that are involved from food and transportation and the list goes on and on. So, you're quoted quite often in the press about talking about force majeure and that this is something that kind of comes up in contract law when these types of events happen. So, I wonder if you can kind of explain the dictionary definition of force majeure and how do you see it kind of executed traditionally in a contract where maybe one person just can't uphold their part of the deal and how that contrasts with something like this, which is hitting kind of both sides of the agreement, if you will. >> Completely. So, I think it's important to step back and look at if we are going to use a music festival as an example. You have a contract, the music festival itself will have a contract with the artist, but they will also have contracts with their vendors, with the production team that comes in and sets up the staging and the sound and the light. There are a myriad of contracts and so, the language in each contract tends to govern the relationship between the festival and that third party. So, in this situation of let's use an artist, for example. There is different things in the contract that point to how you can cancel and what happens when you cancel. A force majeure is an example of that. And force majeure is something that is outside of the control of both parties. So, again, the festival and the artist. If something like the Coronavirus is coming, neither one of those parties can control that from happening. And so it typically relieves both parties of any obligation to move forward with the contract. What is important, though, is the language that's in that force majeure provision. So, you sometimes will see language like sickness or an epidemic. But then, you may not have that, and you may have language that says, a local or national state of emergency. So, depending upon the state you're in, depending upon the exact situation in the city that you are holding the event, all of those things can be looked or looked to to interpret whether or not the language that's in that force majeure contract will impact you or will give you the rights to cancel that event without having to pay additional money. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> And so, you know, not only that but you're then seeing it carried out through the insurance policies, as well. So, even if you have force majeure language whether or not the insurance company will help cover the losses for you again depends upon the exact language that's in your insurance policy. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> So, across the board, it really is a contractual right, that can differ for the different people that are involved. >> Right. But, there's the contractual, the language in the contract, but then there is kind of this random stuff that comes up. And, we hear kind of act of God kind of thrown up by insurance companies when it's something they haven't defined in all the fine language. And then, the other piece that we're hearing about a lot in the news here on Palo Alto, right is the specific descriptive terms used by the authorities. Is it a pandemic? Is it an outbreak? Is it a natural disaster? Is it a state of emergency called by the government? >> Or other. So, how does that figure in on something like we're experiencing? I don't know that we've seen anything quite like this before. >> You know, I was looking back through some contracts earlier this morning because I had a potential cancellation that was going to happen, and I mean some contracts go as far as to even describe the Swine Flu and similar things like that but we really are looking to the authorities to see what decision they are making on everything. And whether or not they are calling it a local state of emergency because a lot of times that exact definition or that exact cause is defined in the agreement . But, yeah, I mean really it comes down to small print wording in this situation, if you are looking at the contract itself to see what rights that you have. What I found is that people aren't going to the nitty gritty of at least the contracts, you're probably going to get into the nitty gritty of the insurance policy, if you have a chance of getting any kind of protection. But, at the end of the day, the artist doesn't want to go play a festival that could potentially cause their fans to have some outbreak of the Coronavirus. An event doesn't want to be liable for holding an event that could be connected with that, as well, because across the board, that creates a PR nightmare for whoever's making that decision. So, you're seeing people that are trying to work together to figure out exactly how we're going to handle things, and what we're going to do moving forward, because no one is going to win in this situation. >> [Jeff Frick} Right. Right. >> It's really just figuring out a way that we can all be in the best position possible across the board. >> Yeah. And I think that's what we're kind of seeing a lot too, where, you know, I think everyone is again instead of just one party that's not upholding their part of the deal and the other party getting screwed on that, this is really, you know, we're kind of in it together, this has kind of come down on both of our houses so how do we work together to minimize the pain and at least, kind of get through this window that we assume will pass at some point or at least the current heightened state will go. But, I just wonder if you have an opinion on, from a legal point of view, and it's not your space, so if you say no that's an okay answer, but, you know, if you look at kind of market forces is determining what is the appropriate action, right? Because we don't really know what's the right action. But, clearly, the market is defined based on activity and the University of Washington shutting down and Stanford shutting down >> Vanderbilt >> Almost is a self-imposed kind of semi-quarantine state, which is just, you know the latest now I think they get the local high school basketball game is they can only have 100 people in the stands in the biggest building they can find and everybody needs to spread out. So, it's just been very interesting to see you know kind of what is the appropriate response. What's the right response? Because ultimately it seems like it's driven by nobody wants to be the one that didn't take the max precautions and something bad happens. >> To be honest, I don't think that anyone really knows. You know, it really is the conversations right now are not the artist's agent calling the festival and saying we're absolutely not doing this The conversation is more so, hey what are you guys seeing? What are you guys thinking? What's the best way to handle this? You know, no one wants to put the consumers and the fans at risk. And, you know, until we have a better handle on exactly how we handle this type of situation, it's really going to be people doing their best to try to not create a situation that's going to, you know, cause some kind of massive outbreak. >> Right. Right. >> If you look at, you know, something like South By, no one wants to cancel, you know. It really impacts, not only the company and the event itself, but really everyone that's associated to it, has a financial hardship because of that decision, but the decision isn't made because someone wants to do it, it's made because collectively, you know, people are feeling like it needs to be done in order to keep people safe. >> Right. >> And if they didn't think that, they'd probably go ahead and try to hold the event and, you know, risk the liability. But, I think people truly want what's in the best interest of everyone. And that's why they are working together to try to figure this out. >> Yeah. Yeah. It really is driven home what social creatures we are when you start to kind of disconnecting crowds and groups of people from so many events and it just continues to ripple through whether it's our business, a convention business, the entertainment business, you know March Madness is coming up here in a very short order. What's going to happen there all the way down to you know, the local talent show for the local middle schoolers that they used to have before graduation, which is now canceled. So, it's interesting times. >> And I think for us, the biggest indicator in terms of just music festivals is going to be what happens with Coachella. And, you know, Billboard and Variety have reported that they're looking to potentially reschedule the event to October, if artists are able. And if not, they're going to have to completely cancel it for this year. And, you know, Coachella is such a massive festival that attracts people from all over the world. And if Coachella is canceled then I think there is a good chance that so long as this is continuing at the speed it is, that we're going to see a lot more music festivals canceled. >> When is Coachella scheduled? >> It starts in about a month. >> In about a month. >> So it's the second weekend in April, but they have to start production and really building out the grounds now. >> Wow. Wow. >> And so the decision kind of has to be made before then. And then, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a decision there in the next few days. >> Yeah. I think I would take the short if I was in Vegas, because there's just not enough data, I don't think, to go forward based on the current situation. I'm glad I'm not the one sitting in that chair. >> Yeah. It'd be a tough position. >> All right, well Lauren, well thank you for sharing your insight and, you know, it's great to get the perspective of another you know kind of industry that's all built around bring people together. And, I think we probably both would agree that this time will pass and we'll get a vaccine out, we'll get the growth curves to start to flatten out and go down which is where they need to go. And then you know I think it will be a different time, but hopefully things will get approximate a little bit more to normal in the not too distant future. >> Yeah, fingers crossed. I hope it gets figured out sooner rather than later and we can all have our summers full of conferences and festivals and the gathering of people. >> Yep. All right Lauren. Well thanks again for your time >> Thank you >> And have a great Tuesday. >> Awesome. You too. >> Alrighty. She's Lauren. I'm Jeff. Thanks for checking in on this Cube Conversation. We'll catch you next time. (upbeat music)

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners come back this is the cubes coverage of Cisco live 2020 here in Barcelona doing about three and a half days of wall-to-wall coverage here I'm Stu minim and my co-host for this segment is Dave Volante John furs also here scouring the floor and really happy to welcome to the program to first-time guests I believe so Ron Daris is the product manager of product marketing for cloud computing with Cisco and sitting to his left is Matt Ferguson who's director of product development also with the Cisco cloud group Dave and I are from Boston Matt is also from the Boston area yes and Costas is coming over from London so thanks so much for joining us thanks IBPS all right so obviously cloud computing something we've been talking about many years we've really found fascinating the relationship Cisco's had with its customers as well as through the partner ecosystem had many good discussions about some of the announcements this week maybe start a little bit you know Cisco's software journey and you know positioning in this cloud space right now yes oh so it's a it's a really interesting dynamic when we start transitioning to multi cloud and we actually deal with cloud and compute coming together and we've had whether you're looking at the infrastructure ops organization or whether you're looking at the apps operations or whether you're looking at you know your dev environment your security operations each organization has to deal with their angle at which they view you know multi cloud or they view how they actually operate within those the cloud computing context and so whether you're on the infrastructure side you're looking at compute you're looking at storage you're looking at resources if you're an app operator you're looking at performance you're looking at visibility assurance if you are in the security operations you're looking at maybe governance you're looking at policy and then when you're a developer you really sort of thinking about CI CD you're talking about agility and there's very few organizations like Cisco that actually is looking at from a product perspective all those various angles of multi-cloud yeah definitely a lot of piece of cost us maybe up level it for us a little bit there's there's so many pieces you know we talked for so long you know you don't talk to any company that doesn't have a cloud strategy doesn't mean that it's not going to change over time and it means every company's got at home positioning but talk about the relationship cisco has with its customer and really the advisory position that you want to have with them it's actually a very relevant question to what to what Matt is talking about because we talk a lot about multi cloud as a trend and hybrid clouds and this kind of relationship between the traditional view of looking at computing data centers and then expanding to different clouds you know public cloud providers have now amazing platform capabilities and if you think about it the the it goes back to what Matt said about IT ops and the development kind of efforts why is this happening really you know there's there's the study that we did with with an analyst and there was an amazing a shocking stat around how within the next three years organizations will have to support 50% more applications than they do now and we have been trying to test this stat our events that made customer meetings etc that is a lot of a lot of change for organizations so if you think about why are they use why do they need to basically what go and expand to those clouds is because they want to service IT Ops teams want ER servers with capabilities their developers faster right and this is where you have within the IT ops kind of theme organization you have the security kind of frame the compute frame the networking where you know Cisco has a traditional footprint how do you blend all this how do you bring all this together in a linear way to support individual unique application modernization efforts I think that's what are we hearing from customers in terms of the feedback and this is what influences our strategy to converts the different business units and engineering engineering efforts right couple years ago I have to admit I was kind of a multi cloud skeptic I always said I thought it was more of a symptom than actually a strategy a symptom of you know shadow IT and different workloads and so forth but now I'm kind of buying in because I think IT in particular has been brought in to clean up the crime scene I often say so I think it is becoming a strategy so if you could help us understand what you're hearing from customers in terms of their strategy toward the multi cloud and how Cisco that was mapping into that yeah so so when we talk to customers it comes back to the angle at which they're approaching the problem in like you said the shadow IT has been probably around for longer than anybody won't cares to admit because the people want to move faster organizations want to get their product out to market sooner and and so what what really is we're having conversations now about you know how do I get the visibility how do I get you know the policies and the governance so that I can actually understand either how much I'm spending in the cloud or whether I'm getting the actual performance that I'm looking for that I need the connectivity so I get the bandwidth and so these are the kinds of conversations that we have with customers is is is going I realize that this is going on now I actually have to now put some you know governance and controls around that is their products is their solutions is their you know they're looking to Cisco to help them through this journey because it is a journey because as much as we talk about cloud and you know companies that were born in the cloud cloud native there is a tremendous number of IT organizations that are just starting that journey that are just entering into this phase where they have to solve these problems yeah I agree and it's just starting the journey with a deliberate strategy as opposed to okay we got this this thing but if you think about the competitive landscape its kind of interesting and I want to try to understand where Cisco fits because again you you initially had companies that didn't know in a public cloud sort of pushing multi cloud and you'd say oh well okay so they have to do that but now you see anthos come out with Google you see Microsoft leaning in we think eventually AWS is going to lean in and then you say I'm kind of interested in working with someone whose cloud agnostic not trying to force now now Cisco a few years ago you didn't really think about Cisco as a player now so this goes right in the middle I have said often that Cisco's in a great position John Fourier as well to connect businesses and from a source of networking strength making a strong argument that we have the most cost-effective most secure highest performance network to connect clouds that seems to be a pretty fundamental strength of yours and does that essentially summarize your strategy and and how does that map into the actions that you're taking in terms of products and services that you're bringing to market I would say that I can I can I can take that ya know it's a chewy question for hours yeah so I I was thinking about a satellite in you mentioned this before and you're like okay that's you know the world is turning around completely because we we seem to talk about satellite e is something bad happening and now suddenly we completely forgot about it like let let free free up the developers gonna let them do whatever they want and basically that is what I think is happening out there in the market so all the solutions you mentioned in the go to market approaches and the architectures that the public cloud providers at least are offering out there certainly the big three have differences have their strengths and I think those strengths are closer to the developer environment basically you know if you're looking into something like a IML there's one provider that you go with if you're looking for a mobile development framework you're gonna go somewhere else if you're looking for a dr you're gonna go somewhere else maybe not a big cloud but your service provider that you've been dealing with all these all these times and you know that they have their accreditation that you're looking for so where does Cisco come in you know we're not a public cloud provider we offer products as a service from our data centers and our partners data centers but at the - at the way that the industry sees a cloud provider a public cloud like AWS a sure Google Oracle IBM etc we're not that we don't do that our mission is to enable organizations with software hardware products SAS products to be able to facilitate their connectivity security visibility observability and in doing business and in leveraging the best benefits from those clouds so we we kind of we kind of moved to a point where we flip around the question and the first question is who is your cloud provider what how many tell us the clouds you work with and we can give you the modular pieces you can put we can put together for you so there's so that you can make the best out of your plan it's been being able to do that across clouds we're in an environment that is consistent with policies that are consistent that represent the edicts of your organization no matter where your data lives that's sort of the the vision in the way this is translated into products into Cisco's product you naturally think about Cisco as the connectivity provider networking that's that's really sort of our you know go to in what we're also when we have a significant computing portfolio as well so connectivity is not only the connectivity of the actual wire between geographies point A to point B in the natural routing and switching world there's connectivity between applications between cute and so this week you know the announcements were significant in that space when you talk about the compute and the cloud coming together on a single platform that gives you not only the ability to look at your applications from a experience journey map so you can actually know where the problems might occur in the application domain you can actually then go that next level down into the infrastructure level and you can say okay maybe I'm running out of some sort of resource whether it's compute resource whether it's memory whether