(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I tell you this place is packed. It's quite amazing here, over 20,000 people, I'd say it's closer to 25, maybe 27,000, and it's whole overflow, lots going on in the evenings. It's quite remarkable and we're really happy to be part of this. Jay Turner is here, he's the Vice President of Development and Operations, at PCCW Global. He's joined by Garrett Lowell, Vice President of Ecosystem Partnerships for the Americas at PCCW Global. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. Jay, maybe you could take us through, for those people who aren't familiar with your company, what do you guys do, what are you all about? >> PCCW Global is the international operating wing of Hong Kong telecom. If it's outside of Hong Kong, it's our network. We've got about 695,000 kilometers of diverse cable, we've got about 43, 44 terabit of capacity came into business in 2005, if my brain is serving me correctly right now. We have a very diverse and vast portfolio ranging all the way from satellite teleports, all the way to IP transit. We're a Tier 1 service provider from that perspective as well. We do one of everything when it comes to networking and that's really, what was the basis of Console Connect, was inventing a platform to really enable our users to capitalize on our network and our assets. >> Okay. 2005, obviously you predated Cloud, you laid a bunch of fibers struck it in the ocean, I mean, global networks. There was a big trend to do that you had to think, you had to go bigger, go home in that business, (laughing) all right. Console Connect is your platform, is that right? >> Jay: Yes. >> So explain- >> Yeah, sorry, Console Connect is a software defined interconnection platform. We built a user self-service portal. Users can allocate ports, they get the LOAs issued to them directly from the platform. And then once they've got an active port or they've come in via one of our partnerships, they can then provision connectivity across our platform. That may be extending to their data centers or extending to their branch office, or it could be building a circuit into the Cloud via direct connect, could be building a circuit into an internet exchange. All of those circuits are going to be across that 685,000 kilometers of diverse fiber rather than going across the public internet. >> When you started, it took some time obviously to build out that infrastructure and then the Cloud came into play, but it was still early days, but it sounds like you're taking the AWS Cloud model and applying that to your business, eliminate all that undifferentiated heavy lifting, if you will, like the visioning in management. >> Yeah, we've heard many people, and that's kind of the impetus of this was, I want to be directly connected to my end point. And how do I do that? AWS, yes, they had direct connect, but figuring out how to do that as an enterprise was challenging. So we said, hey, we'll automate that for you. Just tell us what region you want to connect to. And we'll do all the heavy lifting and we'll just hand you back a villain tag. You're good to go. So it's a classic case, okay. AWS has direct connect. People will go, oh, that's directly competitive, but it's now you're adding value on top of that. Right? >> Yeah. >> Describe where you fit, Garrett, inside of the AWS ecosystem. You look around this hall and it's just a huge growing ecosystem, where you fit inside of that ecosystem and then your ecosystem. What's that like? >> Where we fit into the AWS ecosystem, as Jay alluded to, we're adding value to our partners and customers where they can come in, not only are they able to access the AWS platform as well as other Cloud platforms, but they're also able to access each other. We have a marketplace in our platform, which allows our customers and partners to put a description of their services on the marketplace and advertise their capabilities out to the rest of the ecosystem of PCCW Global and Console Connect. >> And you're doing that inside of AWS, is that right or at least in part? >> No, that's not inside of AWS. >> So your platform is your platform. >> Yes. >> Your relationship with AWS is to superpower direct connect. Is that right or? >> So we're directly connected to AWS throughout the globe. And this allows our customers and partners to be able to utilize not only the PCCW global network, but also to expand that capability to the AWS platform in Cloud. >> So wherever there's a Cloud, you plug into it, okay? >> Garrett: That's correct. >> Jay: Yeah. And then another advantage, the customer, obviously doesn't have to be directly co-located with AWS. They don't have to be in the same geographical region. If for some reason you need to be connected to U.S. west, but you're in Frankfurt, fine, we'll back all the traffic for you. >> Dave: Does that happen a lot? >> It actually does. >> How come? What's the use case there. >> Global diversity is certainly one of them just being able to have multiple footprints. But the other thing that we're seeing more of late is these Cloud-based companies are beginning to be attracted to where their customers are located. So they'll start seeing these packets of views and they'll go, well, we're going to go into that region as well, stand up a VPC there. We want our customers then being able to directly connect to that asset that's closest to them. And then still be able to back call that traffic if necessary or take it wherever. >> What's the big macro trends in your business? Broadly you see cost per bit coming down, you see data consumption and