>>In 2011, early Facebook employee and Cloudera co-founder Jeff Ocker famously said the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to get people to click on ads. And that sucks. Let's face it more than a decade later organizations continue to be frustrated with how difficult it is to get value from data and build a truly agile data driven enterprise. What does that even mean? You ask? Well, it means that everyone in the organization has the data they need when they need it. In a context that's relevant to advance the mission of an organization. Now that could mean cutting costs could mean increasing profits, driving productivity, saving lives, accelerating drug discovery, making better diagnoses, solving, supply chain problems, predicting weather disasters, simplifying processes, and thousands of other examples where data can completely transform people's lives beyond manipulating internet users to behave a certain way. We've heard the prognostications about the possibilities of data before and in fairness we've made progress, but the hard truth is the original promises of master data management, enterprise data, warehouses, data, Mars, data hubs, and yes, even data lakes were broken and left us wanting for more welcome to the data doesn't lie, or does it a series of conversations produced by the cube and made possible by Starburst data. >>I'm your host, Dave Lanta and joining me today are three industry experts. Justin Borgman is this co-founder and CEO of Starburst. Richard Jarvis is the CTO at EMI health and Theresa tongue is cloud first technologist at Accenture. Today we're gonna have a candid discussion that will expose the unfulfilled and yes, broken promises of a data past we'll expose data lies, big lies, little lies, white lies, and hidden truths. And we'll challenge, age old data conventions and bust some data myths. We're debating questions like is the demise of a single source of truth. Inevitable will the data warehouse ever have feature parody with the data lake or vice versa is the so-called modern data stack simply centralization in the cloud, AKA the old guards model in new cloud close. How can organizations rethink their data architectures and regimes to realize the true promises of data can and will and open ecosystem deliver on these promises in our lifetimes, we're spanning much of the Western world today. Richard is in the UK. Teresa is on the west coast and Justin is in Massachusetts with me. I'm in the cube studios about 30 miles outside of Boston folks. Welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us. Let's get right into it. You're very welcome. Now here's the first lie. The most effective data architecture is one that is centralized with a team of data specialists serving various lines of business. What do you think Justin? >>Yeah, definitely a lie. My first startup was a company called hit adapt, which was an early SQL engine for IDU that was acquired by Teradata. And when I got to Teradata, of course, Terada is the pioneer of that central enterprise data warehouse model. One of the things that I found fascinating was that not one of their customers had actually lived up to that vision of centralizing all of their data into one place. They all had data silos. They all had data in different systems. They had data on-prem data in the cloud. You know, those companies were acquiring other companies and inheriting their data architecture. So, you know, despite being the industry leader for 40 years, not one of their customers truly had everything in one place. So I think definitely history has proven that to be a lie. >>So Richard, from a practitioner's point of view, you know, what, what are your thoughts? I mean, there, there's a lot of pressure to cut cost, keep things centralized, you know, serve the business as best as possible from that standpoint. What, what is your experience, Joe? >>Yeah, I mean, I think I would echo Justin's experience really that we, as a business have grown up through acquisition, through storing data in different places sometimes to do information governance in different ways to store data in, in a platform that's close to data experts, people who really understand healthcare data from pharmacies or from, from doctors. And so, although if you were starting from a Greenfield site and you were building something brand new, you might be able to centralize all the data and all of the tooling and teams in one place. The reality is that that businesses just don't grow up like that. And, and it's just really impossible to get that academic perfection of, of storing everything in one place. >>Y you know, Theresa, I feel like Sarbanes Oxley kinda saved the data warehouse, you know? Right. But you actually did have to have a single version of the truth for certain financial data, but really for those, some of those other use cases, I, I mentioned, I, I do feel like the industry has kinda let us down. What's your take on this? Where does it make sense to have that sort of centralized approach versus where does it make sense to maybe decentralized? >>I, I think you gotta have centralized governance, right? So from the central team, for things like swans Oxley, for things like security, for certain very core data sets, having a centralized set of roles, responsibilities to really QA, right. To serve as a design authority for your entire data estate, just like you might with security, but how it's implemented has to be distributed. Otherwise you're not gonna be able to scale. Right? So being able to have different parts of the business really make the right data investments for their needs. And then ultimately you're gonna collaborate with your partners. So partners that are not within the company, right. External partners, we're gonna see a lot more data sharing and model creation. And so you're definitely going to be decentralized. >>So, you know, Justin, you guys last, geez, I think it was about a year ago, had a session on, on data mesh. It was a great program. You invited JAK, Dani, of course, she's the creator of the data mesh. And her one of our fundamental premises is that you've got this hyper specialized team that you've gotta go through. And if you want anything, but at the same time, these, these individuals actually become a bottleneck, even though they're some of the most talented people in the organization. So I guess question for you, Richard, how do you deal with that? Do you, do you organize so that there are a few sort of rock stars that, that, you know, build cubes and, and the like, and, and, and, or have you had any success in sort of decentralizing with, you know, your, your constituencies, that data model? >>Yeah. So, so we absolutely have got rockstar, data scientists and data guardians. If you like people who understand what it means to use this data, particularly as the data that we use at emos is very private it's healthcare information. And some of the, the rules and regulations around using the data are very complex and, and strict. So we have to have people who understand the usage of the data, then people who understand how to build models, how to process the data effectively. And you can think of them like consultants to the wider business, because a pharmacist might not understand how to structure a SQL query, but they do understand how they want to process medication information to improve patient lives. And so that becomes a, a consulting type experience from a, a set of rock stars to help a, a more decentralized business who needs to, to understand the data and to generate some valuable output. >>Justin, what do you say to a, to a customer or prospect that says, look, Justin, I'm gonna, I got a centralized team and that's the most cost effective way to serve the business. Otherwise I got, I got duplication. What do you say to that? >>Well, I, I would argue it's probably not the most cost effective and, and the reason being really twofold. I think, first of all, when you are deploying a enterprise data warehouse model, the, the data warehouse itself is very expensive, generally speaking. And so you're putting all of your most valuable data in the hands of one vendor who now has tremendous leverage over you, you know, for many, many years to come, I think that's the story of Oracle or Terra data or other proprietary database systems. But the other aspect I think is that the reality is those central data warehouse teams is as much as they are experts in the technology. They don't necessarily understand the data itself. And this is one of the core tenets of data mash that that jam writes about is this idea of the domain owners actually know the data the best. >>And so by, you know, not only acknowledging that data is generally