it's on your private cloud that you have enabled on Prem or whether it's in the public cloud that you have that application residing and then why candidly you have the actual hardware itself so inter-site it has an ability to control that entire stack so you can have that visibility all the way down to the hardware layer I'm glad you brought up some of the applications wonderful we can you know stay there for a moment and talk about some of the changing patterns for customers a lot of talk in the industry about cloud native often it gets conflated with you know microservices containerization and lots of the individual pieces there but you know one of our favorite things that been talked about this week is the software that really sits at the application layer and how that connects down through some of the infrastructure pieces so help us understand what you're hearing from customers and and where how you're helping them through this transition to constants as you were saying absolutely there's going to be lots of new applications more applications and they still have the the old stuff that they need to continue to manage because we know an IT nothing ever goes away that's that's definitely true I was I was thinking you know there's there's a vacuum at the moment and and there's things that Cisco is doing from from technology leadership perspective to fill that gap between the application what do you see when it comes to monitoring making sure your services are observable and how does that fit within the infrastructure stack you know everything upwards network the network layer base again that is changing dramatically some of the things that Matt touched upon with regards to you know being able to connect the the networking the security in the infrastructure the computer infrastructure that the developers basically are deploying on top so there's a lot of there's a lot of things on containerization there's a lot of in fact it's you know one part of the of the self-injure side of the stack that you mentioned and one of the big announcements you know that there's a lot of discussion in the industry around ok how does that abstract further the conversation on networking for example because that now what we're seeing is that you have huge monoliths enterprise applications that are being carved down into micro services ok they you know there's a big misunderstanding around what is cloud native is it related to containers different kind of things right but containers are naturally the infrastructure de facto currency for developers to deploy because of many many benefits but then what happens you know between the kubernetes layer which seems to be the standard and the application who's gonna be managing services talking to each other that are multiplying you know things like service mesh network service mess how is the network evolving to be able to create this immutable infrastructure for developers to deploy applications so there's so many things happening at the same time where cisco has actually a lot of taking a lot of the front seat this is where it gets really interesting you know it's sort of hard to squint through because you mentioned kubernetes is the de facto standard but it's a de-facto standard that's open everybody's playing with but historically this industry has been defined by you know a leader who comes out with a de facto standard kubernetes not a company right it's an open standard and so but there's so many other components than containers and so history would suggest that there's going to be another de facto standard or multiple standards that emerge and your point earlier is you you got to have the full stack you can't just do networking you can't just do certain few so you guys are attacking that whole pie so how do you think this thing will evolve I mean you guys are obviously intend to put out as Casta as wide a net as possible capture not only your existing install base but attractive attract others and you're going aggressively at it as are as are others how do you see it shaking out deep do you see you know four or five pockets do you see you know one leader emerging I mean customers would love all you guys to get together come up with standards that's not going to happen so we're it's jump ball right now well yeah and you think about you know to your point regarding kubernetes is not a company right it is it is a community driven I mean it was open source by a large company but it's but it's community driven now and that's the pace at which open source is sort of evolving there is so much coming at IT organizations from a new paradigm a new software something that's you know the new the shiny object that sort of everybody sort of has to jump on to and sort of say that is the way we're going to function so IT organizations have to struggle with this influx of just every coming at them and every angle and I think what's starting to happen is the management and the you know that stack who controls that or who is helping IT organizations to manage it for them so really what we're trying to say is there's elements that you have to put together that have to function and kubernetes is just one example docker the operating system that associated with it that runs all that stuff then you have the application that goes rides IDEs on top of it so now what we have to have is things like what we just announced this week HX ap the application platform for HX so you have the compute cluster but then you have the on top of that that's managed by an organization that's looking at the security that's looking at the the actual making opinions about what should go in the stock and managing that for you so you don't have to deal with that because you can just focus on the application development yeah I mean Cisco's in a strong position to do there's no question about it and to me it comes down to execution if you guys execute and deliver on the the products and services that you say you know your nouns for instance this week and previously and you continue on a roadmap you're gonna get a fair share of this marketplace I think there's no question so last topic before we let you go is love your viewpoint on customers what's separating kind of leaders from you know the followers in this space you know there's so much data out there you know I'm a big fan of the state of DevOps report yeah focus you know separate you know some but not the not here's the technology or the piece but the organizational and you know dynamics that you should do so it sounds like Matt you you like that that report also love them what are you hearing from customers how do you help guide them towards becoming leaders in the cloud space yeah the state of DevOps report was fascinating and I mean they've been doing that for what a number of years yeah exactly and really what it's sort of highlighting is two main factors that I think that are in this revolution or this this this paradigm shift or journey we're going through there's the technology side for sure and so that's getting more complex you have micro services you have application explosion you have a lot of things that are occurring just in technology that you're trying to keep up but then it's really about the human aspect that human elements the people about it and that's really I think what separates you know the the elites that are really sort of you know just charging forward in the head because they've been able to sort of break down the silos because really what you're talking about in cloud native DevOps is how you take the journey of that experience of the service from end to end from the development all the way to production and how do you actually sort of not have organizations that look at their domain their data set their operations and then have to translate that or have to sort of you know have another conversation with another organization that it doesn't look at that that has no experience of that so that is what we're talking about that end-to-end view is that in addition to all the things we've been talking about I think Security's a linchpin here now you guys are executing on security you got a big portfolio and you've seen a lot of M&A and a lot of companies now trying to get in and it's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out but that's going to be a key because organizations are going to start there from a strategy standpoint and then build out yeah absolutely if you follow the DevOps methodology its security gets baked in along the way so that you're not having to sit on after do anything Custis give you the final word I was just as follow-up with regard what what Mark was saying there's so many there's what's happening out there is this just democracy around standards which is driven by communities and we will love that in fact cisco is involved in many open-source community projects but you asked about customers and and just right before you were asking about you know who's gonna be the winner there's so many use cases there's so much depth in terms of you know what customers want to do with on top of kubernetes you know take AI ml for example something that we have we have some some offering the services around there's the customer that wants to do AML there their containers that their infrastructure will be so much different to someone else's doing something just hosting yeah and there's always gonna be a SAS provider that is niche servicing some oil and gas company you know which means that the company of that industry will go and follow that instead of just going to a public law provider that is more organized if there's a does that make sense yeah yeah this there's relationships that exist the archer is gonna get blown away that add value today and they're not gonna just throw them out so exactly right well thank you so much for helping us understand the updates where your customers are driving super exciting space look forward to keeping an eye on it thank you thank you so much all right there's still lots more coming here from Cisco live 20/20 in Barcelona people are standing watching all the developer events lots of going on the floor and we still have more so thank you for watching the cute [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners welcome back over 17,000 in attendance here for Cisco live 2020 in Barcelona ops to Minh and my co-host is Dave Volante and to help us to dig into of course one of the most important topic of the day of course that security we're thrilled to have back a distinguished engineer Francisco one of our cube alumni TK Kia Nene TK thanks so much for joining us ideal man good good all right so TK it's 2020 it's a new decade we know the bad actors are still out there they're there the the question always is you know it used to be you know how do you keep ahead of them then I've here Dave say many times well you know it's not you know when it's it's not if it's when you know you probably already have been okay you know compromised before so it gives latest so you know what you're seeing out there what you're talking to customers about in this important space yeah it's uh it's kind of an innovation spiral you know we we innovate we make it harder for them and then they innovate they make it harder for us right and round and round we go that's been going on for for many years I think I think the most significant changes that have happened recently have to deal with not essentially their objectives but how they go about their objectives and Defenders topologies have changed greatly instead of just your standard enterprise you now have you know hybrid multi cloud and all these new technologies so while while all that innovation happens you know they get a little clever and they find weaknesses and round and round we go so we talked a lot about the sort of changing profile of the the threat actors going from hacktivists took criminals now is a huge business and nation-states even what's that profile look like today and how has that changed over the last decade or so you know that's pretty much stayed the same bad guys are bad guys at some point in time you know just how how they go about their business their techniques they're having to like I said innovate around you know we make it harder for them they you know on Monday we're safe on Tuesday we're not you know and then on Wednesday it switches again so so it talked about kind of this multi-cloud environment when we talk to customers it's like well I want the developer to be able to build their application and not really have to think too much underneath it that that has to have some unique challenges we know security we knew long ago well I just go to the cloud it doesn't mean they take care of it some things are there some things they're gonna remind you now you need to make sure you set certain things otherwise you could be there but how do we make sure that Security's baked in everywhere and is up as a practice that everybody's doing well I mean again some of the practices hold true no matter what the environment I think the big thing was cognitive is in back in the day when when you looked at an old legacy data center you were part sort of administrator in your part detective and most people don't even know what's running on there that's not true in cloud native environments some some llamó file some some declaration it's it's just exactly what productions should look like right and then the machines instantiate production so you're doing things that machine scale forces the human scale people to be explicit and and for me I mean that's that's a breath of fresh air because once you're explicit then you take the mystery out of what you're protecting how about in terms of how you detect threats right phishing for credentials has become a huge deal but not just you know kicking down the door or smashing a window using your your own credentials to get inside of your network so how is that affected the way in which you detect yeah it's it's a big deal you know a lot of a lot of great technology has a dual use and what I mean by that is network cryptology you know that that whole crypto on the network has made us safer for us to compute over insecure networks and unfortunately it works just as well for the bad guys so you know all of their malicious activity is now private to so it you know for us we just have to invent new ways of detecting direct inspection for instance I think it's a thing of the past I mean we just can't depend on it anymore we have to have tools of inference and not only that but it's it's gave rise in a lot of innovation on behavioral science and as you say you know it's it's not that the attacker is breaking into your network anymore they're logging in ok what do you do then right Alice Alice's account it's not gonna set off the triggers so you have to say you know when did Alice start to behave differently you know she's working in accounting why is she playing around with the source code repository that's that's a different thing right yes automation is such a big trend you know how do we make sure that automation doesn't leave us more vulnerable that's rarity because we need to be able automate we've gone beyond human scale for most of these configurations that's exactly right and and how do how do we I always say just with security automation in particular just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should and you really have to go back and have practices you know you could argue that that this thing is just a you know machine scale automation you could do math on a legal pad or you can use a computer to do it right what so apply that to production if you mechanized something like order entry or whatever you're you're you're automating part of your business use threat modeling you use the standard threaten modeling like you would your code the network is code now right and the storage is code and everything is code so you know just automate your testing do your threat modeling do all that stuff please do not automate for your attacker matrix is here I want to go back to the Alice problem because you're talking about before you have to use inference so Alice's is in the network and you're observing her moves every day and then okay something anomalous occurs maybe she's doing something that normally she wouldn't do so you've got to have her profile in her actions sort of observed documented stored the data has got to be there and at the same time you want to make sure it's always that balance of putting handcuffs on people you know versus allowing them to do their job and be productive at the same time as well you don't want to let the bad guys know that you know that alice is doing something that she didn't be doing is actually not Alice so all that complexity how are you dealing with it and what's the data model look like doing it machines help let's say that machines can help us you know you and I we have only so many sense organs and the cognitive brain can only store so many so much state machines really help us extend that and so you know looking at not three dimensions of change but 7000 dimensions have changed right something in the machine is going to say there's an outlier here that's interesting and you can get another machine to say that's that's interesting maybe I should focus on that and you build these analytical pipelines so that at the end of it you know they may argue with each other all the way to the end but at the end you have a very high fidelity indicator that might be at the protocol level it might be at the behavioral level it might be seven days back or thirty days back all these temporal and spatial dimensions it's really cheap to do it with a machine yeah and if we could stay on that for a second so it try to understand I know that's a high-level example but is it best practice to have the Machine take action or is it is it an augmentation and I know it depends on the use case but but how is that sort of playing out again you have to do all of this safely okay a lot of things that machines do don't return back to human scale stuff that returns back to human scale that humans understand that is as useful so for instance if machines you know find out all these types of in assertions even in medical you know right now if if you've got so much telemetry going into the medical field see the machine tells you you have three weeks to live I mean you better explain what the heck you know how you came about that assertion it's the same with security you know if I'm gonna say look we're gonna quarantine your machine or we're gonna readjust machine it's not I'm not like picking movies for you or the next song you might listen to this is high stakes and so when you do things like that your analytics needs to have what is called entailment you have to explain what it is how you got to that assertion that's become incredibly important in how we measure our effectiveness in in doing analytics that's interesting because because you're using a lot of machine intelligence to do this and in a lot of AI is blackbox you're saying you cannot endure that blackbox problem in security yeah that black boxes is is very dangerous you know I you know personally I feel that you know things that should be open sourced this type of technology it's so advanced that the developer needs to understand that the tester needs to understand that certainly the customer needs to understand it you need to publish papers and be very very transparent with this domain because if it is in fact you know black box and it's given the authority to automate something like you know shut down the power or do things like that that's when things really start to get dangerous so good TK what wondered you know give us the latest on stealthWatch there you know Cisco's positioning when it when it comes to everything we've been talking about here you know stealthWatch again is it's been in market for quite some time it's actually been in market since 2001 and when I when I look back and see how much has changed you know how we've had to keep up with the market and again it's not just the algorithms rewrite for detection it's the environments have changed right but when did when did multi-cloud happen so so operating again cusp it's not that stealthWatch wants to go their customers are going there and they want the stealthWatch function across their digital business and so you know we've had to make advancements on the changing topology we've had to make advancements because of things like dark data you know the the network's opaque now right we have to have a lot of inference so we've just you know kept up and stayed ahead of it you know we've been spending a lot of time talking to developer communities and there's a lot of open-source tooling out there that that's helping enable developers specifically in security space you were talking about open-source earlier how does what you've been doing the self watch intersect with that