usage going through the roof. How does that affect you? What are some of the big trends that you see? >> I think one of the biggest ones and one that we targeted with Console Connect, we were hearing a lot of customers going, the world's changing so dynamically. We don't know how to do a one-year forecast of bandwidth, much less a three-year, which is what a lot of contracts are asking us for. So we said, hey, how about one day? Can you do one day? (Dave laughs) Because that's what our granularity is. We allow for anything from one day up to three years right now, and then even within that term, we're dynamic. If something happens, if suddenly some product goes through the roof and you've suddenly got a spike in traffic, if a ship drags its anchor through a sub sea cable, and suddenly you're having to pivot, you just come into the platform, you click a couple of buttons, 20 seconds later, we've modified your bandwidth for you or we've provisioned a new circuit for you, we've got your backup going, whatever. Really at the end of the day, it's the customer paying for their network, so the customer should be the one making those decisions. >> How's that affect pricing? I presume or so, I can have one day to a three-year term, for example if I commit to three years, I get a better deal. Is that right, or? >> You do, but at the end of the day, it's actually pretty much a moderate, a better deal. We don't want to force the hand of the customer. If you signed a 12 month contract with us, we're going to give you a 3% discount. >> So it's not really, that's not a motivation to do it. It's just (indistinct) reduce the transaction complexity. And that's why you will sign up for a longer term not to get the big discount. >> Correct. And then, like I said, even within a longer contract, we're still going to allow you to flex and flow and modify if you need to, because it's your network. >> What kind of constraints do you put on that? Do I have to commit to a flow? And then everything above that is, I can flex up. Is that how it works? >> Yeah. >> Okay. And then, the more I commit to, the better the deal is, or not necessarily? >> No, it's pretty much flat rate. >> Okay, I'm going to commit and I'm going to say, all right, I know I'm going to use X, or sign up for that and anything over it, you're pretty flexible, I might get a few points if I sign up for more, somebody might want to optimize that if they're big enough. >> And another really neat advantage, the other complaint we heard from customers, they go, I need three different direct connect, I need to be connected to three different parties, but I don't want to run three different cross-connects and I don't want to have three different ports. That's just an expense and I don't want. And we, fine, take your one gig port run one gig of services on it. If that's 20 different services, we're fine. We allow you to multiplex your port and provision as- >> So awesome. I love that model. I know some software companies who I would recommend to take a look at that pricing model. So Garrett, how do you segment the ecosystem? How do you look at that? Maybe you could draw and paint a picture of the idea of partners and what they look like. I know there's not just one category, but, >> Sure. Our ideal partners are internet exchangers, Cloud partners and SAS providers, because a big piece of our business is migration to the Cloud, and the flexibility of our platform allows and encourages our SAS providers and SI partners to perform migration to the Cloud much easier in a flexible format for their customers. >> What can you tell us, any kind of metrics you can give us around your business to give a sense of the scope, the scale? >> Well, of our business, (Dave laughs) one of the driving factors here, Gardner says that about 2023, I think, 40% of the enterprise workloads will be deployed in the Cloud, which is all fine and dandy, except in my head, you're just trading one set of complexities for another. Instead of having everything in a glass house and being able to understand that, now you're going, it's in the Cloud, now I need to manage my connectivity there. wait a minute, are my security policies still the same? Do they apply if I'm going across the public internet? What exposure have I just bought into myself to try to run this? The platform really aims at normalizing that as much as possible. If you're directly connected to AWS, at the end of the day, that's a really long ethernet cable. So your a glass house just got a lot bigger, but you're still able to maintain and use the exact same policies and procedures that you've been using. That's really one of our guiding principles, is to reduce that complexity and make it very simple for the user. >> I understand that, cause in the early days of Cloud, a lot of enterprises, the CIOs, they were concerned about security, then I think they realized, ah, AWS has pretty good security. CIA is using it. But still people would say to me, it's not that it's best security, it's just different. You know, we move slow, Dave. How do you accommodate, there's that diversity, I mean, AWS is obviously matured, but are you suggesting that you can take my security edicts in my glass house and bring those into your networks and ultimately into the Cloud? Is that how it works? >> That's the goal. It's not going to be a panacea more than likely, but the more edicts that we can allow you to bring across and not have to go back and revamp and, the better for you as a customer and the better really for us, because it normalizes things, it makes it much easier for us to