(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, my host Lisa Martin here, with some keynote guests who are on the big stage here at re:Invent, Linda Jojo, Chief Digital Officer at United Airlines. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey, great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So up on the big stage, big transformation story in front of 27,000 people, on the virginity, >> Linda: That many? >> that's the number, >> It's a big room >> pretty small for Amazon web services, nearly 60,000, but you know, pandemic and all but great presentation. What was the, what was the transformation story for United? >> Well, I think there's two parts of the story. One is just how fast everything happened, you know. February of 2020, we're having a kickoff meeting with AWS about how we're going to really transform the airline and a month later the world shut down. And so it changed, we went from thinking about the future to really just trying to make it through the next few weeks. But as soon as that happened, we knew that we had to take advantage of the crisis and think about everything from what can we do with our onboard products, we've changed out a lot of things about our airplanes, we've doubled down on sustainability. We're really focused on the diversity of our workforce, but also we really said, what can we do about transforming our technology? And that's where AWS came in because one of the silver linings for our tech team was that we didn't always have a plane in the air. And so when that happens, we had no time to make a change and back it out, if it doesn't work or heaven forbid have an outage. We a little bit longer. So we got aggressive and we made a lot of changes and made a lot of move to AWS Cloud. >> Talk to me a little bit about the cultural shift involved. I mean, you talked about, you know, everybody was just scrambling. >> Yeah. So quickly, there was this instant, what do we do? How do we pivot? How do we survive mode? But from a cultural perspective, it sounds like you took, you leveraged the situation to be able to make a lot of improvements across the United, but culturally that's, that's challenging to get all those folks on board at the same time. How did you facilitate that? >> Well, you know what, the story I'm going to tell isn't all just about me. It's about the incredible team that we have, but you know, folks got focused and Amazon talks about having a two pizza team about how if your team should be no bigger than what can be fed by two pizzas, and that really keeps the decision-making streamlined and fast. For us since we were now all working from home, we called it a one screen team. And so the idea was no more than a number of people that could fit on that video call was the idea. So that was the number of people that we had on our teams. We branded them even call them scrappy teams, which was really kind of fun. And those are the groups that just kind of got their job done. And you know, the first part of their job was every week or every day it seemed like we were getting new rules from the U.S government about what countries you couldn't fly to. And it was chaotic. It was confusing for customers and frankly, our, that one screen team, they were up like every night making modifications to who could check in online and who couldn't. And we said when it's time to open back up, we can't, we got to do this better. And so that group came up with something we now call the Travel-Ready Center. Which is really pretty incredible. What you can do now is first of all, when you book your flight, we'll tell you what you need to fly. You need this type of a COVID test, this many days in advance. This is what fully vaccinated means in the country you're going to. And so this was the kind of vaccine card we need to see. You upload it all. We use Amazon SageMaker and we have machine learning models that actually now will within seven seconds validate that you're ready to fly. And what that means is just like always, you can get your boarding pass before you get to the airport. Now, if you guys travel a lot, I hope you still do, >> Yeah. what that means is that you can actually bypass the lobby of the airport and all the document checking that's going on because your travel ready. So customers love it. Gate agents love it too, because gate agents, the rules are changing so fast. They don't, you know, and they work the flight to Tel Aviv one day and the flight to Paris the next and the rules are different. And maybe in between, they changed. So having the software actually figured that out is what helps. >> So very dynamic and new innovations popped out of this pandemic. What else did Amazon help you with? Was there other Amazon innovations that you guys gravitated to SageMaker was one, what were some of the other? >> Yeah. You know, honestly, the team uses a lot of the tools and a lot of different ways. I would say the other big one was DynamoDB, and some of the things that we did to actually migrate some of our core systems to Amazon and actually, you know, instead of making phoning home to data centers all the time, we're now going right to the Cloud and getting some, some really great performance out of that. >> And, and, and the travel thing that you guys did that was came out of the innovation from the teams. >> Yeah. >> is there any other, other examples that popped out from you guys? >> Yeah. Well, I think another one is something that we call Agent on Demand. Agent on Demand is where you used it when you had to talk to an agent in the airport, you'd go get in line somewhere. And sometimes it was a long line, right? Because there's only two people there. And so the first thing we did was we made sure the technologies they used worked on a phone or an iPad. So now we weren't limited by the number of, of stations at the gate. The next thing we is that we made it QR code enabled. And now what customers can do is they can scan the QR code and they get a live agent, like a FaceTime call on their, on their phone. They can do it from anywhere from their seat at the gate or in line for a coffee, and they can solve their problem right there. And those agents, by the way, now maybe there's a snowstorm going on in Chicago, but the agents are in Houston where it's sunny. And so we can actually leverage the fact that those agents are there to help our customers. >> So you've got the user experience, you did some innovation. How about the operational things, I noticed when I traveled the United, the packaging's different ,the greetings are different. I get why all these operational impacts happened to the whole supply chain.(laughing) >> Yeah. Well, you know, the technology's great, but what makes you remember United are the people that you're going to interact with. And so we really focused on service for our, for our employees. And how do we give them information in the palm of their hand to, to treat you in a very personal way. We know that you flew last week and where you went. We know that you just made a million miles. And so we can give that information to our flight attendant and they can provide a really great experience. >> That experience is key. These days. One of the things that's been in short supply, during the pandemic is patience. And obviously you guys have to be very cognizant of that with some of the things that have happened across all the airlines and passengers not having the patience that they normally would have. >> Oh yeah. That is a real kudos to our flight attendants. And what we did with them, you know, wearing a mask is required on the aircraft and, you know, some folks don't like to be told what to do anywhere, right? And so people don't like that. Our flight attendants learned how to deescalate the situation and deal with it on the ground. So it's very simple. If you're not wearing a mask, flight attendant asked you nicely, you still don't put your mask on. They just give you a little card that says, by the way, if you don't put your mask on, this is going to be your last United flight. And the vast majority of customers put their masks on. So we have not seen some of that level of stress that's happened on some of other, other airlines. >> That's key. Cause it's been pretty rampant. But the fact that you're, you're making things much more accessible. And in real time, I think another thing we learned during the pandemic is that real time is no longer a nice to have. It's essential. We have this expectation as consumers, whether we're flying or we're buying something from an online retailer that we're going to be able to get whatever we want in the palm of our hand. >> Yeah. Well, you know what we like to say, we're very proud of our mobile app. We're very proud of it. But we like to say that are not comparing our mobile app to another airline mobile app. You're, you're comparing it to the last app you probably used. And that might've been the Amazon app. So we have to be as good as the Amazon app, but we have a lot of legacy technology behind it. And so we have really focused on that. >> Good, I want to ask you cause you're a Chief Digital Officer, because this comes up in a lot of our CUBE conversations and around the digital side is that obviously with the virtual now hybrid things, new innovations have happened. So I have to ask you what's changed for the better that's going to be around and what might not be around that you've learned from the pandemic, because these new things are emerging. New standards, new protocols, new digital experiences. What have you learned that's going to stay around and what kind of went away? >> Yeah. >> Well, I think nothing tells you about how important your customers are if you're standing in the middle of O'Hare and not seeing any. And that's what happened in April of 2020, when we actually, there was a day that year, that month that we had more pilots than passengers. It was just, you know, so you realize it's really all about the customer. And what we have to do is make sure that customers choose us. There might be less reasons to fly to certain places all the time, but when you do fly, we want you to pick United. And so it's got to be more than just where we fly. It's got to be the experiences you have with the people. And we have to use the technology to make it easier. I mean, Touchless, wasn't really a thing. QR codes are back. I mean, they were gone, right. And we have QR codes on everything now. Cause you want to get through that airport without having to touch anything, and you do that with your mobile app. >> Yeah. Great innovations. >> It is a great innovation. That contact list is key. You talk about QR cuts coming back. And just some of the things that we've, that we've, some of the silver linings and frankly there have been some the last 22 months or so, but being able to have that experience, that's tailored to me as a consumer. >> Right. I don't need to know what's under the hood enabling it. I just know I want to be able to make transactions or find whatever I need to in the palm of my hand, 24/7. >> Yeah. And you know, for airlines, it usually comes back to something went wrong and frankly, there's always something that going quite right. There's a, there's a weather delay somewhere or maybe your bag didn't get on the same flight you did. And so we want to give you transparency in that and control over what you can do. And so how make it, make it easier to rebook, make you understand what the situation is, be very transparent about it. And we even have something called Connection Saver. And what we do with that is we actually use real time data analytics. And what we do is we say, there's a person that's arriving late. And then we say with real-time weather, real-time connection data. We say, can we hold that flight for Lisa? And we, and we, yeah.(laughing) The worst thing is when that door closed, you run all the way through the airport and they closed the door. Right? We don't want to do, gate agents don't like doing that either. And so we use calculations that say, you know, the wind is blowing in the right direction. The pilots can make up the time. There isn't anybody on the other side, that's going to miss a connection. And so about 2000 times a day, we hold a connection for our customer. >> That's key. If you missed, sometimes just stay overnight. If you miss that connection. >> Especially on the last flight of the day we'll be, we'll be very generous because that doesn't do anybody any good. >> Well, great, great story. I love the keynote, Cloud has changed. I have to ask you this year at re:Invent, what's your observation on the Cloud as the cloud continues to expand, as Adam is talking about, how do you guys see the Cloud evolving for United? >> Well, you know, I, I think what's really impressive here is everybody is coming from every industry. It's not one or two industries that are here, are early adopters in the industry. It really is what you have to do to survive. But I probably would be remiss not to say that, which was really great was that there were two women on the, on the keynote stage and two men. So we were at 50 50 now there are 51% women in the world, but we'll take it. And I, in all seriousness, I do think that there is, there's a lot more diversity here and I think that's good. Not just for AWS. That's good for everybody. >> I couldn't agree more. That was one of the first things I noticed this morning when you took the keynote stage was a strong female leader before you even started telling the story. And that's something from an optics perspective. I know that Amazon is really keen on, but it's nice to hear from your perspective as well that there's, there's that diversity. There's also that thought diversity when you have different perspectives come into play because there's so many dynamics going on these days. But I have to ask you one question. We know we talked to, we, we, we talk about every company, these days being a data company, being a digital company needing to be, to be competitive. >> Right. Do you think of United, should, should we be thinking about United as a digital first company? >> Well, we, we, we connect people, right? And so we are physically moving people from one destination to another and they really want to get there. So we're not going to always be digital, but I would tell you that I often speak with our Chief Customer Officer and our Chief Operating Officer. And it's really hard for us to talk about anything without talking about technology or how it impacts the operation or how it impacts our customer. It's really, really meshing together for sure. >> Great stuff, Linda, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. United Airlines, Chief Digital Officer on the main stage here at re:Invent and now on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the tech leader in event coverage. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Hey, welcome everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, We are in downtown San Francisco Moscone West at the Professional Businesswomen of California's conference. It's the 28th year they've been doing this conference, over 6,000 women, pretty wide range, about 5%, of guys made the trip, and we are excited, it's about diversity and inclusion, and we wanted to come check it out and bring you some of the thought leaders. So, we're really excited to have our first guest, he's Greg Jones, he's a Chief Diversity Officer for United Airlines. Welcome, Greg. >> Good to be here, Jeff. >> Absolutely, so you've been doing this diversity thing for a while, took a look at your LinkedIn, you know, you've been in healthcare, excuse me, insurance, and financial services, now with United. Are we making progress on this front? >> We are making some progress, but given the time that I think we have been doing this in the country, I would say it's not enough yet. >> Jeff: Right. And so, there is still a ways to go, it's a journey. We take two steps forward, sometimes a step back, sometimes a half a step back. But we're moving forward. >> Right, and certainly a lot of positive momentum here, and we cover the Grace Hopper show, and, you know, a lot of the women in tech stuff, but again, you're not only looking at sex or race, but things like veterans with disabilities, I saw >> Absolutely >> you're doing some efforts, >> Absolutely >> so really a broad breaststroke. >> Yeah, it is, and when you think about it, it makes sense, because, especially in the corporate space, we're talking about, how do you actually get the most out of all the people that you have working for you at every level, and if people are afraid to fully commit themselves to work, your productivity is just not what it could be or what it should be. >> Jeff: Right. >> You know, I have a theory, I'm sorry, Jeff, >> Jeff: No. >> that corporate America is probably operating at about 60% capacity, because people can't fully pull the trigger on their skills and talents. So, what inclusion is all about is getting the most out of all of the folks that you have by creating an environment in which they're comfortable in. >> We hear that time and time again, and there's a lot of studies about, you know, diversity of opinion leads to better outcomes, >> Greg: That's true >> This is not the right thing to do, I mean it is the right thing to do, but it's also a great business decision. >> Greg: Right. Do business leaders get that? Do they see that by having a different set of opinions, and all of us bring our own biases, to decision making and processes, that the outcomes are actually better? >> I think it's starting to happen more and more, I think, if you think about the history of this work, diversity and inclusion, since the sixties or whatever, it's migrated from affirmative action and all that that meant and the emotion that that provoked, to, wait a minute, the country is changing, the world has gotten smaller, this is starting to really make sense from a business perspective. So we migrated from almost completely the right thing to do, to wow, wait a minute, this is a business play. >> Right. So what are the things you see that are really concrete for people that, you know, or companies, they want to get involved they want to do a better job, what are some of the low hanging fruit that you suggest since you've been on this journey? >> Greg: Well, I think about, organizations like this, and conferences like this, are very important, and I would say it's a very important tool that companies can use to actually begin to develop the mindset that they need to start to shift gears. Also, organizations should begin to think about their systems. It turns out that there are biases in certain systems in terms of performance ratings, how people are promoted, how people are rewarded, and you know there is a look of leadership, unfortunately, that is based on history. >> Jeff: Right. >> So I think companies can start to really examine their processes, their views of their leadership model, their ways that they promote people, because it turns out that great talent and leadership comes in all kinds of packages. >> Right, and it's tough to fight, I mean, one of the keynote speakers this morning talked about, they've actually published their unbiased, or their unconscious bias class online for anyone to take. I can't remember if it was Schwab or Intel, which is pretty interesting, because we all have bias. >> Greg: We do. >> It's not about not having bias, it's about being aware of your bias and really trying to overcompensate for when you know it's doing things that you know you're not necessarily keeping track of. >> And it turns out that it's one of these things, and I talk about this a lot, it turns out that if you step out into this world, in places in which you're not comfortable, leading people and engaging with people, that you may initially not be comfortable with, what happens over time is you wind up developing a skill set, you know, whether it's leading women, whether it's leading people of color, or whether it's engaging with people with disabilities, once you do it and you find out it doesn't kill you, >> Jeff: Right, right. >> It turns out that by defintion, it makes you a better leader. So we have these biases, >> Right >> We do, were human. >> Jeff: Right. >> But it turns out, when you explore beyond your comfort zone, to use a cliche, you grow as a person, you grow as a leader. >> That's such a great point right, because birds of a feather is always the easiest path. >> It's easy! >> So easy. >> Yes. >> And it's just familiar, whether that familiar, that's cause that's the person that did it for you yesterday, or they're the same race, background, color, they look the same, but it's so easy to go birds of a father, but to your point I think that's a great point that doesn't come up enough, it's when you challenge yourself with something new, it let's you get back on a little steep learning curve, but that's when you grow and you know you feel so much better when you do get a little growth in your personal development. >> Absolutely, and it turns out that that in and of itself is a skill. Once you do it a few times and you find out that you're capable of doing it, you're looking for that next thing that is sort of outside the lines that you used to be comfortable with, and you grow. >> Jeff: That's great. So, I wonder, you got to have an analogy for Jazz. I know you're a Jazz fan, doin' a little homework before you came on. The great musical that just won all the Academy Awards talked about kind of the Jazz groove, and there's a little bit of conflict and harmony but at the end of the day, they make beautiful music together. Do you see some of that kind of analogy in what you're trying to accomplish? >> I actually do. I think that once you begin to master your instrument, I talk about job descriptions and systems as sort of the sheet music. You know, the basic tune that you have. But once you really master your instrument you can take it in all kinds of places, I mean, "Mary Had a Little Lamb" played by Louis Armstrong, is very different than the basic music, right? I would say that as we think about ourselves as leaders, there are the basic things we have, our technical education, our personalities, but once you really master that and you lose your fear of stepping out there, you can improvise all day long with all kinds of people in all kinds of ways and all kinds of systems. I believe that to be true. >> Well, and you're doing it every day. >> That's right! >> Alright Greg, well I was going to say do you have the last word, but I don't know that we could do much better than the Jazz analogy so I think we'll leave it right there. >> There ya go, let's stop right there. >> Alright. Well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day, and I look forward to continued success in your journey. >> Thank you so much, Jeff, very nice to meet you. >> Pleasure >> Absolutely. >> Alright, he's Greg Jones, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE, we'll be back after this short break, thanks for watchin'. (tech music)

(corporate electronic xylophone jingle intro) >> Good afternoon and welcome back to our very last segment of Tuesday's live broadcast here on theCUBE from AWS re:Invent in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson and I am joined here by the brilliant Paul Gillin. Paul, end of our first day. You holding up, are you still feeling overwhelmed with fire hose... >> Savannah, yet my feet are killing me. (savannah laughs) >> Yeah, we've done so much walking in these chairs. >> 14,000 steps already today. It's not even dinner time. >> Hey, well, at least you've earned your dinner, Paul. I love that. I love that. I'm very excited about our next guests. We have Krishna and Sowmya joining us from Tata Consultancy Services. Now, I was impressed when I was doing my background research on you all. The Tata Group has locations in 150 different spots, 46 different countries. You have over 600,000 employees on the team. We are talking about absolutely massive scale here but, today we're going to be focused specifically on the Tata Consultancy Services. Sowmya, can you tell me what you all do? What is that team specifically in charge of? >> Yeah, TCS, first of all, thank you very much for inviting us. >> Savannah: Our pleasure. >> Maybe the last session but, we'll make it very lively. >> Savannah: It's going to be the best session. That's the best part of the day. >> Yes, that's the attitude. From a company standpoint, we are a 50 plus year old company. Part of the Tata group. We focus on IT services. We are categorized as industry verticals and we have horizontal services where AWS is one of the horizontal services that we have. And, when I talk about TCS, we focus a lot more on growth and transformation of our customers. That is one of the key objectives of the current company's growth, I would say. So, that is TCS in a nutshell. >> Extraordinarily important topic to be focused on right now. Growth, transformation, pretty much the core topics of the show. I know you're on the hospitality and transportation side of the business, which is very exciting. And, we're going to dig into that a little bit more. Krishna, you're overseeing the world. Tell us a little bit more about your role within the whole ecosystem. >> Yeah, thank you for the opportunity. Great meeting all of you. It's been awesome experience here. re:Invent is coming back, catching up, right? 50,000 people compared to 25,000 last year. So, great to see and meet all of you. Coming to my role, I am responsible for AWS Business Unit within TCS. That means I am responsible for anything that happens on cloud, on AWS. It's a Full Stack unit. I have the global responsibility. That's whether it's a applications, data, infrastructure, transformation that happens, as well as OT at the edge. So, that's my responsibility. >> Savannah: Well, I love talking about the edge. One of my favorite. >> Transformation is a theme of what you do. We heard that the pandemic accelerated digital transformation initiatives at many companies. How did you see the pandemic affecting your business, affecting the customers you were working with? >> Pandemic definitely kind of accelerated a lot of cloud adoption, right? A lot of companies initially focused on resiliency, coming back to handling the pandemic, the situation. But, it also drove a lot of innovation in the business models. They had to think on their feet, re-look at their business models, change the channels and that continued. Pandemic is thankfully gone by but, the transformation actually continued. The way that we actually see on cloud, especially transformation, it has evolved. What we call as Cloud 2.0. Now, cloud is actually more focused on future-proofing the businesses. And, the initial days it was more about future-proofing the technology and technology architecture. But, it has evolved to future-proofing businesses. That means implementing new business models, bringing in agility, measuring the business value. And, that's where we see a significant traction. >> So, it's not about technology then. It's not about infrastructure. >> It is about technology but, really delivering business value. It's about, how can I improve the customer experience? >> Well, can you give us a couple of examples of companies you work with that embody this idea? >> I can imagine in the travel and hospitality zone. Probably few communities more sensitive than when someone's having a disruption or frustration within that process. And, perhaps few time periods less chaotic than the last few years. Tell us about your experience and what you've seen. >> Absolutely. To answer your question, first of all, coming out of pandemic, right? Many customers in the travel and hospitality industry where legacy, did not modernize for the last decade or so because, there have been many ups and downs in the industry. So, during pandemic, post-pandemic, one of the the way they wanted to rebound was, can we do the transformation? First of all, cloud as a technology adoption, but, beyond that, how do customers derive value, business value? That is one of the key aspects of the old transformation. And, if you take, I can give a couple of examples. Avis Car Rental, they had monolith mainframe applications and, that was there for almost couple of decades, right? But, over a period of time, they were not able to have the availability of those applications. There were many outages. As a result, businesses could not do the bookings. Like OTAs, customers could not do the bookings, the application was not available most of the time. And, it's all legacy, right? So, that is where we all came in, TCS. How do we first of all, simplify the complexity of the landscape? That is one. Then, second is, modernize the legacy application. That's the second thing. Third is, how do you scale it? Because, everyone wants to go faster, right? How do you scale it? That is where we partnered with AWS as well, to bring in some specific solutions. One example for Avis', their Rent Shop. Because, of the lack of availability, because, it's monolith application and legacy application. It was not available. So, as a result, we partnered and we brought in our contextual knowledge of the car rental industry to kind of transform, move it to cloud. And, today, as a result of it, Avis was able to save millions of dollars from a MIB standpoint. Second, in terms of availability, that was 99.9% availability. As a result, they had a pick in their business revenue as well. So, this is one of the ways that its helped. The second example I want to quote is, United Airlines. Here again, we've been present for a long time. We have a deep industry knowledge of the airline industry. So, we brought in our airline contextual knowledge and the United landscape to bring in a TCS's solution that we developed. It's called the Aviana. It's an intelligent operations solution for the airline industry, which we have developed. It's on AWS as well, that is being implemented in United. As a result, the ground staff, they have to take decisions on the moment when there is a irregular operation. That could be flight delays, as a result, customers connections will be lost. >> Savannah: Baggage. >> Baggage, right? Baggage delays. >> So many variables. The complexity... >> exactly >> in this matrix is wild. >> So, leveraging the Aviana solution, the ground staff were able to take decisions based on exceptions. They were able to take decisions quickly so that, they improved the customer experience. I think that was one of the key successes for United in the recent times. So, those two are the examples that I would