yeah that's always interesting too because there's been sort of a shift in let's call them the cool kids right the cool kids they want everything is code right so it's not about what's on glass or you know a single pane of glass anymore it's it's what stealth watches code right what's your router as code look at dev net right yeah yeah I mean definite is basically Cisco as code and it's beautiful because that is infrastructure as code I mean that is the future and so all the products not just stealthWatch have beautiful api's and that's that's really exciting I've been saying for a while now it's do you I think you agree is that that is a big differentiator for Cisco I think you you're one of the few if not the only large established player and the enterprise that has figured out that sort of infrastructure is code play others have tried and are sort of getting there but you know start/stop you use a term that really cool is like living off the land you know bear bear grylls like the guy who lives down so bad so and and and threat actors are doing that now they're using your own installed software and tooling to hack you and and steal from you how were you dealing with that problem yeah it's a tough one and like I said you know much respect the the adversary is talented and they're patient they're well funded okay that's that's where it starts and so you know why why bring why bring an interpreter to a host when there's already one there right why right all this complicated software distribution when I can just use yours and so that's that's where the the play the game starts and and the most advanced threats aren't leaving footprints because the footprints are already there you know they'll get on a machine and behaviorally they'll check the cache to see what's hot and what's hot in the cache means that behaviorally it's a path they can go they're not cutting a new trail most of the time right so living off the land is not only the tools that they're using the automation your automation they're using against you but it's also behavioral and so that that makes it you know it makes it harder it's it impossible no can we make it harder for them yes so yeah no I'm having fun and I've been doing this for over twenty five years every week it's something new well it's a hard problem you're attacking and you know Robert Herjavec who came on the cube sort of opened my eyes and you think about what are we securing we're securing everything I mean a critical infrastructure were essentially exerted securing the entire global economy and he said something that really struck me it's an 86 trillion dollar economy we spend point zero one four percent on securing that economy and it's nothing now of course he's an entrepreneur and he's pimping for his is his business but it's true we are barely scratching the surface of this problem yeah I'm and it's changing I mean it's changing it could it be better yes it is changing his board awareness you know twenty years ago then right me to a dinner party they you know what does your husband do I'd say you know cyber security or something they'd roll their eyes and change the subject now they asked me the same question so oh you know my computer's running really slow right these are not this is everyone I'm worried about a life hack yeah how do I protect myself or what about these coming off the bank I mean that's those guys a dinner table cover every party so now now you know I just make something up I don't do cybersecurity I just you know a tort or a jipner's you've been to this business forever I can't remember have I ever asked you the superhero question what is that your favorite superhero that's a tough one there's all the security guys I know they like it's always dreamed about saving the world [Laughter] you're my superhero man I love what you do I think you've a great asset for Cisco and Cisco's customers really thanks TK give us a final word if people want to you know find out more about about what Cisco's doing read more of what you're working on but what's some of the best resource I have to go do you know just drop by the web pages I mean everything's published out that like I said even even for the super nerdy you know we published all our our laurs security analytics papers I think we're over 50 papers published in the last 12 years TK thank you so much always a pleasure to catch alright yeah and a travels thank you so much for de Villante I'm Stu Mittleman John furrier is also in the house we will be back with lots more coverage here from Cisco live 20/20 in Barcelona thanks for watching the keys [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020s brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage it's our fourth day of four days of coverage here in Barcelona Spain for Cisco live 2020 I'm John Faria my co-host to many men to great guests here in the dev net studio where the cube is sitting all week long been packed with action mindy Whaley senior director developer experiences but dev net and partner a senior director welcome back to this cube good to see you guys glad to be here so we've had a lot of history with you guys what from day one yes watching def net from an idea of hey we should develop earthing you also have definite create yes separate more developer focused definite is Cisco's developer environment we've been here from the beginning what a progression congratulations on the success thank you thank you so much it's great to be here in Barcelona with everybody here you know learning in the workshops and we just love these times to connect with our community at Cisco live and it definitely ate what you mentioned which is coming up in March so it's right around the corner def net zone which we're in it's been really robust spins it's been the top of the show every year and it gets bigger and the sessions are packed because people are learning developers new developers as well as Cisco engineers who were certified coming in getting new skills as the modern cloud hybrid environments are new skills is a technology shift yeah exactly and what we have in the definite zone are different ways that the engineers and developers can engage with that technology shift so we have demos around IOT and security and showing how you know to prevent threats from attacking the Industrial routers and things like that we have coding workshops from you know beginning intro to Python intro to get all the way up through advanced like kubernetes topics and things like that so people can really dive in with what they're looking for and this year we're really excited because we have the new definite certifications with those exams coming out right around the corner in February so a lot of people are here saying I'm ready to skill up for those exams I'm starting to dive into this topic well Susie we was on she's the chief of deaf net among other things and she said there's gonna be a definite 500 the first 500 certifications of deaf net are gonna be kind of like the Hall of Fame or you know the inaugural or founder certifications so can you explain what this it means it's not a definite certification badge it's a series of write different sir can you deeper in then yeah just like we have our you know existing network certifications which are so respected and loved around the world people get CCIE tattoos and things just like there's an associate and professional and expert level on the networking truck there's now a definite associate a definite professional and coming soon definite expert and then there's also specialist badges which help you add specific skills like data center automation IOT WebEx so it's a whole new set of certifications that are more focused on the software so there are about 80 80 % software skills 20 percent knowledge of networking and then how you really connect up and down the stock so these are new certifications not replacing anything all the same stuff they're new they're part of the same program they have the same rigor the same kind of tests they actually have ways to enter weave with the existing networking certifications because we want people to do both skill paths right to build this new IT team of the future and so it's a completely new set of exams the exams are gonna be available to take February 24th and you can start signing up now so with the definite 500 you know that's gonna be a special recognition for the first 500 people who get dead note certifications it'll be a lifetime achievement they'll always be in the definite 500 right and I've had people coming up and telling me you know I'm signed up for the first day I'm taking my exams on the first day I'm trying to get into them you and I only always want to be on the lift so I think we might be on them and what's really great is with the certifications we've heard from people in the zone that they've been coming and taking classes and learning these skills but they didn't have a specific way to map that to their career path to get rewarded at work you know to have that sort of progression and so with the certifications they really will have that and it's also really important for our partners and par is doing a lot of work with certifications and partners yeah definitely that would love to hear a little bit we've interviewed on the cube over the years some of the definite partners from a technology standpoint of course the the channels ecosystem hugely important to Cisco's business gives the update as to you know definite partnering as well as what will these certifications mean to both the technology and go to market partners yeah the wonderful thing about this is it really demonstrates Cisco's embracement of software and making sure that we're providing that common language for software developers and networkers to bring the two together and what we've found is that our partners are at different levels of maturity along that progression of program ability and this new definite specialization which is anchored in the individuals that are now certified at that partner allow them to demonstrate from a go-to-market standpoint from a recognition standpoint that as a practice they have these skills and look at the end of the day it's all about delivering what our customers need and our customers are asking us for significant help in automation digital transformation they're trying to drive new business outcomes and this this will provide that recognition on on who to partner with in the market it's so important I remember when Cisco helped a lot of the partner ecosystem build data center practices went from the silos and now embracing you've got the hardware the software we're talking multi cloud it's the practice that is needed today going forward to help customers with where they're going it really is and and another benefit that we're finding and talking to our partners is we're packaging this up and rolling it out is not only will it help them from a recognition standpoint from a practice standpoint and from a competitive differentiation standpoint but it'll also help them attract challenge I mean it's no secret there is a talent shortage right now if you talk to any CEO that's top of mind and how these partners are able to attract these new skills and attract smart people smart people like working on smart things right and so this has really been a big traction point for them as well it's also giving ways to really specifically train for new job roles so some of the ways that you can combine the new definite certifications with the network engineering certifications we've looked at it and said you know there's there's a role of Network automation developer that's a new role everyone we ask in one of our sessions who needs that person on their team so many customers partners raise their hands like we want the network Automation developer on our team and you can combine you know your CCNP Enterprise with a definite certification and build up the skills to be that Network automation developer certainly has been great buzz I got to get your guys thoughts because certainly it's for careers and you guys are betting on the the people and the people are betting on Cisco mm-hmm yes this is what's going on submit surety of Devin it almost it's like a pinch me moment for you guys because you continue to grow I got to ask you what are some of the cool things that you're showing here as you mature you still have the start here session which is intro to Python and other things pretty elementary and then there's more advanced things what are some of the new things that's going on yeah that you could share so some of the new things we've got going on and one of my favorites is the IOT insecurity demonstration there's a an industrial robot arm that's picking and placing things and you can see how it's connected to the network and then something goes wrong with that robot alarm and then you can actually show how you can use the software and security tools to see was there code trying to access you know something that that robot was it was using it's getting in the way of it working so you could detect threats and move forward on that we also have a whole automation journey that starts from modeling your network to testing to how you would deploy automation to a deep dive on telemetry and then ends with multi domain automation so really helping engineers like look at that whole progression that's been that's been really popular Park talked about the specialization which ones are more popular or entry-level which ones are people coming into getting certified first network engineering automation first or what's the yeah so we're so the program is going to roll out with three different levels one is a specialized level the second is an advanced level and then we'll look to that third level again they're anchored in the in the individual certs and so as we look for that entry level it's really all about automation right I mean some things you take for granted but you still need these new skills to be able to automate and scale and have repeatable scalable benefits from that this the second tier will be more cross-domain and that's where we're really thinking that an additional skill set is needed to deliver dashboard experience compliance experiences and then that next level again we'll anchor towards the expert level that's coming out but one thing I want to point out is in addition to just having the certified people on staff they also have to demonstrate that they have a practice around it so it's not just enough to say I've passed an exam as we work with them to roll out the practice and they earn the badge they're demonstrating that they have the full methodology in place so that it really there's a lot behind it that means we can't be in the 500 list then even if a 500 list I don't know that the cube would end up being specialized its advertising no seriously all fun it's all fun it's Cisco live in Europe is there a difference between European and USD seeing any differences in geographic talent you know in the first couple years we did it I think there was a bigger difference it felt like there were different topics that were very popular in the US slightly different in Europe last year and this year I feel like they have converged it's it's the same focus on DevOps automation security as a huge focus in both places and it also feels like the the interest and level of the people attending has also converged it's really similar congratulations been fun to watch the rise and success of Devon it continues to be strong how see in the hub here and the definite zone behind us pact sessions yes what's the biggest surprise for you guys in terms of things that you didn't expect or some of the success what's what's jumped out yeah I think you know one of the points that I want to make sure we also cover and it has been an added benefit we're hoping it would happen we just didn't realize it would happen this soon we're attracting new companies new partners so the specialization won't just be available for our traditional bars this is also available for our non resale and we are finding different companies accessing definite resources and learning these skills so that's been a really great benefit of Deb net overall definitely my favorite surprises are when I show up at the community events and I hear from someone I met last year what the what they went back and did and the change that they drove and they come in their company and I think we're seeing those across the board of people who start a grassroots movement take back some new ideas really create change and then they come back and we get to hear about that from them those are my favorite surprises and I tell you we've known for years how important the developer is but I think the timing on this has been perfect because it is no longer just oh the developer has some tools that they like in the corner the developer connected to the business and driving things forward exactly so perfect timing congratulations on this certification their thing that's been great is that our at Cisco itself we now have API is across the whole portfolio and up and down the stock so that's been a wonderful thing to see come together because it opens up possibilities for all these developers so Cisco's API first company we are building it guys everywhere we can and and that the community is is taking them and finding creative things to build it's been fun to watch you guys change Cisco but also impact customers has been great to watch far many thanks for coming up yeah games live coverage here in Barcelona for Cisco live 20/20 I'm John Ford Dave Dave Alon face to many men we right back with more after this short break [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage here at Cisco live 20/20 and partial into Spain I'm John first evening men cube coverage we've got a lot of stuff going on with Cisco multi-cloud and cloud technologies of clarification of Cisco's happening in real time is happening right now cloud is here here to stay we got two great guests to unpack what's going on in cloud native and networking and applications as the modern infrastructure and software evolves we got eugene kim global product marketing and compute storage at cisco global part of marketing manager and fabio corey senior director cloud solutions marketing guys great comeback great thanks for coming back appreciate it thanks very much great to see a lot of guys so probably we've had multiple conversations and usually even out from the sales force given kind of the that the discussion and the motivation cloud is big it's here it's here to stay it's changing Cisco API first we hear and all the products it's changing everything what's the story now what's going on I would say you know the reason why we're so excited about the launch here in Barcelona it's because this time it's all about the application experience I mean the last two years we've been announcing some really exciting stuff in the cloud space right think about all the announcements with the AWS the Google's the Azure so the world but this time it really boils down to making sure that is incredibly hyper distributed world well there is an application explosion ultimately we will help for the right operations tools and infrastructure management tools to ensure that the right application experience will be guaranteed for the end customer and that's incredibly important because at the end what really really matters is that you will ensure the best possible digital experience to your customer otherwise ultimately nothing is gonna work and of course you're going to lose your brand and your customers one of the main stories that we're covering is the transformation of the industry also Cisco and one of the highlights to me was the opening keynote you had app dynamics first not networking normally it's like what's under the hood the routers and the gear no it was about the applications this is the story we're seeing it's kind of a quiet unveiling it's not yet a launch but it's evolving very quickly can you share what's going on behind this all this absolutely it's exactly along the lines of what I was saying a second ago in the end that the reason why we're driving the announcement if you want from the application experience side of the house is because without dynamics we already have a very very powerful application performance measurement tool which it's evolving extremely rapidly first of all after Amex can correlate not just the application performance to some technology kpi's but to true actual business KPIs so AB dynamics can give you for instance the real-time visibility of say a marketing funnel conversion rates transactions that you're having in your in your business operation now we're introducing an incredibly powerful new capability that takes the bar to a whole new level and that's the dynamics experience journey Maps what are those it's actually the ability of focusing not so much on front-ends and