decentralized and to your earlier point about, so Oxley, maybe saving the data warehouse, I would argue maybe GDPR and data sovereignty will destroy it because data has to be decentralized for, for those laws to be compliant. But I think the reality is, you know, the data mesh model basically says, data's decentralized, and we're gonna turn that into an asset rather than a liability. And we're gonna turn that into an asset by empowering the people that know the data, the best to participate in the process of, you know, curating and creating data products for, for consumption. So I think when you think about it, that way, you're going to get higher quality data and faster time to insight, which is ultimately going to drive more revenue for your business and reduce costs. So I think that that's the way I see the two, the two models comparing and con contrasting. >>So do you think the demise of the data warehouse is inevitable? I mean, I mean, you know, there Theresa you work with a lot of clients, they're not just gonna rip and replace their existing infrastructure. Maybe they're gonna build on top of it, but the, what does that mean? Does that mean the ed w just becomes, you know, less and less valuable over time, or it's maybe just isolated to specific use cases. What's your take on that? >>Listen, I still would love all my data within a data warehouse would love it. Mastered would love it owned by essential team. Right? I think that's still what I would love to have. That's just not the reality, right? The investment to actually migrate and keep that up to date. I would say it's a losing battle. Like we've been trying to do it for a long time. Nobody has the budgets and then data changes, right? There's gonna be a new technology. That's gonna emerge that we're gonna wanna tap into. There's gonna be not enough investment to bring all the legacy, but still very useful systems into that centralized view. So you keep the data warehouse. I think it's a very, very valuable, very high performance tool for what it's there for, but you could have this, you know, new mesh layer that still takes advantage of the things. I mentioned, the data products in the systems that are meaningful today and the data products that actually might span a number of systems. Maybe either those that either source systems, the domains that know it best, or the consumer based systems and products that need to be packaged in a way that be really meaningful for that end user, right? Each of those are useful for a different part of the business and making sure that the mesh actually allows you to lose all of them. >>So, Richard, let me ask you, you take, take Gemma's principles back to those. You got, you know, the domain ownership and, and, and data as product. Okay, great. Sounds good. But it creates what I would argue or two, you know, challenges self-serve infrastructure let's park that for a second. And then in your industry, one of the high, most regulated, most sensitive computational governance, how do you automate and ensure federated governance in that mesh model that Theresa was just talking about? >>Well, it absolutely depends on some of the tooling and processes that you put in place around those tools to be, to centralize the security and the governance of the data. And, and I think, although a data warehouse makes that very simple, cause it's a single tool, it's not impossible with some of the data mesh technologies that are available. And so what we've done at EMI is we have a single security layer that sits on top of our data mesh, which means that no matter which user is accessing, which data source, we go through a well audited well understood security layer. That means that we know exactly who's got access to which data field, which data tables. And then everything that they do is, is audited in a very kind of standard way, regardless of the underlying data storage technology. So for me, although storing the data in one place might not be possible understanding where your source of truth is and securing that in a common way is still a valuable approach and you can do it without having to bring all that data into a single bucket so that it's all in one place. >>And, and so having done that and investing quite heavily in making that possible has paid dividends in terms of giving wider access to the platform and ensuring that only data that's available under GDPR and other regulations is being used by, by the data users. >>Yeah. So Justin mean Democrat, we always talk about data democratization and you know, up until recently, they really haven't been line of sight as to how to get there. But do you have anything to add to this because you're essentially taking, you know, doing analytic queries and with data, that's all dispersed all over the, how are you seeing your customers handle this, this challenge? >>Yeah, I mean, I think data products is a really interesting aspect of the answer to that. It allows you to, again, leverage the data domain owners, people know the data, the best to, to create, you know, data as a product ultimately to be consumed. And we try to represent that in our product as effectively, almost eCommerce, like experience where you go and discover and look for the data products that have been created in your organization. And then you can start to consume them as, as you'd like. And so really trying to build on that notion of, you know, data democratization and self-service, and making it very easy to discover and, and start to use with whatever BI tool you, you may like, or even just running, you know, SQL queries yourself. >>Okay. G guys grab a sip of water. After the short break, we'll be back to debate whether proprietary or open platforms are the best path to the future of data excellence. Keep it right there.

>> Narrator: From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi everybody, This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. We've been following a company called Actifio for quite some time. Now they've really popularized the concept of copy data management. Really innovative Boston based Waltham based company. And with me Brian Regan who's the chief marketing officer and Paul Forte who's the newly minted chief revenue officer of Actifio. Guys great to see you. I wish we were face to face at your June event but this will have to do. >> You're welcome. >> Thanks Dave. >> You bet Dave. >> Yeah, so Brian you've been on theCUBE a bunch. I'm going to start with Paul if that's okay. Paul, let's talk a little bit about your background. You've done a number of stints at a variety of companies. Big companies like IBM and others as well. What attracted you to Actifio? >> Yes Dave I would say in all honesty, I've been a software guy and candidly a data specific leader for many many years. And so IT infrastructure particularly associated around data has always been sort of my forte for on and onwards there. And so Actifio was just smack dab in the middle of that. And so when I was looking for my next adventure I had an opportunity to meet with Ash our CEO and founder and describe and discuss kind of what Actifio was all about. And candidly, the number of connections that we had that were the same. There are a lot of OEM relationships with people that I actually worked with and for some that work for me historically. So it was almost this perfect world. And I'm a Boston guy so it is in my old backyard. And yeah it was a perfect match for what I was looking for. Which was really a small growth company that was trying to get to the next level that had compelling technology in a space that I was super familiar with and could understand and articulate the value proposition. >> Well as we say in Boston, Paulie we got to get you back here. (laughs) >> I know (mumbles) so I'll pack my car. >> (laughs) Yeah. So Brian... >> For 25 years, I still got it. >> let's talk about the climate right now. I mean nobody expected this of course. And it's funny I saw Ash at an event in Boston last fall. We were talking like "Hey, what are you expecting for next year?" "Yeah a little bit of softening" but nobody expected this sort of black swan. But you guys I just got your press release. You put it out. You had a good quarter. You had a record first quarter. What's going on in the marketplace. How are you guys doing? >> Yeah, well I think that today more than ever businesses are realizing that data is what is actually going to carry them through this crisis. And that data whether it's changing the nature of how companies interact with their customers, how they manage through their supply chain and frankly how they take care of their employees, is all very data centric. And so businesses that are protecting that data that are helping