call where customers have the right business value. So, cloud was not just for technology. They all are deriving a lot of business value as well. I would say. >> How important do you think it is for companies facing these unique challenges and scaling to work with partners like TCS? And, I'm sure you would say very important, but, tell me a little bit more why it's so important and those core benefits that they're going to get. Krishna, let's start off with you. Yeah, let me take again the AWS cloud transformation, right? TCS has formed AWS Business Unit two years back. So, we are a covid baby in a way. We have been working with the AWS for more than a decade but, we formed a dedicated Full-Stack Unit to drive cloud transformation on AWS. In these last two years, we've grown three X and customers we have added 400 new customers we have added. >> Nicely done. Just want to see you there. That's huge. Especially during these times. Congratulations. >> So, it's basically about the scale that we bring in. What we have done as a differentiation is, if you look at the entire cloud journey, right from taking a decision which cloud is, right, all the way to the cloud migration modernization and running operations. So, we have built complete platform. AML based platforms, where we have taken our delivery wisdom and codified it onto these platforms. So, we support around thousand plus customers on AWS in varying capacity. All of that knowledge is codified and, that is what we bring to the table, to the customers. And, so, customers obviously appreciate that value that best practices that are coming. And, coupled with that, the industry knowledge that we have on banking, life sciences, healthcare, automotive. So, it's partly the IT, it is the industry transformation as well. Because, we are working on connected cars, for example, in automotive. We are working on accelerated drug development platforms. We're working on complete banks as a platform that we have. TCS has built on AWS. So, 400 customers are there. It's the complete banking and insurance platform. So, this is the combination of the technical expertize that is digitized using platforms, as well as the industry knowledge, is the reason why customers work with us on the cloud transformation. >> So, we're seeing you talk about the vertical industry knowledge. AWS also has its own vertical industry plays. How do you, I guess, coordinate with them or, do you compete with them or, do you stay out of each other's way? >> No, we actually collaborate aggressively. >> Savannah: I like that (laughs) >> Right, so, it's not.. >> Savannah: With vigor. >> With vigor. TCS supports approximately 14 verticals. With AWS, we went with the focused industry play. We said we look at financial services, travel, transportation, hospitality, healthcare, life sciences and automotive, to start with. And, we have Go Big plans with AWS. very focused. The collaboration is actually at the industry solutions because, AWS is a great platform, ever evolving, keeps you on on your toes to really adapt it. But, that is always going on, the collaboration. But, the industry, I'm actually glad AWS last year took a pivot on focusing on industries. Now, we talk the same language when we go in front of a board or a CEO or COO. Present it. We are talking about the future of the industry not just the future of the technology. So, it's a win-win. >> You are also developing products on top of AWS that are not industry verticals, that build on the platform. What kinds of products are those? >> For cloud transformation, for example, consulting. We have a product called Cloud Counsell. We have a decision engine on the data side. We have something called Cloud Foundation, Mason. CloudMason. It's just the foundation, right? And, entire migration and modernization factory. And, the last one on cloud operations is actually Cloud Exponence. So, these are time tested. You have Fortune 500 customers using this regularly actively leveraging that. And, these are all AWS in a well architecture framework certified. So, they work well and they're designed to work on cloud, not only in the native environment, but, also legacy environment. Because, enterprises is not just only native, cloud-native. There is a lot of legacy. Sowmya spoke about the mainframe model... >> So much legacy, we were talking about it. >> So, you have to have a combination of solutions. So, the platforms that we're building, the products we're building, work in both the environments. >> Yeah, and that agility and ability to help customers navigate that prioritization. I mean, there's so many options. We talk about how many new companies there are every year. New solutions. Our adoption of technology is accelerating. As, McKinsey said, we went through 10 years of technological evolution and workplace evolution over the first six months of the pandemic. So, really everything's moving at unprecedented velocity unlike ever before. We have a new game here on theCUBE specifically for this show. And, we are challenging our guests, prompting our guests, to give us a 30 second sizzly sound bite with your hot take on the most important themes of this year's show. Think of it as a thought leadership moment. Opportunity to plug if you really want it. Krishna, you've just given me the nod. I'm going to start with you first and then we'll then we'll pass it along, yeah >> Sure. I think on thought leadership, the way that on cloud, business value is the focus, not the technology. Technology is important, but business value is the focus. And, the way that I see it evolving is with quantum computing coming out more and more, becoming relevant, and Edge is actually becoming quite active as well. All this while on cloud, we focused on business value at the centralized place at the corporate. But, I think the real value of cloud is when you deliver the results, business results, where the customers consume it, that is at the edge. I think that's basically the combination of centralized and the edge is where the real value of cloud is, right. And, I also loud, I know you said 30 seconds but, give me 30 more seconds. >> I like your answer right now. So, I'm going to give you a little more time. Yeah, thank you. >> You've earned more time. (laughs) >> So, I like the way Adam said in the keynote, if you look at it broadly, I categorizes two things. There are a lot of offerings that are becoming comprehensive, like AWS Connect, bringing in workforce management into it, making it a complete end to end product. Similarly, Security Lake, all bringing in the entire security and compliance under one, similarly data. So, there are lot of things that he announced where it is an end to end comprehensiveness of the thing. But, what I love about is, what Amazon is known for, supply chain. So, they rolled out AWS Supply Chain offering. Walk Out technology. So, the Amazon proposition is actually being brought to AWS as a core proposition. I think that's very futuristic and I think we can see more and more customers, enterprise customers, adopting AWS more to drive transformation >> Badly needed right now. Supply chain resiliency. >> Supply chain really having its moment the last two years. File under two words. No one knew, many of us did who worked in it before this. And, here we are, soon as we lost our toilet paper, everyone's freaked out. I love that you talked about business value and also that the end customer is on the edge and, everyone kind of forgets we are essentially the edge device. This is the edge device, it's all around us. And, all the technology that we're all using that you're even talking about is built right inside here from my airlines app to my car rentals to all of it. All right Sowmya, give us your 30 second hot take, roughly. >> Taking the cue from Krishna, right? Today, things are available on AWS Marketplace. So, tomorrow, somebody wants to start an airline, they just have to come and plug and play the apps that are available in the marketplace. Especially your supply chain. The Amazon is known for that. And, a small and medium business they want to start something, right, a .com. It's very easy. So, that's something that we are all looking for. The future is going to be very, very bright and great for the businesses, is what I would say because, most of it could be plug and play with all the solutions. >> Paul: It's already been built. >> On the cloud, so, we are looking forward to it. The second thing I would talk about is, we have to take it to scale. How more and more people can leverage AWS, right? The talent is very important and, that is where partners like us focus on re-scaling our talent. We have 600,000 people, right? We are not just... >> 600,000 people! That's basically as many people live in the San Francisco Bay area for contexts for our listeners. It's how many people work for Walmart? >> It's 1.2 million in Walmart? >> Is it really? >> It is, yes, yes. That's work for Walmart, sidebar. >> So from that standpoint, as the company, we are focusing on re-skilling, up-skilling our talent in order to work AWS cloud and so on, so, that they can go and support our customers. That is something that is very important and that's going to be the future as well. Bring it to scale, go faster. >> I love that you just touched on the fact that you essentially have to practice what you preach because, you've got to think about those 600,000 people in a 100 locations across 40 plus different countries. I love it. Sowmya, I'm going to close on that note. The future is bright, just like your fabulous blazer. >> Thank you so much. Krishna, Sowmya, thank you so much for being here with us. We can't wait to see what happens next, who you help next, and how Tata continues to transform. Thank all of you for tuning in today. A full jam packed day of coverage live here from Las Vegas, Nevada. We are at AWS re:Invent with Paul Gillin. I'm Savannah Peterson. We're theCUBE, the leader in High-Tech Coverage. (corporate electronic xylophone jingle outro)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase, season two, episode four. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. This topic is cybersecurity detect and protect against threats. Very excited to welcome a CUBE alumni back to the program. Snehal Antani, the co-founder and CEO of Horizon3 joins me. Snehal, it's great to have you back in the studio. >> Likewise, thanks for the invite. >> Tell us a little bit about Horizon3, what is it that you guys do? You were founded in 2019, got a really interesting group of folks with interesting backgrounds, but talk to the audience about what it is that you guys are aiming to do. >> Sure, so maybe back to the problem we were trying to solve. So my background, I was a engineer by trade, I was a CIO at G Capital, CTO at Splunk and helped grow scale that company. And then took a break from industry to serve within the Department of Defense. And in every one of my jobs where I had cyber security in my responsibility, I suffered from the same problem. I had no idea I was secure or that we were fixing the right vulnerabilities or logging the right data in Splunk or that our tools and processes and people worked together well until the bad guys had showed up. And by then it was too late. And what I wanted to do was proactively verify my security posture, make sure that my security tools were actually effective, that my people knew how to respond to a breach before the bad guys were there. And so this whole idea of continuously verifying my security posture through security testing and pen testing became a passion project of mine for over a decade. And through my time in the DOD found the right group of an early people that had offensive cyber experience, that had defensive cyber experience, that knew how to build and ship and deliver software at scale. And we came together at the end of 2019 to start Horizon3. >> Talk to me about the current threat landscape. We've seen so much change in flux in the last couple of years. Globally, we've seen the threat actors are just getting more and more sophisticated as is the different types of attacks. What are you seeing kind of horizontally across the threat landscape? >> Yeah, the biggest thing is attackers don't have to hack in using Zero-days like you see in the movies. Often they're able to just log in with valid credentials that they've collected through some mechanism. As an example, if I wanted to compromise a large organization, say United Airlines, one of the things that an attacker's going to go off and do is go to LinkedIn and find all of the employees that work at United Airlines. Now you've got say, 7,000 pilots. Of those pilots, you're going to figure out quickly that their user IDs and passwords or their user IDs at least are first name, last initial @united.com. Cool, now I have 7,000 potential logins and all it takes is one of them to reuse a compromised password for their corporate email, and now you've got an initial user in the system. And most likely, that initial user has local admin on their laptops. And from there, an attacker can dump credentials and find a path to becoming a domain administrator. And what happens oftentimes is, security tools don't detect this because it looks like valid behavior in the organization. And this is pretty common, this idea of collecting information on an organization or a target using open source intelligence, using a mix of credential spraying and kind of low priority or low severity exploitations or misconfigurations to get in. And then from there, systematically dumping credentials, reusing those credentials, and finding a path towards compromise. And less than 2% of CVEs are actually used in exploits. Most of the time, attackers chain together misconfigurations, bad product defaults. And so really the threat landscape is, attackers don't hack in, they log in. And organizations have to focus on getting the basics right and fundamentals right first before they layer on some magic easy button that is some security AI tools hoping that that's going to save their day. And that's what we found systemically across the board. >> So you're finding that across the board, probably pan-industry that a lot of companies need to go back to basics. We talk about that a lot when we're talking about security, why do you think that is? >> I think it's because, one, most organizations are barely treading water. When you look at the early rapid adopters of Horizon3's pen testing product, autonomous pen testing, the early adopters tended to be teams where the IT team and the security team were the same person, and they were barely treading water. And the hardest part of my job as a CIO was deciding what not to fix. Because the bottleneck in the security process is the actual capacity to fix problems. And so, fiercely prioritizing issues becomes really important. But the tools and the processes don't focus on prioritizing what's exploitable, they prioritize by some arbitrary score from some arbitrary vulnerability scanner. And so we have as a fundamental breakdown of the small group of folks with the expertise to fix problems tend to be the most overworked and tend to have the most noise to need to sift through. So they don't even have time to get to the basics. They're just barely treading water doing their day jobs and they're often sacrificing their nights and weekends. All of us at Horizon3 were practitioners at one point in our career, we've all been called in on the weekend. So that's why what we did was fiercely focus on helping customers and users fix problems that truly matter, and allowing them to quickly reattack and verify that the problems were truly fixed. >> So when it comes to today's threat landscape, what is it that organizations across the board should really be focused on? >> I think, systemically, what we see are bad password or credential policies, least access privileged management type processes not being well implemented. The domain user tends to be the local admin on the box, no ability to understand what is a valid login versus a malicious login. Those are some of the basics that we see systemically. And if you layer that with it's very easy to say, misconfigure vCenter, or misconfigure a piece of Cisco gear, or you're not going to be installing, monitoring security observability tools on that HPE Integrated Lights Out server and so on. What you'll find is that you've got people overworked that don't have the capacity to fix. You have the fundamentals or the basics not well implemented. And you have a whole bunch of blind spots in your security posture. And defenders have to be right every time, attackers only have to be right once. And so what we have is this asymmetric fight where attackers are very likely to get in, and we see this on the news all the time. >> So, and nobody, of course, wants to be the next headline, right? Talk to me a little bit about autonomous pen testing as a service, what you guys are delivering, and what makes it unique and different than other tools that have been out, as you're saying, that clearly have gaps. >> Yeah. So first and foremost was the approach we took in building our product. What we set upfront was, our primary users should be IT administrators, network engineers, and that IT intern who, in three clicks, should have the power of a 20-year pen testing expert. So the whole idea was empower and enable all of the fixers to find, fix, and verify their security weaknesses continuously. That was the design goal. Most other security products are designed for security people, but we already know they're task saturated, they've got way too many tools under the belt. So first and foremost, we wanted to empower the fixers to fix problems that truly matter. The second part was, we wanted to do that without having to install credentialed agents all over the place or writing your own custom attack scripts, or having to do a bunch of configurations and make sure that it's safe to run against production systems so that you could test your entire attack surface. Your on-prem, your cloud, your external perimeter. And this is where AWS comes in to be very important, especially hybrid customers where you've got a portion of your infrastructure on AWS, a portion on-prem, and you use Horizon3 to be able to attack your complete attack surface. So we can start on-prem and we will find say, the AWS credentials file that was mistakenly saved on a shared drive, and then reuse that to become admin in the cloud. AWS didn't do anything wrong, the cloud team didn't do anything wrong, a developer happened to share a password or save a password file locally. That's how attackers get in. So we can start from on-prem and show how we can compromise the cloud, start from the cloud and show how we can compromise on-prem. Start from the outside and break in. And we're able to show that complete attack surface at scale for hybrid customers. >> So showing that complete attack surface sort of from the eyes of the attacker? >> That's exactly right, because while blue teams or the defenders have a very specific view of their environment, you have to look at yourself through the eyes of the attacker to understand what are your blind spots, what do they see that you don't see. And it's actually a discipline that is well entrenched within military culture. And that's also important for us as the company. We're about a third of Horizon3 served in US special operations or the intelligence community with the United States, and then DOD writ large. And a lot of that red team mindset, view yourself through the eyes of the attacker, and this idea of training like you fight and building muscle memory so you know how to react to the real incident when it occurs is just ingrained in how we operate, and we disseminate that culture through all of our customers as well. >> And at this point in time, every business needs to assume an attacker's going to get in. >> That's right. There are way too many doors and windows in the organization. Attackers are going to get in, whether it's a single customer that reused their Netflix password for their corporate email, a patch that didn't get applied properly, or a new Zero-day that just gets published. A piece of Cisco software that was misconfigured, not buy anything more than it's easy to misconfigure these complex pieces of technology. Attackers are going to get in. And what we want to understand as customers is, once they're in, what could they do? Could they get to my crown jewel's data and systems? Could they borrow and prepare for a much more complicated attack down the road? If you assume breach, now you want to understand what can they get to, how quickly can you detect that breach, and what are your ways to stifle their ability to achieve their objectives. And culturally, we would need a shift from talking about how secure I am to how defensible are we. Security is kind of a point in time state of your organization. Defensibility is how quickly you can adapt to the attacker to stifle their ability to achieve their objective. >> As things are changing constantly. >> That's exactly right. >> Yeah. Talk to me about a typical customer engagement. If there's, you mentioned folks treading water, obviously, there's the huge cybersecurity skills gap that we've been talking about for a long time now, that's another factor there. But when you're in customer conversations, who are you talking to? Typically, what are they coming to you for help? >> Yeah. One big thing is, you're not going to win and win a customer by taking 'em out to steak dinners. Not anymore. The way we focus on our go to market and our sales motion is cultivating champions. At the end of the proof of concept, our internal measure of successes is, is that person willing to get a Horizon3 tattoo? And you do that, not through steak dinners, not through cool swag, not through marketing, but by letting your results do the talking. Now, part of those results should not require professional services or consulting. The whole experience should be self-service, frictionless, and insightful. And that really is how we've designed the product and designed the entire sales motion. So a prospect will learn or discover about us, whether it's through LinkedIn, through social, through the website, but often because one of their friends or colleagues heard about us, saw our result, and is advocating on our behalf when we're not in the room. From there, they're going to be able to self-service, just log in to our product through their LinkedIn ID, their Google ID. They can engage with a salesperson if they want to. They can run a pen test right there on the spot against their home without any interaction with a sales rep. Let those results do the talking, use that as a starting point to engage in a more complicated proof of value. And the whole idea is we don't charge for these, we let our results do the talking. And at the end, after they've run us to find problems, they've gone off and fixed those issues, and they've rerun us to verify that what they've fixed was properly fixed, then they're hooked. And we have a hundred percent technical win rate with our prospects when they hit that find-fix-verify cycle, which is awesome. And then we get the tattoo for them, at least give them the template. And then we're off to the races. >> Sounds like you're making the process more simple. There's so much complexity behind it, but allowing users to be able to actually test it out themselves in a simplified way is huge. Allowing them to really focus on becoming defensible. >> That's exactly right. And the value is, especially now in security, there's so much hype and so much noise. There's a lot more time being spent self-discovering and researching technologies before you engage in a commercial discussion. And so what we try to do is optimize that entire buying experience around enabling people to discover and research and learn. The other part, remember is, offensive cyber and ethical hacking and so on is very mysterious and magical to most defenders. It's such a complicated topic with many nuance tools that they don't have the time to understand or learn. And so if you surface the complexity of all those attacker tools, you're going to overwhelm a person that is already overwhelmed. So we needed the experience to be incredibly simple and optimize that find-fix-verify aha moment. And once again, be frictionless and be insightful. >> Frictionless and insightful. Excellent. Talk to me about results, you mentioned results. We love talking about outcomes. When a customer goes through the PoC, PoV that you talked about, what are some of the results that they see that hook them? >> Yeah, the biggest thing is, what attackers do today is they will find a low from machine one plus a low from machine two equals compromised domain. What they're doing is they're chaining together issues across multiple parts of your system or your organization to opone your environment. What attackers don't do is find a critical vulnerability and exploit that single machine. It's always a chain, always multiple steps in the attack. And so the entire product and experience in, actually, our underlying tech is around attack paths. Here is the path, the attack path an attacker could have taken. That node zero our product took. Here is the proof of exploitation for every step along the way. So you know this isn't a false positive. In fact, you can copy and paste the attacker command from the product and rerun it yourself and see it for yourself. And then here is exactly what you have to go fix and why it's important to fix. So that path, proof, impact, and fix action is what the entire experience is focused on. And that is the results doing the talking, because remember, these folks are already overwhelmed, they're dealing with a lot of false positives. And if you tell them you've got another critical to fix, their immediate reaction is "Nope, I don't believe you. This is a false positive. I've seen this plenty of times, that's not important." So you have to, in your product experience and sales process and adoption process, immediately cut through that defensive or that reflex. And it's path, proof, impact. Here's exactly what you fix, here are the exact steps to fix it, and then you're off to the races. What I learned at Splunk was, you win hearts and minds of your users through amazing experience, product experience, amazing documentation. >> Yes. >> And a vibrant community of champions. Those are the three ingredients of success, and we've really made that the core of the product. So we win on our documentation, we win on the product experience, and we've cultivated pretty awesome community. >> Talk to me about some of those champions. Is there a customer story that you think really articulates the value of node zero and what it is that you are doing? >> Yeah, I'll tell you a couple. Actually, I just gave this talk at Black Hat on war stories from running 10,000 pen tests. And I'll try to be gentle on the vendors that were involved here, but the reality is, you got to be honest and authentic. So a customer, a healthcare organization ran a pen test and they were using a very well-known managed security services provider as their security operations team. And so they initiate the pen test and they wanted to audit their response time of their MSSP. So they run the pen test and we're in and out. The whole pen test runs two hours or less. And in those two hours, the pen test compromises the domain, gets access to a bunch of sensitive data, laterally maneuvers, rips the entire environment apart. It took seven hours for the MSSP to send an email notification to the IT director that said, "Hey, we think something suspicious is going on." >> Wow. >> Seven hours! >> That's a long time. >> We were in and out in two, seven hours for notification. And the issue with that healthcare company was, they thought they had hired the right MSSP, but they had no way to audit their performance. And so we gave them the details and the ammunition to get services credits to hold them accountable and also have a conversation of switching to somebody else. >> Accountability is key, especially when we're talking about the threat landscape and how it's evolving day to day. >> That's exactly right. Accountability of your suppliers or your security vendors, accountability of your people and your processes, and not having to wait for the bad guys to show up to test your posture. That's what's really important. Another story that's interesting. This customer did everything right. It was a banking customer, large environment, and they had Fortinet installed as their EDR type platform. And they initiate us as a pen test and we're able to get code execution on one of their machines. And from there, laterally maneuver to become a domain administrator, which in security is a really big deal. So they came back and said, "This is absolutely not possible. Fortinet should have stopped that from occurring." And it turned out, because we showed the path and the proof and the impact, Fortinet was misconfigured on three machines out of 5,000. And they had no idea. >> Wow. >> So it's one of those, you want to don't trust that your tools are working, don't trust your processes, verify them. Show me we're secure today. Show me we're secure tomorrow. And then show me again we're secure next week. Because my environment's constantly changing and the adversary always has a vote. >> Right, the constant change in flux is huge challenge for organizations, but those results clearly speak for themselves. You talked about speed in terms of time, how quickly can a customer deploy your technology, identify and remedy problems in their environment? >> Yeah, this find-fix-verify aha moment, if you will. So traditionally, a customer would have to maybe run one or two pen tests a year. And then they'd go off and fix things. They have no capacity to test them 'cause they don't have the internal attack expertise. So they'd wait for the next pen test and figure out that they were still exploitable. Usually, this year's pen test results look identical than last year's. That isn't sustainable. So our customers shift from running one or two pen tests a year to 40 pen tests a month. And they're in this constant loop of finding, fixing, and verifying all of the weaknesses in their infrastructure. Remember, there's infrastructure pen testing, which is what we are really good at, and then there's application level pen testing that humans are much better at solving. >> Okay. >> So we focus on the infrastructure side, especially at scale. But can you imagine, 40 pen tests a month, they run from the