backends and databases performances but really focusing on what the user is seeing in front of his or her screen and so what really matters is capturing the journey that a given user of your application is is being and understanding whether the experience is the one that you want to deliver oh you have like a sudden drop of somewhere and you know why that is important because in the end we've been talking about is it a problem of the application performance user performance well it could be a badly designed page how do you know and so this is a very precious information is that were giving to application developers not just to the IT ops guys that is incredibly precious to get this in so you just brought up that journey so that's part of the news so just break down real quick one minute yeah what the news is yeah so we have three components the first one as you as you correctly pointed out is really introduction the application journey Maps right the experience journey Maps that's very very important the second is we are actually integrating after am it's with the inter-site action inter-site optimization manager the workload team is a workload promisor and so because there is a change of data between the two now you are in a position to immediately understand whether you have an application problem we have a workload problem or infrastructure problem which is ultimate what you really need to do as quickly as you can and thirdly we have introduced a new version of our hyper flex platform which is hyper-converged flat G flat for Cisco with a fully containerized version we tax free if you want as well there is a great platform for containerized application of parameter so you teen when I've been talking to customers last few years when they go through their transformational journey there's the modernization they need to do the patterns I've seen most successful is first you modernize the platform often HCI is you know and often for that it really simplifies the environment you know reduces the silos and has more of that operational model that looks closer to what the cloud experience is and then if I've got a good platform then I can modernize the applications on top of it but often those two have been a little bit disconnected it feels like the announcements now that they are coming together what are you seeing what are you hearing how is your solution set solving this issue yeah exactly I mean as we've been talking to our customers love them are going through different application modernisations and kubernetes and containers is extremely important to them and to build a container cloud on Prem is extremely one of their needs and so there's three distinctive requirements that they've kind of talked to us about a lot of it has to be able to it's got to be very simple very turnkey and a fully integrated ready to turn on the other one is something that's very agile right very DevOps friendly and the third being a very economic container cloud on Prem as far we mentioned high flex application platform takes our hyper-converged system and builds on top of it a integrated kubernetes platform to deliver a container as a service type capability and it provides a full stack fully supported element platform for our customers and the one of the best great aspects of is that's all managed from inside from the physical infrastructure to the hyper-converged layer to all the way to the container management so it's very exciting to have that full stack management and insight as well yeah it's great to you know John and I have been following this kubernetes wave you know since the early early days Fabio mentioned integrations with the Amazons and Google's the world because you know a few years ago you talked to customers and they're like oh well I'm just gonna build my own urbanity right back nobody ever said that is easy now just delivering at his service seems to be the way most people wanted so if I'm doing it on Amazon or Google they've got their manage service that I could do that or that they're through partners they're working with so explain what you're doing to make it simpler in the data center environment because I'm tram absolutely is a piece of that hybrid equation the customers need yes so essentially from the customer experience perspective as I mentioned it's very fairly turnkey right from the hyper flicks application platform we're taking our hyper grew software we're integrating a application virtualization layer on top of it Linux KVM based and then on top of that we're integrating the kubernetes stack on top as well and so in essence right it's a fully curated kubernetes stack right it has all the different elements from the networking from the storage elements and and providing that in a very turnkey way and as I mentioned the inner site management is really providing that simplicity that customers need for that management ok Fabio this the previous announcement you've made with the public clouds yeah this just ties into those hybrid environments that's exactly you know a few years ago people like oh is there gonna be a distribution that wins in kubernetes we don't think that's the answer but still I can't just move between kubernetes you know seamlessly yet but this is moving towards that direction so a lot of customers want to have a very simple implementation at the same time they want of course a multi cloud approach and I really care about you know marking the difference between you know multi-cloud hybrid cloud there's been a lot of confusion but if you think about it multi cloud is really rooted into the business need of harnessing innovation from whatever it comes from you know the different clouds PV different things and you know what they do today tomorrow it could even change so people want option maladie so they want a very simple implementation that's integrated with public cloud providers that simplifies their life in terms of networking security and application of workload management and we've been executing towards that goal to fundamentally simplify the operations of these pretty complex kind of hybrid environments I want you to nail that operations on ibrid that's where multi cloud comes in absolutely just a connection point absolutely you're not a shitty mice no isn't a shit so in order to fulfill your business like your I know business needs you then you have a hybrid problem and you want to really kind of have a consistent production rate environment between fins on Prem that you own and control versus things that you use and you want to control better now of course there are different school of thoughts but most of the customers who are speaking with really want to expand their governance and technology model right to the cloud as opposed to absorb in different ways of doing things from each and every clock I want to unpack a little bit of what you said earlier about the knowing where the problem is because a lot of times it's a point the finger at the other first and where's it's the application problem isn't a problem so I want to get into that but first I want to understand the hyper flex application platform Eugene if you could just share the main problem that you guys saw what did some of the pain points that customers had what problems does the AP solve yeah as I mentioned it's really the platform for our customers to modernize their applications on right and it addresses those things that they're looking for as far as the economics right really the ability to provide a full stack container experience without having to you know but you know bringing any third party hypervisor licenses as well as support cost so that's fully integrated there you have your integrated hyper-converged storage capability you have the cloud-based management and that's really developing you providing that developer DevOps simplicity from the data Julie that they're looking for internally as well as for their product production environments and then the other aspect is its simplicity to be able to manage all this right in the entire lifecycle management as well so it's the operational side of the whole yeah uncovers Papio on the application side where the problem is because this is where I'm a little bit skeptical you know normally rightfully so but I can see in a problem where it's like whose fault is it gasification is problem or the network I mean it runs into more serious workloads the banking app that's having trouble how do you know where it what the problem is and how do you solve that problem what what's going on for that specific issue absolutely and you know the name of the game here is breaking down this operational side right and I love what our app dynamics VP GM Danny winoker said you know it has this terminology beast DevOps which you know may sound like an interesting acrobatics but it's absolutely true the business has to be part of this operational kind of innovation because as you said you know developer edges you know drops their containers and their code to the IET ops team but you don't really know whether the problem a certain point is gonna be in the code or in how the application is actually deployed or maybe a server that doesn't have enough CPU so in the end it boils down to one very important thing you have to have visibility inside and take action and every layer of the stack I mean instrumentation absolutely there are players that only do it in their software overlay domain the problem is very often these kind of players assume that underneath links are fine and very often they're not so in the end this visibility inside inaction is the loop that everybody is going after these days to really get to the next if you want generational operation where you gotta have a constant feedback loop and making it more faster and faster because in the end you can only win in the marketplace right regardless of your IT ops if you're faster than your competitor well still still was questioning the GM of AppDynamics running observability and he's like no it's not to feature it's everywhere so he his comment was yeah but serve abilities don't really talk about it because it's big din do you agree with that absolutely it has to be at every layer of the stack and only if you have visibility inside an action through the entire stack from the software all the way to the infrastructure level that you can solve the problem otherwise the finger-pointing quote-unquote will continue and you will not be able to gain the speed that you need okay so the question on my mind I want to get both of you guys can weigh in on this is that you look at Cisco as a company you got a lot going on I mean a guy's huge customer base core routers - no applications there's a lot going on a lot of a lot of complexity you got IOT security Ramirez talked about that you got the WebEx rooms got totally popular it's kind of got a lot of glam to it having the WebEx kind of you know I guess what virtual presence was yeah telepresence kind of model and then you get cloud is there a mind share within the company around how cloud is baked into everything because you can't do IOT edge without having some sort of cloud operational things so there's stuff you're talking about is not just a division it's kind of gonna it's kind of threads everywhere across Cisco what's the what's the mind share right now within the Cisco teams and also customers around clarification well I would say it's it's a couple of dimension the first one is the cloud is one of the critical domains of this multi domain architecture that of course is the cornerstone of Cisco's technology strategy right if you think about it it's all about connecting users to applications wherever they are and not just the user the applications themselves like if you look at the latest stats from IDC 58% of workloads is heading to the public cloud and to the edge it's like the data center is literally exploding in many different directions so you have this highly distributed kind of fabric guess what sits in between all these applications and microservices is a secure network and that's exactly what we're executing upon now that's the first kind of consideration the second is if you look at the other silver line most of the Cisco technology innovation is also going a direction of absorbing cloud as a simplified way of managing all the components or the infrastructure you look at the IP flex ap is actually managed by inter site which is a SAS kind of component this journey started a long time ago with Cisco Meraki and then of course we have SAS properties like WebEx everything else is kind of absolutely migrants reporter we've been reporting eugen that from years ago we saw the movement where api's are starting to come in when you go back five years ago not a lot of the gear and stuff at Cisco had api's now you got api's building into all the new products that's right you see the software shift with you know you know intent-based networking to AppDynamics it's interesting it's you're seeing kind of this agile mindset this is some of you and I talk about all the time but agile now is the new model is it ready for customers I mean the normal Enterprise is still got the infrastructure and application it's separated okay how do I bring it together what are you guys seeing the customer base what's going on with with not that not the early adopters heavy-duty hardcore pioneers out there but you know the the general mainstream enterprise are they there yet have they had that moment of awakening yeah I mean I think they they are there because fundamentally it's all about that ensuring that application experience and you can only ensure that application experience right by having your application teams and your structure teams work together and that's what's exciting you mentioned the API is and what we've done there with AppDynamics integrating with inter-site workload optimizer as Fabio mentioned it's all about visibility inside action and what app dynamics is provides providing that business and end-user application performance experience visibility inner sites giving you know visibility on the underlining workload and the resources whether it's on Prem in your you know drive data center environment or in different type of cloud providers so you get that full stack visibility right from the application all the way down to the bottom and then inner side local optimizer is then also optimizing the resources to proactively ensure that application experience so before you know if we talk about someone at a checkout and they're about to have abandonment because the functions not working we're able to proactively prevent that and take a look at all that so you know in the end I think it's all about ensuring that application experience and what we're providing with app dynamics is for the application team is kind of that horizontal visibility of how that application is performing and at the same time if there's an issue the infrastructure team could see exactly within the workload topology where the issue is and insert' aeneas lee whether it be manual intervention or even automatically there's or a ops capability go ahead and provide that action so the action could be you know scaling out the VMS it's on-prem or looking at a new different type of ec2 template in the cloud that's what's very exciting about this it's really the application experience is now driving and optimizing infrastructure in real time and let me flip your question like do you even have a choice John when you think about in the next two years 50% more applications if you're a large enterprise you have 5 to 7,000 apps you have another to 3,000 applications just coming into into the the frame and then 50% of the existing ones that are gonna be refactor lifted and shifted or replace or retired by SAS application it's just like it's tsunami that's that's coming on you and oh by the way because of again the micro service is kind of affect the number of dependencies between all these applications is growing incredibly rapidly like last year we were eight average interdependencies for applications now we are 20 so imaging imaging what happens as as you are literally flooded with the way the scanner really you have to ensure that your application infrastructure fundamentally will get tied up as quickly as you can still and I have been toilet for at least five years now if not longer the networking has been the key kind of last changeover - clarification and I would agree with you guys I think I've asked the question because I wanted to get your perspective but think about it it's 13 years since the iPhone so mobile has shown people that a mobile app can change business but now if you look at the pressure the network's bringing the pressure on the network or the pressure for the network to be better than programmable is the rise of video and data I mean so you got mobile check now you've got video I mean more people doing video now than ever before videos of consumer oil as streaming you got data these two things absolutely forced yeah the customers to deal with it but what really tipped the the balance John is is actually the SAS effect is the cloud effect because as you know it's in IT sort of inflection points nothing is linear right so once you reach a certain critical mass of cloud apps and we're absolutely there already all of a sudden you're traffic pattern on your network changes dramatically so why in the world are you continuing kind of you know concentrating all of your traffic in your data center and then going to the internet you have to absolutely open the floodgates at the branch level as close to the users as possible and that implies a radical change I would even add to that and I think you guys are right on where you guys are going it may be hard to kind of tease out with all the complexity with Cisco but in the keynote the business model shifts come from SAS so you got all this technical stuff going on now you have this Asif ocation or cloud that's changes the business models so new entrants can come in and existing players can get better so I think that whole business model conversation yeah never was discussed at Cisco live before yeah in depth as well hey run your business connect your hubs campus move packets around that was applications in business model yeah but also the fact that there is increasing number of software capabilities and so fundamental you want to simplify the life of your customers through subscription models that help the customer by now using what they really need right at any given point in time all the way to having enterprise agreements I also think that's about delivering these application experiences for your business small different type experience that's really what's differentiating you from your different competitors right and so I think that's a different type of shift as well well you guys are good got some good angle on this cloud I love it I got to ask you the question what can we expect next from Cisco more progression along clarification what's next well I would say we've been incredibly consistent I believe in the last few years in executing on our cloud strategy which again is centered around helping customers really gluon this mix set of data centers and clouds to make it work as one write as much as possible and so what we really deliver is networking security and application of performance management and we're integrating there's more and more on the two sides of the equation right the the designer side and the powerful outside and more more integrating in between all of these layers again to fundamentally give you this operational capability to get faster and faster we'll continue doing so and you set up before we came on camera that you were talking to the sales teams what are they what's their vibe with the sales team they get excited by this what's that oh yeah feedback oh yeah absolutely from the inner side were claw optimizer and they have dynamics that's very exciting for them especially the conversations they're having with their customers really from that application experience and proactively insuring it and on the hyper flex application platform side this is extremely exciting with providing a container cloud to our customers and you know what's coming down is more and more capabilities for our customers to modernize their applications on hyper flex you guys are riding some pretty big waves here at Cisco I get a cloud way to get the IOT Security wave it's pretty exciting pretty big stuff thanks for coming in thanks for sharing the insights Fabio I appreciate it thank you for having us your coverage here in Barcelona I'm John Force dude Minutemen be back with more coverage fourth day of four days of cube coverage we right back after this short break [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] why Trump Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners welcome back to Barcelona everybody we're here at Cisco live and you're watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage we got to the events and extract the signal from the noise this is day one really we started a zero yesterday Eric Hertzog is here he's the CMO and vice president of storage channels probably been on the cube more than [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] live from Barcelona Spain it's the cube covering Cisco live 2020 rot to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners welcome back everyone's two cubes live coverage day four of four days of wall-to-wall action here in Barcelona Spain Francisco live 2020 I'm John Ferrier with mykos Dave Volante with a very special guest here to wrap up Cisco live the president of Europe Middle East Africa and Russia Francisco Wendy Mars cube alumni great to see you thanks for coming on to kind of put a bookend to the show here thanks for joining us right there it's absolutely great to be here thank you so what a transformation as Cisco's business model of continues to evolve we've been saying brick by brick we still think is a big move coming I think there's more action I can sense the walls talking to us like let's just go live in the US and more technical announcements in the next 24 months you can see you can see where it's going it's cloud its apps yeah its policy based program ability it's really a whole nother business model shift for you and your customers the technology shift and the business model shift so I want to get your perspective of this year opening key no you let it off talking about the philosophy of the business model but also the first presenter was not a networking guy it was an application person yeah app dynamics yep this is a shift what's going on with Cisco what's happening what's the story well you know if you look for all of the work that we're doing is but is really driven by what we see from requirements from our customers the change that's happening in the market and it is all around you know if you think digital transformation is the driver organizations now are incredibly interested in how do they capture that opportunity how do they use technology to help them but you know if you look at it really there's the three items that are so important it's the business model evolution it's actually the business operations for for organisations plus their people there are people in the communities within that those three things working together and if you look at it with you know it's so exciting with application dynamics there because if you look for us within Cisco that linkage of the application layer through into the infrastructure into the network and bringing that linkage together is the most powerful thing because that's the insight and the value our customers are looking for you know we've been talking about the in the innovation sandwich you know you got you know date in the middle and you got technology and applications underneath that's kind of what's going on here but you I'm glad you brought up the year the part about business model business operations and people in communities because during your keno you had a slide that laid out three kind of pillars yes people in communities business model and business operations there was no 800 series in there there was no product discussions this is fundamentally the big shift that business models are changing I tweeted provocatively the killer app and digital the business model because you think about it the applications are the business and what's running under the covers is the technology but it's all shifting and changing so every single vertical every single business is impacted by this it's not like a certain secular thing in the industry this is a real change can you describe how those three things are operating with that constitute think if you look from you know so thinking through those three areas if you look at the actual business model itself our business models as organizations are fundamentally changing and they're changing towards as consumers we are all much more specific about what we want we have incredible choice in the market we are more informed than ever before but also we are interested in the values of the organizations that were getting the capability from as well as the products and the services that naturally we're looking to gain so if you look in that business model itself this is about you know organizations making sure they stay ahead from a competitive standpoint about the innovation of portfolio that they're able to bring but also that they have a strong strong focus around the experience that their customer gains from an application a touch standpoint that all comes through those different channels which is at the end of the day the application then if you look as to how do you deliver that capability through the systems the tools and the processes as we all evolve our businesses you have to change the dynamic within your organization to cope with that and then of course in driving any transformation the critical success factor is your people and your culture you need your teams with you the way teams operate now is incredibly different it's no longer command and control its agile capability coming together you need that to deliver on any transformation never never mind let it be smooth you know in the execution there so it's all three together what I like about that model and I have to say we this is you know ten years to do in the cube you you see that marketing in the vendor community often leads what actually happens not surprising as we entered the last decade it was a lot of talk about cloud well it kind of was a good predictor we heard a lot about digital transformations a lot of people roll their eyes and think it's a buzzword but we really are I feel like an exiting this cloud era into the digital era it feels real and there are companies that you know get it and are leaning in there are others that maybe you're complacent I'm wondering what you're seeing in in Europe just in terms of everybody talks digital yeah be CEO wants to get it right but there is complacency there when it's a services say well I'm doing pretty well not on my watch others say hey we want to be the disruptors and not get disrupted what are you seeing in the region in terms of that sentiment I would say across the region you know there will always be verticals and industries that are slightly more advanced than others but I would say that then the bulk of conversations that I'm engaged in independence of the industry or the country in which we're having that conversation in there is a acceptance of transfer digital transformation is here it is affecting my business i if I don't disrupt I myself will be disrupted and be challenged help me so I you know I'm not disputing the end state I need guidance and support to drive the transition and a risk mythic mitigated manner and they're looking for help in that and there's actually pressure in the boardroom now around a what are we doing within within organizations within that enterprise the service right of the public said to any type of style of company there's that pressure point in the boardroom of come on we need to move it speed now the other thing about your model is technology plays a role in contribute it's not the be-all end-all but plays a role in each of those the business model of business operations and developing and nurturing communities can you add more specifics what role do you see technology in terms of advancing those three spheres so I think you know if you look at it technology is fundamental to all of those spheres in regard to the innovation the differentiation technology can bring then the key challenges one of being able to reply us in a manner where you can really see differentiation of value within the business so in then the customers organization otherwise it's just technology for the sake of technology so we see very much a movement now to this conversation of talk about the use case the use cases the way by which that innovation can be used to deliver the value to the organization and also different ways by which a company will work look at the collaboration capability that we announced earlier this week of helping to bring to life that agility look at the app D discussion of helping to link the layer of the application into the infrastructure the network's to get to root cause identification quickly and to understand where you may have a problem before you thought it actually arises and causes downtime many many ways I think the agility message has always been a technical conversation a gel methodology technology software development no problem check that's ten years ago but business agility mmm it's moving from a buzzword to reality exactly that's what you're kind of getting in here and teams how teams operate how they work you know and being able to be quick efficient stand up stand down and operate in that way you know we were kind of thinking out loud on the cube and just riffing with Fabio gory on your team on Cisco's team about clarification with Eugene Kim around just just kind of real-time what was interesting is we're like okay it's been 13 years since the iPhone and so 13 years of mobile in your territory in Europe Middle East Africa mobilities been around before the iPhone so with in more advanced data privacy much more advanced in your region so you got you out you have a region that's pretty much I think the tell signs for what's going on in North America and around the world and so you think about that you say okay how is value created how the economics changing this is really the conversation about the business model is okay if the value activities are shifting and be more agile and the economics are changing with sass if someone's not on this bandwagon it's not an in-state discussion where it's done deal yeah it's but I think also there were some other conversation which which are very prevalent here is in in the region so around trust around privacy law understanding compliance you look at data where data resides portability of that data GDP are came from Europe you know and as ban is pushed out and those conversations will continue as we go over time and if I also look at you know the dialogue that you saw so you know within World Economic Forum around sustainability that is becoming a key discussion now within government here in Spain you know from a climate standpoint and many other areas as well Dave and I've been riffing around this whole where the innovation is coming from it's coming from Europe region not so much the u.s. I mean us discuss some crazy innovations but look at blockchain us is like don't touch it pretty progressive outside United States little bit dangerous to but that's where innovation is coming from and this is really the key that we're focused on I want to get your thoughts on how do you see it going next level the next level next-gen business model what's your what's your vision so I think there'll be lots of things if we look at things like with the introduction of artificial intelligence robotics capability 5g of course you know on the horizon we have Mobile World Congress here in Barcelona in a few weeks time and if you talked about with the iPhone the smartphone of course when 4G was introduced no one knew what the use case would that would be it was the smartphone which wasn't around at that time so with 5g in the capability there that will bring again yet more change to the business model for different organizations and the capability and what we can bring to market when we think about AI privacy data ownership becomes more important some of the things you were talking about before it's interesting what you're saying John and when the the GDP are set the standard and and you see in the u.s. there are stovepipes for that standard California is going to do one every state is going to have a different center that's going to slow things down that's going to slow down progress do you see sort of an extension of a GDP are like framework of being adopted across the region and that potentially you know accelerating some of these you know sticky issues and public policy issues that can actually move the market forward I think I think the will because I think there'll be more and more you know if you look at there's this terminology of data is the new oil what do you do with data how do you actually get value from that data and make intelligent business decisions around that so you know that's critical but yet if you look for all of ours we are extremely passionate about you know where is our data used again back to trust and privacy you need compliance you need regulation you know I think this is just the beginning of how we will see that evolve you know when do I get your thoughts does Dave and I have been riffing for 10 years around the death of storage long live storage and but data needs to be stored somewhere networking is the same kind of conversation just doesn't go away in fact there's more pressure now forget the smartphone that was 13 years ago before that mobility data and video now super important driver that's putting more pressure on you guys and so hey we're networking so it's kind of like Moore's law it's like more networking more networking so video and data are now big your thoughts on video and data video but if you look at the Internet of the future you know what so if you look for all of us now we are also demanding as individuals around capability and access to that and inter vetted the future the next phase we want even more so there'll be more and more - you know requirement for speed availability that reliability of service the way by which we engage and we communicate there's some fundamentals there so continuing to to grow which is which is so so exciting for us so you talk about digital transformation that's obviously in the mind of c-level executives I got to believe security is up there as a topic what other what's the conversation like in the corner office when you go visit your customers so I think that there's a huge excitement around the opportunity realizing the value of the of the opportunity you know if you look at top of mind conversations are around security around making sure that you can make tank maintain that fantastic customer experience because if you don't the custom will go elsewhere how do you do that how do you enrich at all times and also looking at markets adjacencies you know as you go in and you talk at senior levels within within organizations independent of the industry in which they're in there are a huge amount of commonalities that we see across those of consistent problems by which organizations are trying to solve and actually one of the big questions is what's the pace of change that I should operate at and when is it too fast and when is what am I too slow and trying to balance that is exciting but also a challenge for companies so you feel like sentiment is still strong even though we're 10 years into this this bull market you know you got Briggs it you get you know China tensions with the US u.s. elections but but generally you see Tennessee sentiment still pretty strong and demand so I would say that the the excitement around technology the opportunity that is there around technology in its broadest sense is greater than ever before and I think it's on all of us to be able to help organizations to understand how they can consume I see value from us but it's you know it's fantastic science it tastes trying to get some economic indicators but really the real thing I'm trying to get you is Minh set of the CEO the corner office right now is it is it we're gonna we're gonna grow short-term by cutting or do we do are we gonna be aggressive and go after this incremental opportunity and it's probably both you're seeing a lot of automation yeah and I think if you look fundamentally for organizations it's it's that the three things helped me to make money how me to save money keep me out of trouble you know so those are the pivots they all operate with and you know depending on where an organization is in its journey whether a start-up there you know in in the in the mid or the more mature and some of the different dynamics and the markets in which they operate in as well there's all different variables you know so it's it's it's mix Wendy thanks so much for spending the time to come on the cube really appreciate great keynote folks watching if you haven't seen the keynote opening sections that's a good section the business model I think it's really right on I think that's going to be a conversation it's going to continue thanks for sharing that before we look before we leave I want to just ask you a question around what you what's going on for you here at Barcelona as the show winds down you had all your activities take us in the day of the life of what you do customer meetings what were some of those conversations take us inside inside what what goes on for you here well I'd say it's been an amazing it's been an amazing few days so it's a combination of customer conversations around some of the themes we just talked about conversations with partners and there's investor companies that we invest in a Cisco that I've been spending some time with and also you know spending time with the teams as well the DEF net zone you know is amazing we have this afternoon the closing session where we've got a fantastic external guest who's coming in it's going to be really exciting as well and then of course the party tonight and we'll be announcing the next location which I'm not gonna reveal now later on today we kind of figured it out already because that's our job and there's the break news but we're not gonna break it for you you can have that hey thank you so much for coming on really appreciate Wendy Martin expecting the Europe Middle East Africa and Russia for Cisco she's got our hand on the pulse and the future is the business model that's what's going on fundamental radical change across the board in all areas this the cue bringing you all the action here in Barcelona thanks for watching [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music]