businesses get faster access to that data and ultimately give them choice as to where they manage that data. On premises, in the cloud and hybrid configuration. Those are the businesses that are really going to be top of a CIO's mind. I think RQ1 is a demonstration that customers voted with their wallets and they are confident in Actifio as an important part of their data supply chain. >> Paul I want to come back to you. First of all I want to let people know you're an Ex-Army Ranger. So thank you for your service, that's awesome. >> You're welcome (mumbles). >> I was talking to Frank Slootman, I interviewed in the other day and he was sharing with me sort of how he manages and he says "Yeah I manage by a playbook". He's a situational manager and that's something that he learned in the military. Well it's weird. This is a situation. (Paul laughs) And that really is kind of how you're trained. And of course we've never seen anything like this but you're trained to deal with things that you've never seen before. So how you seeing organizations generally, Actifio specifically kind of manage through this crisis. What are some of the moves that you'are advising, recommending? Give us some insight there. >> Yeah, so it's really interesting. It's funny that you mentioned my military background. So I was just having this discussion with one of my leaders the other day. That one of the things that they trained for in the military, is the eventuality of chaos. So when you do an exercise we will literally tap the leader on the shoulder and say okay you are now dead. And without that person being allowed to speak they take a knee and the (mumbles) unit has to go on. And so what happens is you learn by muscle memory like how to react in times of crisis and you know this is a classic example of leadership in crisis. And so it's just interesting. So to me you have a playbook. I think everybody needs to start with a playbook and then start with the plan. I can't remember if it was Mike Tyson but one of my famous quotes was "Plan is good until somebody punches you in the face". (Dave laughs) >> That's the reality of what just happened to business across the globe. This is just a punch in the face. And so you've got a playbook that you rely on and then you have to remain nimble and creative and candidly opportunistic. And from a leadership perspective, I think you can't lose your confidence. Right, so I've watched some of my friends and I've watched some other businesses cripple in the midst of this pandemic because they're afraid instead of looking at this. In my first commentary in our first staff meeting Brian, if I remember it was this, okay so what makes Actifio great in this environment? Not why is it not great? And so we didn't get scared. We jumped right into it. We adjusted our playbook a little bit and candidly we just had a record quarter. And we took down deals. Honestly Dave we took down deals in every single geography around the globe to include Italy. It was insane, it was really fun. >> Okay, so this wasn't just one monster deal that gave you that record quarter. It was really a broad based demand. >> Yeah, so if you dug underneath the covers you would see that we had the largest number of transactions ever in the first quarter. We had the largest average selling price in the first quarter ever. We had the largest contribution from our nano partners and our OEM partners ever. And we had the highest number ever. And so it was really a nice truly balanced performance across the globe and across the size of deal sets and candidly across industries. >> Interesting, you used the term opportunistic and I get right on. You obviously don't want to be chasing ambulances. At the same time, we've talked to a lot of CEOs and essentially what they're doing and I'd like to get your feedback on this Brian. You're kind of reassessing the ideal profile of a customer. You're reassessing your value proposition in the context of the current pandemic. And I noticed that you guys in your press release talked about cyber resiliency. You talked about digital initiatives, data center, transformations etc. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that, Brian. Did you do those things, how did you do those things? What kind of pace were you guys at? How did you do it remotely with everybody working from home? Give us some color on that. >> Sure, and if Ash, if he were here he would probably remind us that Actifio was born in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis. So we have essentially been book ended by two black swans over the last decade. The lessons we learned in 2008 are every bit is as relevant today. Everything starts with cost containment and cost reduction. Hence in protection of the business and so CIOs in the midst of this shock to the system. I think we're very much looking at what are the absolutely vital and critical initiatives and what is a "nice to have" and I'm going to hit pause on nice to have and invest entirely in the critical initiative. And the critical initiatives tended to be around getting people safely working remotely. Getting people safe access to their systems and their applications and their data. And then ultimately it also became about protecting the systems from malicious individuals in the state actors. Unfortunately as we've seen in other times of crisis this is when crime and cyber crime particularly tends to spike, particularly against industries that don't have the strong safeguards in place to really ensure the resiliency in their applications. So we very much went a little bit back to the 2008 playbook around helping people get control of their costs, helping people continue to do the things they need to do at a much more infrastructural light manner. But also really emphasized the fact that if you are under attack or if you are concerned that you're infected but you don't know when, instant access to data and a time machine that can take you back and forth to those points in time is something that is something that is incredibly valuable. >> So let's dig into cyber resiliency. So specifically what is Actifio doing for its customers from a product standpoint, capabilities, maybe it's part of the 10C announcement as well but can you give us some specifics on where you fit in. Let's take that use case, cyber resiliency? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think there's a stack of capabilities when it comes to cyber resiliency. At the lowest level, you need a time machine because most people don't know when they're infected. And so the ability to go back in time, test the recoverability of data, test the validity of the data is step one. Step two is once you found the clean point, being able to resume operations, being able to resume the applications operation instantly or very rapidly is the next phase. And that's something that Actifio was founded on this notion of instant access to data. And then the third phase and this is really where our partnerships really shine is you probably want to go back and mitigate that risk. You want to go back and clean that system. You want to go back and find the infection and eliminate it. And that's where our partnership with IBM for example, resiliency services and their cyber incident recovery solutions which takes the Actifio platform and then wrappers in a complete manage services around it. So they can help the customer not only get their systems and applications back on their feet but clean the systems and allow them to resume operations normally on a much safer and more stable ground. >> Okay, so that's interesting. So Paul was it kind of new adoptions? Was it increases from existing customers combination? Can you talk to that? >> Yeah, totally. So ironically to really come clean the metrics that we had in the first quarter were very similar to do with the metrics that we see historically. So the mix with mean our existing customer base and then our new customer acquisition were very similar to our historical metrics which candidly we were a little surprised by. We anticipated that the majority of our business would come from that safe harbor of your existing customer base. But candidly we had a really nice split which was great which meant that our value proposition was resonating not only with our existing customer base where you would expect it but also in any of our new customers as well who had been evaluating us that either accelerate it or just continue down the path of adoption during the timeframe of COVID-19. Across industries I would say that again there were some industries I would say that pushed pause. And so the ones that you can imagine that accelerated during this past period were the ones you would think of, right? So financial institutions primarily as well as some of the medical. So some of those transactions, healthcare and medical they accelerated along with financial institutions. And then I would say that we did have some industries that pushed pause. You can probably guess what some of those are. Among the majority of those were the ones that were dealing with the small and midsize businesses or consumer-facing businesses, things like retail and stuff like that. Well we typically do have a pretty nice resonance and a really nice value proposition but there were definitely some transactions that we saw basically just pause. Like we're going to come back. But overall yeah the feedback was just in general. It felt like any other quarter and it felt like just pretty normal. As strange as that sounds. 