perimeter, the inside from a specific subnet, from work from home machines, from the cloud. And they're running these pen tests from many different perspectives to understand what does the attacker see from each of these locations in their organization and how do they systemically fix those issues? And what they look at is, how many critical problems were found, how quickly were they fixed, how often do they reoccur. And that third metric is important because you might fix something, but if it shows up again next week because you've got bad automation, you're in a rat race. So you want to look at that reoccurrence rate also. >> The reoccurrence rate. What are you most excited about as, obviously, the threat landscape continues to evolve, but what are you most excited about for the company and what it is that you're able to help organizations across industries achieve in such tumultuous times? >> Yeah. One of the coolest things is, because I was a customer for many of these products, I despised threat intelligence products. I despised them. Because there were basically generic blog posts. Maybe delivered as a data feed to my Splunk environment or something. But they're always really generic. Like, "You may have a problem here." And as a result, they weren't very actionable. So one of the really cool things that we do, it's just part of the product is this concept of flares, flares that we shoot up. And the idea is not to cause angst or anxiety or panic, but rather we look at threat intelligence and then because all of the insights we have from your pen test results, we connect those two together and say, "Your VMware Horizon instance at this IP is exploitable. You need to fix it as fast as possible, or is very likely to be exploited. And here is the threat intelligence and in the news from CSAI and elsewhere that shows why it's important." So I think what is really cool is we're able to take together threat intelligence out in the wild combined with very precise understanding of your environment to give you very accurate and actionable starting points for what you need to go fix or test or verify. And when we do that, what we see is almost like, imagine this ball bouncing, that is the first drop of the ball, and then that drives the first major pen test. And then they'll run all these subsequent pen tests to continue to find and fix and verify. And so what we see is this tremendous amount of excitement from customers that we're actually giving them accurate, detailed information to take advantage of, and we're not causing panic and we're not causing alert and fatigue as a result. >> That's incredibly important in this type of environment. Last question for you. If autonomous pen testing is obviously critical and has tremendous amount of potential for organizations, but it's only part of the equation. What's the larger vision? >> Yeah, we are not a pen testing company and that's something we decided upfront. Pen testing is a sensor. It collects and understands a tremendous amount of data for your attack surface. So the natural next thing is to analyze the pen test results over time to start to give you a more accurate understanding of your governance, risk, and compliance posture. So now what happens is, we are able to allow customers to go run 40 pen tests a month. And that kind of becomes the initial land or flagship product. But then from there, we're able to upsell or increase value to our customers and start to compete and take out companies like Security Scorecard or RiskIQ and other companies like that, where there tended to be, I was a user of all those tools, a lot of garbage in, garbage out. Where you can't fill out a spreadsheet and get an accurate understanding of your risk posture. You need to look at your detailed pen test results over time and use that to accurately understand what are your hotspots, what's your recurrence rate and so on. And being able to tell that story to your auditors, to your regulators, to the board. And actually, it gives you a much more accurate way to show return on investment of your security spend also. >> Which is huge. So where can customers and those that are interested go to learn more? >> So horizonthree.ai is the website. That's a great starting point. We tend to very much rely on social channels, so LinkedIn in particular, to really get our stories out there. So finding us on LinkedIn is probably the next best thing to go do. And we're always at the major trade shows and events also. >> Excellent. Snehal, it's been a pleasure talking to you about Horizon3, what it is that you guys are doing, why, and the greater vision. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you, likewise. >> All right. For my guest, I'm Lisa Martin. We want to thank you for watching the AWS Startup Showcase. We'll see you next time. (gentle music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the Cube's presentation of the AWS startup showcase. Season two, episode four, I'm your host. Lisa Martin. This topic is cybersecurity detect and protect against threats. Very excited to welcome a Cub alumni back to the program. SNA hall, autonomy, the co-founder and CEO of horizon three joins me SNA hall. It's great to have you back in the studio. >>Likewise, thanks for the invite. >>Tell us a little bit about horizon three. What is it that you guys do you we're founded in 2019? Got a really interesting group of folks with interesting backgrounds, but talk to the audience about what it is that you guys are aiming to do. >>Sure. So maybe back to the problem we were trying to solve. So my background, I was a engineer by trade. I was a CIO at G capital CTO at Splunk and helped, helped grows scale that company and then took a break from industry to serve within the department of defense. And in every one of my jobs where I had cyber security in my responsibility, I suffered from the same problem. I had no idea I was secure or that we were fixing the right vulnerabilities or logging the right data in Splunk or that our tools and processes and people worked together well until the bad guys had showed up. And by then it was too late. And what I wanted to do was proactively verify my security posture, make sure that my security tools were actually effective, that my people knew how to respond to a breach before the bad guys were there. And so this whole idea of continuously verifying my security posture through security testing and pen testing became a, a passion project of mine for over a decade. And I, through my time in the DOD found the right group of an early people that had offensive cyber experience that had defensive cyber experience that knew how to build and ship and, and deliver software at scale. And we came together at the end of 2019 to start horizon three. >>Talk to me about the current threat landscape. We've seen so much change in flux in the last couple of years globally. We've seen, you know, the threat actors are just getting more and more sophisticated as is the different types of attacks. What are you seeing kind of horizontally across the threat landscape? >>Yeah. The biggest thing is attackers don't have to hack in using zero days. Like you see in the movies. Often they're able to just log in with valid credentials that they've collected through some mechanism. As an example, if I wanted to compromise a large organization, say United airlines, one of the things that an attacker's gonna go off and do is go to LinkedIn and find all of the employees that work at United airlines. Now you've got, say 7,000 pilots of those pilots. You're gonna figure out quickly that their use varie and passwords or their use varie@leastarefirstnamelastinitialatunited.com. Cool. Now I have 7,000 potential logins and all it takes is one of them to reuse a compromise password for their corporate email. And now you've got an initial user in the system and most likely that initial user has local admin on their laptops. And from there, an attacker can dump credentials and find a path to becoming a domain administrator. >>And what happens oftentimes is security tools. Don't detect this because it looks like valid behavior in the organization. And this is pretty common. This idea of collecting information on an organization or a topic or target using open source intelligence, using a mix of credentialed spraying and kinda low priority or low severity exploitations or misconfigurations to get in. And then from there systematically dumping credentials, reusing those credentials and finding a path towards compromise and almost less than 2% of, of CVEs are actually used in exploits. Most of the time attackers chain together misconfigurations bad product defaults. And so really the threat landscape is attackers don't hack in. They log in and organizations have to focus on getting the basics right and fundamentals right first, before they layer on some magic, easy button that is some security AI tools hoping that that's gonna save their day. And that's what we found systemically across the board. >>So you're finding that across the board, probably pan industry, that, that a lot of companies need to go back to basics. We talk about that a lot when we're talking about security, why do you think that >>Is? I think it's because one, most organizations are barely treading water. When you look at the early rapid adopters of horizon threes, pen testing, product, autonomous pen testing, the early adopters tended to be teams where the it team and the security team were the same person and they were barely treading water. And the hardest part of my job as a CIO was deciding what not to fix because the bottleneck in the security processes, the actual capacity to fix problems. And so fiercely prioritizing issues becomes really important, but the, the tools and the processes don't focus on prioritizing what's exploitable, they prioritize, you know, by some arbitrary score from some arbitrary vulnerability scanner. And so we have as a fundamental breakdown of the small group of folks with the expertise to fix problems, tend to be the most overworked and tend to have the most noise to need to sift through. So they don't even have time to get to the basics. They're just barely treading water doing their day jobs. And they're often sacrificing their nights and weekends. All of us at horizon three were practitioners at one point in our career, we've all been called in on the weekend. So that's why, what we did was fiercely focus on helping customers and users fix problems that truly matter, and allowing them to quickly retack and verify that the problems were truly fixed. >>So when it comes to today's threat landscape, what is it that organizations across the board should really be focused on? >>I think systemically what we see are bad password or credential policies, least access, privileged management type processes, not being well implemented. The domain user tends to be the local admin on the box, no ability to understand what is a valid login versus a, a malicious login. Those are some of the basics that we see systemically. And if you layer that with, it's very easy to say misconfigure vCenter, or misconfigure a piece of Cisco gear, or you're not gonna be installing monitoring and OB observa security observability tools on that. HP integrated lights out server. And so on. What you'll find is that you've got people overworked that don't have the capacity to fix. You have the fundamentals or the basics, not, not well implemented. And you have a whole bunch of blind spots in your security posture, and defenders have to be right. Every time attackers only have to be right once. And so what we have is this asymmetric fight where attackers are very likely to get in. And we see this on the news all the time. >>So, and, and nobody of course wants to be the next headline. Right? Talk to me a little bit about autonomous pen testing as a service, what you guys are delivering and what makes it unique and different than other tools that have been out there as, as you're saying that clearly have >>Gaps. Yeah. So first and foremost was the approach we took in building our product. What we set up front was our primary users should be it administrators, network, engineers, and P. And that, that it intern who in three clicks should have the power of a 20 year pen testing expert. So the whole idea was empower and enable all of the fixers to find, fix in verify their security weaknesses continuously. That was the design goal. Most other security products are designed for security people, but we already know they're they're task saturated. They've got way too many tools under the belt. So first and foremost, we wanted to empower the fixers to fix problems. That truly matter, the second part was we wanted to do that without having to install credentialed agents all over the place or writing your own custom attack scripts, or having to do a bunch of configurations and make sure that it's safe to run against production systems so that you could, you could test your entire attack surface your on-prem, your cloud, your external perimeter. >>And this is where AWS comes in to be very important, especially hybrid customers where you've got a portion of your infrastructure on AWS, a portion on-prem and you use horizon three to be able to attack your complete attack surface. So we can start on Preem and we will find, say the AWS credentials file that was mistakenly saved on a, a share drive, and then reuse that to become admin in the cloud. AWS didn't do anything wrong. The cloud team didn't do anything wrong. A developer happened to share a password or save a password file locally. That's how attackers get in. So we can start from on-prem and show how we can compromise the cloud, start from the cloud and, and, and show how we can compromise. On-prem start from the outside and break in. And we're able to show that complete attack surface at scale for hybrid customers. >>So showing that complete attack surface sort of from the eyes of the attacker, >>That's exactly right, because while blue teams or the defenders have a very specific view of their environment, you have to look at yourself through the eyes of the attacker to understand what are your blind spots? What do do they see that you don't see? And it's actually a discipline that is well entrenched within military culture. And that's also important for us as the company. We're about a third of horizon, three served in us special operations or the intelligence community with the United States, and then do OD writ large. And a lot of that red team mindset view yourself through the eyes of the attacker and this idea of training. Like you fight in building muscle memories. So you know how to react to the real incident when it occurs is just ingrained in how we operate. And we disseminate that culture through all of our customers as well. >>And, and at this point in time, it's, every business needs to assume an attacker's gonna get in >>That's right. There are way too many doors and windows in the organization. Attackers are going to get in, whether it's a single customer that reused their Netflix password for their corporate email, a patch that didn't get applied properly, or a new zero day that just gets published a piece of Cisco software that was misconfigured, you know, not by anything more than it's easy to misconfigure. These complex pieces of technology attackers are going to get in. And what we want to understand as customers is once they're in, what could they do? Could they get to my crown Jewel's data and systems? Could they borrow and prepare for a much more complicated attack down the road? If you assume breach, now you wanna understand what can they get to, how quickly can you detect that breach and what are your ways to stifle their ability to achieve their objectives. And culturally, we would need a shift from talking about how secure I am to how defensible are we. Security is kind of a state, a point in time, state of your organization, defense ability is how quickly you can adapt to the attacker to stifle their ability to achieve their objective >>As things are changing >>Constantly. That's exactly right. >>Yeah. Talk to me about a typical customer engagement. If there's, you mentioned folks treading water, obviously there's the huge cybersecurity skills gap that we've been talking about for a long time. Now that's another factor there, but when you're in customer conversations, who were you talking to? What typically are, what are they coming to you for help? >>Yeah. One big thing is you're not gonna win and, and win a customer by taking 'em out to steak dinners. Not anymore. The way we focus on, on our go to market and our sales motion is cultivating champions. At the end of the proof of concept, our internal measure of successes is that person willing to get a horizon three tattoo. And you do that, not through state dinners, not through cool swag, not through marketing, but by letting your results do the talking. Now, part of those results should not require professional services or consulting it. The whole experience should be self-service frictionless and insightful. And that really is how we've designed the product and designed the entire sales motion. So a prospect will learn or discover about us, whether it's through LinkedIn, through social, through the website, but often because one of their friends or colleagues heard about us saw our result and is advocating on our behalf. >>When we're not in the room from there, they're gonna be able to self-service just log to our product through their LinkedIn ID, their Google ID. They can engage with a salesperson if they want to, they can run a pen test right there on the spot against their home, without any interaction with a sales rep, let those results do the talking, use that as a starting point to engage in a, in a more complicated proof of value. And the whole idea is we don't charge for these. We let our results do the talking. And at the end, after they've run us to find problems they've gone off and fixed those issues. And they've rerun us to verify that what they've fixed was properly fixed, then they're hooked. And we have a hundred percent technical win rate with our prospects when they hit that fine fix verify cycle, which is awesome. And then we get the tattoo for them, at least give them the template. And then we're off to the races >>That it sounds like you're making the process more simple. There's so much complexity behind it, but allowing users to be able to actually test it out themselves in a, in a simplified way is huge. Allowing them to really focus on becoming defensible. >>That's exactly right. And you know, the value is we're all, especially now in security, there's so much hype and so much noise. There's a lot more time being spent, self discovering and researching technologies before you engage in a commercial discussion. And so what we try to do is optimize that entire buying experience around enabling people to discover and research and learn the other part, right. Remember is offensive cyber and ethical hacking. And so on is very mysterious and magical to most defenders. It's such a complicated topic with many nuance tools that they don't have the time to understand or learn. And so if you surface the complexity of all those attacker tools, you're gonna overwhelm a person that is already overwhelmed. So we needed the, the experience to be incredibly simple and, and optimize that fine fix verify aha moment. And once again, be frictionless and be insightful, >>Frictionless and insightful. Excellent. Talk to me about results. You mentioned results. We, we love talking about outcomes. When a customer goes through the, the POC POB that you talked about, what are some of the results that they see that hook them? >>Yeah. The biggest thing is what attackers do today is they will find a low from machine one, plus a low from machine two equals compromised domain. What they're doing is they're chaining together issues across multiple parts of your system or your organization to hone your environment. What attackers don't do is find a critical vulnerability and exploit that single machine it's always a chain is always, always multiple steps in the attack. And so the entire product and experience in actually our underlying tech is around attack pads. Here is the path, the attack path an attacker could have taken. You know, that node zero, our product took here is the proof of exploitation for every step along the way. So, you know, this isn't a false positive, in fact, you can copy and paste the attacker command from the product and rerun it yourself and see it for yourself. >>And then here is exactly what you have to go fix and why it's important to fix. So that path proof impact and fix action is what the entire experience is focused on. And that is the results doing the talking, because remember, these folks are already overwhelmed. They're dealing with a lot of false positives. And if you tell them you've got another critical to fix their immediate reaction is Nope. I don't believe you. This is a false positive. I've seen this plenty of times. That's not important. So you have to in your product experience in sales process and adoption process immediately cut through that defensive or that reflex and its path proof impact. Here's exactly what you fix here are the exact steps to fix it. And then you're off to the races. What I learned at Splunk was you win hearts and minds of your users through amazing experience, product experience, amazing documentation, yes, and a vibrant community of champions. Those are the three ingredients of success, and we've really made that the core of the product. So we win on our documentation. We win on the product experience and we've cultivated pretty awesome community. >>Talk to me about some of those champions. Is there a customer story that you think really articulates the value of no zero and what it is that, that you are doing? Yeah. >>I'll tell you a couple. Actually, I just gave this talk at black hat on war stories from running 10,000 pen tests. And I'll try to be gentle on the vendors that were involved here, but the reality is you gotta be honest and authentic. So a customer, a healthcare organization ran a pen test and they were using a very well known, managed security services provider as their, as their security operations team. And so they initiate the pen test and they were, they wanted to audit their response time of their MSSP. So they run the pen test and we're in and out. The whole pen test runs two hours or less. And in those two hours, the pen test compromises, the domain gets access to a bunch of sensitive data. Laterally, maneuvers rips the entire entire environment apart. It took seven hours for the MSSP to send an email notification to the it director that said, Hey, we think something's suspicious is wow. Seven hours. That's >>A long time >>We were in and out in two, seven hours for notification. And the issue with that healthcare company was they thought they had hired the right MSSP, but they had no way to audit their performance. And so we gave them the, the details and the ammunition to get services credits to hold them accountable and also have a conversation of switching to somebody else. >>That accountability is key, especially when we're talking about the, the threat landscape and how it's evolving day to day. That's >>Exactly right. Accountability of your suppliers or, or your security vendors, accountability of your people and your processes, and not having to wait for the bad guys to show up, to test your posture. That's, what's really important. Another story is interesting. This customer did everything right. It was a banking customer, large environment, and they had Ford net installed as their, as their EDR type platform. And they, they initiate us as a pen test and we're able to get code execution on one of their machines. And from there laterally maneuver to become a domain administrator, which insecurity is a really big deal. So they came back and said, this is absolutely not possible. Ford net should have stopped that from occurring. And it turned out because we showed the path and the proof and the impact Forder net was misconfigured on three machines out of 5,000. And they had no idea. Wow. So it's one of those you wanna don't trust that your tools are working. Don't trust your processes. Verify them, show me we're secure today. Show me we're secured tomorrow. And then show me again, we're secure next week, because my environment's constantly changing. And the, and the adversary always has a vote, >>Right? The, the constant change in flux is, is huge challenge for organizations, but those results clearly speak for themselves. You, you talked about the speed in terms of time, how quickly can a customer deploy your technology, identify and remedy problems in their environment. >>Yeah. You know, this fine fix verify aha moment. If you will. So traditionally a customer would have to maybe run one or two pen tests a year and then they'd go off and fix things. They have no capacity to test them cuz they don't have the internal attack expertise. So they'd wait for the next pen test and figure out that they were still exploitable. Usually this year's pen test results look identical the last years that isn't sustainable. So our customers shift from running one or two pen tests a year to 40 pen tests a month. And they're in this constant loop of finding, fixing and verifying all of the weaknesses in their infrastructure. Remember there's infrastructure, pen testing, which is what we are really good at. And then there's application level pen testing that humans are much better at solving. Okay. So we focus on the infrastructure side, especially at scale, but can you imagine so 40 pen tests a month, they run from the perimeter, the inside from a specific subnet from work from home machines, from the cloud. And they're running these pen tests from many different perspectives to understand what does the attacker see from each of these locations in their organization and how do they systemically fix those issues? And what they look at is how many critical problems were found, how quickly were they fixed? How often do they reoccur? And that third metric is important because you might fix something. But if it shows up again next week, because you've got bad automation, you're not gonna you're in a rat race. So you wanna look at that reoccurrence rate also >>The recurrence rate. What are you most excited about as obviously the threat landscape continues to evolve, but what are you most excited about for the company and what it is that you're able to help organizations across industries achieve in such tumultuous times? Yeah. You >>Know, one of the coolest things is back because I was a customer for many of these products, I, I despised threat intelligence products. I despised them because they were basically generic blog posts maybe delivered as a, as a, as a data feed to my Splunk environment or something. But they're always really generic. Like you may have a problem here. And as a result, they weren't very actionable. So one of the really cool things that we do, it's just part of the product is this concept of, of flares flares that we shoot up. And the idea is not to be, to cause angst or anxiety or panic, but rather we look at threat intelligence and then because all, all the insights we have from your pen test results, we connect those two together and say your VMware horizon instance at this IP is exploitable. You need to fix it as fast as possible or as very likely to be exploited. >>And here is the threat intelligence and in the news from CSUN elsewhere, that shows why it's important. So I think what is really cool is we're able to take together threat intelligence out in the wild combined with very precise understanding of your environment, to give you very accurate and actionable starting points for what you need to go fix or test or verify. And when we do that, what we see is almost like, imagine this ball bouncing, that is the first drop of the ball. And then that drives the first major pen test. And then they'll run all these subsequent pen tests to continue to find and fix and verify. And so what we see is this tremendous amount of AC excitement from customers that we're actually giving them accurate, detailed information to take advantage of, and we're not causing panic and we're not causing alert, fatigue as a result. >>That's incredibly important in this type of environment. Last question for you. If, if autonomous pen testing is obviously critical and has tremendous amount of potential for organizations, but it's not, it's only part of the equation. What's the larger vision. >>Yeah. You know, we are not a pen testing company and that's something we decided upfront. Pen testing is a sensor. It collects and understands a tremendous amount of data for your attack surface. So the natural next thing is to analyze the pen test results over time, to start to give you a more accurate understanding of your governance risk and compliance posture. So now what happens is we are able to allow customers to go run 40 pen tests a month. And that kind of becomes the, the initial land or flagship product. But then from there we're able to upsell or increase value to our customers and start to compete and take out companies like security scorecard or risk IQ and other companies like that, where there tended to be. I was a user of all those tools, a lot of garbage in garbage out, okay, where you can't fill out a spreadsheet and get an accurate understanding of your risk posture. You need to look at your detailed pen, test results over time and use that to accurately understand what are your hotspots, what's your recurrence rate and so on. And being able to tell that story to your auditors, to your regulators, to the board. And actually it gives you a much more accurate way to show return on investment of your security spend also, which >>Is huge. So where can customers and, and those that are interested go to learn more. >>So horizon three.ai is the website. That's a great starting point. We tend to very much rely on social channels. So LinkedIn in particular to really get our stories out there. So finding us on LinkedIn is probably the next best thing to go do. And we're always at the major trade shows and events also. >>Excellent SNA. It's been a pleasure talking to you about horizon three. What it is that you guys are doing, why and the greater vision we appreciate your insights and your time. >>Thank you, likewise. >>All right. For my guest. I'm Lisa Martin. We wanna thank you for watching the AWS startup showcase. We'll see you next time.