>>from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue. Here's your host Still, Minutemen >>Hi and welcome to the Boston area studio. Happy to welcome back two of our Cube alumni, both from Active e o Brian Regan, the C M O of the company. And it took Rommel. Who's the vice president and general manager of Cloud? Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >>Happy New Year's too great to be here. >>Yeah, 2020 way we're talking about. We don't all have flying cars and some of these things, but there are a lot of exciting things and ever changing in the tech world. We're gonna talk a lot about N. C. Which, of course, is active use announcement. If I heard the sea, it's about clouds, about containers and about copy data management. With course, you know we know act as always quite well, Brian. Let's start with a company update first. Of course, you know, copy data management is where activity really created a category, but all of these new waves of technology that activity is fitting into Well, 2000 >>19 was an incredible year for us, you know, continued accelerating our growth in the market in the enterprise particularly, You know that the secular trends around hybrid and multi cloud really played well to our existing strengths. And 10 c really builds on those strengths will talk more about that. I know in a moment we also saw continued, you know, as digital transformation as as application modernization initiatives to cold. In just about every enterprise, our database capabilities really played again a cz a strength that we could capitalize on to land significant enterprise accounts, get started with them and then really start to expand overall data platform data management platform in those accounts >>s Oh, sure, before we get into the 10 see stuff specifically. But Brian, Brian teed up some of those cloud trends and how I think about data protection. Data management absolutely has changed. You know, I remember a couple years ago we said, Oh, well, you know, people are adopting all these clouds. All of these concerns still exist. You know. It doesn't go away. It's not magically Oh, I did office 3 65 I don't need to think about all the things that I thought about without. Look, when I do public cloud and build new applications. Oh, wait. You know, somebody needs to take care of that data. So bring us inside your customers. The team that's building these products and some of those big trends should >>happen. You're still so happy to be back in the Cube. So 2019 really defined. There were a lot of for enterprises really started moving. Production will look to the cloud multi cloud become a reality for active field way. We're running production workloads on seven o'clock platforms. So the key elements off being infrastructure agnostic wherein active you can do everything in all clark platforms. Basically, infrastructure neutral was a key element. On the other element was a single pane of glass. You could have an Oracle worker running on prime with the logic application running in azure and not know the difference. S o. The seamless mobility of data was the key element. That lot of our enterprises took advantage from elective standpoint on a lot of the 10 see capabilities adds onto those capabilities and you see more of these adoptions happening in 2020. So I think 10 seat eases up absolutely perfectly for that market. >>Yeah, let's talk a little bit about activities, place in the market, that differentiation there, that direct connection with the application and the partner's eyes. Real big piece of it. >>It's a huge piece and something we really not just double triple down on in 2019. Certainly for us our database capabilities, which we believe are really second to none in the industry, we continue to expand and enrich the capabilities, including ASAP Hana obviously already Oracle and sequel server D B two, as well as the linen space databases, the new and no sequel databases. We also understood, and as our customers were talking to us about their application modernization, they were moving Maur of their front and capabilities two containers, and they wanted that the data to come with it a t east temporarily on. So that was a big focus for us as well was making sure that we could bring the data whether it was into a V M, into a container into a physical server into any number of clouds in order to support that application. At that time, it was a critical part of our differentiation. For two dozen 1 19 >>I'd love just a little more on the database piece because you go to Amazon, reinvent and you know, the migrations of databases to the cloud, of course, is a major conversation. You look at Amazon, they have a whole number of their offerings as well, as if you want to use any database out there, they'll let you use it. Course Oracle might charge him or if you're doing it on the Amazon, the Amazon partner. The azure partnership with Oracle was big news in the back and 1/2 of 2019. So when you're working with their customers, you know, databases still central to you know how they run their business and one of the bigger expenses on the books, they're So you know what we look at 2020. You know, what is the landscape specifically from a database? Well, we continue >>to see and in most of our large enterprise accounts that Oracle and sequel servers continue to dominate the majority of the payload of databases. We don't see that changing, although we do see net new applications being built on new database platforms. Thio complement the oracle and sequel server back end. So we are seeing a rise of the bongos and the new and no Sequels out there. We're also seeing Maur consideration of building in the cloud, as opposed to starting on Prem and then potentially leveraging the cloud sort of post facto and in terms of the application architecture's. So our ability to support both the the legacy big iron database platforms as well as the new generation platforms, regardless of application architectural, regardless of the geometry of the application, is a big part of our differentiation >>going forward. >>All right, so let let's Wave hinted about it. But 10 c major announcement. Let's get into how that extends what we've been talking about. >>Absolutely so you know, we've made a lot of the new databases, particularly the no sequel databases, the Mongols and Hannah's first class citizens intensity, which means we understand not just the database. He also he also the ecosystem that the database lives. We all know Hannah's a fairly big database in terms of the number of machines that consumes number off, you know, applications that you use it and toe capture and actually provide value for Hannah. You need to understand where the Honda database lifts and so some of the capabilities we've added in 10 C's to kind of figure out this ecosystem, and when you migrate, you might need the ecosystem, not just the holiday. The peace because you know that is that is a key element. On the second aspect is the containers that that Brian touched on. Now we're seeing legacy data being presented into containers, and there's a bridge too quiet for that. Now. How do you present that bridge containers could be brought up, but they're lifeless unless you give them data. So the actors of bridge ready and you bring up the container using communities of whatever framework you have and be married the data into the container framework. So most organizations, you know, as they evolved from yesterday's architecture to today's architect. And they need this bridge, which helps them navigate that that my creation process and an active field being the data normalization platform is helping them live on both segments, Right? Nobody does us turn the switch off of the old one and move to the new That'll be co exist. That is the key element >>way spent a lot of time over the last couple of years hearing about cloud native architectures and that discussion of data, it is kind of something you need to kind of dig in to understand. I'm glad to hear you talking about, You know, when you talk about storage and container ization, you know where that fits today? Because originally it was only stateless. But now we know we could do state full environment here. But while container ization is, you know, growing at huge leaps and bounds, customers aren't taking their Oracle database and shoving Brian A lot of discussion about the partnerships. I think it was seven. You know, major cloud providers. That activity is there talk a little bit about the common native. The relationships with some >>of those partners? Absolutely. I mean, way made great strides from a go to market standpoint with our cloud partners this past year. Google Cloud is probably our most significant go to market partner. From a cloud standpoint, we've done a lot of joint engineering works in order to support both our existing, uh, software platform as well as our SAS control plane in the Google Cloud. We have landed many significant deals with with Google this past year on dhe. They have been as they continue to really increase their focus on enterprise accounts and both hybrid as well as public cloud sort of architectures. We are hand in glove with them as their backup in D R partner for those club >>workloads. >>Great eso We talked quite a bit about the database peace, but in general, back into the cloud archive in the cloud. What is 10 see specifically an active you, in general, enhance in those environments >>so tense he bring It brings in you know, the key elements of the recovery orchestration. So if I have to bring up, let's say, 500 machines in any club platform, how did I do it? Well, I can go and bring up one machine at a time and take two days to bring it up or with active fuels. Resiliency. Director. You can create a recovery plan and a push pardon Recovery happens, so we've seen a lot of customers adopt that, particularly customers that want to leverage the Google platform for its infrastructure capabilities. Wants an orchestration, that is, that is, that understands the applications that are coming up, so there is a significant benefit from a PR standpoint of the recovery orchestrations will be invested a lot of time and tuning the performance and understanding Google and Amazon and Azure to make sure this was built, right. The other big push we're seeing for the clock platforms ASAP, ASAP, as an enterprise has taken a mission to say, there's no more data centers. Everything is going to the cloud. So an escapee workloads are not the easiest were close to manage. And so they did the the intersection point of S A P and the cloud is very active. Field becomes really valuable because, though, did this data sets by definition or large, their complex and there were distributed. And the D artists of paramount importance because these air crown jewels So so those segments of the R orchestration forward with, you know ASAP and Hannah, which is to get our strength of databases. It's kind of their tense. He really hits, hits, hits a home run >>when we're talking to users in the discussion of multi Cloud in general, one of the challenges is Yoon hee. Different skill sets across. One of those powerful things I've heard from active use really is a normalization across any cloud or even in a cloud. Oh, wait. I was gonna stuck six up again in an archive. That means I'm never going to touch it again. Ingress and egress fees. You know, I have to figure these out or I need toe dedicated engineer to those kind of environments. So it seems that just fundamentally the architecture that you built it active eo is toe help customers really get their arms around those multi cloud >>environments? Absolutely. And I think there are two additional components that really one of which has lived with activity from the very beginning of the company, which is a p a p I. First, the cloud is very much an AP I centric type of operating model on with active fio We don't change the management system were operating model. But in fact we incorporate in eso all of this orchestration that it shook talked about can be actuated via a P I. The second piece, which we really started in 2017 with our eight Dato platform release, is the the consumption and the intelligent consumption of object with 10 see, we've continued to advance our object capabilities. In fact, we published a paper with the SG in late 2019 that talked about mounting 50 terabyte Oracle databases directly out of object with actually increased performance versus the production block >>storage behind it. >>So we have really with 10 C, actually added cashing to even further performance optimized object workloads, which speaks to both the flexibility but also the economic flexibility of being able. Thio contemplate running workloads in the cloud out of object at a lower cost platform without necessarily the compromise of performance that you would normally expect >>absolutely. And like you said, the skill set required. Do I need to put it in object to any reported in block? We can eliminate that right. Be neutralized that to say you want to leverage the cloud, give us your cost point and you can dial the cost up or down, depending on what you see for performance, and we will be the day that back and forth, so that flexibility is enormous for customers. >>That's greater if you talk to anybody that's been in the storage industry for a while, and you want to make them squirm, say the word migration s O. We know how painful it has been if you go talk to any of the triple vendors, they have so many tools and so many service is to help do that in a cloud era. It should be a little bit easier, but it sounds like that's another key piece. Intensity? >>Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, 10 See, you know, hits the home. I think with the A P. I integration. So the other element 2019 Saul, was the scale of deployment effective. You know, when you have to manage hundreds of thousands of machines across different geo's, that is a scale that comes to the data protection that you know, people. Really? You have a seat to actually build for it and and work with it and be sorry in 2019 and 10 See, incorporates a lot of that capabilities as well, making it ask Cloud needed as possible. So basically, around these applications globally. All >>right, uh, I was wondering if you might have a customer example toe really highlight the impact that NBC's having understand if you can't name them specifically, but, uh, yeah, >>well, actually, shook has already talked about 11 customer slash partner. Who is I think still the world's largest software company in the world based out of Germany. And they are powering their enterprise cloud on the data management data protection. Beneath that enterprise cloud across four different hyper scale er's using, active you on. I think they're on record in a weapon. Our earlier in December, talking about their evaluation of pretty much every technology out there on the one that could really deliver on performance at scale across clouds was activity >>on. The key element was they wanted a single platform with a single pane of glass across all platforms, and an active feel was the solution to each other. So >>and certainly I think we credit them and are the rest of our enterprise customers for pushing us to make 10 see more powerful and more a capable across any clout, you know, Ultimately, an inter enterprise is going to make a decision that they've probably already made the decision to incorporate cloud into their enterprise architecture. What we give them is the freedom and the flexibility to choose any cloud. And, by the way, any cloud today that might change tomorrow and having the ability to seamlessly migrate and or convert from cloud eight o'clock be. Is something that active powers as well? >>Yeah, just make sure we're clear as to what's happening there. It's great that you've got flexibility there when we're talking about data and data gravity. Of course, we're not talking about just lifting an entire database land, you know, ignoring the laws of physics there. But it's the flexibility of using a ll These various things, any way Talk about A S, A P, of course, needs to live across all these clouds. But when you talk about an enterprise, you know what is kind of that? That killer use case? Because we said we're not at a point where cloud is not a utility. I don't wake up in the morning and look at the sheet and say, Oh, I'm gonna, you know, use Cloud a versus cloud be s o. You know what is? You know the importance of that flexibility for us >>today. The majority of our business starts with company saying I need to deliver my data faster to my developers or my tester's, or even increasingly, my data scientists and analysts and my data sets have become so large that it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to do that with regularity. So the currency of the data is starting to suffer. That is the first use case for us and that that powering that enterprise transformational initiative around a new application or an updated application based on a historical app using those enterprise databases delivering that seamlessly quickly, regardless of how big the data is still remains our first use case. And then, increasingly, those customers air realizing that they can start to achieve the other benefits of active eo, including I can start to back that up to the cloud. Aiken actually orchestrate recoveries in the cloud. Not just bulk sort of transfer, but actually the entire application stack. And bring that up in the cloud. I can start Thio, take those those data sets and actually amount them into containers for my next generation application. So that starting point of give me my data as quickly as possible, regardless of how big it is, starts to become universal in terms of its applicability for all use cases. >>Yeah, I guess I shook. The last thing I wanna understand from you is in 2019. We saw a lot of large providers putting out their vision for how I manage in this multi cloud environment. You were at the Google Cloud event where Anthros was unveiled. I was at Microsoft ignite when as your ark was unveiled. VM wear has things like tans you out there. So this moldy cloud environment how do I manage across these disperse environments? What? What What are all those move mean to active you on how you look at things. >>And I think you know, the Tennessee release and with the core architecture that if you had in place, which was multiple already and a P I ready. So those are the two elements that are kind of building blocks that you can tie into any one of those construct you talked about. All right, so we've had we have customers, innovated us with Antos. If customers get up service now we have customers doing Vieira with us, right? So there are many, many integration platforms. The latest I saw was an Alexa app, but we were mounting an oracle database on a voice command. So So you know, there's endless possibilities as thes equal systems evolve because active feel stays behind the cowards powering the data delivering the data available if needed on the target. So that is the key element in the neighbor that we see that helps all these other platforms become super successful. >>So, Brian, it sounds very much a hell wind. The big trends that we're seeing here keep partnerships and, you know, meeting your customers where they need to >>pay. Absolutely. We continue Thio play in the enterprise market, where these thes are absolutely top of mind of every CEO and top of their agenda. Onda, we are working hand in glove with them to make sure that our platform not only anticipates their needs but delivers on their current state of needs as well. >>Brian, thank you so much. Congratulations on the 10 sea launch Cloud containers. Copy data management. Look forward to watching your customers and your continued Thanks. As always, Very much. All right, I'm still Minutemen. Lots more coverage here in 2020. Check out the cube dot net for all of it. And thank you for watching the Cube

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host Stu minimun hi this is a cute conversation from our Boston area studio I'm Stu minimun and joining for this deep dive into partnership discussions is Brian Regan the CMO of activity Oh Brian great to see you and happy 2020 great to see you used to thanks all right so we had a conversation with yourself and a shuch talking about 10c some of the activities the general momentum of ectopy oh but really want to spend a little bit of time talking about partnerships so Activia being a software company always has add a number of partnerships so you know when we talk a little bit of just the philosophy of the company and you know how important that is for you know technology partnerships as well as the go-to-market absolutely and I think we you know in 2019 we really increased our focus our investments and really our entire company alignment towards five types of partners specifically one was relatively new partnership for us which is a software partnership with IBM and their data and AI division of IBM under Arvid Krishna and Rob Thomas that we really the OEM our product to go after the test data management market opportunity and really become a data platform for a lot of their initiatives that involve Watson and and analytics as well as test data management that was a huge new partnership for us in 2019 well of course a new area of partnership because IBM I understand is probably the longest and oldest partnership that activity oh is that absolutely so the software group was probably the last group that we have partnered with in inside of the IBM corporation but we saw incredible traction throughout the year great pipeline growth from literally the beginning of the the Inc signing the the paper and have a roster of incredible logos to show for it over the last 12 months yeah it's always interesting to look if you talk about software and how a ifit's to it that was 2019 one of the things we said just you know okay what is AI are along that spectrum but you know how do these things stitch together everything to a Maya feed for the training algorithms or there are other things I can do so that sounds like you found some areas where customers are going to be working at leveraging your solution absolutely and certainly with IBM's acquisition of Red Hat and their embrace of containers and kubernetes that application modernization intersection point where we can bring data into containers is going to be a big theme for us in 2020 as well okay exciting stuff so that's on the software piece so if you have software hardware still matters into C 20 it turns out we still need to run things on servers and storage so and and switches and the like so we're fortunate to have partnered with Dell EMC as one of our focus infrastructure partners we have reference architectures for converged infrastructure using the rail and their rack designs on the VX flex OS underneath and really going after the database cloning market opportunity so bringing a essentially a data center pod architecture with Activia software running inside to power these databases of service opportunities that exist in a large enterprises alright interesting that you know EMC was not one that I would have thought would have been the first one to partnership Dell EMC with a much broader portfolio it seems a natural fit absolutely and and we were excited actually to based on client demand to also introduce the support to write to data domain so we can actually support data domain essentially we treated almost like an object target to increase the useful life and actually increase the power of data domain within these broader infrastructures that the enterprise clients have you know I had a great conversation with the shuch talking