'Cause I know speaking to a lot of my friends in peer companies, peer software companies, they didn't have that experience but we did pretty well. >> That's interesting, you're right. Certain industries, airlines, I'm interviewing a CIO of a major resort next week. Really interested to hear how they're dealing with this but those are obviously depressed and they've dialed everything down. But we were one of the first to report that work from home pivot, it didn't, it didn't buffer the decline in IT spending that were expected to be down maybe as much as 5% this year but it definitely offset it. What about Cloud? We're seeing elevated levels in Cloud demand. Guys have offerings there. What are you seeing in Cloud guys? >> Do you want to take it Brian? >> Yeah, I'll start and then Paul please weigh in. I think that the move to the cloud that we've been witnessing and the acceleration of the move to cloud that we've been we've been witnessing over the past several years probably ramped up in intensity over the last two months. The projects that might have been on the 18 to 24 month roadmap have of all of a sudden been accelerated into maybe this year of our roadmap. But in terms of the wholesale everything moves to Cloud and I abandoned my on-premises estate. I don't think we've seen that quite yet. I think that the world is still hybrid when it comes to Cloud. Although I do think that the beneficiaries of this are probably the non-number one and number two Cloud providers but the rest of the hyper-scalers who are fighting for market shares because now they have an opportunity to perhaps, Google for example, a strategic partner of ours has a huge offering when it comes to enabling work from home and the remote work. So leveraging that as a platform and then extending into their enterprise offerings, I think it gives them a wedge that the Amazon might not have for example. So it's an acceleration of interest but I think it's just a continuation of the trend that we've been seeing for years. >> Yeah, and I would add a little bit Dave. The IBM held their Think Conferences past week. I don't know if you had an opportunity to participate. They're one of our OEM partners and... >> Dave: Oh Yeah, we covered it. >> When our CEO presented his opening his opening remarks it was really about digital transformation and he really put it down to two things and said any business that's trying to transform is either talking about hybrid Clouds or they're talking about AI and machine learning. And that's kind of it, right? And so every digital business is talking in one of those categories. And when I look to Q1 it's interesting that we really didn't see anything other than as Brian talked about all of the cloud business which is some version of an acceleration. But outside of that the customers that are in those industries that are in position to accelerate and double down during this opportunity did so and those that did not just peeled back a little bit. But overall I would agree with IBM's assessment of the market that those are kind of the two hotspots and hybrid Cloud is hot and the good news is, we've got a nice value prop right in the middle of it. >> Yeah, Alvin Chris has talked about, and he has it, maybe not a thing but he talked earlier in his remarks on the earnings call just in public statements that IBM must win the battle the architectural battle, the hybrid Cloud. And also that he wants to lead with a more technical sell essentially, which is to mean those two things are great news for you guys, obviously Red Hat is the linchpin of that. I want to ask you guys about your conference, Data-Driven. So we were there last year it was a really great intimate event. Of course you can't have the physical events anymore. So you've pushed to September or you're going all digital? Give us the update on that Brian. >> We're eager to have theCube participate in our September event. So I'm sure we'll be talking more about that in the coming weeks, but also >> Dave: Awesome, love it. (Brian laughs) >> Exactly, so you can tell Frank to put that in there. So we've been participating in some of the other conferences most notably last week learning a lot and really trying to cherry pick the best ideas and the best tactics we're putting on the digital event. I think that as we look to September and as we look to put on a really rich digital event one of the things that is first and foremost in our minds is we want to actually produce more on demand digital content particularly from a technology standpoint. Our technology sessions last year were oversubscribed. The digital format allows people to stream whenever they can and frankly as many sessions as they might want. So I think we can be far more efficient in terms of delivering technical content for the users of our technology. And then we're also eager to have as we've done with data driven in years past, our customers tell the story of how they're using data. And this year certainly I think we're going to hear a lot of stories about in particular how they use data during this incredible crisis and hopefully renewal from the crisis. >> Well one of my favorite interviews last year at your show was the guy from DraftKings. So hopefully they'll be back on and we'll have some football to talk about, well let's hope. >> Amen. >> I Want to end with just sort of this notion of we've been so tactical the last eight weeks. Right? You guys too I'm sure. Just making sure you're there for customers, making sure your employees are okay. But as we start to think about coming out of this into a Post-COVID Era and it looks like it's going to be with us for a while but we getting back to Quaseye opening. So I'm hearing hybrid is here to stay. We agree for sure. Cyber resiliency is very interesting. I think one of the things we've said is that companies may sub-optimize near term profitability to make sure that they've got the flexibility and business resiliency in place. That's obviously something that is I think good news for you guys but I'll start with Paul and then maybe Brian you can bring us home. How do you see this sort of emergence from this lockdown and into the Post-COVID Era? >> Yeah, this is a really interesting topic for me. In fact I've had many discussions over the last couple of weeks with some of our investors as well as with our executive staff. And so my personal belief is that the way buying and selling has occured, for IT specifically at the enterprise level, it's about to go through a transformation, no different than we watched the transformation of SAS businesses when you basically replaced a cold calling sales person with an inside and inbound marketing kind of effort followed up with SDR and BDR. Because what we're finding is that our clients now are able to meet more frequently because we don't have the friction of airplane ride or physical building to go through. And so that whole thing has been removed from the sales process. So it's interesting to me that one of the things that I'm starting to see is that the amount of activity that our sales organization is doing and the amount of physical calls that were going on, they happen to be online. However, way higher than what we can (mumbles), you coupled that with the cost savings of not traveling around the globe and not being in offices. And I really think that those companies that embrace this new model, are going to find ways to penetrate more customers in a less expensive way. And I do believe that the professional sales enterprise sales person of tomorrow is going to look different than it looks today. And so I'm super excited to be in a company that is smack dab in the middle of selling to enterprise clients and watching us learn together how we're going to buy, sell and market to each other in this post-COVID way. 