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante last week's aws re invent brought into focus the degree to which cloud computing generally and aws specifically have impacted the technology landscape from making infrastructure orders of magnitude simpler to deploy to accelerating the pace of innovation to the formation of the world's most active and vibrant infrastructure ecosystem it's clear that aws has been the number one force for change in the technology industry in the last decade now going forward we see three high-level contributors from aws that will drive the next 10 years of innovation including one the degree to which data will play a defining role in determining winners and losers two the knowledge assimilation effect of aws's cultural processes such as two pizza teams customer obsession and working backwards and three the rise of super clouds that is clouds that run on top of hyperscale infrastructure that focus not only on i.t transformation but deeper business integration and digital transformation of entire industries hello everyone and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we'll review some of the takeaways from the 10th annual aws re invent conference and focus on how we see the rise of super clouds impacting the future of virtually all industries one of the most poignant moments for me was a conversation with steve mullaney at aw aws re invent he's the ceo of networking company aviatrix now just before we went on the cube nick sterile one of aviatrix's vcs looked up at steve and said it's happening now before i explain what that means this was the most important hybrid event of the year you know no one really knew what the crowd would be like but well over twenty 000 people came to reinvent and i'd say at least 25 to 26 000 people attended the expo and probably another 10 000 or more came without badges to have meetings and side meetings and do networking off the expo floor so let's call it somewhere between thirty to forty thousand people physically attended the reinvent and another two hundred thousand or more online so huge event now what nick sterile meant by its happening was the next era of cloud innovation is upon us and it's happening in earnest the cloud is expanding out to the edge aws is bringing its operating model its apis its primitives and services to more and more locations yes data and machine learning are critical we talk about that all the time but the ecosystem flywheel was so evident at this year's re invent more so than any other re invent partners were charged up you know there wasn't nearly as much chatter about aws competing with them rather there was much more excitement around the value that partners are creating on top of aws's massive platform now despite aggressive marketing from competitive hyperscalers other cloud providers and as a service or on-prem slash hybrid offerings aws lead appears to be accelerating a notable example is aws's efforts around custom silicon far more companies especially isvs are tapping into aws's silicon advancements we saw the announcement of graviton 3 and new chips for training and inference and as we've reported extensively aws is now on a curve a silicon curve that will outpace x86 vis-a-vis performance price performance cost power consumption and speed of innovation and its nitro platform is giving aws and its partners the greatest degree of optionality in the industry from cpus gpus intel amd and nvidia and very importantly arm-based custom silicon springing from aws's acquisition of annapurna aws started its custom silicon journey in 2008 and is and it has invested massive resources into this effort other hyperscalers notably microsoft google and alibaba which have the scale economics to justify such custom silicon efforts are just recently announcing initiatives in this regard others who don't have the scale will be relying on third-party silicon providers a perfectly reasonable strategy but because aws has control of the entire stack we believe it has a strategic advantage in this respect silicon especially is a domain where to quote andy jassy there is no compression algorithm for experience b on the curve matters a lot and the biggest story in my view this past week was the rise of the super clouds in his 2020 book with steve hamm frank slootman laid out the case for the rise of data cloud a title which i've conveniently stolen for this breaking analysis rise of the super cloud thank you frank in his book slootman made a case for companies to put data at the center of their organizations rather than organizing just around people for example the idea is to create data networks while people of course are critical organizing around data and enabling people to access and share data will lead to the democracy democratization of data and network effects will kick in this was essentially metcalfe's law for data bob metcalf was the inventor of ethernet ethernet he put forth that premise when we we both worked or the premise when we both worked for pat mcgovern at idg that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users or nodes on the network thought of another way the first connection isn't so valuable but the billionth connection is really valuable slootman's law if i may says the more people that have access to the data governed of course and the more data connections that can be shared or create sharing the more value will be realized from that data exponential value in fact okay but what is a super cloud super cloud is an architecture that taps the underlying services and primitives of hyperscale clouds to deliver incremental value above and beyond what's available from the public cloud provider a super cloud delivers capabilities through software consumed as services and can run on a single hyperscale cloud or span multiple clouds in fact to the degree that a super cloud can span multiple clouds and even on-premises workloads and hide the underlying complexity of the infrastructure supporting this work the more adoption and the more value will be realized now we've listed some examples of what we consider to be super clouds in the making snowflake is an example we use frequently frequently building a data cloud that spans multiple clouds and supports distributed data but governs that data centrally somewhat consistent with the data mesh approach that we've been talking about for quite some time goldman sachs announced at re invent this year a new data management cloud the goldman sachs financial cloud for data with amazon web services we're going to come back to that later nasdaq ceo adina friedman spoke at the day one keynote with adam silipsky of course the new ceo of aws and talked about the super cloud they're building they didn't use that term that's our term dish networks is building a super cloud to power 5g wireless networks united airlines is really in my view they're porting applications to aws as part of its digital transformation but eventually it will start building out a super cloud travel platform what was most significant about the united effort is the best practices they're borrowing from aws like small teams and moving fast but many others that we've listed here are on a super cloud journey just some of the folks we talked to at reinvent that are building clouds on top of clouds that are shown here cohesity building out a data management cloud focused on data protection and governance hashicorp announced its ipo at a 13 billion valuation building an it automation super cloud data bricks chaos search z-scaler z-scaler is building a security super cloud and many others that we spoke with at the event now we want to take a moment to talk about castles in the cloud it's a premise put forth by jerry chen and the team at greylock it's a really important piece of work that is building out a data set and categorizing the various cloud services to better understand where the cloud giants are investing where startups can participate and how companies can play in the castles that are being built that have been built by the hyperscalers and how they can cross the moats that have been dug and where innovation opportunities exist for other companies now frequently i'm challenged about our statements that there really are only four hyperscalers that exist in the world today aws microsoft google and alibaba while we recognize that companies like oracle have done a really excellent job of improving their clouds we don't consider companies like oracle ibm and other managed service providers as hyperscalers and one of the main data points that we use to defend our thinking is capex investment this was a point that was made in castles in the cloud there are many others that we look at elder kpi size of ecosystem partner acceleration enablement for partners feature sets etc but capex is a big one here's a chart from platform nomics a firm that is obsessed with cl with capex showing annual capex spend for five cloud companies amazon google microsoft ibm and oracle this data goes through 2019 it's annual spend and we've superimposed the direction for each of these companies amazon spent more than 40 billion dollars on capex in 2020 and will spend more than 50 billion this year sure there are some warehouses for the amazon retail business in there and there's other capital expenses in these numbers but the vast majority spent on building out its cloud infrastructure same with google and microsoft now oracle is at least increasing its cap x it's going to spend about 4 billion but it's de minimis compared to the cloud giants and ibm is headed in the other direction it's choosing to invest for instance 34 billion dollars in acquiring red hat instead of putting its capital into a cloud infrastructure look that's a very reasonable strategy but it underscores the gap okay another metric we look at is i as revenue here's an updated chart that we showed last month in our cloud update which at the time excluded alibaba's most recent quarter results so we've updated that very slight change it wasn't really material so you see the four hyperscalers and by the way they invested more than a hundred billion dollars in capex last year it's gonna be larger this year they'll collectively generate more than 120 billion dollars in revenue this year and they're growing at 41 collectively that is remarkable for such a large base of revenue and for aws the rate of revenue growth is accelerating it's the only hyperscaler that can say that that's unreal at their size i mean they're going to do more than 60 billion dollars in revenue this year okay so that's why we say there are only four hyperscalers but so what there are so many opportunities to build on top of the infrastructure that the three u.s giants especially are building as folks are really cautious about china at the moment so let's take a look at what some of the companies that we've been following are doing in the super cloud arena if you will this chart shows some etr data plotting net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share or presence in the etr data set on the horizontal axis most every name on the chart is building some type of super cloud but let me start as we often do calling out aws and azure i guess they're already super clouds but they're not building necessarily on top of of of other people's clouds and there are a little bit you know microsoft does some of that certainly google's doing some of that amazon really bringing its cloud to the edge at this point it's not participating in multi-cloud actively anyway aws and azure they stand alone as the cloud leaders and you can debate what's included in azure in our previous chart on revenue attempts to strip out the microsoft sas business but this is a customer view they see microsoft as a cloud leader which it is so that's why its presence on the horizontal axis and its momentum is is you know very large and very strong stronger than even in aws in this view even though it's is revenue that we showed earlier microsoft is significantly smaller but they both have strong momentum on the vertical axis as shown by that red horizontal line anything above that remember is considered considered elevated that 40 percent or above now google cloud it's well behind these two to we kind of put a red dotted line around it but look at snowflake that blue circle i mean i realize we repeat ourselves often but snowflake continues to hold a net score in the mid to high 70s it held 80 percent for a long time it's getting much much bigger it's so hard to hold that and in 165 mentions in the survey which you can see in the inserted table it continues to expand its market's presence on the horizontal axis now all the technology companies that we track of all of them we feel snowflake's vision and execution on its data cloud and that strategy is most is the most prominent example of a super cloud truly every tech company every company should be paying attention to snowflakes moves and carving out unique value propositions for their customers by standing on the shoulders of cloud giants as ceo ed walsh likes to say now on the left hand side of the chart you can see a number of companies that we spoke with that are in various stages of building out their super clouds data bricks dot spot data robots z z scalar mentioned hashi you see elastic confluent they're all above the forty percent line and somewhat below that line but still respectable we see vmware with tanzu cohesity rubric and veeam and many others that we didn't necessarily speak with directly at reinvent and or they don't show up in the etr dataset now we've also called out cisco dell hpe and ibm we didn't plot them because there's so much other data in there that's not apples to apple but we want to call them up because they all have different points of view and are two varying degrees building super clouds but to be honest these large companies are first protecting their respective on-prem turf you can't blame them those are very large install basis now they're all adding as a service offerings which is cloud-like i mean they're behind way behind trying to figure out you know things like billing and they don't nearly have the ecosystem but they're going to fight rightly they're going to fight hard and compete with their respective portfolios with their channels and their vastly improved simplicity but when you speak to customers at re invent and these are not just startups we're talking to we're talking about customers of these enterprise tech companies these customers want to build on aws they look at aws as cloud and that is the cloud that they want to write to now they want to connect they're on-prem but they're still largely different worlds when you when you talk to these customers now they'll fully admit they can't or won't move everything out of their data centers but the vast vast majority of the customers i spoke with last week at reinvent have much more momentum around moving towards aws they're not repatriating as everybody's talking about or not everybody but many are talking about and yeah there's some recency bias because we just got back but the numbers that we shared earlier don't lie the trend is very clear now these large firms that we mentioned these incumbents in the tech industry these big enterprise tech giants they're starting to move in the super cloud direction and they will have much more credibility around multi-cloud than the hyperscalers but my honest view is that aws's lead is actually accelerating the gap in my opinion is not closing now i want to come back and dig into super cloud a little bit more around 2010 and 2011 we collaborated with two individuals who really shaped our thinking in the big data space peter goldmaker was a cell side analyst at common at the time and abi abhishek meta was with bank of america and b of a was transforming its data operations and avi was was leading that now peter was you know an analyst sharp and less at the time he said you know it's going to be the buyers of big data technology and those that apply big data to their operations who would create the most value he used an example of sap he said look you you couldn't have chosen that sap was going to lead an erp but if you could have figured out who which companies were going to apply erp to their business you would have made a lot of money investing so that was kind of one of his investment theses now he posited that the companies that would apply the big data technology the buyers if you will would create far more value than the cloud errors or the hortonworks or a collection of other number of big data players and clearly he was right in that regard now abi mehta was an example of that and he posited that ecosystems would evolve within vertical industries around data kind of going back to frank slootman's premise that in putting data at the core and that would power the next generation of value creation via data machine learning and business transformation and he was right and that's what we're seeing with the rise of super cloud now after the after the first reinvent we published a post seen on the right hand side of this chart on wikibon about the making of a new gorilla aws and we said the way to compete would be to take an industry focus or one way to compete with take an industry focus and become best to breed within that industry and we aligned really with abbey meta's point of view that industry ecosystems would evolve around data and offer opportunities for non-hyperscalers to compete now what we didn't predict at the time but are now seeing clearly emerge is that these super clouds are going to be built on top of aws and other hyperscale clouds makes sense goldman's financial cloud for data is taking a page out of aws it's pointing its proprietary data algorithms tools and processes at its clients just like amazon did with its technology and it's making these assets available as a service on top of the aws cloud a super cloud for financial services if you will they are relying on aws for infrastructure compute storage networking security and other services like sagemaker to power that super cloud but they're bringing their own ip to the table nasdaq and dish similarly bringing forth their unique value and as i said as i said earlier united airlines will in our view eventually evolve from migrating its apps portfolio to the cloud to building out a super cloud for travel what about your logo what's your super cloud strategy i'm sure you've been thinking about it or perhaps you're already well down the road i'd love to hear how you're doing it and if you see the trends the same or differently as we do okay that's it for now don't forget these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen all you do is search breaking analysis podcast you definitely want to check out etr's website at etr.plus for all the survey data remember we publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com you can email me if you want to get in touch with david.velante at siliconangle.com you can dm me at devolante on twitter you can comment on our linkedin posts this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr have a great week stay safe be well and we'll see you next time [Music] you

(soft instrumental music) >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here in person at a live physical event with real people. Of course, it's a hybrid event. Great stuff online. Check it out on the Amazon site, as well as theCUBE zone. We've got great guests, talking about the cloud vision for getting talent in to the marketplace, in being productive and for society Accenture always great content. Denise Reese, Managing Director of the South Market Unit Lead at Accenture, AABG, which stands for "Accenture Area Business Group" and Gina Gina Fratarcangeli who is also the managing director of Midwest sales leader. Ladies, thanks for coming, I appreciate you coming on and talking about the vision of talent. >> I guess >> Thanks for having us. >> Yes, absolutely. It's a pleasure to be here. >> So, Amazon's got this dangerous goal, to train 29 million people. Maureen Lonergan came on yesterday, who I've known for a long time, doing a great job. It's hard to get the talent in. First of all, it sounds harder than it really is, that's my opinion. You know, you get some training certifications and you're up and running. So, talent's a big thing. What do you guys do? Give us the overview. >> Sure. Well, we're having a lot of activity at Accenture trying to get talent in. Across the entire country we're spending a tremendous amount of effort to do that. A couple of critical things we're doing in the Midwest is bringing in and searching for different talent streams that we haven't typically done in the past. For instance, one thing that we're doing is, we set up an apprentice program where we're reaching out into the market to find diverse talent, who aren't coming through the critical normal college path and bringing folks in like that. And we've got 1200 people that we've brought in that way, just in the Midwest. Which has been a phenomenal new talent stream for us. And supporting our inclusion and diversity. One of the other exciting things is what we call "The Mom Project", where we're intentionally working with an organization called the Mom Project, to bring women back into the workplace who may have left while they were taking care of their families and helping them get certified in all the new cloud technology and getting back to work. >> I love how you guys are going after this whole places that not everyone's looking at, because what I love about Cloud is that, it's a level up kind of opportunity where you don't really have to have that pedigree, or that big-big school. Of course, I went to a different school. So, I have a little chip on my shoulder. I didn't go to MIT, wasn't North-east but still good school. But, I mean, you could really level up from anywhere. >> Gina: That's right. >> And the opportunities with Cloud are so great. This is like a huge thing. No I'm surprised no one knows about it. >> Absolutely. I would add to that. So, we've in the South, in Georgia in particular. We've just launched an initiative with the technical college system of Georgia and AWS. So, it's a public-private partnership, where we're actually helping to set the curriculum for those students that are going through programs, through the technical colleges. It's one of the largest parts of the university system of Georgia. And, we're actually helping to frame the curriculum. And, giving folks what they need, to your point. It is an opportunity to level up. It's a great way to get talent in non-traditional spaces. It helps us to achieve our inclusion and diversity roles or goals, rather. But, then it also allows us to really continue to fill that pipeline with folks that we may not have had access to otherwise. >> Is there a best practice that you see developing in the acquisition of talent? Or enticing people to come in? Because that's just economics you know, Maureen was telling me that it was this person she was unemployed, and she got certified and she's making six figures. >> Both: Yeah. >> She's like oh my God, this is great. So, that's the Cloud growth. Is there a way to entice people? Is there a pattern? Is it more economic? Is it more, hey, be part of something. What's the data showing? >> There's definitely a war for talent out there. And so in this space we continuously hear from our clients that they can't hire enough people. So in the past, in the technology space, a lot of clients were hiring their own teams and here they just can't get the skills fast enough. So we're spending a tremendous amount of time being proactive. We started a women in Cloud organization where we're proactively reaching out to the community to bring women in, let them know that we will help them get those certifications and partnering with organizations like Women in Cloud, which is a global organization to create new funnels of talent. >> I think the women angle is great. The mom network coming out of the work for back into the workforce, because things change. Like we were talking about how Amazon just changed over the past five years now that this architectural approach is changing. So that's cool. Also we were involved in the women in data science, out of Stanford University, they have that great symposium. This is power technical women. >> Yes >> And it's got a global following. So the women networks that are developing are phenomenal. So that's not just an Accenture thing, right? That's outside of Accenture. >> I think it's a combination because I think we do a really good job inside of Accenture to create opportunities for women of various ethnicities lived experiences to be able to come together to network internally, but then also to pour some of that talent that they have into the communities where we live and we all do business as well. So I think I'm seeing definitely a two-pronged approach there. >> Let me ask you a question, I don't mean to put you on the spot, but I kind of will, Accenture's known as a pretty great firm. So working at Accenture is kind of a big deal. Does that scare people? Because if you could work at a Accenture I mean, that's good pedigree right there. So like, when you're trying to get people coming into the cloud, do they get the Accenture mojo or does it work for them? And can you share your experiences on that? >> I've been here five years and it's been a phenomenal ride for me. I've really enjoyed the fact having a female CEO, I think, and having a CEO who is so committed to diversity on all aspects, right? Her commitment is 50% diversity parody by 2025 at every level of our organization. And that doesn't happen without really intentional efforts at the entry-level and everywhere through the process to ensure that women are not only promoted, but really given the support network among all of our leaders and mentorship to be successful. And it's not just words, it's something that we're really spending a lot of time doing with intention. And that word is out in the space now, as women come in, they're loving it and they're recruiting their other women into the organization and diverse groups as well as what I'm seeing. >> And so I actually just started at Accenture in March. So I've been around eight months. I actually joined from AWS, interestingly enough. And I can tell you from my own experience, the intentionality that Gina spoke to you is it's evident at all levels. I feel like the way that I was courted to the firm was nothing short of amazing. That's another story for another day, but I feel like my being where I am, being hired in as a managing director, as an experienced hire, I think my presence is a testament to the focus that Accenture has on inclusion diversity and the equity component as well. And then also in Atlanta, we are exceptionally fortunate. We have close to 30 black and Latin X managing directors and senior managing directors out of the Atlanta office. So what we're doing there is pretty magical and it's something that I've never experienced in my 25 years. >> It's contagious I hope, the magic is contagious. >> Yeah. >> Yes, absolutely. >> And it's exciting because we're known as a management consulting business, right? So our product is the people >> That's right. >> And so there is intention from day one as to what you want from your career and setting your career plan. So everyone is given those career counselors and the expectation that someone is thinking about your business and your personal business, and what is your role today and what should your role be in two years, and what skills do you need to get there? Which is awesome, it's a lot of fun. >> It's also walking the talk too, right? I mean, Amazon here, they had a 50% women on stage. I don't know if you noticed on the keynote, they was two men and two women, 50%. Of course the United Airlines, it's got to be three. We got to get a 51%,, 'cause technically 51% So it should be three to one, but yeah, like, okay, that was cute notice but that's good. But this is real, I've been a big proponent of software development. Customers are women too that's 51%. So I think this whole representation thing has to be more real and more intentional. And so I want to ask you, how would you share the best practice of making that real from the essential playbook? What could people learn and what mistakes should they avoid? I think people who do want to try with it, but they don't know what to do. >> You know, I think get started, right. Do the work. I feel like since I started in technology, we've been having this conversation about diversity and inclusion and bringing more people into the space. And now it's time for us to just do that. And I feel like Accenture is doing that in spades. I think also again, I've been using this word. I was on a breakout panel yesterday talking about our partnership with AWS and intentionality keeps coming up. But I think also it helps to have a CEO who's creating diversity as an imperative at the most senior levels of the firm and folks are being incentivized as a result. So you've got to put the mechanisms in place to ensure that folks understand that this is not just lip service. >> That's a great point. It's not only just the people, but the mechanisms. And one of the things that I've been saying early on in the top of the interview was Cloud is an instant leveler there, because if you can be so capable so fast. So like when you start thinking about getting people in the market, producing talent, this notion of meritocracy isn't lip service, because if you have the capabilities and the people side lineup, then it truly can be like that. 