about what one of the things about 10 C is we've known for a long time that object storage is so important for the storage industry and where we want to go but customers shouldn't have to think about it it's just how we enable that and that leads up to of course cloud is big piece absolutely NC there so so where the important partnership from a cloud standpoint so certainly all of the clouds for us in our multi cloud effort are important we we support seven of the hyper scalars and and certainly you know Alibaba cloud IBM cloud Oracle cloud VMware cloud in addition to the three that people think about most but from a go-to-market standpoint we were probably the most embedded with Google cloud over the last year to 18 months again we've aligned a lot of both go to market but also engineering efforts to make sure that we're supporting Google cloud in the best way possible bringing the most compelling and differentiated offerings particularly for database workloads for backup dr and ultimately database cloning well congratulations important partnership especially when you talk about that engineering standpoint Google is not one just to make oh you know we made a handshake and it's good it really they dig in from an engineering standpoint and we know that Google makes the smartest stuff out there they'll tell you that so if you you've gone through the wringer on that that that really speaks to the architectural absolutely piece of the environment and and credit to a shook in the entire engineering organization I mean that is to your point very much an engineering first and then go to market second type of relationship and we're delighted to be in the go-to-market side of that okay go to market then is probably another way piece of absolutely so the last two types of partners that were really focused on for 2020 and we certainly got very serious in 2019 one is global systems integrators and TCS has really emerged is a really key partner for us in that landscape when we think about the enterprise accounts that we target you know a billion and up in revenue they're in every single one of them and we have several wins that we can look back on 2019 and credit their influence they are certainly helping the application modernization initiatives within all of these enterprises and partnering with active Pheo to really bring a data management and test data management capability to bear really was an important step for us in nineteen that we hope to accelerate in 2020 and then the the last piece and last but not least from a go-to-market standpoint is the chat and you know important channel partners whether it's Trace 3 particularly on the west coast whether it's data trend you know from the Midwest and East Coast these types of channel partners have really helped us you know become embedded in some of the largest accounts in in North America as well as globally and really are the the trusted adviser inside of those accounts that we want to continue to enable with compelling differentiated offerings like Tennessee yeah there were a lot of transformations going on in the channel they were all trying to figure out how they live in that multi-cloud world seems a natural fit for those that are thriving and surviving absolutely in this era that those would be the ones that you'd be working with absolutely so as a software company you know the part of our power is the ecosystem power and but we believe that by continuing to foster these multifaceted relationships they all have actually really fascinating benefits across the board the IBM relationship for example has ecosystem benefits in their channel and their systems integrators the Dell EMC relationship has you know ripple effects into their channel and their distribution points of distribution so we believe it's a very complimentary ecosystem that we're building we're excited at the possibility of an even stronger 2020 because of it awesome the one that you mentioned actually in our earlier conversation talking about active intensity si P of course a big important partner also a huge it's an important partner from a standpoint of it's maybe the most critical workload in most enterprises that use sa P and being a part of their technology stack inside of the Hana enterprise cloud is a critical capability for us but it's also an important point of distribution as they go out to their enterprise customers and are looking to become more relevant in a broader sense of data management so we're certainly excited about the work that we're doing with them we're delighted about the influence that they've had in terms of our roadmap and pushing our platform to be even more capable particularly for Hana workloads all right a lot of different pieces Brian congratulations on all that happened in 2019 and looking forward to watching the momentum in 2020 Thanks looking forward to being back all right lots more coverage from us at the cube dotnet of course will be lots of shows feel free to reach out on Twitter I'm at Stu and thank you for watching the cube

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum, World 2019 brought to you by IBM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is The Cube. Live at VM World, 2019 times. Too many men with my co host Justin Warren, David Dante, John Ferrier. John Wall's John Troyer. Like a certain founding fonder, Alexander Hamilton, the Cube is going non stop coverage for the three days Habito. Welcome back to our program. Two of our Cube alumni's Lynn Lucas, who is the chief marketing officer of Cohee City. And she's brought along John White, who is the chief innovation officer at Expedient. Thank you both for joining us. >> Happy to be here. Happy 10 year anniversary to the cute >> Well, thank you so much. And you know, so many people we've known over the years. Actually, the first time I met John wait was I believe in this whole, you know, at VM World, you know, talk about what's going on. Eso You know, I always love talking to the service riders because it's been going through just a massive transformation, you know, all along on you, John, you've got a different title Since the last time I interviewed you, You been involved in the strategy You and I have gone toe cloud shows together and some of the other things they're so bring us up to speed as to, you know, expedient here at the show. And, uh, what brings you here with cohesive? >> Yes. Oh, yeah, thanks to your right. But I think it's probably five or six years ago. Maybe I asked too. You said, Hey, what do you know about the service provider community? Cause I wanted to kind of educate you because it was something that's been fairly new and expedience been in that industry for a long time. We were mainly in infrastructure of the service provider, man. The service providers are rounding on all that I t. Stuff that people need and ah, this VM world is a huge one for us. Last year we launched Enterprise Cloud, which is a product based on VM. Where's full softer to find stack And that was something we wanted to go to market with to give an alternative people, When you say Hey, I need to go to the cloud and you realize that okay. I really can't just take my APS and lift and shift and go there. There's another place for you that's a little a little more familiar. And as we see 20,000 people know VM were obviously that air here. So that's usually what what's usually happening in the Enterprise. So we're talking with those folks, and so we would launch that platform. We thought about everything differently. We were running virtualization since, 06 of seven, and we wanted to change everything back up platforms as well as needing things like scale out now, as were necessity at that point. So this VM worlds are coming out because we had, ah, release that last year. And now we have a lot of good customers to talk about on that platform. 12 months later. >> Yeah, well, Lynn, first of all, congratulations because, you know, I know John sits on customer counsels for some of these events. I've dug into a bunch of the networking pieces with him and actually was, you know, we spent a bunch of years. We went to a bunch of shows together and he was looking at the some of the various vendors and a bunch of the new startups and cohesive E is the one that you know really stepped up provided the solution that he was looking for. So it's been interesting to hear service fighters. You were usually the first ones that companies were talking to. But bring brings the cohesive story there. >> Yeah, and so were a super pleased and honored to have expedient working with Cohee City. And John has been instrumental in really providing a lot of direction to us on what his needs are and how to make the product even better for for him and the service provider community, it's a huge part of our go to market strategy. We believe that with the massive growth in the interest in hybrid and Justus John was saying, There's so many customers that really aren't equipped to deal with How do I move to ah hybrid cloud strategy, whether that before compliance reasons, whether that be geographical reasons under you've seen them all. And so this is something where we feel really thrilled to have the, um, where's cloud partner of the Year working with us and to help serve customers with the expedient enterprise Cloud platform. >> Congratulations on that team. And right when we first met five years ago Public cloud for VM wear And for most of the service bodies, it was the enemy, all right. It's like, Oh, my gosh. There, you know, you went toe Amazon reinvent and create a little bit of partnership. So give us the update on hybrid. What that means and how solutions like, Oh, he city, you know, help you provide services to your customer. >> Yeah, it's funny you mentioned. I mean, that's you would ask me, What are you doing here? What are you doing here? Because it was going out doing this research, seeing where the market was on containers on adoption of Claude practices. So we wanted to make sure that we were very open with all the different solutions that are out there. And that's been our strategy from the from the start. So building enterprise cloud was one thing we need to do to come to market with a platform like everybody else. But multi cloud is really where we have focused. And it's funny. I mean, when I when I first started coming to the M world, it was very product centric, you know, you had this product, you could do X with it. And here's the return that you would get at it. And when you're coming to the emerald now it's more about platforms. And that's really what I found most interesting with Cohee City when I first met Mohit, probably two and 1/2 3 years ago, was that he was focusing on the platform of data management. And that's really what the problem was. It wasn't now, specifically, it wasn't data protection. Specifically, it was What all can you do with that with that data management? And we're You know, we're spending a ton of time with Cohee City on. We were building multi Tennessee with them to them, be able to support that. And that's what we're delivering on now. So it's it's it's the scale out now's it's ah, data protection. And then we're taking those service is and then putting him in eight of us in azure or wherever it might be because it doesn't matter to us, because long term we want to care about the long term I t care and feeding and focus on that as our value prop instead of just actually which silo >> it lives in. Yeah, and right from the very beginning, I remember speaking to Kohei City very, very early on when it just sort of come out of stealth. And it was baked into into the product the idea of data management that it was going to be much more, much more than just data protection. So, what are you seeing now that we have a lot of years of product development has clearly gone into it since we first looked at it then. But what are you seeing? Customers using the platform for here in 2019? >> Well, we started a little bit more unique than most other customers. I think we talked about this, you know, throughout CO e city. And we actually started on a scale out now's platform s. So we have one of our clients homes dot com who? They're with us this week because they have a really interesting you. No need for this type of enterprise. Cloud there with us and they're talking about all the different benefits they received out. And they started actually with on the file side of things homes dot com, real estate, online real estate. So I think you know about how many images and how many fouls you have out there. We have 2.6 billion images right now running on the cohesive platform. That was 2.6 billion and a 30% annual growth rate. Yes. So the numbers are crazy. You can't put those on any other traditional now, as that's out there. Uh, so we used a he city first to get started there, and then the backups really were the icing on the cake. So last October, we built We started going out the Nats platform to handle those images. And if you actually go to homes dot com right now, it's being served fully out Enterprise cloud from a container and virtual machine layer and then on the back end from Cohee City. And they were using that to protect it as well. >> And I think that if I add on to that is really a testament to the, you know, the foundation that mo it built, which is a true distributed file system, Google like, in that sense. And I think correct me if I'm wrong, John. But you know, you then also saw while that benefit of a platform approach and not another silo for the backup and having co he city help solve the challenges for both files as well as data protection and then maybe one day in the future. Looking at some of the things that we're doing now that we're doing more security on running APS and things like that on the platform as that may be an extension for you, >> Yeah, that's that's definitely a big focus of our effort, the global d duplication that you get with CO he city. When you add all those files in all the different customers, we have all the different virtue machines. Ah, the ratios were hitting or just insane. And it's something we decided as a service provider that we we said, OK, this technology, we actually want to give that benefit back to the customer. And so when somebody buys data stores from us on the data production, they buy what they're actually consuming on the disk. So you could have 100 terabytes in all of your V EMS. If you only need one terabyte, that's all you're buying from us. And that's a lot of the power of that platform that we get with cohesive. >> Yeah. So, John, wanna help? They want you to help us understand the nuance of something. We're platform? Yeah. Has a little bit of new Monsanto. Little bit, a little loaded thing. GM was the platform. Cohesive is a platform. You use both of them. So just help us understand how cohesive Ian Veum wear and all those things that they go together. They're not, you know, competing against each other in as your architectural Or are they? They're >> not competing there two layers, In my opinion, where you have your primary stores really living in and the M R and secondary storage is everything else on Cohee City. Ah, what? The nice thing is, they did a lot of cool things to kind of marry the two together. Um, one of the one of the tools that we're using Aesthetic ahi city is called Instant on or instant Restore a Virtue machines so we can actually spin up a virtual machine almost instantaneously. It lives on the Coast City platform. Once it's rehydrated, then does a storage the emotion automatically into the V, m or environment. So we're able to do migration or if we had, You know, we have a bad ransomware attack and we need to restore 100 V EMS within a few minutes. We can instantly bring those back up in the cohesive platform and then move them to a production virtual environment once it's done. And that's something that we weren't able to do with our existing vendor. And that was something we needed to actually go and focus on because being in the healthcare space being in the compliance space, that's that's a big problem for us. >> Yeah, just add, I think that, um Vienna, where is clearly one of our most important partners. The very first area that mo it developed was data protection, for I am where, I would say, well north of 70 75% of our customers are protecting their Veum, where environments We have a very large customer that's protecting over 18,000 V EMS on Cohee City. So with the certifications that we have with V. C. D. And with the integrations, as you've mentioned with of you realize it's it's really it's a partnership. Andi think we're adding a lot of value to the customers that are building on V. M. where is >> very complimentary for sure. >> Yeah, it's been interesting that to see how customers choosing to go with a platform like like expedient because, as you mentioned earlier, stewed like five years ago, Cloud was the enemy. And but we're being told that on a public card is gonna take everything, and it's just gonna own all of the environment where is now? In 2019 we found that the story is actually much more complicated than that. Some of us probably believe that at the time I put my hand up is one of those that customers actually needed to live in multiple places. It's not a story of or it's a story of end, so you do need to be ableto have something which can work well with others on the same way we've got. We've got co, he's ity and V M. Where is it? Well, they're not really competing with each other. They work better together and particularly as customers scale, we find my any any kind of enterprise customer is header a genius, so you have to have solutions that give them options and that work together well with you have to play nicely with others. >> I think that's exactly right. And part of what we've done is built a software to find solution and to also give John expedient flexibility. How do you want to deploy for your customers? The solution. Is it in the, uh, the hyper scaler? Is it Hello, somewhere? Is that your own cloud? And so that's part of the advantage. I think all in one solution that then you can give your customers some flexibility as well as to how they want to consume the service as well. >> Absolutely meaning the flexibility And you mentioned software only, and are, you know, software or suffer to find that was something that was big for us. When we're looking for partnerships, we have a standardized hardware build that we want to use. And that was all built on Del. And it was something that, you know, we were able to work with obesity to get that standardized so we can continue to roll out. Excuse that we were most comfortable with. And they could just have the software layer on top. >> Yeah. So you've managed to do this successfully. You're going really well. Yeah. What's next? >> Well, um you know we have, you know, So in we ordered in October of last year. Right now we have six petabytes online enrolling. So that's that's great. You know, that's that's good to see. That's going to continue to grow at a pretty rapid rate. Data is something that obviously, we all know is never gonna shrink on. We're gonna continue to grow that with new customer acquisitions, and that's everything where we want to continue to go with this, Uh, this product specifically is on the data management side. The things that they're doing in Helios to start to get understanding and awareness in value out of that data that's sitting there is really, really important and exciting for us in the future. We deal what tonic compliance PC idea says hip. And we want to make sure that the data that we're storing inside of there will be compliant by those. So being able to write an application to see if the credit card numbers in a file or in a database by using the cozy platform that we brought us value. Same thing goes with a lot of the ransomware protection they're doing. So if you see a foul that gets encrypted, then I know. Okay, I have a problem. I better go look at that and give me a time stamped, Actually. Go on, restore from instead of actually trying toe, you know, pick around. And hopefully I find it when it before it was encrypted. So we're really excited about those opportunities is the future and seeing what data management can just bring to it. >> Well, Lynn, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thank you so much for joining us again. And John, my friend, this is your six time on the program, actually gonna have a celebration in New England in a little over unveil for, ah, six s o right in New England. So for Justin Warren, I'm stupid him in. We love talking about sports here, and, uh, yeah, the Cuban way have the Niners and the Patriots for the team there. But as always, Thank you for watching the cue