accommodate more and more users. >> And is it such now in the eco, is all the diversity in the ecosystem, is it such that there's enough common patterns you guys can accommodate most of those use cases? >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the key components is the fact that the platform runs on our MPLS network, which is inherently secure. It's not on the public internet anywhere. We do have internet on demand capability. So in the event that a customer wants access to the internet, no problem. We can accommodate this. And we also have 5G capability built into the platform to allow flexibility of location and flexibility of, I would say, standing up new customer locations. And then the other component of the security is the fact that the customers can bring their own security and apply anywhere. We're not blocking, we don't have any port filters or anything of this nature. >> If would think 5G actually, I could see people arguing both sides, but my sense is 5G is going to be a huge driver for your business cause it's going to just create so much more demand for your services, I think. I can see somebody arguing the counter about it. What's your point of view on that? >> No, I think that's a fair assessment. I think it's going to drive business for everyone here on the show floor and it's pushing those workloads more toward the edge, which is not an area that people were typically concerned with. The edge was just the door that they walked through. That's becoming much different now. We're also going to start seeing, and we're already seeing it, huge trends of moving that data at the edge rather than bringing it all the way back to a central warehouse and help ending it. The ability to have a dynamic platform where you can see exactly what your network's doing and in the push of a button, modify that, or provision new connectivity in response to how your business is performing. >> Yeah, ultimately it's all about the applications that are going to be driving demand for more data. That's just a tailwind for you guys. >> Yeah. You look at, some of the car companies are coming on, Tesla, you're drive around with like eight CPUs and I think communicating back over the air. >> Dave: Yeah, right. >> You start scaling that and you start getting into some some real bottlenecks. >> Amazing business you guys having obviously capital intensive, but once you get in there, you got a big moat. That is a matter of getting on a flywheel and innovating. Guys, congratulations on all the progress and so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Great to meet you guys. Good luck. All right, thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in High-Tech Coverage. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Good morning everybody. Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is day four of theCUBE's wall-to-wall coverage of our Super Bowl, aka AWS re:Invent 2022. I'm here with my co-host, Paul Gillin. My name is Dave Vellante. Sanjay Poonen is in the house, CEO and president of Cohesity. He's sitting in as our guest market watcher, market analyst, you know, deep expertise, new to the job at Cohesity. He was kind enough to sit in, and help us break down what's happening at re:Invent. But Paul, first thing, this morning we heard from Werner Vogels. He was basically given a masterclass on system design. It reminded me of mainframes years ago. When we used to, you know, bury through those IBM blue books and red books. You remember those Sanjay? That's how we- learned back then. >> Oh God, I remember those, Yeah. >> But it made me think, wow, now you know IBM's more of a systems design, nobody talks about IBM anymore. Everybody talks about Amazon. So you wonder, 20 years from now, you know what it's going to be. But >> Well- >> Werner's amazing. >> He pulled out a 24 year old document. >> Yup. >> That he had written early in Amazon's evolution about synchronous design or about essentially distributed architectures that turned out to be prophetic. >> His big thing was nature is asynchronous. So systems are asynchronous. Synchronous is an illusion. It's an abstraction. It's kind of interesting. But, you know- >> Yeah, I mean I've had synonyms for things. Timeless architecture. Werner's an absolute legend. I mean, when you think about folks who've had, you know, impact on technology, you think of people like Jony Ive in design. >> Dave: Yeah. >> You got to think about people like Werner in architecture and just the fact that Andy and the team have been able to keep him engaged that long... I pay attention to his keynote. Peter DeSantis has obviously been very, very influential. And then of course, you know, Adam did a good job, you know, watching from, you know, having watched since I was at the first AWS re:Invent conference, at time was President SAP and there was only a thousand people at this event, okay? Andy had me on stage. I think I was one of the first guest of any tech company in 2011. And to see now this become like, it's a mecca. It's a mother of all IT events, and watch sort of even the transition from Andy to Adam is very special. I got to catch some of Ruba's keynote. So while there's some new people in the mix here, this has become a force of nature. And the last time I was here was 2019, before Covid, watched the last two ones online. But it feels like, I don't know 'about what you guys think, it feels like it's back to 2019 levels. >> I was here in 2019. I feel like this was bigger than 2019 but some people have said that it's about the same. >> I think it was 60,000 versus 50,000. >> Yes. So