'Cause your game does the talking, right. >> And we're doing it with intention at every level in the organization so much though, that every people leader, one of their metrics is the diversity. And as we look at the promotions, making sure that that parody is there, but every person who's managing people has diversity as a metric that they're being measured on. And so I think that's really critical as well as having the people who are being the advocates and being the allies and really asking the questions as the teams are getting put together. You know, my job is to review all the deals in the Midwest. And when the teams come forward, I say, "Great where are the women on the team? Who are we putting it?" We're all talking about the diversity. So when we're going to a client meeting, where are the women who are you're taking to that meeting? And if the answer is well, there's not one who's technical yet, the most senior, the most technical, well, great bring her on and use this as a training opportunity. We need to walk the walk and talk the talk and show that to our clients. >> I think that's really good. You guys are senior leaders, one can do that, demonstrate that, but also you're in the field for Accenture. You're in front of your customers. What are you seeing out there and what excites you about being in these industry? >> Yeah, I love the fact that there are so many more women in this space. I love that we're having so many women out there with intention. We've had six female CEOs do women in Cloud panel discussions with us and with our team. So you made the comment early about cloud moving so fast. That's the most exciting thing for me and the fact that it is moving at such a pace that no one client is going to be able to get the skills fast enough. They need companies like Accenture. They need companies like AWS to help them where we're leveraging all the knowledge from our own other clients and bringing that together so we can help them accelerate their development. What about you? >> Absolutely. Now I would echo that as we used to say at AWS plus one to that. But I'm really hopeful because what I'm seeing is the number of folks with my lived experience better at senior executive levels, not only within Accenture and AWS, but in our customers. And I think going back to the point that you were making earlier regarding Cloud being a level up and giving folks opportunity, folks have to be able to see a path, right? It's one thing to just get a certification and tick a box, that's great. But if you don't see a pathway to being able to utilize that in a way that allows you to move up and seeing where we are now, just as a firm, just really, really excites me that every time I get onto a call and I see another strong, amazing woman, I'm like, man, this is amazing. And it's something that... I think it's a phenomenon that I've started to see maybe within the last like five years or so. And probably even within the last two to three years, I've started to see that even more so, so that really excites me. >> Well, first of all, you guys are great. You're contagious, okay? Which is good, a good thing. I love how you brought the whole path thing because path finders was a big part of Adam's Leslie's keynote, and it must be really fun to see people taking the path that you guys are pioneering- >> We're ploughing, we're ploughing >> Yes we are. We're ploughing and you know what else we're doing? We're lifting, as we climb. That is important. I would say that, we don't have all of these amazing opportunities and blessings just to talk about what we have, but if you're not actually bringing somebody else along and giving those opportunities to folks, then it's all for not. >> You got people and the Cloud, to get them people, which is, we're humans and the mechanisms software to bring it together, magic. >> Absolutely >> Congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Both: Thanks for having us. >> Okay this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in global tech coverage from re:Invent 2021 AWS web services. Thanks for watching (soft instrumental music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to the live CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for in-person AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE two sets, live wall to wall coverage, all scopes of the hybrid events. Well, great stuff online. That was too much information to consume, but ultimately as usual, great show of new innovation for startups and for large enterprises. We've got a great guest, Paul Duffy head of startups Solutions Architecture for North America for Amazon Web Services. Paul, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Hi John, good to be here. >> So we saw you last night, we were chatting kind of about the show in general, but also about start ups. Everyone knows I'm a big startup fan and big founder myself, and we talk, I'm pro startups, everyone loves startups. Amazon, the first real customers were developers doing startups. And we know the big unicorns out there now all started on AWS. So Amazon was like a dream for the startup because before Amazon, you had to provision the server, you put in the Colo, you need a system administrator, welcome to EC2. Goodness is there, the rest is history. >> Yeah. >> The legacy and the startups is pretty deep. >> Yeah, you made the right point. I've done it myself. I co-founded a startup in about 2007, 2008. And before we even knew whether we had any kind of product market fit, we were racking the servers and doing all that kind of stuff. So yeah, completely changed it. >> And it's hard too with the new technology now finding someone to actually, I remember when we stood with our first Hadoop and we ran a solar search engine. I couldn't even find anyone to manage it. Because if you knew Hadoop back then, you were working at Facebook or Hyperscaler. So you guys have all this technology coming out, so provisioning and doing the heavy lifting for start is a huge win. That's kind of known, everyone knows that. So that's cool. What are you guys doing now because now you've got large enterprises trying to beat like startups. You got startups coming in with huge white spaces out there in the market. Jerry Chen from Greylock, and it was only yesterday we talked extensively about the net new opportunities in the Cloud that are out there. And now you see companies like Goldman Sachs have super cloud. So there's tons of growth. >> Paul: Yeah. >> Take us through the white space. How do you guys see startups taking advantage of AWS to a whole another level. >> And I think it's very interesting when you look at how things have changed in those kind of 15 years. The old world's horrible, you had to do all this provisioning. And then with AWS, Adam Szalecki was talking in his keynote on the first day of the event where people used to think it was just good for startups. Now for startups, it was this kind of obvious thing because they didn't have any legacy, they didn't have any data centers, they didn't have necessarily a large team and be able to do this thing with no commitment. Spin up a server with an API call was really the revolutionary thing. In that time, 15 years later, startups still have the same kind of urgency. They're constrained by time, they're constrained by money, they're constrained by the engineering talent they have. When you hear some of the announcements this week, or you look what is kind of the building blocks available to those startups. That I think is where it's become revolutionary. So you take a startup in 2011, 2012, and they were trying to build something maybe they were trying to do image recognition on forms for example, and they could build that. But they had to build the whole thing in the cloud. We had infrastructure, we had database stuff, but they would have to do all of the kind of the stuff on top of that. Now you look at some of the kind of the AIML services we have things like Textract, and they could just take that service off the shelf. We've got one startup in Canada called Chisel AI. They're trying to disrupt the insurance industry, and they could just use these services like text extracts to just accelerate them getting into that product market fit instead of having to do this undifferentiated (indistinct). >> Paul, we talk about, I remember back in the day when Web Services and service oriented architecture, building blocks, decoupling APIs, all that's now so real and so excellent, but you brought up a great point, Glue layers had to be built. Now you have with the scale of Amazon Web Services, things we're learning from other companies. It reminds me of the open source vibe where you stand on the shoulders of others to get success. And there's a lot of new things coming out that startups don't have to do because startup before then did. This is like a new, cool thing. It's a whole nother level. >> Yeah, and I think it's a real standing on the shoulders of giants kind of thing. And if you just unpick, like in Verna's announcement this morning, his key to this one, he was talking about the Amplify Studio kind of stuff. And if you think about the before and after for that, front-end developers have had to do this stuff for a long period of time. And in the before version, they would have to do all that kind of integration work, which isn't really what they want to spend that time doing. And now they've kind of got that headstart. Andy Jassy famously would say, when he talked about building AWS, that there is no compression algorithm for experience. I like to kind of misuse that phrase for what we try to do for startups is provide these compression algorithms. So instead of having say, hire a larger engineering team to just do this kind of crafty stuff, they can just take the thing and kind of get from naught to 60 (indistinct). >> Gives some examples today of where this is playing out in real time. What kinds of new compression algorithms can startups leverage that they couldn't get before what's new that's available? >> I think you see it across all parts of the stack. I mean, you could just take it out of a database thing, like in the old days, if you wanted to start, and you had the dream that every startup has, of getting to kind of hyper scale where things bursting that seems is the problem. If you wanted to do that in the database layer back in the day, you would probably have to provision most of that database stuff yourself. And then when you get to some kind of limiting factor, you've got to do that work where all you're really wanting to do is try and add more features to your application. Or whether you've got services like Aurora where that will do all of that kind of scaling from a storage point of view. And it gives that startup the way to stand on the shoulders of giants, all the same kind of thing. You want to do some kind of identity, say you're doing a kind of a dog walking marketplace or something like that. So one of the things that you need to do for the kind of the payments thing is some kind of identity verification. In the old days, you would have to have gone pulled all those premises together to do the stuff that would look at people's ID and so on. Now, people can take things like Textracts for example, to look at those forms and do that kind of stuff. And you can kind of pick that story in all of these different stream lines whether it's compute stuff, whether it's database, whether it's high-level AIML stuff, whether it's stuff like amplify, which just massively compresses that timeframe for the startup. >> So, first of all, I'm totally loving this 'cause this is just an example of how evolution works. But if I'm a startup, one of the big things I would think about, and you're a founder, you know this, opportunity recognition is one thing, opportunity capture is another. So moving fast is what nimble startups do. Maybe there's a little bit of technical debt. There maybe a little bit of model debt, but they can get beach head quickly. Startups can move fast, that's the benefit. So where do I learn if I'm a startup founder about where all these pieces are? Is there a place that you guys are providing? Is there use cases where founders can just come in and get the best of the best composable cloud? How do I stand up something quickly to get going that I could regain and refactor later, but not take on too much technical debt or just actually have new building blocks. Where are all these tools? >> I'm really glad you asked that one. So, I mean, first startups is the core of what everyone in my team does. And most of the people we hire, well, they all have a passion for startups. Some have been former founders, some have been former CTOs, some have come to the passion from a different kind of thing. And they understand the needs of startups. And when you started to talk about technical debt, one of the balances that startups have always got to get right, is you're not building for 10 years down the line. You're building to get yourself often to the next milestone to get the next set of customers, for example. And so we're not trying to do the sort of the perfect anonymity of good things. >> I (indistinct) conception of startups. You don't need that, you just got to get the marketplace. >> Yeah, and how we try to do that is we've got a program called Activate and Activate gives startup founders either things like AWS credits up to a hundred thousand dollars in credits. It gives them other technical capabilities as well. So we have a part of the console, the management console called the Activate Console people can go there. And again, if you're trying to build a backend API, there is something that is built on AWS capability to be launched recently that basically says here's some templatized stuff for you to go from kind of naught to 60 and that kind of thing. So you don't have to spend time searching the web. And for us, we're taking that because we've been there before with a bunch of other startups, so we're trying to help. >> Okay, so how do you guys, I mean, a zillion startups, I mean, you and I could be in a coffee shop somewhere, hey, let's do a startup. Do I get access, does everyone gets access to this program that you have? Or is it an elite thing? Is there a criteria? Is it just, you guys are just out there fostering and evangelizing brilliant tools. Is there a program? How do you guys- >> It's a program. >> How do you guys vet startup's, is there? >> It's a program. It has different levels in terms of benefits. So at the core of it it's open to anybody. So if you were a bootstrap startup tomorrow, or today, you can go to the Activate website and you can sign up for that self-starting tier. What we also do is we have an extensive set of connections with the community, so T1 accelerators and incubators, venture capital firms, the kind of places where startups are going to build and via the relationships with those folks. If you're in one, if you've kind of got investment from a top tier VC firm for example, you may be eligible for a hundred thousand dollars of credit. So some of it depends on where the stock is up, but the overall program is open to all. And a chunk of the stuff we talked about like the guidance that's there for everybody. >> It's free, that's free and that's cool. That's good learning, so yeah. And then they get the free training. What's the coolest thing that you're doing right now that startups should know about around obviously the passionate start ups. I know for a fact at 80%, I can say that I've heard Andy and Adam both say that it's not just enterprising, well, they still love the startups. That's their bread and butter too. >> Yeah, well, (indistinct) I think it's amazing that someone, we were talking about the keynote you see some of these large customers in Adam's keynote to people like United Airlines, very, very large successful enterprise. And if you just look around this show, there's a lot of startups just on this expert floor that we are now. And when I look at these announcements, to me, the thing that just gets me excited and keeps me staying doing this job is all of these little capabilities make it in the environment right now with a good funding environment and all of these technical building blocks that instead of having to take a few, your basic compute and storage, once you have all of these higher and higher levels things, you know the serverless stuff that was announced in Adam's keynotes early, which is just making it easy. Because if you're a founder, you have an idea, you know the thing that you want to disrupt. And we're letting people do that in different ways. I'll pick one start up that I find really exciting to talk to. It's called Study. It's run by a guy called Zack Kansa. And he started that start up relatively recently. Now, if you started 15 years ago, you were going to use EC2 instances building on the cloud, but you were still using compute instances. Zack is really opinionated and a kind of a technology visionary in this sense that he takes this serverless approach. And when you talk to him about how he's building, it's almost this attitude of, if I've had to spin up a server, I've kind of failed in some way, or it's not the right kind of thing. Why would we do that? Because we can build with these completely different kinds of architectures. What was revolutionary 15 years ago, and it's like, okay, you can launch it and serve with an API, and you're going to pay by the hour. But now when you look at how Zack's building, you're not even launching a server and you're paying by the millions. >> So this is a huge history lesson slash important point. Back 15 years ago, you had your alternative to Amazon was provisioning, which is expensive, time consuming, lagging, and probably causes people to give up, frankly. Now you get that in the cloud either you're on your own custom domain. I remember EC2 before they had custom domains. It was so early. But now it's about infrastructures code. Okay, so again, evolution, great time to market, buy what you need in the cloud. And Adam talked about that. Now it's true infrastructure is code. So the smart savvy architects are saying, Hey, I'm just going to program. If I'm spinning up servers, that means that's a low level primitive that should be automated. >> Right. >> That's the new mindset. >> Yeah, that's why the fun thing about being in this industry is in just in the time that I've worked at AWS, since about 2011, this stuff has changed so much. And what was state of the art then? And if you take, it's funny, when you look at some of the startups that have grown with AWS, like whether it's Airbnb, Stripe, Slack and so on. If you look at how they built in 2011, because sometimes new startups will say, oh, we want to go and talk to this kind of unicorn and see how they built. And if you actually talked to the unicorn, some of them would say, we wouldn't build it this way anymore. We would do the kind of stuff that Zack and the folks studied are doing right now, because it's totally different (indistinct). >> And the one thing that's consistent from then to now is only one thing, it has nothing to do with the tech, it's speed. Remember rails front end with some backend Mongo, you're up on EC2, you've got an app, in a week, hackathon. Weekend- >> I'm not tying that time thing, that just goes, it gets smaller and smaller. Like the amplify thing that Verna was talking about this morning. You could've gone back 15 years, it's like, okay, this is how much work the developer would have to do. You could go back a couple of years and it's like, they still have this much work to do. And now this morning, it's like, they've just accelerated them to that kind of thing. >> We'll end on giving Jerry Chan a plug in our chat yesterday. We put the playbook out there for startups. You got to raise your focus on the beach head and solve the problem you got in front of you, and then sequence two adjacent positions, refactor in the cloud. Take that approach. You don't have to boil the ocean over right away. You get in the market, get in and get automating kind of the new playbook. It's just, make everything work for you. Not use the modern. >> Yeah, and the thing for me, that one line, I can't remember it was Paul Gray, or somehow that I stole it from, but he's just encouraging these startups to be appropriately lazy. Like let us do the hard work. Let us do the undifferentiated heavy lifting so people can come up with these super cool ideas. >> Yeah, just plugging the talent, plugging the developer. You got a modern application. Paul, thank you for coming on theCUBE, I appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Head of Startup Solution Architecture North America, Amazon Web Services is going to continue to birth more startups that will be unicorns and decacorns now. Don't forget the decacorns. Okay, we're here at theCUBE bringing you all the action. I'm John Furrier, theCUBE. You're watching the Leader in Global Tech Coverage. We'll be right back. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. You're watching CUBE's worldwide leader in tech coverage. We're in person on the show floor. It's also a hybrid event, online as well. CUBE coverage online with Amazon re:Invent site. Great content all around, amazing announcements, transformation in all areas are exploding and in innovation, of course, we have innovation here with Sandy Carter, the worldwide public sector vice-president of partners and programs for Amazon Web Services. Sandy, welcome back, CUBE alumni. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to see you and great to see you in person again. It's so exciting. The energy level, oh my God. >> Oh my God. It's so much. Thanks, great keynote. Good to see you again in person. A lot of action, give us the top announcements. What's going on? What are the top 10 AWS announcements? >> Yeah, so we, this year for 2022, as we frame it out, we decided on a 3D strategy, a three-dimensional strategy. So we started with destination then data and then delivery. So if I could do them in that order, does that sound good? >> Yeah. Destination. >> So let's start with destination. So I got this from one of the customers and he said to me, "look, Sandy, I thought it was all going to be about getting to the cloud. But when I got to the cloud, I realized it wasn't about just in the cloud, it was about what you do in the cloud." And so we made some announcements this morning, especially around migration, modernization, and optimization. So for migration, we have the mainframe announcement that Adam made, and then we also echoed it. Cause most of the mainframes today sit in public sector. So this is a managed service, it's working with Micro Focus, one of our partners. And Lockheed Martin one of our partners is one of the first into the mainframe migration, which is a service and services to help customers transform their business with the mainframe. And then as we compliment them, we look at that we also have modernization occurring. So for example, IoT. IDC tells us that IoT and that data has increased four times since COVID because now devices and sensors are tracking a lot of data. So we made an announcement around smart cities and we now have badging for our partners. We have 18 partners solutions now in smart cities. So working backwards from the partners they were talking about given now COVID is kind of in the midst of where it is smart cities and making those cities work better in public transportation and utility, it's just all where it's at. And then the final announcement in that category is containers. So 60% of our customers said that they're going to be using containers. So we announced a Rapid Adoption Assistance program for our partners to be able to help our customers move to containers overall. >> So mainframe migration, I saw that on stage, but Micro Focus, that was a good job. Get that legacy out of the way, move to the cloud. You've got smart cities, which is basically IoT, which brings cloud to the edge. And then containerization for the cloud native, either development or compatibility, interoperability kind of sets that table. That's the destination. >> That's right. That's right. Because all of those things, you know, you've got to get the mainframe to the cloud, but then it's about modernizing, right? Getting rid of all that COBOL code and then, you know, IoT and then making sure that you are ready to go with containers. It's the newest- >> So you've got the 3D, destination, data and delivery. >> That's right. >> Okay. Destination, check. Cloud. Cloud destination. >> Yeah. >> I'm putting dots together in real time. >> Destination cloud. There you go. You've got it. >> I'm still with it after all these interviews. >> Yeah, there you go. >> Data, I'll say killer Swami's onstage today, whole new data, multiple databases. What's the data focus in this area? >> So for our partners, first it's about getting the data to the cloud, which means that we need a way to really migrate it. So we announced an initiative to help get that data to the cloud. We had a set of partners that came on with us early on in this initiative to move that data to the cloud, it's called a Rapid Adoption Assistance, which helps you envision where you want to go with your data. Do you want to put it in a data lake? Do you want data stored as it is? What do you want to visualize? What do you want to do with analytics? So envision that and then get enablement. So all the new announcements, all the new services get enablement and then to pilot it. And then the second announcement in this area is a set of private offers in the marketplace. Our customers told us that they love to go after data, but that there's too many pieces and moving parts. So they need the assessment bundled with the managed service and everything bundled together so it's a solution for them. So those were our two announcements in the data area. >> So take me through the private marketplace thing, because this came up when I was talking with Stephen Orban who's now running the marketplace. What does that mean? So you're saying that this private offer is being enabling the suppliers and in government? >> Yeah. So available in the marketplace, a lot of our government agencies can buy from the marketplace. So if they have a contract, they can come and buy. But instead of having to go and say, okay, here's an assessment to tell me what I should do, now here's the offering, and now here's the managed service, they want it bundled together. So we have a set of offerings that have that bundled together today with the set of our great public sector partners. >> So tons of data action, where's the delivery fit in? >> So delivery. This one is very interesting because our customers are telling us that they no longer want just technology skills, they also need industry skills too. So they're looking for that total package. For example, you know, the state of New Jersey when hurricane Ida hit, category four storm, they wanted someone who obviously could leverage all the data, but they wanted someone who understood disaster response. And so Maxar fits that bill. They have that industry specialty along with the technology specialty. And so for our announcements here, we announced a new competency, which is an industry competency for energy. So think about renewables and sustainability and low carbon. These are the partners that do that. We have 32 different partners who met the needs of that energy competency. So we were able to GA that here today. The other really exciting announcement that we made was for small businesses to get extra training, it's called Think Big for Small Business communities. So we announced last year virtually, Think Big for Small Business. We now have about 200 companies who are part of that program, really getting extra help as diverse companies. Women owned, black owned, brown owned, veteran owned businesses, right? But now what they told us was in addition to the AWS help, what they loved is how we connected them together and we almost just stumbled upon it. I was hosting some meetings and I had Tia from Bellflower, I had Lisa from DLZP together and they got a lot of value just being connected. And we kept hearing that over and over and over again. So now we've programmatized that so it's more scalable than me introducing people to each other. We now have a program to introduce those small business leaders to each other. And then the last one that we announced is our AWS government competency is now the largest competency at AWS. So the government competency, which is pretty powerful. So now we're going to do a focus enhancement for federal. So all of our federal partners with all that opportunity can now take advantage of some private advisory council, some additional training that will go on there, additional go-to market support that they can use to help them. >> Okay. I feel like my brain is going to explode. Those are just the announcements here. There's a lot going. >> Yeah. There's a lot going on. >> I mean it's so much you've got to put them into buckets. Okay. What's the rationale around 3D? Delivery, data... I mean, destination, delivery, data. Destination, meaning cloud. Data, meeting data. And delivery meaning just new ways to get up and running- >> Skills. >> To get this delivery for the services. >> Yep. >> Okay. So is there a pattern emerging? What can you say? Cause remember we talked about this before a year ago, as well as in person at your public sector summit with your partners. Is there a pattern emerging that you're seeing here? Cause lots of the announcements are coming, done with the mainframes. Connect on your watch has been a big explosion. Adam Slansky told me personally, it's on fire. And public sector, we saw a lot of that. >> Well, in fact, you know, if you look at public sector, three factoids that we shared this morning in the keynote. Our public sector partners grew 54% this year, this is after last year we grew 45%. They grew the number of certifications that they had by 40% and the number of new customers by 32%. I mean, those are unreal numbers. Last year we did 28% new customers and we thought that was the cat's meow, now we're at 32%. So our partners are just exploding in this public sector space right now. >> It's almost as if they have an advantage because they dragged their feet for so long. >> It's true. It's true. COVID accelerated their movement to the cloud. >> A lot of slow moving verticals because of the legacy and whether it's regulation or government funding or skills- >> Or mainframes. >> All had to basically move fast, they had no excuses. And then the cloud kind of changes everyone's mindset. How about the culture? I want to ask you about the culture in the public sector, because this is coming up a lot. Again, a lot of your customers that I'm interviewing all talk... and I try to get them to talk about horizontally scalable and machine learning, and they're always, no, it's culture. >> Yeah. It's true. >> Culture is the number one thing. >> It is true. You know, culture eats strategy for lunch. So even if you have a great strategy around the cloud, if you don't have that right culture, you won't win in the marketplace. So we are seeing this a lot. In fact, one of our most popular programs is PTP, Partner Transformation Program. And it lays out a hundred day program on cloud best practices. And guess what's the number one topic? Culture. Culture, governance, technology, all of those things are so important right now. And I think because, you know, a lot of the agencies and governments and countries, they had moved to the cloud now that they're in the cloud, they went through that pain during COVID, now they're seeing all the impact of artificial intelligence and containers and blockchain and all of that, right? It's just crazy. >> That's a great insight. And I'll add to that because I think one of the things I've observed, especially with your partners is the fear of getting eliminated by technology or the fear of having a job change or fear of change in general went away once they started using it because they saw the criticality of the cloud and how it impacted their job, but then what it offered them as new opportunities. In fact, it actually increases more areas to innovate on and do more, whether it's job advancement or cross training or lateral moves, promotion, that's a huge retention piece. >> It really is. And I will tell you that the movement to the cloud enabled people to see it wasn't as scary as they thought it was going to be, and that they could still leverage a lot of the skills that they had and learn new ones. So I think it is. And this is one of the reasons why, I was just talking with Maureen launching that 29 million training program for the cloud, that really touches public sector because there is so many agencies, countries, governments that need to have that training. >> You're talking about Maureen Lonergan, she does the training. She's been working on that for years. >> Yeah. >> That's the only getting better and better. >> Yeah. >> Well Sandy, I've got to ask you, since you have a few minutes left, I want to ask you about your journey. >> Yeah. >> We've interviewed you going back a long time look where we are now. >> I know. It's incredible. >> Look at these two sets going on at CUBE. >> You've been an incredible voice on theCUBE. We really appreciate having you on because you're innovative. You're always moving like a shark. You can't sit still. You're always innovating. Still going on, you had the great women's luncheon from 20 to 200. >> Yeah, we grew. So we started out with 20 people back five years ago and now we had about 200 women and it was incredible because we do different topics. Our topic was around empathy and empathetic leadership. And you know how you can really leverage that today, back with the skills and your people. You know, given that Amazon just announced our new leadership principle about wanting to be the Earth's most employee centric company. It fits right in, empathetic leadership. And we had amazing women at that luncheon that told some great stories about empathy that I think will live in our hearts forever. >> And the other thing I want to point out, we had some of the guests on sitting on theCUBE. We had Linda Jojo from United airlines. >> Oh yeah. >> And a little factoid, yesterday in the keynote, 50% of the speakers were women. >> I know. The first time I did a blog post on it, like we had two amazing women in STEM and we had, you know, the black pilot that was highlighted. So it's showing more diversity. So I was just so excited. Thank you Adam, for doing that because I think that was an amazing, amazing focus here at the conference. >> I wanted to bring up a point. I had a note here to bring up to you. Public sector, you guys doubled the number of partners, large migrations this year. That's a big statoid. You've had 575,000 individuals hold active certifications. Okay. That grew 40% from August 2021, clearly a pandemic impact. A lot of people jumping back in getting their certs, migrating so if they're not... They're in between transitions where they have a tailwind or a headwind, whether you're United Airlines or whether you're Zoom, you got some companies were benefiting from the pandemic and some were retooling. That's something that we talked about actually at the beginning. >> That's right. Absolutely. And I do think that those certifications also demonstrate that customers have raised the bar on what they expect from a partner. It's no longer just like that technology input, it's also that industry side. And so you see the number of certifications going up because customers are demanding higher skill level. And by the way, for the partners we conducted a study with ESG and ESG said that more skilled partners, you drive more margin, profit margin, 42% more profit margin for a higher skilled partner. And we're seeing that really come to fruition with some of these really intense focus on getting more certifications and more training. >> I want to get your thoughts on the healthcare and life science. I just got a note here that tells me that the vertical is one of the fastest growing verticals with 105% year on year growth. Healthcare and life sciences, another important... Again, a lot of legacy, a lot of old silos, forced to expand and innovate with the pandemic growing. >> Yes. You know, government is our largest segment today, our largest competency. Healthcare is our fastest growing segment. So we have a big focus there. And like you said, it's not just around, you know, seeing things stay the same. It's about digital transformation. It's one of the reasons we're also seeing such an increase in our authority to operate program both on the government side and the healthcare side. So we do, you know, FedRAMP and IL5. We had six companies that got IL5, five of them in 2021, which is an amazing achievement. And then, you know, if you think about the healthcare side, our fastest growing compliance is HIPAA and HITRUST. And that ATO program really brings best practices and templates and stronger go to market for those partners too. >> Yeah. I mean, I think it's opportunity recognition and then capture during the pandemic with the cloud. More agility, more speed. >> That's right. >> Sandy, always great to have you on. In the last couple of seconds we have left, summarize the top 10 announcements in a bumper sticker. If you had to kind of put that bumper sticker on the car as it drives away from re:Invent this year, what's on that bumper sticker? What's it say? >> Partners that focus on destination, data and delivery will grow faster and add more value to their customers. >> There it is. The three dimension, DDD. Delivery... Destination, data and delivery. >> There you go. >> Here on theCUBE, bringing you all the data live on the ground here, CUBE studios, two sets wall-to-wall coverage. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in global tech coverage. I'm John Furrier your host. Thanks for watching. (soft techno music)