'Cause the only thing I really do know it's just not going to be the way it used to be. What is it going to look like? I think all of us are placing bets and I don't think anybody has the answer yet. But it's going to look different for sure. >> They're very, very thoughtful comments. And so Brian, you know our thinking is the differentiation in the war. Gets one in digital. How is that affecting your marketing and your things around that? >> We fortunately decided coming into 2020, our fiscal 21, that we were actually going to overweigh digital anyway. We felt that, it was far more effective, we were seeing far better conversion rates. We saw way better ROI in terms of very targeted additive digital campaigns or general purpose ABM type of efforts. So our strategy had essentially been set and what this provided us is the opportunity to essentially redirect all of the other funds into digital. So we have essentially a two pronged marketing attack, right now, which is digital creating inbounds and BDRs that are calling on those inbounds that are created digitally. And so it's going to be a really interesting transition back when physical events if and when they do actually back and spawn, how much we decide to actually go back into that. To some extent we've talked about this in the past Dave. The physical events and the sheer spectacle and the sheer audacity of having to spend a million dollars just to break through that was an unsustainable model. (laughs) And so I think this is hastening perhaps the decline or demise of really silly marketing expense and getting back to telling customers what they need to know to help and assist their buying journey and their investigation journey into new technology. >> There in the IT world is hybrid. And I think the events world is also going to be hybrid. Intimate, they're going to live on but they're also going to have a major digital component to them. I'm very excited that there's a lot of learnings now in digital especially around events and by September, a lot of the bugs are going to be worked out. You know we've been going, feels like 24/7, but really excited to have you guys on. Thanks so much, really looking forward to working with you in September at Data-Driven. So guys thanks a lot for coming on theCUBE. >> Oh my gosh, thank you Dave. So nice to be here, Thank you. >> All right, stay safe. >> Thanks Dave, always a pleasure. You too. >> Thank you everybody, thank you. And thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation [Music] hi buddy this is Dave Volante and welcome to this cute conversation you know the we've been following a company called Activia for quite some time now they they've really popularized the concept of copy data management really innovative Boston based Waltham based company and with me Brian Regan who's the chief marketing officer and all 40 who's the newly minted chief revenue officer of actifi Oh guys great to see you I wish we were face to face that you're you're you're June event but this will have to do yeah you bet yeah so you know Brian you've been on the cube a bunch I'm gonna start with Paul if that's okay Paul you know just let's talk a little bit about your your background you've you've done a number of stance at a variety of companies you know big companies like IBM and others as well what attracted you to Activia in all honesty I've been a software guy and candidly a data specific leader for many many years and so IT infrastructure particularly associated around data has always been sort of my forte for fun on words there and and so Activia was just smack dab in the middle of that right and so when I was looking for my next adventure you know I had an opportunity to to meet with a shower CEO and Founder and describe and discuss kind of what activity was all about and candidly the the number of connections that we had that were the same a lot of our OEM relationships with people that I actually worked with and for and some that worked for me historically so it was almost this perfect world right and I'm a Boston guy so it was in my in my old backyard and it was just a perfect yeah it was a perfect match for what I was looking for which was really a small growth company that was trying to you know get to the next level that had compelling technology in a space that I was super familiar with and understanding and articulate the value proposition well as we're saying in Boston Paulie we got to get you back here I know I pack my cock let's talk about the let's talk about the climate right now I mean nobody expected this of course I mean it's funny I was I saw ash and an event in in Boston last fall we were talking like hey what do you expected for next year yeah a little bit of softening but you know nobody expected this sort of Black Swan but you guys I just got your press release you put out you had a good you had a good quarter you had a record first quarter um what's going on in the marketplace how you guys doing yeah well I think that today more than than ever businesses are realizing that data is what is actually going to carry them through this crisis and that data whether it's changing the nature of how companies interact with their customers how they manage through their supply chain and in frankly how they take care of their employees is all very data-centric and so businesses that are protecting that data that are helping businesses get faster access to that data and ultimately give them choice as to where they manage that data on-premises in the cloud and hybrid configuration those are the businesses that are really going to be top of a CIOs mind I think our q1 is a demonstration that customers voted with their wallets in their confidence in ectopy Oh has an important part of their data supplied nopal I want to come back to you first of all your your other people know you're next you're next Army Ranger so thank you for your service that's awesome you know I was talking to Frank's lute man we interviewed me other day and he was sharing with me sort of how he manages and and he says the other managed by a playbook he's a situational manager and that's something that he learned in the military well this is weird this is a situation okay and that really is kind of how you're trained and and of course we've never seen anything like this but you're trained to deal with things that you've never seen before so how are you seeing organizations generally actifi Oh specifically going to manage through this process what are some of the moves that you're advising recommending give us some insight there yeah so I'm it's really interesting it's a it's funny that you mentioned my military background I was just having this discussion with one of my leaders the other day that you know one of the things that they trained for in the military is the eventualities of chaos right and so when you when you do an exercise they we will literally tap the leader on the shoulder and say okay you're now dead and without that person being allowed to speak they take a knee and the unit has to go on and so what happens is you you learn by muscle memory like how to react in time suffice it or and you know this is a classic example of leadership and crisis and so um so it's just it's just interesting like so to me you have a playbook I think everybody needs to start with a playbook and then start with a plan I can't remember if it was Mike Tyson but one of them one of my famous quotes was you know let you know plan is good until somebody punches you in the face that's the reality of what just happened the business across the globe is it just got punched in the face and so you got a playbook that you rely on and then you have to remain nimble and creative and candidly opportunistic and from a leadership perspective I think you can't lose your confidence right so I've watched some of my friends and of what some other businesses crippled in the midst of this and I'm because they're afraid instead of instead of looking at this in my first commentary that our first staff meeting Brian if I remember it was this okay so what makes active feel great in disembark like not why is it not great right and so we didn't get scared we jumped right into it we you know we adjusted our playbook a little bit and candidly we just had a record quarter and we just down here the honestly date we took down deals in every single geography around the globe to include Italy I mean so it was insane it was really fun okay so this wasn't just one monster deal that gave you that record Porter is really a broad-based the demand yeah so if you you know if you dug underneath the covers you would see that we had the largest number of transactions ever in the first quarter we had the largest average selling price in the first quarter ever we had the largest contribution from our panel partners and our OEM partners