(click) >> Stu: Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is a special on-the-ground here at the VTUG: Summer Slam 2019. It's the 16th year of the event and unfortunately it's actually the final event. I've been to a few of these in Maine. I've been to many more of them at the Winter Warmer at Gillette Stadium and welcoming back to the program someone that's been to many more of these that I have, Chris Collotti, who's a principal technologist today at Cohesity but you know, who is doing many other jobs and actually used to live here in New England, southern New Hampshire before. >> Chris: That's right. Chris, welcome back. >> Chris: Thank you, good to see you as always. >> Yeah, give us a little bit of your history with these events and you know, what you've been seeing at you know, user groups and regional events and what brought you back for the final one. >> So this one was interesting cause even last night when I showed up for the night before, I think I knew everybody in the room, it was all hugs and you know, it's just, it's all about the people, I mean, this is all the same people that we've had up here. But, yeah, I grew up in southern New Hampshire, since moved to Tennessee five years ago but I was actually at another event before this and when we found it was the last one, well, Cohesity has always sponsored it but I actually decided to fly over here, being the last one cause knowing the Harneys really well and see all you guys it's just, it's kind of an odd thing to have the curtain go down. >> Yeah, you talk about the people and communities, Chris, I think back to the earliest days that I came to this event I'm like, there's that guy on stage, he's almost always wearing a Patriots jersey there and >> (laughs) I did make that famous. >> Figuring out it was I believe P90x and some of the other things there so, you know, what's the workout regime today? >> Uh, this morning I actually jacked up my neck, um, back in to lifting heavy a little bit but yeah, it was always great to be the guy who always came up on stage and always had a Brewsky jersey on or something. I remember the one year that someone told me they were practicing that year and I was in the middle of the presentation and I was, you know, conflicted on what to do but, um, no I think it's always been good to come back and talk, not just about technology, but I've had so many conversations over the years about where my career's gone and the changes and it was always that opportunity a couple times a year to figure out what changed for everybody. And even now, I mean, there's guys that I've seen that have different shirts on that we're, you know, I have one different from last year when I was at the Winter Warmer. >> Yeah, 16 years it's safe to say almost everyone here has changed what logo they had here. Many of the companies >> We've lost a little more hair, we've got a little more gray. >> So a lot of changes. One thing I tell you, 16 years has been a good run for the Patriots over the last 16 years >> People don't like us when we talk about that for some reason >> We're here in New England, we're allowed to talk about it. >> That's true, that's true. >> At this event, Chris, it's The Cube, you always like talking about sports and if they don't like this piece of it that's all right but, you know, I tell you talking to the vendors here, they're always hiring, like, SEs, technical people, you know, if they understand that latest in technology, usually they can find a job here. What else are you seeing? What are some of the you know, kind of in-demand jobs, of course, you know, the space that your company is playing in, data, is at the center of so much of what we talk, >> Absolutely. Data protection, data management, is a super hot space. >> Yep. I think, I've definitely seen a lot of, all the new companies are always hiring SEs, right? They got to get their sales up and running. For Cohesity, it's a bit similar. I mean, we took over another couple of floors in one of the other buildings in San Jose, which is great, the growth is unbelievable. For people who don't know, you know, we've got a truck rolling around the country that John Hildebrand and I personally, pretty much built over the course of a couple a months, but I think that speaks to it. There's all this stuff happening and everybody's trying to find a different way to get out in front of customers, right, whether it's a salesperson, whether it's the marketing, whether it's creative videos or something else and we're always trying to figure out what's the next, well, not even technical ability, but what's just the next ability you want to hire, right, is it a coder, is it, I mean, we always have developers, we're always hiring developers, but around here, I've been out of the area so much I'm really not sure, like what the hotbed is right now around the Boston area and southern New Hampshire. >> Boston's such a hotbed lately for, you know, everything that's going in IoT, of course, Cloud's having an impact, those people that hadn't been to the Seaport District, oh my gosh, it's great to see those buildings go up. >> Oh yeah. >> You know, not just, you know, Red Hat put in a big facility there, AWS and Amazon, of course, has a strong presence, but between Cambridge and Boston there's so much growth here. Chris, want to give you the kind of final word, as you've been at more of these events than many people, you know, what's it like to see kind of the end of an era and any final memories you have from these shows. >> The only, and I've been talking about this memory, and you may remember this one, and Ed Hartley would too, I think, Tex, he will, when my Challenger broke down. Were you here for that one, when I pulled into Gritty's? That's my worse memory of these but it's the one that always comes up when I come back and everybody saw it on the flatbed driving by, you know, Luigi and everybody. What made it interesting was a horrible situation for me because I drove up here but it speaks to the community because everybody ran out to ask what happened, do you need a ride home, what's going on? And I do think the Harneys have done such an incredible job over the years just bringing all these people together. It's a little bit sad I think, you know, my wife came up for this, Julie actually flew up because she knows everybody and being the last one. She also won't turn down lobster, at all. I'm happy for them though, I think, a lot's happened in their lives in the last couple years and to finally get down to Florida and spend more time down there, I'm happy for them, I think it's great, I think they've done a, they've left a legacy, really I think, I don't think anybody can match up here. >> The intersections of great information, great people and you throw in >> Great food. a great New England Lobsterfest, you really can't go wrong with that, Chris, thank you so much for sharing the update. Always great to catch up with you. >> Yeah, great seeing you again. We'll see you tonight at the bake. >> All right and we'll see Chris and many others at VMWorld later this year as well as lots of other shows. Be sure to check out thecube.net. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thanks for watching. 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>> Live from Anaheim, California It's the queue covering nutanix dot next twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Nutanix >> Welcome back, everyone to the Cubes Live coverage of Nutanix Next here in Anaheim, California I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, John Furrier. We're joined by Pharma's Mahdavi. He is the senior group director Cadence Design Systems. Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. So tell our viewers a little bit about Kate, based in San Jose. Can't tell our viewers a little bit about your company Cadence Design Systems. >> So Cajuns has been a A company in the very essence about thirty years ago. So we make software to enable semiconductor companies to design test than billed chips. So most technique, you know, technology that you bought, you see, and the fries Electronics has some cadence solution. >> So you guys had a lot of legacy and you're talking about the nutanix relationship. >> So our journey with Nutanix started about three years ago. I'd actually explored Nutanix at a previous company. I've been with Cadence three and a half years. Eso liked it, but there was really no opportunity Teo do much At that time, the company was very new at the time. But I cadence, we identified some opportunities Teo to explore nutanix. And it's been a great experience so far Way actually are running a lot of our critical of business applications on nutanix. So we're all in. >> What was the door opener for? What was the door opener for you? You guys there? That cadence. What? Goddammit! >> The overall architecture look good in a presentation level s so it was worth exploring. But, you know, it's a new company. New architecture. Er you have to kind of going to it carefully. So it was a matter of identifying opportunities that were maybe not production, not super business critical to start. But as time goes on, you build confidence and you do more and more. So today we're using Nutanix. As I said for business applications were using your for VD I AA lot of ours End that stop. You know, instances are running on nutanix today. We use that as well because here zero so a lot of art shared services. You know, the n s active directory. Those sorts of services are running on his hands. So, you know, we're looking for more and more opportunities to expand it. >> So I always like to know how this actually helps you and your company. Do people do their jobs better, more quickly, more efficiently, more productively? Can you sort of walk us through what life was like before nutanix and what life is like now in terms of the staffing and the overhead and the >> star? So I would say there's a couple of different, you know, big benefits. One is we're in a cloud, uh, era, right? So a lot of companies are looking for work close to move to the public cloud, and we're no different. We're constantly looking for what? What makes sense and the public cloud. What makes sense on Prem? So from this support and skill sets, fan point is very important to be consistent. I basically have the same support model for both on Prima's well as public public cloud. So that's one big benefit that Nutanix offers because the same skill sets to support. Let's say eight lbs environment is the same as, you know, the nutanix support environment. Thie. Other critical thing is just like any ICTSI organization were challenged with limited resource is you know, doing more with less. So the ease of administration, ease of support, just inherent reliability of the technology allows our staff to, you know, sleep more at nights and, you know, work less often during the weekend. So the overalls support overhead has reduced significantly. So that's the those are the biggest things. I would say. >> Those are two very important things. >> Those are the two biggest things that way went into this, um, this engagement with But, you know, we're pleasantly surprised that performance is exceeded our expectations, you know? You know, I did expect reliability. I didn't quite expect this level of performance improvement, so that's been excellent. So again, we're looking for more and more opportunities to expand it. Just given that experience, he >> said, the staff sleeps well at night. How have they reacted? What if some other anecdotes from the staff freed more free time management playing? What's the most of what was some of the feedback from the from your team? >> Well, I mean, I don't want to give the wrong impression. It's not like they're not >> working. Yeah, I write >> the scenario, but, you know, I would say it's gone from, uh, crazy environments is something a little more humane, S O, I think not only with the staff just across the company. You have those who are who kind of buy in and go into it positively and others who are more reluctant. And that's no different the support staff. So I think just their own confidence level. And, you know, there, >> uh, a >> desire to do more with nutanix as increase as they had more experience with >> it. It's interesting. I did a panel yesterday with some customers from NUTANIX and was a mixed in a big bank, midsized company and and a good, big corporate kind of it. And it's very interesting. The legacy with was where there was more legacy. There was a lot of dependencies, and they were looking at time frames for pushing stuff out, like eight weeks to two months in two hours. So they went for eight weeks. Teo pushing any kind of rule propagation or any kind of new stuff. It weeks the two hours and that was a huge number. Are you Are you guys seeing anything around in terms of performance and group on the time side with Nutanix? What are some of the things that you're getting benefits wise operationally. >> Well, the more we do, the more cookie cutter it becomes. So you know, each migration is easier and faster and so on. And that also acid with confidence, right? The very first critical business application that we moved to Nutanix the level of testing we did was insane. Now it's less Oh, so for multiple reasons that migration experience is much more efficient much, much quicker today than it was early on. >> One of the things we hear to Rebecca was, you know, new channels. The new vendor you mentioned new company. They're ten years old, so still new relative to the bigger guys getting it pushed, getting it through, getting it approved by executive confidence from executive management around. Wait, was this new new company what's the benefits? All kinds of gyrations, of approvals and sometimes politics and, you know, legacy kind of factors in How does that work on your N? How did that go? Getting nutanix through was a struggle. That was The challenge was to take us through that. >> So as you mentioned the fact that it's new technology new company that has its own set of challenges from first, some application owners and executives. You know, why take the risk? Why not do the same thing we've done? You know, always, um so? So that that's one big big challenge. The other was There is a tendency, especially early on when NUTANIX was selling it as an appliance, as opposed to license on Lee. Um, there is a tendency to view it as a hardware solution, and it's exactly not that it's the exact opposite of that is purely a software solution. That's where the value is. So it's very easy to get chopped into that hardware discussion where people will kind of compare with servers and storage versus nutanix s. So you have to kind of change that mindset and show the real value that hyper convergence provides thes of administration, that high performance reliability and so on on DH. Then, as you make that argument and convince more people again, you have to, you know, start small and expand. But that that was some of the main challenges. I would say >> when you're talking about the migration experience and you said when we formed the first business critical application with it was a long time we tested it. We really worked at it. Now we have a bit more faith that it's that it's going to work out. But can you talk about some best practices that emerged in terms of how to migrate and my great well, that maybe other companies could learn from from Cadence Design System? >> Yeah, well, I would say the best practices aren't unique to unit nutanix. Any migration process has, you know, various phases in terms of planning, testing and so on. And I think just having that discipline well documented, consistent process so that you're not starting fresh every time there's a new migration initiative going on. But I think nutanix makes it easier just given the especially the prison management tool. But I would say it's not particularly unique to your tent. NUTANIX Torto organization just need to be well disciplined in immigration process. >> One of the things that you mentioned software, which is great point that cultural shifts, not a hardware box, and it's probably all the best practices around. Evaluating hardware software is becoming more and more central to it. How do you see it evolving because you got cloud right on the horizon. You got public cloud benefits. They are clear if you're greenfield yet legacy Stop. We have containers containing ization happening as a trend lift and shift versus, you know, evolved life cycle management of APS and workloads, or are now under a new kind of view with software that was changing and, you know, as a as a practitioner in the field. Now, do you look at the evolution of how it is going to change? >> So my side of the house is the infrastructure and operations side, and they tend to be historically kind of manual, you know, different network administrator, storage administrator, system administrations, the administrators that is all changing and all becoming more developer skill sets, scripting automation, things without sort. So I think that's the biggest changes going on in today is kind of changing the skill sets and kind of viewing it as a full stack as opposed to just stories. You're just network. So having that holistic view point having ability, too, develop automation that works across the stack. I think that those those are the changes that traditional infrastructure groups need. Thio adapted. >> While I was talking to a customer yesterday And he was a young young guy, was I think, in this late twenties I'm seeing myself. You know, ten years ago he was in high school or college. So you see a new generation coming up where they gravitate towards Dev ops, right? And so they get that so they don't have that dogma. What? We went with this vendor. So they kind of this new thinking, Any observations that you can share on this younger generation coming inside your new talent that's coming in. That's developer or what they like. What? What's the work style? What they gravitate to what some of the tools they like. That's the mindset. >> So I think they can teach us to be honest way have you know, the older folks like myself have a tendency to look at the way things have always been done. Right? So having the fresh viewpoint is great to kind of come into it with a dead body develops mentality, you know, off jump. But I think I which we should kind of welcome that and take advantage of that. Um you know, for cadence in General Wei are pretty mature company in terms of our personnel we don't have that rapid turnover person of, you know, our team members. So we're trying to actually, you know, we welcome that new talent, eh? So that we can kind of get that, uh, Dev officer mentality in house and kind of mature it ourselves. So we're in the beginning of that journey. >> How do you work together? Because, I mean, you're not that old first of all, but But this This is the time where we have multiple generations together working in the workforce, thes digital natives that we were talking about that and the people who get technology so innate Li grew up with it versus the Gen Xers. The boomers are still there. The gen y's that are emerging and graduating. Now, how is it a challenge at at Cadence to to get all these people working collaboratively productively together? >> Well, Katie, this is an extremely technical company. Uh, referred to our customers, you know, they're all double e, you know, Master's and doctorate engineers. So it's a very technical environment. We try not to really focus on the technology, actually, but to look at, you know, the business objectives, you know? What are we trying to achieve what problems that we're trying to solve. That supposed, Tio. Oh, here's a cool technology. How can we use it? You know, the mindset is a little bit different. We're looking at the business side first and then using technology to solve for those problems. So once you have that focus, regardless of your experience, your age, your background, you work together, you know, to to achieve that end goal. >> What you think about the show. We're here at NUTANIX next Anaheim. What's what's your verdict on so far? The content. Positioning your customer. What's next for you guys? Yeah, very loyal customer. Based on what we found. People love the product. What's next, Joe? >> I'm very impressed. I wasn't expecting it to be this large. You know, I went Teo Local smaller version that was in the area last year. That was pretty impressive, too. But this is amazing. I like it because, you know, I t leaders get sales calls all the time, and we kind of get bombarded. So Tennessee so ignore those. This kind of gives us a chance to at our own pace kind of see who the key partners are. Two new tenants look for opportunities and meet some of these other vendors s. So it's been both educational as well as kind of entertaining. >> Excellent. Well, thank you so much. Farmers for coming on the Q b really appreciated >> my pleasure to meet you. Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have much more of nutanix next here in Anaheim, coming up in just a little bit.