(bright music) >> Welcome back to AWS re:Invent. You're watching theCUBE. And we're here with Steve Mullaney, who is the president and CEO of Aviatrix. Steve, I got to tell ya, great to see you man. >> We started the whole pandemic, last show we did was with you guys. >> Steve: Don't say we started, we didn't start it. (steve chuckles) >> Right, we kicked it off (all cross talking) >> It's going to be great. >> Our virtual coverage, that hybrid coverage that we did, how ironic? >> Steve: Yeah, was as the world was shutting down. >> So, great to see you face to face. >> Steve: Great to see you too. >> Wow, so you're two years in? >> Steve: Two and a half years yeah. >> Started, the company was standing start $2 billion valuation, raised a bunch of dough. >> Steve: Yeah. >> That's good, you got to feel good about that. >> We were 38 people, two and a half years ago, we're now 400. We had a couple million in ARR, we're now going to be over a 100 million next year, next calendar year, so significant growth. We just raised $200 million, three months ago at a $2 billion valuation. Now have 550 customers, 54 of them are fortune 500, when I started two and a half years ago, we didn't have any fortune 500s, we had probably about a 100 customers. So, massive growth, big growth (indistinct). >> Awesome, I got to ask you, I love to ask CEO's, entrepreneurs, how did you know when to scale? >> You just know it, when you see it. (indistinct) Yeah, there's no formula, you just know it and what you look for is that point where you say, okay, we've now proven the model and until you do that you minimize things and we actually just went through this. We had 12 sales teams, four months ago, we now have 50. 50, five zero and it's that step function as a company, you don't want to linearly grow 'cause you want to hold until you say, it's happening. And then once you say it's happening, okay, the dogs are eating the dog food, this is good then you flip the other way, and then you say, let's grow as fast as we possibly can and that's kind of the mode we're in right now. >> Okay, You've... >> You just know it when you see it. >> Other piece of that is how fast do you scale? And now you're sort of doing that step function as your going. >> Steve: We are going as fast as we possibly can. >> Wow, that's awesome, congratulations and I know you've got to long way to go. So okay, let's talk about the big trends that you're seeing that Aviatrix has taken advantage of, maybe explain a little bit about what you guys do. >> Yeah. So we are, what I like to call Multi- Cloud Native Networking and Network Security. So, if you think of... >> David: What is multicloud native? You got to explain that. >> I got to to explain that. Here's what's happened, it's happening and what I mean by it's happening is, enterprises at two and a half years ago, this is why I joined Aviatrix, all decided for the first time, we mean it now, we are going into Cloud 'cause before that they were just mouthing it. And they said, "We're going into the Cloud." And oh by the way, I knew two and a half years ago of course it was going to be multicloud, 'cause enterprises run workloads where they run best. That's what they do, it's sometimes it's AWS, sometimes it's ads or sometimes it's Google, it's of course going to be multicloud. And so from an enterprise perspective, they love the DevOps, they love the simplicity, the automation, the infrastructure is code, the Terraform, that Cloud operational model, because this is a business transformation, moving to Cloud is not a technology transformation it's the business. It's the CEO saying we are digitizing we have an existential threat to the survival of our company, I want to grow a market share, I want to be more competitive, we're doing this, stop laying across the tracks technology people, will run you over, we're doing this. And so when they do that as an enterprise, I'm BNY Mellon, I'm United Airlines, you name it, your favorite enterprise. I need the visibility and control from a networking and network security perspective like I used to have on-prem. Now I'm not going to do it in the horrible complex operational model the Cisco 1994 data center, do not bring that crap into my wonderful Cloud, so that ain't happening but, all I get from the Native constructs, I don't get enough of that visibility and control, it's a little bit of a black box, I don't get that. So where do I get the best of the Cloud from an operational model, but yet with the visibility and control that I need, that I used to have on-prem from networking network security, that's Aviatrix. And that's where people find us and so from a networking and network security, so that's why I call it multicloud Native because what we do is, create a layer basically an abstraction layer above all the different Clouds, we create one architecture for networking and network security with advanced services not basic services that run on AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, Ali Cloud, Top Secret Clouds, GovClouds, you name it. And now the customer has one architecture, which is what enterprises want, I want one network, I want one network security architecture, not AWS Native, Azure Native, Google Native. >> David: Right. >> We leverage those native constructs, abstract it, and then provide a single common architecture with demand services, irrespective of what Cloud you're on. >> Dave, I've been saying this for a couple of years now, that Cloud Native... >> Does that make sense Dave? >> Absolutely. >> That abstraction layer, right? And I said, "The guys who do this, who figure this out are going to make a lot of dough." >> Yeah. >> Snowflakes obviously doing it. >> Yeah. >> You guys are doing it, it's the future. >> Yeah. >> And it's really an obvious construct when you look back at the world of call it Legacy IT for a moment... >> Steve: Yeah. >> Because did we have different networks to hookup different things in a data center? >> No, one network. >> One network of course. I don't care if the physical stack comes from Dell, HP or IBM. >> Steve: That's right, I want an attraction layer above that, yeah. >> Exactly. >> So the other thing that happens is, everybody and you'll understand this from being at Oracle, everybody wants to forget about the network. Network security, it's down in the bowels, it's like plumbing, electricity, it's just, it has to be there but people want to forget about it and so you see Datadog, you see Snowflake, you see HashiCorp going IPO in early December. Guess what? That next layer underneath that, I call it the horsemen of the multicloud infrastructure is networking and network security, that's going to be Aviatrix. >> Well, you guys make some announcements recently in that space, every company is a security company but you're really deep into it. >> Well, that's the interesting thing about it. So I said multicloud Native Networking and Network Security, it's integrated, so guess where network security is going to be done in the Cloud? In the network. >> David: Network. >> Yeah in the network. >> What a strange concept but guess what on-prem it's not, you deflect traffic to this thing called a firewall. Well, why was that? I was at Synoptics, I was at Cisco 'cause we didn't care about network security, so that's why firewall companies existed. >> Dave: Right. >> It should be integrated into the infrastructure. So now in the Cloud, your security posture is way worse than it was on-prem. You're connected to the internet by default so guess what? You want your network to do network security, so we announced two things in security; one, we're now a security competency partner for AWS, they do not give that out lightly. We were networks competency four years ago, we're now network security competency. One of the few that are both, they don't do that, that took us nine months of working with them to get there. And they only do that for the people that really are delivering value. And then what we just announced what we call, 'ThreatIQ with ThreatGuard.' So again, built into the network because we are the network, we understand the traffic, we're the control plane and the data plane, we see all traffic. We integrate into the network, we subscribe to threat databases, public databases, where we see what are the malicious IPS. If we have any traffic anywhere in your overall, and this is multicloud, not just AWS, every single Cloud, if we see that malicious traffic going some into IP guess what? It's probably BIT Mining, Bitcoin, crypto mining, it's probably some sort of data ex filtration. It could be some tour thing that you're connected to, whatever it is, you should not have traffic going. And so we do two things we alert and we show you where that all is and then with ThreatGuard, we actually will do a firewall rule right at that gateway, at that point that it's going out and immediately gone. >> You'll take the action. >> We'll take the action. >> Okay. >> And so every single customer, Dave and David, that we've shown this new capability to, it lights up like a Christmas tree. >> Yeah al bet. Okay, but now you've made some controversial statements... >> Steve: Which time? >> Okay, so you said Cisco, I think VMware... >> Dave: He's writing them down. >> I know but I can back it up. >> I think you said the risk, Cisco, VMware and Arista, they're not even in the Cloud conversation now. Arista, Jayshree Ullal is a business hero of mine, so I don't want to... >> Steve: Yeah, mine too. >> I don't want to interrogate her, she's awesome. >> Steve: Yeah. >> But what do you mean by that? Because can't Cisco come at this from their networking perspective and security and bring that in? What do you mean by they're not in the Cloud conversation? >> They're not in the conversation. >> David: Okay, defend that. >> And the reason is they were about four years ago. So when you're four years ago, you're moving into the Cloud, what's the first thing you do? I'm going to grab my CSR and I'm going to try to jam it in the Cloud. Guess what? The CSR doesn't even know it's in the Cloud, it's looking for ports, right? And so what happens is the operational model is horrendous, so all the Cloud people, it just is like oil and water, so they go, oh, that was horrendous. So no one's doing that, so what happens in the Cloud is they realize the number one thing is the Cloud operational model. I need that simplicity, I have to be a single Terraform provider, infrastructure is code. Where do I put my box with my wires? That's what the on-prem hardware people think. >> David: The selling ports your saying? >> The selling boxes. >> David: Yeah. >> And so they'll say, "Oh, we got us software version of it, it runs as a VM, it has no idea it's in the Cloud." It is not Cloud Native, I call that Cloud naive, they don't understand so then the model doesn't work. And so then they say, "Okay, I'm not going to do that." Then the only other thing they can do, is they look at the Cloud providers themselves and they say, "All right, I'm going to use Native constructs, what do you got?" And what happens basically is the Cloud providers say, "Well, we do everything and anything you'll ever need and networking and network security." And the customers, "Oh my God, it's fantastic." Then they try to use it and what they realize is you get very basic level services, and you get no visibility and control because they're a black box, you don't get to go in. How about troubleshooting, Packet Captures, simple things? How about security controls, performance traffic engineering, performance controls, visibility nothing, right? And so then they go, "Oh shit, I'm an enterprise, I'm not just some DevOps Danny three years ago, who was just spinning up workloads and didn't care about security." No, that was the Cloud three years ago. This is now United, BNY, Nike. This is like elite of elite. So when my VC was here, he said, "It's happening." That's what he meant, it's happening. Meaning enterprises, the dogs are eating the dog food and they need visibility and control, they cannot get it from the Cloud providers. >> It's happening in early days Dave. >> So Steve, we're going to stipulate that you can't jam this stuff into Cloud, but those dinosaurs are real and they're there. Explain how you... >> Steve: Well you called them dinosaurs not me but they're roaming the earth and they're going to run out of food pretty soon. (all laughing) The comet hit the earth. >> Hey, they're going to go down fighting. (all laughing) >> But the dinosaurs didn't all die the day after the comet hit the earth... >> Steve: That's right. >> They took awhile. >> Steve: They took a while. >> So, how are you going to saddle them up? That's the question because you're... >> Steve: It's over there walking dead, I don't need to do anything. >> Is it the captain Kirk to con, let them die. >> Steve: Yeah. >> Because you're in the Cloud, you're multicloud... >> Steve: Yeah. >> That's great, but 80% of my IT still on-prem and I still have Cisco switches. Isn't that just not your market or? >> When IBM and DEC did we have to do anything with IBM and DEC in the 90s, early 90s, when we created BC client server, IP architectures? No, they weren't in the conversation. >> David: Yeah. >> So, we dint compete with them, just like whatever they do on-prem, keep doing it, I wish you the best. >> But you need to integrate with them and play with them. >> Steve: No. >> Not at all? >> No, no we integrate, here is the thing that's going to happen, so to the on-prem people, it's all point of reference. They look at Cloud as off-prem, I'm going to take my operational model on-prem and I'm going to push it into the Cloud. And if I push it into multiple Clouds, they're going to call that multicloud, see we are multicloud. You're pushing your operational model into the Cloud. What's happening is Cloud has won, it won two and a half years ago with every enterprise. It's like a rock in the water. And what's going to happen is that operational model is moving out to the edge, it's moving to the branch, it's moving to the data center and it's moving into edge computing. That's what's happening... >> So outpost, so I put an outpost in my data center... >> Outpost looks like... >> Is that Aviatrix? >> Absolutely, we're going to get dragged with that... >> Dave: Okay, alright. >> Because we're the networking and network security provider, and as the company pushes out, that operational model is going to move out, not the existing on-prem OT, IT branch office then pushing in. And so, what's happening is you're coming at it from the wrong perspective. And this wave is just going to push over and so I'm just following behind this wave of AWS and Azure and Google. >> Here's the thing, you can do this and you don't have a bunch of legacy deductible debt... >> Steve: Yeah. >> So you can be Cloud Native, multicloud native, I think you called it? >> Steve: Yeah, yeah. >> I love it, you're building castles on the sand. >> Steve: Yeah. >> Jerry Chen's thing. >> Steve: Yeah. >> Now, the thing is, today's executives, they're not as naive as Ken Olsen, UNIX as, "Snake oil," who would need a PC, so they're not in denial. >> They're probably not in denial, yeah. >> Right, and so they have some resources, so the problem is they can't move as fast as you can. So, you're going to do really well. >> Steve: Yeah. >> I think they'll eventually get there Steve, but you're going to be, I don't know how many, four or five years ahead, that's a nice lead. >> That's a bet I'll take any day. >> David: Then what you don't think they'll ever get there? >> No, 10 years. (steve laughing) >> Okay, but they're not going out of business. >> No, I didn't say that. >> I know you didn't. >> What they're doing, I wish them all the best. >> Because a lot of their customers move... >> I don't compete with them. >> Yeah. We were out of time. >> Yeah. >> What did you mean by AWS is like Sandals? You mean like cool like Sandals? >> Steve: Oh, no, no, no. I don't want to... >> You mean like the vacation place? >> Have you ever been to Sandals? >> I never done it. What do you mean by that? >> There coming, there coming. Which version of sandals (indistinct)? (people cross talking) >> This is for an enterprise by the way, and look, Sandals is great for a lot of people but if you're a Cloud provider, you have to provide the common set of services for the masses because you need to make money. And oh, by the way, when you go to Sandals, go try it, like get a bottle of wine, they say, "We got red wine or white wine?" "Oh, great, what kind of red wine?" "No, red wine and it's in a box." And they hope that you won't know the difference. The problem is some people in enterprises want Four Seasons, so they want to be able to swipe the card and get a good bottle of wine. And so that's the thing with the Cloud, but the Cloud can't offer up a 200 bottle of wine to everybody. My mom loves box wine, so give her box wine. Where ISBs like us come in, is great but complimentary to the Cloud provider for that person who wants that nice bottle of wine because if AWS had to provide all this level of functionality for everybody, their instant sizes would be too big, >> Too much cost for that. (people cross talking) You're right on. And as long as you can innovate fast and stay ahead of that and keep adding value... >> Well, here's the thing, they're not going to do it for multicloud either though. >> David: I wouldn't trust them to do it with multicloud. >> No. >> David: I wouldn't. >> No enterprise would and I don't think they would ever do it anyway. >> That makes sense. Steve, we've got to go man. You're awesome, love to have you on theCUBE, come back anytime. >> Awesome, thank you. >> All right, keep it right there everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech coverage. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage here at AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. We're in-person, on the floor, also a virtual event, it's a hybrid event. A lot of people watching online, of course, wall-to-wall coverage. We got a great guest here, we're going to go in-depth on the keynote review with Leah Bibbo who's the vice president product and marketing behind the scenes with Adam Selipsky, the CEO, setting up the table for his first keynote as CEO. Leah, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> So I thought Adam did a fantastic job. It was Adam's keynote, not Andy. He did a great job. Hit his points, Adam's style. But it's the same Amazonian misses, he's Amazonian. I watched a 2006 interview on YouTube, he's talking, taking away all the undifferentiated heavy lifting. He's been Amazonian all his life. He went to Tableau now came back, he's doing a good job. >> He's doing a great job, and he is his own man. But he is an Amazonian, and I think we are really lucky to have him. Our customers are in good hands and it's been fun working with him. >> So had a great one-on-one pre event interview with him for about, almost two hours with Dave Vellante. And I just published a piece, and I think what was interesting was is that, the press was kind of like, oh yeah, new regime change. The competition's heating up, but the game is still the same. Amazon has got an, the same playbook, nothing new here. It's just new capabilities, every re:Invent. It's the same thing, and you have that in the keynote where you kind of hit the history lesson, where we've come. Was that the kind of set the table for the next generation? >> Maybe, I think also we're at this special point, it's the 10th re:Invent and it's our 15th anniversary as AWS. And so I think that's a good moment to kind of look back and see how far we've come. And I think that's one of those things that for all of us, everything's grown so fast. The cloud is something that's changing the world for a lot of customers, but it wasn't that long ago that we just started this new thing. And you know, many of our customers that are here with us, we're part of that. And so we really wanted to acknowledge that. >> And on the product side, a lot of key product announcements, notable. I mean, if you're kind of in the game, you kind of know what it is, but if you're kind of watching from the outside, not inside the ropes, the Annapurna relationship and the grill chips that are coming out with the Silicon is interesting. When you start looking at how the new stacks developing out for this next generation, a big part of the core strategy is compute. >> Absolutely compute is foundational as Adam said, and it's really important. And I think that we've innovated a lot and will continue to innovate in that area because we really want to make the best price performance for any workloads that our customers want to run. Whether that's, you know, legacy workloads like mainframe applications or the workloads of the future that are going to be mobile and running on the 5G network. >> So I have to ask you while got you here before we go to the next piece is that, you're in product marketing, which is a really hard job because I can imagine, `cause there's so much to highlight on the product side. I mean, there's so much, how do you know what people are interested in? Like what's the key feature that people love about AWS? If you had to point to a few, cause there's so much, but the key is to know what resonates with the customers. >> I think that's part of our customer obsession, is that we stay close to the customers and we listen to them. And what we develop is based on what they tell us they need and what we are seeing in their usage as they are. >> Is it compute? Is it the SageMaker? Is it the ML? >> Yes. (laughs) >> You do not want to pick a favorite side >> It's all of those, it's hard to pick. It's hard to pick a favorite. I think that, you know, Adam kind of had three areas where he hit, where he talked about continued innovation and infrastructure and really pushing the edge of the cloud out. He talked about data and data's everywhere and super important to customers right now. And then of course, really doubling down on making solutions that are targeted to use cases and industries. >> And verticals too, very key point. >> Leah: Correct, vertical initiates. >> And as the machine learning really shines there in this vertical and that's the big part of his keynote is that machine learning is everywhere, but these vertical cases that's super important. >> Very much so. >> All right, so let's go through the review. What's the highlights when they announces, what's the new announcements that you guys rolled out today? >> Do you want me to go through all of them, or should I pick a few? >> Pick the highlights, the big ones. >> Well, I think you've kind of touched on a few of them when you talked about some of the work that we're doing in Silicon. And so introducing the new Trainium instance, Trainium based EC2 instance, Trn1 we're pretty excited about that, it's going to offer the best price performance for training in the cloud. I think also we got a lot of buzz around the mainframe modernization. I know that maybe it's not as exciting and forward-looking, but it's super important to a lot of customers and the whole idea that we can cut, you know, cut your migration by two-thirds is kind of a big deal. So we're excited about that and then of course, AWS private 5G. >> Yeah, one of the things that came up in my interviews with Adam was this whole connect phenomenon. And last year during the pandemic, a lot of my interviews I've done with a lot of your customers is the connect thing came up the call center where it was an example of how the call center filled a void during the pandemic when people were kind of, I won't say disabled, but they were having to shift to working at home and cause a big disruption. So this notion of this horizontally scalable use case, purpose-built use case could be offered as a platform and people were into it, it was on fire as he said, that seems to be the trend going forward. He had said that, is that something that you guys are talking more about? Can you give some color into this idea of purpose-built platforms? >> I think it is something that you'll hear us continue to talk about. I think that, you know, connect is one of our fastest growing services. Customers are loving it you're right, it was great during the pandemic. And that's an area where we're going to always continue to make building blocks for our customers. People love all of the building blocks and stitching those together. But we are looking at a lot of different ways, where we can take use cases or vertical industry use cases and, you know, create an abstraction or a new solution that makes it possible for many, many more people to interact with AWS and get the benefits of the cloud. >> A lot of your customers, I interviewed, they loved the whole edge strategy because without posts, they can now put it out in the edge. Now you've got 5G, we had Dish on earlier, we had United Airlines on, the chief digital officer, she was amazing and we, so you've got 5G, which, okay, I get it, but this is a telecom transformation. You've got healthcare, you've got telecom, You've got all these verticals, 5G is huge. How much is that impacting the products, as you guys look at the edge, what's your take on that? What's your, how do you talk to customers about this whole 5G impact? >> Well, I think that, you know, 5G is exciting to everyone. We're very excited about it. As we mentioned, there's a whole range of new applications that are going to be enabled by 5G. And it's going to be applications that are in factories, in hospitals, it's really on the edge. And so I think, I think it's really important and big, but it's still emerging and we're pretty excited about it. >> I mean, Like the whole Amazon, everywhere vibe, Amazon in factories, Amazon on farm windmills, Amazon in cars, I mean cloud's everywhere now, that's a big theme, essentially promotes this continuum, where cloud meets outcomes and that messaging is resonating. When you guys are discussing like the kind of get all this keynote content together. I mean, it's super hard. >> It's really hard. >> Like how do you guys cut it down? What's the, take us inside the ropes. What goes on when you guys have to put this, this program together? Because it's not a lot of time, only a couple of hours on keynote. I mean, seems like a long time. >> Well, I mean, it's really hard. You've kind of nailed it, right? We want to be able to have customers come up and give great presentations about what they're doing so that their peers can see all the innovations that are happening on the cloud. And then we have so much innovation and selecting the innovation is difficult and challenging. I think that we really looked at some of the areas where we feel like we're not leading and customers are super interested in and we kind of make some decisions there. And the good news is, we have a lot more coming, re:Invent is many more days and we'll be probably a lot more news. >> One of the feedback we've been hearing, is the diversity has been really strong. The speakers onstage, 50% women, 50% men. That's really good, 51% is women. So we are going to get more women on stage. I mean, that's, I mean, you had two men and two women, phenomenal. >> Yes. >> Awesome. (laughing) When's it going to be all women? I see that. (laughing) All right, so give me the bottom line. Now let's get into like, okay, what's next? As you guys look to the next couple of days, what's coming, what can people expect for the next re:Invent? Cause they're going to need the bait on that, so some announcement on that. So what's next? >> Well, we have a few more keynotes, you know, tomorrow we'll have Swami and Peter, and then we have Werner on Thursday. >> John: Yes, AI tomorrow with Swami, okay. >> Maybe a little bit of that. And I think you can expect some excitement in that keynote, as always. Peter will do his keynote and then Werner, always look forward to Werner on Thursday. >> What's your big takeaway this year? If you had to boil down this year, re:Invent into kind of a bumper sticker, what's the big theme that people should walk away with this, what's the top story in your mind? >> Well, I think a big part of it, and what's so exciting is that we're all here together. And I feel like everybody's happy to be connecting again. And the energy here is really great. So I think that's one of the big themes, is kind of the community and everything we're doing together across AWS and our customers and our partners and kind of bringing it all together is super exciting. >> And the products are continuing to do well, congratulations. >> I mean, innovation is going to be something that we continue to do. It's a core pillar of AWS and it's in our DNA. >> The number is 27,000 People was here. What's the numbers, 26,000 attendees, here, roughly? >> I do not know the exact numbers. >> More than expected, a big turnout. >> Yeah, it's good, the energy here is great. And we have the, you know, it's our hybrid event as well. So we have a lot of customers that are tuning in virtually. >> Well, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it, congratulations on a great keynote. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Okay, CUBE coverage here, I'm John Furrier, the worldwide leader in tech coverage is theCUBE, we're here on the ground at AWS re:Invent. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hi, everyone. Welcome to the cubes coverage of Avis reinvent 2021 we're onsite in person. It's a virtual event, also hybrid events. I'm Jennifer and my host, David Dante ninth year, Dave, we've been doing Avis reinvent the cube and it's 11th season. We've seen a lot. Yeah, I'll say. >>And the show is pretty packed, John. I mean, I think it's surprised some folks over 25,000 people here. I mean, obviously a lot of sponsors, but >>Customers to a bad event for AWS in terms of attendance is like record-breaking for any other company, people are standing in line for sessions. It's definitely happening. People are here to learn. They're not just all employees. So definitely a successful event in person as well in the live stream. But so much news to talk about. Andy Jassy is now the CEO of Amazon. That's the top story Adam's Lipsky's taking over as CEO of AWS time, Amazonian who left Amazon to take the CEO job of Tableau sold that company to Salesforce under mark Benioff. Now back to take the helm from Andy Jassy and quite the pressure cooker here as he takes the stage, a lot of people are asking, is will he do well? Will he fumble on stage? Will he do the right things? And does he have what it takes to take the cloud to the next generation with AWS as their number one clear far and away, then the second competitor in Microsoft and then a look distant third and Google. So Amazon's are under a ton of competitive pressure. At least from an industry standpoint, everyone's still trying to catch up. It's the same theme, Dave, every year Amazon is out front and the lead just gets extended and extended. And again, here, no exception. Well, the Uber >>Of course there's you mentioned is Andy Jassy is now taking over a CEO of Amazon. And you know, history would suggest that a lot of times that companies falter when there's a CEO transition, but it feels like it's different this time. Andy Jassy was here since the beginning launched AWS versus a profit engine of Amazon brought back Adam sill Lipski who has a deep understand. He's not as technical as Andy, but obviously as a deep understanding of the business, yeah, he was comfortable up in the keynote. It wasn't John, a typical firehose of announcements. Even those, a lot of announcements, they didn't shove them down our throat and they didn't in the analyst session as well. Usually in the analyst session, it's hours and hours and hours of firehose Kool-Aid injection, not this year. Why do you think that is, is that a COVID thing? Is that a change in now? >>I think Adam's Leschi wants to be his own guy. As, as leader here, a lot of things were eliminated from the keynote that Andy Jasmine did, for instance, Andy Jesse loves music. So we always had the music walk up music like you see in sports, uh, which is very cool. That's an Andy Jassy kind of tweak. Andy is all about announcements and he was just, uh, pushing the envelope. Adam was much more laid back. He sees, I think, more of a holistic picture being more of an app guy being more of a data guy, less of a, I would say under the covers nerd like Jassy was, Andy was very deep on, on a lot of the tech stuff as is Adam. But I think Andy a little bit more proactive on that. So Adam was very much more about the impact of 80 of us culturally, as a society, as a company and kind of brought in this kind of think different apple vibe, which is, you know, the people who are Pathfinders, um, as he takes that Jassy kind of, um, approach of leaders, but be a builder, be a change agent, be a game changer. >>Adam took it to another level by saying, Hey, it's okay to be a Pathfinder because it's net new disruption with the cloud. And I think that's the story that I see coming out of this where, uh, in talking to Adam one-on-one Amazon absolutely has a secret weapon in it's chips, custom Silicon. They're absolutely crushing it with how they're thinking about SAS and platforms and they have a huge ecosystem. And I think at the end of the day, and we talked about this in our story on Silicon angle, Amazon could actually wipe out Microsoft. And I think Microsoft's core competitive advantage has always been their ecosystem and their developers. I think right now in the next few years, if Microsoft doesn't match Amazon, they will be decimated anyway, you know? >>Yeah, hold on. Okay. Amazon's not going to wipe out Microsoft. Microsoft has too much of a cash cow. Look at the hanging on to windows. Couldn't, you know, the mistake and missing mobile event initially missing the cloud. Didn't wipe out Microsoft. So they've just got too much of a software cashflow. That's not gonna happen maybe a little bit over the top. >>I thought, but Microsoft has done a great job and it's not going to tell it to kind of stay in the game and do more. But if you look at the major inflection points, Dave where's digital equipment corporation, where's prime computer. Well, >>I think this is the point is again, history would show that those companies, when they handed the reigns over to a new CEO failed, they faltered, it was self-inflicted wounds. It almost happened. You thought it would happen with Microsoft, whether it became irrelevant under bomber, but when Nadella came in, he reinvigorated because specifically they had the cashflow to be able to do that. Now. So the big question is, okay, w what's going to happen. We ran a survey to our community to see what could disrupt Amazon. You know, that the us government wants to break them apart or wants to regulate them. But our survey respondents said there's a 60% plus probability that Amazon will be disrupted by other factors. And that's what I was self-inflicted wound that's Jesse's that's right. And that's, Jessie's big challenge is how to not make those disruptions, how to fight those disruptions. >>The number one, uh, reason why they could be disrupted was self-inflicted wounds, which again, history would show what happened. But one of the things we talked about is that normally happens when companies stop innovating when they rest on their laurels. Right. And you kind of saw that with those companies that you mentioned, but you mentioned their secret weapon. We wrote about that in our article, the chips. So we heard no secret. Everybody knew graviton three was coming, right? And so that is Amazon secret up. And you know, I've been thinking about this. John Amazon makes a lot of money on x86 instances that they've deployed years ago and they charge a lot for, I was wondering, you know, is the, or the old X 86 instances actually more profitable than graviton, maybe at this point in time, but long-term graviton. They control their own destiny because they control the hardware and software stack. And I bet you allows them to get better negotiating leverage with >>M D and it's of course, I mean, pat, Kelsey, we should talk about this all the time, but as bad as Jason Intel, you, if you're not out in the next wave, your driftwood, I think Intel and AMD and others, they have purpose-built general purpose chips. They're probably going to be for the lift and shift stuff when you, but if you're actually seriously writing software as an owner on the cloud, and you want specific advantages of speed and performance, you're going to want the custom Silicon that's purpose-built for your application and write code to that stack. So, so I think there's a whole nother level of platform as a service. Dave, that's kind of coming out of this re-invent that I think could be a multi generational