ever and we had the highest number ever and so it was a it was really a nice truly balanced performance across the globe and across the size of deal sets and candidly across industries interesting I mean you use the term opportunistic and and I think you're right on I mean you obviously you don't want to be chasing ambulances at the same time you know we've talked to a lot of CEOs and essentially what they're doing and I'd like to get your feedback on this Brian you you you're kind of reassessing the ideal profile of a customer you're reassessing your value proposition in the context of the current pandemic and and I noticed that you guys in your press release talked about cyber resiliency you talked about digital initiatives you know data center transformations etc so maybe you could talk a little bit about that Brian did you do those things how did you do those things what kind of pace were you guys at how did you do it remotely with everybody working from home give us some color on that sure and you know Ashley if you were here you would probably remind us that Activia was born in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis so we we have essentially been bookended by two black swans over the last decade the and the lessons we learned in 2008 are every bit as as relevant today everything starts with cost containment in hospital and in protection of the business and so cio is in the midst of this shock to the system I think we're very much looking at what are the absolutely vital critical initiatives and what is a nice to have and I'm going to pause on my step and invest entirely in the critical mission and the critical initiatives tended to be around getting people safely working for remotely getting people safe access to their systems and their applications in their data and then ultimately it also became about protecting the systems from malicious individuals and state actors up unfortunately as we've seen in other times of crisis this is when crime and cyber crime particularly tends to spike particularly against industries that don't have the strong safeguards in place to to really ensure the resiliency their applications so we very much went a little bit back to the 2008 playbook around helping people get control of their costs helping people continue to do the things they need to do at a much more infrastructure light manner but also really emphasize the fact that if you are under attack or if you are concerned that you're infected but you don't know when you know instant access to data and a time machine that can take you back and forth to those points in time is something that is incredibly valuable so so let's >> cyber resiliency so specifically what is aekta video doing for its customers from a product standpoint capabilities maybe it's part of the the 10 see announcement as well but but can you can you give us some specifics on where you fit in let's take that use case cyber resiliency yeah absolutely so I think there's there's a staff of capabilities when it comes to cyber resiliency at the lowest level you need a time machine because most people don't know when they're in fact and so the ability to go back in time test the recoverability of data test the validity of the data is step one step two is once you've found the clean point being able to resume operations being able to resume the applications operation instantly or very rapidly is the next phase and that's something that Activia was founded on this notion of instant access to data and then the third phase and this is really where our partnerships really shine is you probably want to go back and mitigate that risk you want to go back and clean that system you want to go back and find the infection and eliminate it and that's where our partnership with IBM freezing resiliency services and their cyber incident recovery solution which takes the activity of platform and then rappers and a complete managed services around it so they can help the customer not only get their their systems and applications back on their feet but clean the systems and allow them to resume operations normally on a much safer and more stable okay so so that's interesting so Paul Paul was it kind of new adoptions was it was it increases from existing customers kind of a combination and you talk to that yeah totally so like ironically to really come clean we are the metrics that we had in the first quarter were very similar through the metrics that we see historically so the mix need our existing customer base and then our new customer acquisition were very similar to our historical metrics which candidly we were a little surprised by we anticipated um that the majority of our business would come from that safe harbor of your existing customer base but candidly we had a really nice split which was great which meant that you know a value proposition was resonating not only with our existing customer base where you would expect it but also in in any of our new customers as well who had been evaluating us that either accelerated or or just continue down the path of adoption during the time frame of Koba 19 across industries I would say that again um there was there were there were some industries I would say that pushed pause and so the ones that you can imagine that accelerated during during this past period were the ones you would think of right so financial institutions primarily as well as some some of the medical so some of those transactions healthcare and medical they accelerated along with financial institutions and then I would say that that we did have some industries that push pause and you can probably guess what some of those are a majority of those were the ones that we're dealing with the small and mid-sized businesses or consumer facing businesses things like retail stuff like that where we typically do have a pretty nice residence in a really nice value proposition but there were there were definitely some transactions that we saw basically just pause like we're going to come back but overall the yeah the feedback was just in general it felt like any other quarter and it felt like just pretty normal as strange as that sounds because I know speaking to a lot of my friends and gear companies your software companies they didn't have that experience but we did pretty well that's interesting I mean you're right I mean certain industries Airlines I'm interviewing a cio of major resort next week you know really interested to hear how they're you know dealing with this but those those are obviously depressed and they've dialed everything down but but we've we were one of the first to report that work from home pivot it didn't it didn't you know buffer the decline in IT spending that were expecting to be down you know maybe as much as 5% this year but it definitely offset it what about cloud we're seeing elevated levels in cloud demand guys you know have offerings there what are you seeing in cloud guys you want that yeah I'll start and then fall please please weigh in I think that'd be the move to the cloud that we've been witnessing and the acceleration of the MOOC table that we've been whipped over the past several years probably ramped up in intensity over the last two months The Improv been on the you know 18 to 24 month road map have all of a sudden been accelerated into maybe this year but in terms of the wholesale you know everything moves to cloud and I abandoned my on-premises estate I I don't think we've seen that quite yet I think the the world is still hybrid when it comes to cloud although I do think that the beneficiaries of this are probably the the non number one or number two cloud providers but the rest of the hyper scalers who are fighting for market share because now they have an opportunity to perhaps google for example a strategic partner of ours has a you know a huge offering when it comes to enabling work home and remote work so leveraging that as a platform and then extending into their enterprise offerings I think gives them a wedge that the you know Amazon might not have so this it's an acceleration of interest but I think it's just a continuation of the trend of seeing four years yeah and I would add a little bit if the you know IBM held their think conference this past week I don't know if you had an opportunity to participate there one of our OEM partners and oh yeah because you know when our the CEO presented his kind of opening his opening remarks it was really about digital transformation and he really he really kind of put it down to two things and said you know any business that's trying to transform is either talking about hybrid cloud but they're talking about AI and machine learning and that's kind of it right and so every