>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. >>Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 it's virtual this year because of the pandemic. We're not there in person and in real life, we're remote. I'm John for a year hosting the cube or the cube virtual. Um, as we continue to cover the three weeks of AWS reinvent and analyze the keynotes, we bring it in, uh, from our Cuban alumni, uh, network experts. And we have here great guest, Steve Malaney, CEO of Ava Trex, industry executive legend, former entrepreneur had done startups, um, been very, very successful with luminary and Silicon Valley, um, Palo Alto networks and the Sierra Cisco, I me, all the companies you've worked for. Um, Steve, great to see you again. >>Oh yeah. Hey awesome. Even if it's just virtual, John's great to be back in the cube. >>Okay, Steve, what's up? Am I muted? I got you. Okay. >>Gotcha. Oh, okay. I just said it's great. They're great to be back in the cube. >>I had to shut up my volume, got to love live cube TV. Um, I wanted to bring you on, because one, we've been talking with you guys and your company that you're now heading. You came off the board to take the helm of Ava tricks. You really saw the vision early on before the pandemic. We were actually, we did a hybrid event with you guys, a digital hybrid and your vision of multi-cloud and hybrid was pretty much in line with what Andy Jassy. And Amazon's now rolling out, except they're not calling it. Multi-cloud, they're just saying hybrid. But when you factor in the edge, the complexity there, you're really talking multiple environments. So I want to get your take, as you look at what Amazon has done in their announcements, they're continuing to power long. What's your analysis. What's your industry take? >>Yeah, I, I think it's, uh, you know, I think it's great. I think, you know, when we were a year ago, it was just a little over a year ago, we were at a multi-cloud conference and I think people kind of thought, wow, is multicloud something that the vendors are wanting to happen because they don't want to be killed by AWS. And you know, I mean, I saw this two years ago, I call it the Cambridge and explosion to cloud where every enterprise to we are now going to move to cloud. And they had been talking about it for six or seven years, but they didn't really mean it. And two years ago I saw they meant it and I knew what was going to happen. It was going to go multi-cloud they we're going to care about day two operations, visibility, control, security, all the things that enterprises care about. And I think, um, you know, what we've seen really over the last year is AWS and all the other cloud providers recognizing this, that the world is going multicloud. Um, and day two operations matter. You've gotta be able to operationalize this and enterprises. Can't just, it's not just about wiring it and building it up. You got do, you can operate it. And so that's, I think the thing that's really interesting is the maturity of the messaging. I would say from AWS to recognize, um, where enterprises are in their journey. >>You know, Steve, I want to just reflect on something. When I was 19 years old in my first job, uh, in New York, it was on a prime mini computer, my first exposure to the enterprise office and then went and worked for IBM and HP and others. I've been in the, around the enterprise. Let me just go back 10 years in Silicon Valley, you could literally count on one or two hands. The number of enterprise experts out there that you knew of that were out circulating that weren't retired. Um, because it went through this kind of commodity stage of outsource everything kind of down to the bone, you know, just keeping the lights on there. Wasn't really a lot of innovation in the enterprise. Now it's the hottest thing in the world. And you, and you look at what's happening with cloud. They're redefining the enterprise in Andy Jassy said to me, and I'm going to interview him, uh, later this week. And you know, he said, we're done with eyes and pads. We checked that's anything. I say anyone, but he's kind of implying that we did. I, as in pass, we're targeting global it. >>Yeah. Well, you know, >>Now enterprise is super hot and you know, it's, it's a whole nother ball game to restructuring on G >>Yeah, I mean, so I, uh, the AWS is marketing slogan, Mark. My words I'll bet you a hundred bucks within the next year is going to change. They are not going to say go build anymore. Right? Because that's what they're going to say. Go consume because no enterprise wants to build and Oh, by the way, here's the other thing that they're now also figuring out. Cause I know Andy Jassy analysis, there's a skills shortage of cloud, so they don't have the skills at the aptitude, but there's also a people shortage. It's not just the skills, it's the amount of people. They don't have the ability to go deploy this. And they're going to, you're going to need solutions like ABA tricks, abstract the way a lot of the complexities of the underlying clouds and deliver this architecture for people to be able to actually deploy. >>Where is the skill gaps in your opinion, where do you see them? >>You know, I was just talking to a customer yesterday and he said most of my, most of my team are CLI jockeys. And so for networking, that means the CLI the command line interface that a human manipulates to control the Cisco router. That's the old operational model. The model of this, these days are Terraform. You're going to infrastructure is code everything. You need scriptures. You need, you need developers that are going to be driving your infrastructure. And, and, but I can't, I can't fire all these people that I've had in my enterprise for the last 30 years. I got to bring them along. I got to bring them along and the tools and the platforms to be able to go, to go do that. >>Andy's argument and Amazon's position is we eliminate the undifferentiated heavy lifting and we have all this training and content to bring everyone along. Okay. By that. >>Well, I mean, here's, here's the thing that I think AWS and all the, all the cloud providers are figuring out is the enterprise is a different beast. You know, when you go to a company as AWS and