trend, which is, Hey, the cloud is of super cloud or platform. Look at the riser, snowflake and Databricks. Those guys are on Amazon. Like they're super clouds in and of themselves they're platforms. They're not appoint SAS solution. I think Microsoft in my, my analysis is, yeah, they got office 365, okay. Word processing stuff. But what other SAS apps do they have besides SQL server and other things that are actually being built on there? And if, if I'm a developer you're going to want to go to the platform. That's the highest performance for office 365. It's a cash cow. But how long is that going to last >>A long time? I mean, major momentum. We argue about that later, but I wanna, I want to touch on graviton three because I think that was the big announcement of the day 25% faster than graviton to at least twice the floating point performance twice the crypto graphic performance in three times for machine learning, learning workloads, and very importantly, 60% less power. So at Amazon scale, uh, Adam said this in our meeting, he said, the economics really favor us because of our scale. And so, and they've also announced new training them instances and, and, and what, what having custom Silicon allows Amazon to do is release on a much, much faster cadence than traditional x86. And they could do, and they could do really cool things. Nitro is there, Nick they're smart NEC, which it says the basis, their new hypervisor, if you will. So it allows them to bring in x86, uh, Nvidia NPUs some of their own or Nvidia GPU, some of their own Silicon. So optionality is really the key there. You heard them announce, uh, an SAP instance. So that's a memory intensive instance. They can dial things up, dial things down. They've got full control of the stack. And by the way, copying them Google's copy of Microsoft is copying them. And who's leading this charge in custom Silicon, AWS, obviously Tesla, apple. I mean, these are leading companies that I don't think they all got it wrong. I think >>The Silicon angle is to have your own custom Silicon. And that's the, that is the clearly the advantage as it's vertically integrated. But the other thing that's coming out of this reinvents, the purpose built software concept where, you know, they're not copying Microsoft playbook as the wall street journal was saying, and some are saying Microsoft copying Amazon, Amazon has always been this horizontally scalable resource that's cloud, but with machine learning and AI, you now have this purpose-built kind of capability from software into the app itself where data has to be addressable. And I think the people in the data business kind of know this, but as the rest of the world comes out, architecturally having that horizontal observation space and data that's vertically tied to machine learning is a huge architectural shift. This is a complete rethinking of how software is built and that's going to be a game changer. I think Amazon's well out on front of that. And I think that's going to be a huge architectural shift. >>Well, let's quantify this a little bit because you know, you're, you're making the point that Amazon is the number one cloud, which I would agree with. We're talking here about IAS infrastructure as a service in the past layer that sits on top of that. Microsoft defines the cloud is we'll put in an office 365, Google we'll put in its Google apps, Amazon pure infrastructure as a service. And if you just look at that space, that's about $120 billion business. When you add up AWS, Azure, Alibaba and GCP, which I would contend are the only four hyperscalers out there. I don't include Oracle as a hyperscale. I don't include IBM. I get a lot of crap for that sometimes. Yeah, but we're talking big scaler, $120 billion. So actually relatively small compared to the trillion dollar opportunity that they have, but it's growing at 35% a year. Amazon will do more than 60 billion this year, 62 billion, just to quantify it in that ISS space. Microsoft will be about 38, 30 9 billion. Okay. So pretty substantial. Those two are far ahead of the others. Everybody else's, you know, Google is still in, you know, under 10 billion, Alibaba is right around there. So those two, it's really a two horse race. And I asked Microsoft using its software estate. Amazon's gotta be the innovator and has to have the best cloud to win. And it does well >>Also a platform. Let's go back to the little history lesson for the younger folks out there. When Microsoft was had a monopoly, they had windows operating system, which has had DAS under the covers, but windows was the operating system. And office was a suite of applications. They encourage software developers to build on top of windows and they had other servers off SQL server all came out of that small history. So their bread and butter was to have developers build on top of windows. Hence the monopoly, of course they had the application and the system software, hence the monopoly, hence the Microsoft breakup by the government in 1997. Now today cloud is essentially one big kind of PC concept. It's like windows, it's windows equivalent. So cloud is essentially an environment platform that has apps that run on top of it. Okay. In that world, Amazon by far is the number one windows model at Amazon's. >>I mean, Microsoft is used to is okay, I got Azure and I got office 365 that keeps them in business that keeps them from losing. So it's a placeholder. So that what I'm looking at is what is Amazon? I mean, Amazon versus Azure, doing relative to ISV and uptake for developers. And I'm suggesting that this trend of Amazon will go, if it goes uncontested by Azure, they'll wipe the table on ISV and suffer developers. If you're an owner of a software, you're not gonna write software, that's gonna be sub-optimized for a platform. That's not going to be before, >>Unless you're, unless you're a Microsoft developer, nearly all.net days. And there are a lot of those. And that's what, that's what Microsoft is doing. They're they're, they're, they've, they've shifted to cloud, they've gone everything into cloud. So Azure is their platform for innovation and acceleration. >>So those developers are going to build a sub application versus going over here on AWS. >>Well, that's the, that's the story with Microsoft. Good enough. I know >>Again, this is we're speculating, but we're going to watch that, but that is, to me, will be the battlefield of what will determine Azure versus AWS. And I think everything else is smoke and mirrors Amazon Webster way ahead of Azure, but the TeleSign is going to be does 80 bus attract those developers on their cloud with the custom Silicon, with the integrated stack and with the purpose-built software. I mean, it's looking really good. I think they've got a really compelling story. >>I think it's less about Azure versus AWS. I mean, that's an interesting storyline and I love to talk about it, but I think they'll go back to 120 billion out of 4 trillion. That's really the, the larger opportunity for, for both Microsoft and AWS to continue to grow. Because you look at, you look at Dell with apex, you look at HPE with GreenLake, Lenovo, Cisco, they've all got their own clouds. One of the things that didn't get into our article, but Adam Lipski when, when you asked him about hybrid is that hybrid cloud. When we were talking about some of the stuff they're doing, he S he said, look, that's not cloud what those guys are doing. That's not what we did. And he talked today about edge has to be AWS, not like AWS. That was the quote to use. Talk about, you know, private 5g, bringing out posts. And he gave some examples of that. The point is they, AWS is bringing its system, its architecture to the edge it's programming model infrastructure as code to the edge. Now, Kubernetes, Kubernetes does moderate that a little bit, but his point was, that's not AWS. That's not the cloud. >>Yeah. I think in summary, Dave had to wrap up what's the big trend this week is that Amazon web services is a, is a heaven environment for a developer, for the elite people who want to roll their own for the folks in it. In these other environments, you can have prefabricated purpose-built software platform to build on top of. And I think that isn't going to address the whole ease of ease of rollout. So if I'm a SAS developer, I don't, I want, I don't want to rebuild that over again. I don't want to roll my own. I'll take what you got and connects a good example. If you want to call shedder, you can take it and use it and then build on top of it and iterate on it. So I think it's more of here's a platform for you and take it. So I think that to me is the big story and that's not and think about it. How many people out there, a role in their own Amazon, you've got to be pretty strong at Amazon, uh, familiar ups to roll your own gut >>Of other quick points that he barely emphasized the primitives, the API APIs, that multiple databases, right tool for the right job, took a shot at Oracle without mentioning Oracle because they had sort of one database, but I will say this is mission critical. Oracle still owns that. Uh, they talked about a mainframe migration, tooling and runtime from mainframe compatible runtime. That's going to allow them to nip at the edges of those mainframe workloads and Oracle workloads. It, they're not going to get to the core anytime soon. They also talked about role level and cell level security. We think that's the squirrel acquisition from years ago. And then he made a statement. We have three X with Redshift price performance better than any cloud data warehouse sort of interesting shot at, at, at, at a snowflake and Databricks Databricks. So, um, anyway, yeah, >>I mean, I think, I think overall, I thought Adam did a good job. I think he didn't, uh, he didn't disappoint. Okay. But that's comfortable. I think his goal was to get through this and not have people go well, it's not Andy Jassy. I thought he did an awesome job and he did a good job. And he, he got, he got what he needed to do >>Comfortable. And he obviously leaned on some of his Pathfinder customers. NASDAQ, I thought was very impressive. United airlines dish. So, >>Okay. Cutie coverage, ninth year of the cube here at ADP reinvent, uh, 2021 is the cube. You're watching the leader in high-tech coverage. The cube.

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of H P S. Green Lake announcement. We've been following Green Lake and the cadence of announcements making. Now we're gonna talk about ransomware, ransomware become a household term. But what people really don't understand is that virtually any bad actor can become a ransomware criminal by going on the dark web hiring a ransomware as a service sticking, putting a stick into a server and taking a piece of the action and that is a really insidious threat. Uh, the adversaries are extremely capable, so we're going to dig into that with Omar assad, who's the storage platform, lead cloud data services at H P E and Deepak verma vice president of product Zito, which is now an H P E company Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. Thank you. >>Thank you. Welcome. Pleasure to be here. So >>over you heard my little narrative upfront. How does the Xarelto acquisition fit into that discourse? >>Thank you. Dave first of all, we're extremely excited to welcome Sir toe into the HP family. Uh, the acquisition of Puerto expands the Green Lake offerings from H P E uh, into the data protection as a service and ransomware protection as a service capabilities and it at the same time accelerates the transformation that the HP storage businesses going through as it transforms itself into more of a cloud native business, which sort of follows on from the May 4th announcements that you helped us cover. Uh, this enables the HP sales teams to now expand the data protection perimeter and to start offering data protection as a service and ransomware as a service with the best in class technologies uh, from a protection site as well as from ransomware recovery side of the house. And so we're all the way down already trying to integrate uh, you know, the little offerings as part of the Green lake offerings and extending support through our services organization. And the more of these announcements are gonna roll out later in the month. >>And I think that's what you want to see from it as a service offering. You want to see a fast cadence of new services that are not a box by a box that are applying. No, it's services that you want to access. So let's, let's talk about before we get into the tech, can we talk about how you're helping customers deal with ransomware? Maybe some of the use cases that you're seeing. >>First of all, extremely excited to be part of the HP family now. Um, Quick history and that we've been around for about 11 years. We've had about 9000 plus customers and they all benefit from essentially the same technology that we invented 11 years ago. First and foremost, one of the use cases has been continuous data protection. So were built on the CdP platform, which means extremely low RTO S and R P O S for recovery. I'll give you example there um, United Airlines is an application that cost them $1 million dollars for every hour that they're down. They use traditional approaches. That would be a lot of loss with Zito, we have that down two seconds of loss in case and the application goes down. So that's kind of core and fundamental to our plaque. The second uh critical use case that for us has been simplicity. A lot of customers have said we make the difficult, simple. So DRS is a complex uh process. Um, give you an example there. Hcea Healthcare Consolidated four different disaster recovery platforms into a single platform in Puerto and saved about $10 million dollars a year. So it's making that operations of having disaster recovery process is much simpler. Um the third kind of critical use case for us as uh, the environment has evolved as the landscape has involved has been around hybrid cloud. So being able to take customers to the platforms that they want to go to that's critical for us And for our customers an example, there is Kingston technology's so Kingston tried some competitive products to move to Azure, it would take them about 24 hours to recover 30 VMS or so with zero technology. They will get about all their 1000 VMS up in Azure instantaneously. So these are three use cases that were foundational. Built. Built the company in the tech. >>Nice. Thank you. Thank you for that. So simple works well these days, especially with all this complexity we have to deal with. Can we get into the secret sauce a little bit. I mean CdP has been around forever. What do you guys do that? That's different. Maybe you can talk about that. Sure. >>Um it's cdp based, I think we've perfected the technology. It's less about being able to just copy the data. It's more about what you do when things go bump. We've made it simpler with driven economies of scale lower and being platform agnostic. We've really brought that up across to whatever platforms once upon a time it was moving from physical to virtual or even across different virtualization platforms and then being able to move across to whatever cloud platform customer may want or or back >>to cbP continuous data protection by the way for the audience that may not know that go ahead. And >>one of the additional points that I want to add to the box comment over here is the the basics of platform independence is what really drew uh hp technologists into the technology because you know, one of the things we have many, we have the high end platform with the H B electra nine Kv of the electro six kids the midrange platform. Then we have a bunch of file and object offerings on the side. What zero does it University universally applies to all those technologies and along with, you know, as you pair them up with our computer offerings to offer a full stack but now the stack is disaster recovery capable. Natively with the integration of certo, you know, one of the things that, you know, Deepak talked about about the as your migrations that a lot of the customers are talking about cloud is also coming up as a D our use case for a lot of our customers, customers, you know, you know, as we went through thousands of customers interviews one of the, one of the key things that came back was investing in a D our data center which is just waiting there for a disaster to happen. It's a very expensive insurance policy. So absurd. Oh, through its native capabilities allows customers to do is to just use public cloud as a D our target and and as a service, it just takes care of all the format conversions and recoveries and although that's completely automated inside the platform and and we feel that, you know, when you combine this either at the high end of data center storage offering or the middle age offering with this replication, D. R. And ransomware protection built into the same package, working under the same hood, it just simplifies and streamlines the customers deployment. >>Come here a couple of things. So first of all historically, if you wanted to recover to appoint within let's say, you know, 10 seconds, five seconds you have to pay up. Big time. Number one. Number two is you couldn't test your D. R. It was too risky. So people just had it in, they had a checkbox on compliance but they actually couldn't really test it because they were afraid they were going to lose data. So it sounds like you're solving both of those problems or >>or you know we remember the D. R. Test where it was a weekend. It was an event right? It was the event and at the end of july that the entire I. T. Organizing honey >>it's not gonna be home this weekend. Exactly what >>we've changed. That is a click of a button. You can D. R. Test today if you want to you can have disaster recovery still running. You can D. R. Test in Azure bring up your environment an isolated network bubble, make sure everything's running and bring it and bring it down. The interesting thing is the technology was invented back when our fear in the industry was losing a data center was losing power was catastrophic, natural disasters. But the technology has lent itself very well to the new threats which which are very much around ransomware as you mentioned because it's a type of disaster. Somebody's going after your data. Physical servers are still around but you still need to go back to a point in time and you need to do that very quickly. So the technology has really just found itself uh appealing to new challenges. >>If a customer asks you can I really eliminate cyber attacks, where should I put my my if I had 100 bucks to spend. Should I spend it on you know layers and defense should I spend it on recovery. Both, what would you tell them? >>I think it's a balanced answer. I think prevention is 100% impossible. Uh It's really I'd say spend it in in thirds. You want to spend a third of it and and prevention a third of it maybe in detection and then a third of it in uh recovery. So it's really that balancing act that means you can't leave the front door open but then have a lot of recovery techniques invested in. It has to be it has to be a balance and it's also not a matter of if it's a matter of when so we invest in all three areas. Hopefully two of them will work to your advantage. >>You dave you you should always protect your perimeter. I mean that that goes without saying but then as you invest in other aspects of the business, as Deepak mentioned, recovery needs to be fast and quick recovery whether from your recovering from a backup disaster. Are you covering from a data center disaster a corrupted file or from a ransomware attack. A couple of things that zero really stitches together like journal based recovery has been allowed for a while but making journal based recovery platform independent in a seamless fashion with the click of a button within five seconds go back to where your situation was. That gives you the peace of mind that even if the perimeter was breached, you're still protected, you know, five minutes into the problem And, and that's the peace of mind, which along with data protection as a service, disaster recovery as a service and now integrating this, you know, recovery from ransomware along with it in a very simple, easy to consume package is what drew us into the >>more you can do this you said on the use the cloud as a target. I could use the cloud as an air gap if I wanted to. It sounds like it's cloud Native, correct? Just wrap your stack in kubernetes and shove it in the cloud and have a host and say we're cloud to No, really I'm serious. So >>absolutely, we we looked at that approach and that that's where the challenge comes in, Right? So I give you the example of Kingston technology just doesn't scale, it's not fast enough. What we did was developed a platform for cloud Native. We consume cloud services where necessary in order to provide that scalability. So one example in Azure is being able to use scale set. So think about a scenario where you just declare a disaster, you've got 1000 VMS to move over, we can spin up the workers that need to do the work to get 1000 VMS spin them down. So you're up and running instantaneously and that involves using cloud Native uh tools and technologies, >>can we stay on that for a minute, So take take us through an example of what life was like would be like without zero trying to recover and what it's like with Puerto resources, complexity time maybe you could sort of paint a picture. Sure. >>Let me, I'll actually use an example from a customer 10 Kata. They uh develop defensive fabrics, especially fabric. So think about firefighters, think about our men and women abroad that need protective clothing that developed the fibers behave. They were hit by ransomware by crypto locker. That this was before zero. Unfortunately it took they took about a two week uh data loss. It took them weeks to recover that environment, bring it back up and the confidence was pretty low. They invested in, they looked at our technology, they invested in the technology and then they were hit with a different variant of crypto locker immediately. The the IT administrators and the ITS folks there were relieved right, they had a sense of confidence to say yes we can recover. And the second time around they had data loss of about 10 seconds, they could recover within a few minutes. So that's the before and after picture giving customers that confidence to say yep, a breach happened, we tried our best but now it's up to recovery and I can recover without having to dig tapes out from some vault and hopefully have a good copy of data sitting there and then try that over and over again and there's a tolerance right before a time before which business will not be able to sustain itself. So what we want to do is minimize that for businesses so that they can recover as quickly as possible with as little data loss as possible. >>Thank you for that. So, Omar, there's a bigger sort of cyber recovery agenda that you have as part of, of green lake, I'm sure. What, what should we expect, what's next? Where do you want to take this? >>So uh excellent question point in the future day. So one of the things that you helped us, uh you know, unveil uh in May was the data services. Cloud console. Data services. Cloud console was the first uh sort of delivery as we took the storage business as it is and start to transform into more of a cloud native business. We introduced electra uh which is the cloud native hardware with the customers buy for persistent storage within their data center. But then data services, cloud console truly cemented that cloud operational model. Uh We separated the management from, from the devices itself and sort of lifted it up as a sas service into the public, public cloud. So now what you're gonna see is, you know, more and more data and data management services come up on the data services. Cloud console and and zero is going to be one of the first ones. Cloud physics was another one that we we talked about, but zero is the is the true data management service that is going to come up on data services, cloud console as part of the Green Lake services agenda that that HP has in the customer's environ and then you're gonna see compliance as a service. You're going to see data protection as a service. You're gonna see disaster recovery as a service. But the beautiful thing about it is, is choice with simplicity as these services get loaded up on data services, clown console. All our customers instantly get it. There's nothing to install, there's nothing to troubleshoot uh, there's nothing to size. All those capabilities are available on the console, customers go in and just start consuming Xarelto capabilities from a management control plane, Disaster recovery control plan are going to be available on the data services, cloud console, automatically detecting electro systems, rian Bear systems, container based systems, whichever our customers have deployed and from there is just a flip of a button. Another way to look at it is it sort of gives you that slider that you have data protection or back up on one side, you've got disaster recovery on one side, you've got ransomware protection on on the extreme right side, you can just move a slider across and choose the service level that you want without worrying about best practices, installation, application integration. All of that just takes control from the data services, cloud concepts. >>Great, great summary because historically you would have to build that right now. You can buy it as a service. You can programmatically, you know, deploy it and that's a game changer. Have to throw it over the fence to some folks. That's okay. Now, you know, make it make it work and then they change the code and you come back a lot of finger pointing. It's now it's your responsibility. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. We're excited to provide Zito continue provides the desert of customers but also integrate with the Green Green Lake platform and let the rest of Green Lake customers experience some of the sort of technology and really make that available as a service. >>That's great. This is a huge challenge for customers. I mean they do, I pay their ransom. Do not pay the ransom. If I pay the ransom the FBI is going to come after me. But if I don't pay the ransom, I'm not gonna get the crypto key. So solutions like this are critical. You certainly see the president pushing for that. The United States government said, hey, we got to do a better job. Good job guys, Thanks for for sharing your story in the cube and congratulations. Thank >>you. Thank you David. >>All right. And thank you for watching everybody. Uh this is the, I want to tell you that everything that you're seeing today as part of the Green Lake announcement is going to be available on demand as part of the HP discover more. So you got to check that out. Thank you. You're watching the cube. >>Mhm mm.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality symposium brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hi everybody. This is Dave Vellante and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the MIT CDOIQ 2020 event. Of course, it's gone virtual. We wish we were all together in Cambridge. They were going to move into a new building this year for years they've done this event at the Tang Center, moving into a new facility, but unfortunately going to have to wait at least a year, we'll see, But we've got a great guest. Nonetheless, Doug Laney is here. He's a Business Value Strategist, the bestselling author, an analyst, consultant then a long time CUBE friend. Doug, great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Dave, great to be with you again as well. So can I ask you? You have been an advocate for obviously measuring the value of data, the CDO role. I don't take this the wrong way, but I feel like the last 150 days have done more to accelerate people's attention on the importance of data and the value of data than all the great work that you've done. What do you think? (laughing) >> It's always great when organizations, actually take advantage of some of these concepts of data value. You may be speaking specifically about the situation with United Airlines and American Airlines, where they have basically collateralized their customer loyalty data, their customer loyalty programs to the tunes of several billion dollars each. And one of the things that's very interesting about that is that the third party valuations of their customer loyalty data, resulted in numbers that were larger than the companies themselves. So basically the value of their data, which is as we've discussed previously off balance sheet is more valuable than the market cap of those companies themselves, which is just incredibly fascinating. >> Well, and of course, all you have to do is look to the Trillionaire's Club. And now of course, Apple pushing two trillion to really see the value that the market places on data. But the other thing is of course, COVID, everybody talks about the COVID acceleration. How have you seen it impact the awareness of the importance of data, whether it applies to business resiliency or even new monetization models? If you're not digital, you can't do business. And digital is all about data. >> I think the major challenge that most organizations are seeing from a data and analytics perspective due to COVID is that their traditional trend based forecast models are broken. If you're a company that's only forecasting based on your own historical data and not taking into consideration, or even identifying what are the leading indicators of your business, then COVID and the economic shutdown have entirely broken those models. So it's raised the awareness of companies to say, "Hey, how can we predict our business now? We can't do it based on our own historical data. We need to look externally at what are those external, maybe global indicators or other kinds of markets that proceed our own forecasts or our own activity." And so the conversion from trend based forecast models to what we call driver based forecast models, isn't easy for a lot of organizations to do. And one of the more difficult parts is identifying what are those external data factors from suppliers, from customers, from partners, from competitors, from complimentary products and services that are leading indicators of your business. And then recasting those models and executing on them. >> And that's a great point. If you think about COVID and how it's changed things, everything's changed, right? The ideal customer profile has changed, your value proposition to those customers has completely changed. You got to rethink that. And of course, it's very hard to predict even when this thing eventually comes back, some kind of hybrid mode, you used to be selling to people in an office environment. That's obviously changed. There's a lot that's permanent there. And data is potentially at least the forward indicator, the canary in the coal mine. >> Right. It also is the product and service. So not only can it help you and improve your forecasting models, but it can become a product or service that you're offering. Look at us right now, we would generally be face to face and person to person, but we're using video technology to transfer this content. And then one of the things that I... It took me awhile to realize, but a couple of months after the COVID shutdown, it occurred to me that even as a consulting organization, Caserta focuses on North America. But the reality is that every consultancy is now a global consultancy because we're all doing business remotely. There are no particular or real strong localization issues for doing consulting today. >> So we talked a lot over the years about the role of the CDO, how it's evolved, how it's changed the course of the early... The pre-title days it was coming out of a data quality world. And it's still vital. Of course, as we heard today from the Keynote, it's much more public, much more exposed, different public data sources, but the role has certainly evolved initially into regulated industries like financial, healthcare and government, but now, many, many more organizations have a CDO. My understanding is that you're giving a talk in the business case for the CDO. Help us understand that. >> Yeah. So one of the things that we've been doing here for the last couple of years is a running an ongoing study of how organizations are impacted by the role of the CDO. And really it's more of a correlation and looking at what are some of the qualities of organizations that have a CDO or don't have a CDO. So some of the things we found is that organizations with a CDO nearly twice as often, mention the importance of data and analytics in their annual report organizations with a C level CDO, meaning a true executive are four times more often likely to be using data, to transform the business. And when we're talking about using data and advanced analytics, we found that organizations with a CIO, not a CDO responsible for their data assets are only half as likely to be doing advanced analytics in any way. So there are a number of interesting things that we found about companies that have a CDO and how they operate a bit differently. >> I want to ask you about that. You mentioned the CIO and we're increasingly seeing lines of reporting and peer reporting alter shift. The sands are shifting a little bit. In the early days the CDO and still predominantly I think is an independent organization. We've seen a few cases and increasingly number where they're reporting into the CIO, we've seen the same thing by the way with the chief Information Security Officer, which used to be considered the fox watching the hen house. So we're seeing those shifts. We've also seen the CDO become more aligned with a technical role and sometimes even emerging out of that technical role. >> Yeah. I think the... I don't know, what I've seen more is that the CDOs are emerging from the business, companies are realizing that data is a business asset. It's not an IT asset. There was a time when data was tightly coupled with applications of technologies, but today data is very easily decoupled from those applications and usable in a wider variety of contexts. And for that reason, as data gets recognized as a business, not an IT asset, you want somebody from the business responsible for overseeing that asset. Yes, a lot of CDOs still report to the CIO, but increasingly more CDOs you're seeing and I think you'll see some other surveys from other organizations this week where the CDOs are more frequently reporting up to the CEO level, meaning they're true executives. Along I advocated for the bifurcation of the IT organization into separate I and T organizations. Again, there's no reason other than for