digital business is talking in one of those categories and so when I look 2q1 it's interesting that we really didn't see anything other than as brian talked about all the cloud business which is some version of an acceleration but outside of that the customers that are in those industries that are in position to accelerate and double down during this opportunity didn't so and those that did not you know kind of just peeled back a little bit but overall I still I would agree with with ibm's assessment of the market that you know those are kind of the two hot spots and have a cloud is hot and the good news is we've got a nice guy operating Molloy yeah Arvind Krista talked about the the in and it has it maybe not I think but he talked earlier in his remarks on the earnings call just in Publix Davis that IBM must win the battle the architectural battle the hybrid cloud and also that he wants to lead with a more technical sell essentially which is submitted to me those those two things are great news for you guys obviously you know Red Hat is the linchpin of that I want to ask you guys about your your conference data-driven so we were there last year it was a great really great intimate event of course you know you hand up the physical events anymore so you've pushed to September you're going all digital would give us the update on on that program we're um we're eager to have the cube participate in our September event so I'm sure we'll be talking more about that in the coming weeks but awesome we love it we exactly so you can tell Frank to put that so we we've been participating in some of the other conferences I think most notably last week learning a lot and and really trying to cherry pick the best ideas and the best tactics for putting on a digital event I think that as we look to September and as we look to put on a really rich digital event one of the things that is I think first and foremost in our minds is we want to actually produce more on-demand digital content particularly from a technology standpoint our technology sessions last year were oversubscribed the digital format allows people to stream whenever they can and frankly as many sessions as they as they might so I think we can be far more efficient in terms of delivering technical content or the users of our technology and then we're also eager to have as we've done with data driven in the years past our customers tell the story of how they're using data and this year certainly I think we're going to hear a lot of stories about in particular how they use data during this incredible you know crisis and and hopefully renewal from crisis well one of my favorite interviews last year your show is the the guys from draft King so hopefully they'll be back on it will have some football to talk about let's hope I mean I want it I want to end with just sort of this notion of you know we've been so tactical the last eight weeks right I'm you guys too I'm sure just making sure you're there for customers making sure your employees are ok but as we start to think about coming out of this you know into a post probe Adaro it looks like it's gonna be with us for a while but we're getting back the you know quasi opening so I'm hearing you know hybrid is here to stay we agree for sure cyber resiliency is very interesting I think you know one of the things we've said is that that companies may sub optimize near-term profitability to make sure that they've got the flexibility and resilience business resiliency in place you know that's obviously something that is I think good news for you guys but but I'll start with Paul and then maybe Brian you can bring us home how do you see this sort of emergence from this lockdown and into the post ghovat era yeah so this is a really interesting topic for me in fact I've had many discussions over the last couple weeks with some of our investors as well as our executive staff and so my personal belief is that the way buying and selling has occurred for IT specifically at the enterprise level is about to go through a transformation no different than we watched the transformation of SAS businesses when you basically replace the cold-calling salesperson with an inside and you know inbound marketing kind of effort followed up with SDR and vdr because what we're finding is that our clients now are able to meet more frequently because we don't have the friction of airplane ride or or physical building to go through and so like that that whole thing has been removed from the sales process and so it's interesting to me that one of the things that I'm starting to see is that the amount of activity that our sales organization is doing and the amount of physical calls that were going on they happen to be online however you couple that with the cost savings of not traveling around the globe and not being in offices and and I really think that those companies that embrace this new model are gonna find ways to penetrate more customers in a less expensive way and I do believe that the professional sales enterprise salesperson of tomorrow is gonna look at then it looks today and so I'm super excited to be in a company that is smack dab in the middle of selling to enterprise clients and and watching us learn together how we're gonna buy sell and market to each other in this post public way because I I'm the only thing I really do know it's just not gonna be the way it used to be what is it gonna look like I think all of us are placing bets and I don't think anybody has the answer yet but it's gonna look different for sure they're very very thoughtful comments and so Brian you know our thinking is the differentiation and the war yes it gets one in digital how is that affecting you know sort of your marketing and your thing around that we we fortunately decided coming into 2020 our fiscal 21 that we were actually going to overweight digital anyway we felt that it was far more effective we were seeing far better conversion rates we saw you know way better ROI in terms of very targeted tentative digital campaigns or general-purpose ABM type of efforts so our strategy had essentially been set and and what this provided us is the opportunity to essentially redirect all of the other funds individually so you know we have essentially a two-pronged marketing you know attack Frank now which is you know digital creating inbounds and B DRS that are calling on those in bounds that are created digital and so it's a you know it's going to be a really interesting transition back when physical events if and when they do actually come back into form you know how much we decide to actually go back into that that been I think that you know to someone to some extent we've talked about this in the past II you know the physical events and the the sheer spectacle and this year you know audacity of having to spend a million dollars just to break through that was an unsustainable model and so I think this is this is hastening perhaps the decline or demise of really silly marketing expense and getting back to telling telling customers what they need to know to help their an assist their buying journey in their investigation journey into a new technology I mean the IT world is hybrid and I think the events world is also going to be hybrid to me nice intimate events you know they're gonna live on but they're also gonna have a major digital component to them I'm very excited that you know we're a lot of learnings now in digital especially around events and by September the a lot of the the bugs are gonna be worked out you know we've been going to it so it feels like 24/7 but really excited to have you guys on thanks so much really looking forward to working with you in in September it's data-driven so guys thanks a lot for coming on the cube oh my gosh thank you Dave so nice it's so nice to be here thank you alright pleasure you did thank you everybody thank you and thanks for watching this is Dave Volante for the cube and we'll see you next time [Music]