say, Hey, you can get it as long as it's any color you want, as long as it's black. And so guess what, I'm a service. And the beautiful thing is you don't need to know anything about how we do anything and just trust me, it's all going to work that does not go over well with an enterprise because they say, I'm the guy that needs to know I will get fired. If this infrastructure goes down, you know, you saw us East one go down two weeks ago, Google had a outage to two days ago or whatever it was, shit happens. I don't know if I can say that on the cube. >>We're not going to actually see regulated at this point, but who's going to know. >>Um, and you know what? I've got to have that visibility in controls and enterprise, and I need the granular controls and the visibility to troubleshoot and the security controls and the performance controls that I used to have on prem, because I'm a regulated enterprise. I need that visibility and control. And the cloud providers just say, look, I deliver a service and I deliver it to everybody. And it's the same service. And you don't need to know that does not fly with the >>Well, certainly you're seeing more regulated industries. It used to be just public sector. I just talked with Teresa Carlson. She now took over all the industries. So FinTech is regulated. Energy is regulated. Telecom's regulated. The only thing that's not regulated is a VC and startup sectors, right? So there's a >>Well, and, and, and every, every good CIO of an enterprise knows nothing good comes from your, from your infrastructure that gets outsourced. We tried that it doesn't work. Now, maybe in 20 years, I can outsource my infrastructure if I'm the CIO of a major enterprise corporation. But right now I am not outsourcing that I have to have control. Now, am I going to leverage services and basic infrastructure from the cloud providers? Absolutely. I'm not going to build it on my own data centers. That world is over, but what I'm going to maintain is the visibility and control. >>Yeah. And that's what we heard from Verner. Vogel's around observability systems, thinking control versus observability, um, evolvable systems, things like reasoning, um, you know, these are, these are innovations, right? So, so let's get back to that builders thing, because you mentioned that earlier, I think there might be an opportunity. And I think this is where I think Jassy will either look brilliant or it might not pan out. So go big or go home moment. Can Amazon create a market for companies to say, instead of bringing along everybody, I'm going to bring along some people and hire more builders because there's rewards as spoils to be had for those builders. At this point in time, given the pandemic, it's kind of put everything on full display in terms of what to do. What's your thoughts on that? >>I think, I think outside in meaning I, I look at the customer and I, and I sit at the same side of the table as a customer. I think, what did they want? And every enterprise customer right now is building out their PRI it's just like in 1992, when they built out their private infrastructures, global infrastructure, and they did it with on-prem and data centers. I bought my stories, my compute, my networking, my MPLS, and I built my infrastructure. And it was my infrastructure. They're doing the same thing. It's just, they're architecting on top of cloud and they're doing it in a multi-cloud world because they're not going to be locked in to just one cloud. And they're going to have some applications that run better on GCP. Some have better in AWS and some on Oracle, and all of our customers are doing this. And what they want though, is a common infrastructure. That's their architecture and their infrastructure, not an AWS architecture and a Google architecture and an Azure architecture. What architecture, abstracted away above the clouds. That's my architecture. And it's common for my global network that that's what enterprises want to do. And I think each of the individual clouds are going to have to understand that they are a piece of the puzzle. They are not the puzzle. And I think you're going to have to come to that realization. >>I appreciate your expertise and insight into the commentary real quick, last 30 seconds, give a quick plug for Ava tricks. What are you guys doing? What's new cause the quick update. >>I mean, it's, it's, it's crazy just since, uh, I've been the CEO for two years and you know, the, the logos of large enterprise that we're getting right now. My, my Cambrian explosion that I saw two years ago is real, um, more executing on that strategy. It's a, who's who of logos right now. We've got 450 customers now we're, uh, exploding and more importantly, enterprises are now getting that deployment phase. They have, they're done with the architecture phase of, Hey, let me check this whole thing out in cloud. And now they're pushing the button and they're, they're accelerating, which my guess is it's not a coincidence that AWS is now talking about operations. And what Aviatrix does is, is, is, does gives that visibility and control cloud networking, but in a very cloud native way with Terraform simplicity, agility, because agility is part of mission critical infrastructure. Now can't be like it was in 1994 with a Cisco infrastructure where it said, what year do you want your, your, your infrastructure, Mr. Customer? >>Great. And the biggest thing people should pay attention to this year, uh, for around the enterprise dynamics with cloud and scale what's what should people be watching >>In your opinion? Just the continued movement of big enterprises, uh, all into cloud. The center of gravity is now into cloud and, uh, they're going to be completely running away from everything on prem. >>All right. Steven Landy, CEO of VBA tricks, a proven success entrepreneur CEO, back in the two years of the helm, the VBA tricks. Great to see you. I wish we were in person. One of our last events was your altitude event. It's on YouTube. If anyone was interested in watching, we had a great time. Steve, thank you so much for your candid commentary. Yeah. Thanks, John. Okay. I'm Jennifer with the cube. You're watching the cube virtual here on the cube. Thanks for watching..