historical purposes to keep the data and technology sides of the organizations so intertwined. >> Well, it makes sense that the Chief Data Officer would have an affinity with the lines of business. And you're seeing a lot of organizations, really trying to streamline their data pipeline, their data life cycles, bringing that together, infuse intelligence into that, but also take a systems view and really have the business be intimately involved, if not even owned into the data. You see a lot of emphasis on self-serve, what are you seeing in terms of that data pipeline or the data life cycle, if you will, that used to be wonky, hard core techies, but now it really involving a lot more constituent. >> Yeah. Well, the data life cycle used to be somewhat short. The data life cycles, they're longer and they're more a data networks than a life cycle and or a supply chain. And the reason is that companies are finding alternative uses for their data, not just using it for a single operational purpose or perhaps reporting purpose, but finding that there are new value streams that can be generated from data. There are value streams that can be generated internally. There are a variety of value streams that can be generated externally. So we work with companies to identify what are those variety of value streams? And then test their feasibility, are they ethically feasible? Are they legally feasible? Are they economically feasible? Can they scale? Do you have the technology capabilities? And so we'll run through a process of assessing the ideas that are generated. But the bottom line is that companies are realizing that data is an asset. It needs to be not just measured as one and managed as one, but also monetized as an asset. And as we've talked about previously, data has these unique qualities that it can be used over and over again, and it generate more data when you use it. And it can be used simultaneously for multiple purposes. So companies like, you mentioned, Apple and others have built business models, based on these unique qualities of data. But I think it's really incumbent upon any organization today to do so as well. >> But when you observed those companies that we talk about all the time, data is at the center of their organization. They maybe put people around that data. That's got to be one of the challenge for many of the incumbents is if we talked about the data silos, the different standards, different data quality, that's got to be fairly major blocker for people becoming a "Data-driven organization." >> It is because some organizations were developed as people driven product, driven brand driven, or other things to try to convert. To becoming data-driven, takes a high degree of data literacy or fluency. And I think there'll be a lot of talk about that this week. I'll certainly mention it as well. And so getting the organization to become data fluent and appreciate data as an asset and understand its possibilities and the art of the possible with data, it's a long road. So the culture change that goes along with it is really difficult. And so we're working with 150 year old consumer brand right now that wants to become more data-driven and they're very product driven. And we hear the CIO say, "We want people to understand that we're a data company that just happens to produce this product. We're not a product company that generates data." And once we realized that and started behaving in that fashion, then we'll be able to really win and thrive in our marketplace. >> So one of the key roles of a Chief Data Officers to understand how data affects the monetization of an organization. Obviously there are four profit companies of your healthcare organization saving lives, obviously being profitable as well, or at least staying within the budget, depending upon the structure of the organization. But a lot of people I think oftentimes misunderstand that it's like, "Okay, do I have to become a data broker? Am I selling data directly?" But I think, you pointed out many times and you just did that unlike oil, that's why we don't like that data as a new oil analogy, because it's so much more valuable and can be use, it doesn't fall because of its scarcity. But what are you finding just in terms of people's application of that notion of monetization? Cutting costs, increasing revenue, what are you seeing in the field? What's that spectrum look like? >> So one of the things I've done over the years is compile a library of hundreds and hundreds of examples of how organizations are using data and analytics in innovative ways. And I have a book in process that hopefully will be out this fall. I'm sharing a number of those inspirational examples. So that's the thing that organizations need to understand is that there are a variety of great examples out there, and they shouldn't just necessarily look to their own industry. There are inspirational examples from other industries as well, many clients come to me and they ask, "What are others in my industry doing?" And my flippant response to that is, "Why do you want to be in second place or third place? Why not take an idea from another industry, perhaps a digital product company and apply that to your own business." But like you mentioned, there are a variety of ways to monetize data. It doesn't involve necessarily selling it. You can deliver analytics, you can report on it, you can use it internally to generate improved business process performance. And as long as you're measuring how data's being applied and what its impact is, then you're in a position to claim that you're monetizing it. But if you're not measuring the impact of data on business processes or on customer relationships or partner supplier relationships or anything else, then it's difficult to claim that you're monetizing it. But one of the more interesting ways that we've been working with organizations to monetize their data, certainly in light of GDPR and the California consumer privacy act where I can't sell you my data anymore, but we've identified ways to monetize your customer data in a couple of ways. One is to synthesize the data, create synthetic data sets that retain the original statistical anomalies in the data or features of the data, but don't share actually any PII. But another interesting way that we've been working with organizations to monetize their data is what I call, Inverted data monetization, where again, I can't share my customer data with you, but I can share information about your products and services with my customers. And take a referral fee or a commission, based on that. So let's say I'm a hospital and I can't sell you my patient data, of course, due to variety of regulations, but I know who my diabetes patients are, and I can introduce them to your healthy meal plans, to your gym memberships, to your at home glucose monitoring kits. And again, take a referral fee or a cut of that action. So we're working with customers and the financial services firm industry and in the healthcare industry on just those kinds of examples. So we've identified hundreds of millions of dollars of incremental value for organizations that from their data that we're just sitting on. >> Interesting. Doug because you're a business value strategist at the top, where in the S curve do you see you're able to have the biggest impact. I doubt that you enter organizations where you say, "Oh, they've got it all figured out. They can't use my advice." But as well, sometimes in the early stages, you may not be able to have as big of an impact because there's not top down support or whatever, there's too much technical data, et cetera, where are you finding you can have the biggest impact, Doug? >> Generally we don't come in and run those kinds of data monetization or information innovation exercises, unless there's some degree of executive support. I've never done that at a lower level, but certainly there are lower level more immediate and vocational opportunities for data to deliver value through, to simply analytics. One of the simple examples I give is, I sold a home recently and when you put your house on the market, everybody comes out of the woodwork, the fly by night, mortgage companies, the moving companies, the box companies, the painters, the landscapers, all know you're moving because your data is in the U.S. and the MLS directory. And it was interesting. The only company that didn't reach out to me was my own bank, and so they lost the opportunity to introduce me to a Mortgage they'd retain me as a client, introduce me to my new branch, print me new checks, move the stuff in my safe deposit box, all of that. They missed a simple opportunity. And I'm thinking, this doesn't require rocket science to figure out which of your customers are moving, the MLS database or you can harvest it from Zillow or other sites is basically public domain data. And I was just thinking, how stupid simple would it have been for them to hire a high school programmer, give him a can of red bull and say, "Listen match our customer database to the MLS database to let us know who's moving on a daily or weekly basis." Some of these solutions are pretty simple. >> So is that part of what you do, come in with just hardcore tactical ideas like that? Are you also doing strategy? Tell me more about how you're spending your time. >> I trying to think more of a broader approach where we look at the data itself and again, people have said, "If you tortured enough, what would you tell us? We're just take that angle." We look at examples of how other organizations have monetized data and think about how to apply those and adapt those ideas to the company's own business. We look at key business drivers, internally and externally. We look at edge cases for their customers' businesses. We run through hypothesis generating activities. There are a variety of different kinds of activities that we do to generate ideas. And most of the time when we run these workshops, which last a week or two, we'll end up generating anywhere from 35 to 50 pretty solid ideas for generating new value streams from data. So when we talk about monetizing data, that's what we mean, generating new value streams. But like I said, then the next step is to go through that feasibility assessment and determining which of these ideas you actually want to pursue. >> So you're of course the longtime industry watcher as well, as a former Gartner Analyst, you have to be. My question is, if I think back... I've been around a while. If I think back at the peak of Microsoft's prominence in the PC era, it was like windows 95 and you felt like, "Wow, Microsoft is just so strong." And then of course the Linux comes along and a lot of open source changes and low and behold, a whole new set of leaders emerges. And you see the same thing today with the Trillionaire's Club and you feel like, "Wow, even COVID has been a tailwind for them." But you think about, "Okay, where could the disruption come to these large players that own huge clouds, they have all the data." Is data potentially a disruptor for what appear to be insurmountable odds against the newbies" >> There's always people coming up with new ways to leverage data or new sources of data to capture. So yeah, there's certainly not going to be around for forever, but it's been really fascinating to see the transformation of some companies I think nobody really exemplifies it more than IBM where they emerged from originally selling meat slicers. The Dayton Meat Slicer was their original product. And then they evolved into Manual Business Machines and then Electronic Business Machines. And then they dominated that. Then they dominated the mainframe software industry. Then they dominated the PC industry. Then they dominated the services industry to some degree. And so they're starting to get into data. And I think following that trajectory is something that really any organization should be looking at. When do you actually become a data company? Not just a product company or a service company or top. >> We have Inderpal Bhandari is one of our huge guests here. He's a Chief-- >> Sure. >> Data Officer of IBM, you know him well. And he talks about the journey that he's undertaken to transform the company into a data company. I think a lot of people don't really realize what's actually going on behind the scenes, whether it's financially oriented or revenue opportunities. But one of the things he stressed to me in our interview was that they're on average, they're reducing the end to end cycle time from raw data to insights by 70%, that's on average. And that's just an enormous, for a company that size, it's just enormous cost savings or revenue generating opportunity. >> There's no doubt that the technology behind data pipelines is improving and the process from moving data from those pipelines directly into predictive or diagnostic or prescriptive output is a lot more accelerated than the early days of data warehousing. >> Is the skills barrier is acute? It seems like it's lessened somewhat, the early Hadoop days you needed... Even data scientist... Is it still just a massive skill shortage, or we're starting to attack that. >> Well, I think companies are figuring out a way around the skill shortage by doing things like self service analytics and focusing on more easy to use mainstream type AI or advanced analytics technologies. But there's still very much a need for data scientists and organizations and the difficulty in finding people that are true data scientists. There's no real certification. And so really anybody can call themselves a data scientist but I think companies are getting good at interviewing and determining whether somebody's got the goods or not. But there are other types of skills that we don't really focus on, like the data engineering skills, there's still a huge need for data engineering. Data doesn't self-organize. There are some augmented analytics technologies that will automatically generate analytic output, but there really aren't technologies that automatically self-organize data. And so there's a huge need for data engineers. And then as we talked about, there's a large interest in external data and harvesting that and then ingesting it and even identifying what external data is out there. So one of the emerging roles that we're seeing, if not the sexiest role of the 21st century is the role of the Data Curator, somebody who acts as a librarian, identifying external data assets that are potentially valuable, testing them, evaluating them, negotiating and then figuring out how to ingest that data. So I think that's a really important role for an organization to have. Most companies have an entire department that procures office supplies, but they don't have anybody who's procuring data supplies. And when you think about which is more valuable to an organization? How do you not have somebody who's dedicated to identifying the world of external data assets that are out there? There are 10 million data sets published by government, organizations and NGOs. There are thousands and thousands of data brokers aggregating and sharing data. There's a web content that can be harvested, there's data from your partners and suppliers, there's data from social media. So to not have somebody who's on top of all that it demonstrates gross negligence by the organization. >> That is such an enlightening point, Doug. My last question is, I wonder how... If you can share with us how the pandemic has effected your business personally. As a consultant, you're on the road a lot, obviously not on the road so much, you're doing a lot of chalk talks, et cetera. How have you managed through this and how have you been able to maintain your efficacy with your clients? >> Most of our clients, given that they're in the digital world a bit already, made the switch pretty quick. Some of them took a month or two, some things went on hold but we're still seeing the same level of enthusiasm for data and doing things with data. In fact some companies have taken our (mumbles) that data to be their best defense in a crisis like this. It's affected our business and it's enabled us to do much more international work more easily than we used to. And I probably spend a lot less time on planes. So it gives me more time for writing and speaking and actually doing consulting. So that's been nice as well. >> Yeah, there's that bonus. Obviously theCUBE yes, we're not doing physical events anymore, but hey, we've got two studios operating. And Doug Laney, really appreciate you coming on. (Dough mumbles) Always a great guest and sharing your insights and have a great MIT CDOIQ. >> Thanks, you too, Dave, take care. (mumbles) >> Thanks Doug. All right. And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, our continuous coverage of the MIT Chief Data Officer conference, MIT CDOIQ, will be right back, right after this short break. (bright music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation you know for years marketers marketers have been pushing for more digital especially with their big conferences I heard forward-thinking CMO say the war will be won in digital but the sales teams love the belly-to-belly interaction so every year once or even sometimes more often big corporations have hosted gatherings of thousands or even tens of thousands of attendees these events were like rock concerts they had DJs in the hallway thumping music giant screens beautiful pitches highly produced videos thing a technical breakouts Food lines private dinners etc all come on it culminating in a customer appreciation event with a big-name band physical events are expensive but they generate tons of leads for the host companies and their partner ecosystems well then BOOM coronavirus hits and the marketing teams got what they wished for right overnight virtual events became a mandate if you don't have a solution you were in big trouble because your leads from these large events just dried up hello everyone this is Dave Allen day and welcome to this week's cube insights powered by ETR ETR is entering its quiet period and I won't be able to share any new data for a couple of weeks so rather than look back at the April survey in this breaking analysis we thought we'd take a pause and really talk about the virtual event landscape and just a few of the things that we've learned in the past 120 days now this isn't meant to be an exhaustive list but we do want to call out a few important items that we see is critical in this new digital world in the isolation economy every company scrambled they took one of three paths first companies either postpone their events to buy some time think like Dell technology world Google cloud next cube convey my MIT CBO event etc or to some companies flat-out canceled their events for the year until next year like snowflake and uipath forth number three they scrambled to deploy a virtual event and they went forward IBM think did this HPE discover Susac on AWS summits docker convey Monde a peggle world Vertica big data conference octane sa P sapphire and hundreds of others pushed forward so when this braking analysis I want to share some data from the cube what we've learned not only in the last hundred and twenty days but in ten years of doing events mostly physical and we want to share the new rules of events and event marketing and beyond so let's get right into it everyone knows events events have gone virtual and there are tons of people who could give you advice on approving your digital events including us and and I will in this segment but the first thing that everyone found out is they're going to attract far more people online with a free virtual event than they do with a paid physical event so removing time timing in the expensive travel dramatically increases the participation Tam the total available market here's a tweet from docker CEO Scott Johnson he says that he's looking forward to welcoming 50,000 people to his event this is based on registration data somewhere around 30,000 people logged into the live event so docker got 60% of the pre event registrants to actually log in which is outstanding but there's a lot more to this story I'll share some other stats that are worth mentioning by the way I got permission from docker to to share these numbers not surprising because the event was it was a huge success for such a small company in the end they got nearly 83,000 registrations and they continue to come in weeks after the event which was held in late May now marketers generally will cite 2 to 3 minutes as a respect-- respectable time on site for a web property docker logged in users averaged almost four and a half minutes on site that's the average the bell curve sauce superfans like this guy who was binge watching so this brings me to rule number one it's actually really easy to get people to sign up for free online events but it's not so easy to keep them there now I could talk all day about what docker did right and I'm gonna bring some examples in during this except this segment but the one thing docker did was they did a call for papers or a call for sessions and that's a lot of work but if you look at the docket on speaker list the content is all community driven not all but mostly community driven talker had to break some eggs and reject some folks but it also had a sponsor track so it gave folks another avenue to participate so big success for docker they definitely did it right which brings us to new rule number two attention is precious you got to create high-quality content and realize that you have much less time with participants than if they were in person now unfortunately the doctor docker example is a bit of an outlier it hasn't always been this pretty remember that scene in the social network the movie when a duardo pulled the funding on the servers just to get marks attention remember how Jesse Eisenberg the actor who played Zuckerberg reacted everybody else we don't crash ever if the server's are down for even a day our entire reputation is irreversibly destroyed the whole point well some of the big tech companies crashed their servers and they say there's no such thing as bad press but look at look what happened to s AP and s AP apologized publicly and its CEO told people that they made a mistake in outsourcing their event platform so this brings us to new rule number three don't crash now I come back to Dhaka Khan for a second here's a tweet from a developer who shared the network traffic profile of his network before and during docker con you can see no glitches I mean I don't mean to pick on sa P they they owned the problem and look s AP had a huge attention attendance at its digital event more than 200,000 people and over a million views so Wow you'll kill me with that problem but it underscores the importance of scaling and s AP you have to say was not alone there have been lots of fails from much smaller events here's an example that was really frustrating you try to log in at 7:59 but the event doesn't start until 8:00 sharp really come on back in 60 seconds and in another example there was a slide failure I mean many of these virtual events are glorified webinars so if you're going to rely on slide where make sure the slides will render its scale you maybe embed them into the video you know but at least this company had a back-up plan here's another example and I've redacted the email because I'm not here to throw anyone under the bus well you know kind of but but no reason to name names you know who they are but in this case an old legacy webinar platform failed and they had to move to WebEx and again at least there was a back-up plan so you know it's been tough in a lot of these cases here's a tweet from Jason Reed it kind of summed sums it up now what does he mean by vendors are not getting the job done not enough creativity well not only were platforms failing they weren't performing adequately but the virtual experience is leaving many users unenthused they're they're just one alt-tab away from something better if the virtual event fails to engage them so new rule number four is virtual events that look like webinars actually our webinar webinars I mean in fairness you know the industry had to pivot with no notice but this is why I always tell people start with the outcome that you want and work backwards that'll inform you as to the content strategy the new roles you need to assign and make no mistakes there are new rules you know there's no site inspection virtual and then you got to figure out what you want to use your experience to be there's a whole lot to figure out and this next next one is a bit of a throwaway because yeah it's so obvious and everyone talks about it but I want to bring it up because it's important because I'm amazed at how many virtual event speakers really haven't thought through their setup you can look good you know or at least less bad get those things called books and raise up the laptop figure out some better audio your better yet get a good kit send it to their home with a nice camera and a solid mic maybe you know a clearer IFB comms for the ear spend some money to look good just as you might go and buy a nice outfit even if you're a developer put on a clean t-shirt so rule number five don't cheap out on production value get your guests a good set up and coach them up it doesn't have to be over the top no just a bit thought out okay one of the biggest mistakes I've seen is event organisers they become enamored with a platform and the features of that platform that really don't support their objectives kind of feature creep or they have so many competing objectives and masters that they're serving that they lose sight of the user experience and then the event becomes a buffet of unused features rather than a buffet of engaging content now many have told me that Dave these virtual events are too long there's too much content now I don't necessarily agree I really think if you have something to say you should say it as long as you do it right and you keep people engaged so I want to talk a little bit about a to of the meteor events that we attended one was octane twenty20 hosted by octo the identity management security player and then IBM think 2020 they called it the the think digital event experience and they both had multi day events with lots of content they both organized sessions by topic and made it pretty easy to find stuff and all assessing sessions had a reasonably consistent look and feel to them which kind of helped the production value IBM had content organized and categorized which made things easy to find and they both had good search and with IBM you could go directly from the list of topics right into the videos which I really liked very easy and intuitive and as you can see here in this octane video they had a nice and very ambitious agenda that was really quite well organized and things were pretty easy to find as you can see with this crisp filtering on the left hand side and in really nice search but one of the things that has been frustrating with most of the events that I've watched is you can't get to the sessions directly from the agenda you got to go back out for some linear path and find the content and it's somewhat confusing so I want to come back to the docker count example because I think there were two things that I found interesting and useful with docker con you know this got George nailed it when he said this is how you display a virtual conference what's relevant about this picture is you have multiple simultaneous sessions running live and concurrently and you can pop in and out of them you can easily see the sessions and this tile and there's a red line this linear clock that's running in real time to show you where you are in the event agenda versus in a time of day so I felt like with docker that as a user user you're really connected to the event you come to the site and there's a hero video very easy to find the content and in fact you can't miss it it's not a sales pitch to get to the content and then I really liked what what George change was talking about in terms of the agenda and the tile layout you can see they ran simultaneous sessions and at one point up to seven at once and they gave their sponsors a track on the agenda which is very easy to navigate but what I really like as well is when you click on a tile it takes you directly to the session video and you can see the chat which docker preserved in the PO event mode and you have this easy-to-follow agenda and again you can go directly to the session video and in the chat from the agenda so many paths to find the content I mean something so simple is navigating directly from the agenda to the session most events haven't done that they make you back out and then what I call this linear manner and then go forward and find the sessions that you want and then dive in now maybe they're trying to simulate walking to a session in a Las Vegas Convention Center because it takes about that long to figure out where most of these events in these sessions live so rule number six is make it easy to discover and consume content sounds so simple why is it not happening in most events okay I'm running out of time so I want to encapsulate a number of items in one idea that we talk about all the time at the cube I ran a little survey of the day and someone asked does it really make sense to cram educational content product content partner content customer content rally content and leadership content into the constrain confines of an arbitrary one or two-day window I thought that was an interesting comment now it doesn't necessarily mean shorten up the virtual event which a lot of people think should happen people complain that these things are too long well let me leave you with this it's actually not just about events what do I mean by that well you know how everyone says that all companies are software companies or every company is a SAS company well guess what we believe that every company is a media company in 2004 at the low point of its reputation Microsoft launched channel 9 it was named after the United Airlines channel 9 that lets you listen in to the pilots and their unfiltered conversations kind of cool Microsoft understood that having an authentic voice with which to communicate to developers and serve its community was a smart thing to do and that is the key point channel 9 is about community it's not about audience metrics or lead generation both important things but Microsoft they launched this site understanding the leverage it gets out of its community of developers and instead of treating them like leads they created a site to help developers learn so rule number seven is get your best media mojo on one of the biggest failures I see with physical events and it's clearly carrying over to digital is the failure to optimize the post-event opportunity and experience so just like physical events when the event is over I see companies and their employees they're so burnt out after a virtual event because they feel like they've just given birth and what do they do now after the event they take some time off they got to recharge and when they come back they're swamped and so they're on to the next project it might be another event it might be a webinar series or some regional summits or whatever now it's interesting it feels like all tech companies talk about these days is breaking down silos but most of these parent and child events are disconnected silos sure maybe the data around the events is consolidated into a marketing cloud maybe so that you can nurture leads okay that's fine but what about the community kovat has given us a great opportunity to reimagine how we serve communities and one thing I'm certain about is that physical events they're going to come back at some point in some form but when they do there's gonna be a stronger digital component attached to them hybrids will emerge and some will serve communities better than others and in our opinion the ones that do the best job in digital and serving their communities are gonna win the marketing Wars so ask yourself how are you serving your community are you serving the best way that you can is a lead conversion your number one metric that's okay there's nothing wrong with that but how are your content consumption metrics looking what are you measuring what does your Arc of content look like what's your content and an organic media strategy what does your media stack look like media stack you ask what do you mean Dave well you nailed physical and then you were forced to do virtual overnight eventually there's going to be a hybrid that emerges so there's physical at the bottom and then there's a virtual layer and then you get this hybrid layer at some point on top of that at the very top of the stack you got apps social media you got corporate content you got TV like channel 9 you have video library's website you have tools for agile media you got media production and distribution tooling remember customers will be entering from any one of these layers of that stack and they'll be looking to you for guidance inspiration learning vision product knowledge how to's etc and you'd be delivering that primarily through content so your media stack should be designed to serve your community events software yeah sure but it's much more than that we believe that this stack will emerge not as a monolithic beast but rather as a set of scalable cloud services and api's think of paths for media that you can skin yes of course but also one that you can control add value to integrate with other platforms and fit your business as your community demands and remember new roles are emerging as a result of this pandemic and the pivot to digital the things are different really mostly from from most physical events is that it's very important to think about these roles and one of the important roles is this designer or UX developer that can actually do some coding and API integration think of it as a DevOps for digital organizations that's emerging organizations like yours will want self-service and sometimes out-of-the-box functionality and features for sure no question but we believe that as a media producer you will want to customize your media experience for your community and this work will require new skills that you haven't really prioritized in the past what what do you think what's your vision as to how this will all play out and unfold do you buy that all companies must become media companies or at least media savvy not in the sense of Corp comms but really as an organic media producer tweet me at devonté or email me at David Galante at Silicon angle comm or comment on my LinkedIn post who would react next week with some data from et our survey sphere thanks for watching this wiki bond cube insights powered by ETR this is Dave Volante we'll see you next time [Music]