(energetic, playful techno music) [Voiceover] - Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> We are live here at the Sands Expo, one of eight venues that are actually here for AWS re:Invent this week as we continue our three day coverage here with you Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday as well, live from Las Vegas here on the CUBE. Along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls, and we're now joined by Phil Tee, who is the CEO and co-founder of Moodsoft. Phil, good to see you this afternoon. >> Great to be with you, thank you for inviting me along. >> You bet, nice to have you. In fact, I'm going to be the only guy without a charming accent on this set as a matter of fact. A UK and an Aussie here. Your world's data, right? And it kind of reminds me of the old movie Jaws when Robert says we're going to need a bigger boat, right? AI ops, is that your bigger boat? Is that how you're handling this world of data? >> I think that's exactly spot on and one of the things we observe at Moodsoft with our customers is just this crazy complexity that they have to deal with. I mean, we cover everything from large financials, telephone companies, e-commerce businesses, and the drive to adopt agile and cloud and software defined in the the enterprise has driven complexity to the point where the poor old human brain is just out of luck, right? The unaided "I'll figure it out by myself" approach, dead in the water, and you've got to use this artificial intelligence approach precisely as your "bigger boat" to go catch that shark. >> Right. So tell us, there's a lot of hype around AI, and machine learning, and all of these different buzzwords are getting thrown around. Dial us in a little bit. Explain what you mean by AI in the context you're talking about things with Moodsoft. >> So, I think that's very perceptive. There's a tweet going around at the moment which describes the difference between machine learning and AI as, if it's written in Python it's probably machine learning, if it's on a Powerpoint deck it's probably AI. Which is kind of funny, but to the point. And there is a ton of hype going around artificial intelligence. There are some purists who claim there is no such thing as AI and everything we talk about today is really machine learning or data driven algorithms. And there's some truth in that. Really, what we mean by AI is the full panoply of both feature detection, you know, looking for patterns that are not obvious to the human eye all the way through to deep learning, neural nets, convolutional neural nets, where you are training a system to recognize features of the data as representative of something underlying that you're hunting for. So in the case of AI ops it's looking for the cause of, or looking for the presence of, a potential service-impacting outage in the data that we monitor, in the events. But one thing it's not going to do is, it's not going to unplug itself from the internet and come and kill you anytime soon. It's really quite benign and very useful to our customers with what they deal with. >> So, to that point, because you have so much data, and it seems like, I hate to say, most of it isn't needed or most of it isn't of value, but a lot of it isn't, if not most. How do you then decern, how do you assess value and assign value to what really is important and then, put it to use today, when you're getting so much more information than you were even a year ago? >> So just to put a little bit of context on the amount of data, way back before the cloud and virtualization, a typical enterprise, a high event rate would have been 100, 200, events a second. Nowadays, in an average customer of ours, you add a zero or two to that rate, maybe even three. And it's one of the reasons why the legacy systems really struggle with that data. So, job one is, if you accept, and I certainly do, that most of that data is junk. Most of it is inconsequential. You've got to have an algorithmic way of getting rid of that. You know, the old-fashioned way was creating lists of "ignore it because it's a certain severity", "ignore it because it comes from this list of hosts", you know, the whole listing approach. What we do is we use information science. So we can measure the semantic content, and the informational content, of an event to work out whether it's telling us something of import. And we use that technique with great effectiveness to eliminate as much as ninety, ninety-five, percent of the inbound data as effectively affecting nothing. So that narrows the data lake, you feel, down to a point where we can process it in real time through much more computer-intensive AI algorithms to kind of get that high-quality indication of an instance or a potential instance. >> A lot of machine learning and AI is based on learning from history, so, "we've seen all this stuff before and we know what that means", or, even encouraging the machines to go and look at the historical data and then pull out the details as you said. Even things that a human might miss, you'll look at that data and then learn new things. How does that work when we're doing all of this innovation? When there's all of this change and novelty coming in, how does the AI system cope with that kind of environment? >> So, you have to have a dual approach. I mean, I guess everyone's familiar with Mikolas Nassim Taleb's book, The Black Swans. He was trying to explain why it is that you can get a bunch of Nobel Prize winners in a room to design a hedge fund and it can still go bankrupt in the blink of and eye, like the long-term capital management. And the truth of the matter is, yes, an awful lot of the techniques that are supervised and based upon a training set are vulnerable to the "unknown unknowns" to misquote Donald Rumsfeld, and that's why we use a combination of unsupervised feature detection and supervised learning. The unsupervised feature detection just knows something as an unusual, highly correlated, pattern or feature in the data and needs no prior understanding of what's going on. Now, interestingly, there are some hybrid techniques now. You may have heard of something called transfer learning, which is the idea that you partially train a neural net on some kind of standard corpus. It'd be like the stuff that you already know and adapting that sort of partially trained net to something that is literally very, very, very adapted to the system that it's monitoring, it does that very quickly rather than having to wait for a certain critical amount of data before the net is converged. And so those sort of techniques, which we also experiment with at Moodsoft, I think are going to be interesting directions for us in the future with our platform, but there's maybe a hundred PhDs a week given out in AI and machine learning these days. It's definitely getting a lot of focus and there's a ton of innovation that's coming down the line. One thing that we're particularly committed to is shortening the distance between when something's invented and when we can get it into our customer's hands. >> There's usually quite a lag, historically, it's about ten years before someone discovers something and then it actually makes it into the business world so if we could shorten that cycle that would be quite useful. >> We know an academic called professor Maggie Bowden who's just getting ready to retire and she was one of the original authors of the neural net papers in the 1960's, so that kind of gives you an idea of the lag, it could be many, many, decades and it's a shame because the truth of the matter is the pressure on all the people coming to a show like this that want to benefit from the public cloud, new ways of thinking about the application development toolchain, they don't have time to wait around for that innovation to come to them. We've got to drive it a lot faster and, certainly, we view that as one of our missions at Moodsoft, as being passionately involved and sort of shortening that gap between innovation and a production implementation as something really cool. >> So what have you seen at the show so far that you think you want to take to your customers and say, "oh, actually, this is happening and you need to get on to this now"? >> One thing I've observed here is, I guess if we would've been here two years ago, nobody was talking about AI ops. I mean essentially the entirety of how people looked at the cloud was "same old stuff, just lives somewhere different, we can use all of the old techniques". You walk around here, there's a bunch of startups, more established companies, recognizing that a new approach is necessary and my sense of it is that this market which, I mean, let's be honest, we were pretty lonely in it two or three years ago, is starting to feel like it's a little more populated and that's goodness, we're very happy about that, so that is definitely a take away. You know, to go to customers and say "this is no longer bleeding edge, it's simply leading edge". >> Not just a gap in the market, there is actually a market in that gap. >> You're the bigger boat. >> Well, we hope so. >> Phil, thanks for being with us. We appreciate your time here on the CUBE and once again, have a great show and we do thank you for your time, sir. >> Thank you very much indeed. Great talking to you both. >> Phil Tee from Moodsoft joining us here on the CUBE. We're at AWS re:Invent and we're at the Sands, and we're in Las Vegas. (energetic, playful techno music)