close. >> It was a little bigger in 2019. But it feels like it's more active. >> And then last year, Sanjay, you weren't here but it was 25,000, which was amazing 'cause it was right in that little space between Omicron, before Omicron hit. But you know, let me ask you a question and this is really more of a question about Amazon's maturity and I know you've been following them since early days. But the way I get the question, number one question I get from people is how is Amazon AWS going to be different under Adam than it was under Andy? What do you think? >> I mean, Adam's not new because he was here before. In some senses he knows the Amazon culture from prior, when he was running sales and marketing prior. But then he took the time off and came back. I mean, this will always be, I think, somewhat Andy's baby, right? Because he was the... I, you know, sent him a text, "You should be really proud of what you accomplished", but you know, I think he also, I asked him when I saw him a few weeks ago "Are you going to come to re:Invent?" And he says, "No, I want to leave this to be Adam's show." And Adam's going to have a slightly different view. His keynotes are probably half the time. It's a little bit more vision. There was a lot more customer stories at the beginning of it. Taking you back to the inspirational pieces of it. I think you're going to see them probably pulling up the stack and not just focused in infrastructure. Many of their platform services are evolved. Many of their, even application services. I'm surprised when I talk to customers. Like Amazon Connect, their sort of call center type technologies, an app layer. It's getting a lot. I mean, I've talked to a couple of Fortune 500 companies that are moving off Ayer to Connect. I mean, it's happening and I did not know that. So it's, you know, I think as they move up the stack, the platform's gotten more... The data centric stack has gotten, and you know, in the area we're working with Cohesity, security, data protection, they're an investor in our company. So this is an important, you know, both... I think tech player and a partner for many companies like us. >> I wonder the, you know, the marketplace... there's been a big push on the marketplace by all the cloud companies last couple of years. Do you see that disrupting the way softwares, enterprise software is sold? >> Oh, for sure. I mean, you have to be a ostrich with your head in the sand to not see this wave happening. I mean, what's it? $150 billion worth of revenue. Even though the growth rates dipped a little bit the last quarter or so, it's still aggregatively between Amazon and Azure and Google, you know, 30% growth. And I think we're still in the second or third inning off a grand 1 trillion or 2 trillion of IT, shifting not all of it to the cloud, but significantly faster. So if you add up all of the big things of the on-premise world, they're, you know, they got to a certain size, their growth is stable, but stalling. These guys are growing significantly faster. And then if you add on top of them, platform companies the data companies, Snowflake, MongoDB, Databricks, you know, Datadog, and then apps companies on top of that. I think the move to the Cloud is inevitable. In SaaS companies, I don't know why you would ever implement a CRM solution on-prem. It's all gone to the Cloud. >> Oh, it is. >> That happened 15 years ago. I mean, begin within three, five years of the advent of Salesforce. And the same thing in HR. Why would you deploy a HR solution now? You've got Workday, you've got, you know, others that are so some of those apps markets are are just never coming back to an on-prem capability. >> Sanjay, I want to ask you, you built a reputation for being able to, you know, forecast accurately, hit your plan, you know, you hit your numbers, you're awesome operator. Even though you have a, you know, technology degree, which you know, that's a two-tool star, multi-tool star. But I call it the slingshot economy. This is like, I mean I've seen probably more downturns than anybody in here, you know, given... Well maybe, maybe- >> Maybe me. >> You and I both. I've never seen anything like this, where where visibility is so unpredictable. The economy is sling-shotting. It's like, oh, hurry up, go Covid, go, go go build, build, build supply, then pull back. And now going forward, now pulling back. Slootman said, you know, on the call, "Hey the guide, is the guide." He said, "we put it out there, We do our best to hit it." But you had CrowdStrike had issues you know, mid-market, ServiceNow. I saw McDermott on the other day on the, on the TV. I just want to pay, you know, buy from the guy. He's so (indistinct) >> But mixed, mixed results, Salesforce, you know, Octa now pre-announcing, hey, they're going to be, or announcing, you know, better visibility, forward guide. Elastic kind of got hit really hard. HPE and Dell actually doing really well in the enterprise. >> Yep. >> 'Course Dell getting killed in the client. But so what are you seeing out there? How, as an executive, do you deal with such poor visibility? >> I think, listen, what the last two or three years have taught us is, you know, with the supply chain crisis, with the surge that people thought you may need of, you know, spending potentially in the pandemic, you have to start off with your tech platform being 10 x better than everybody else. And differentiate, differentiate. 'Cause in a crowded market, but even in a market that's getting tougher, if you're not differentiating constantly through technology innovation, you're going to get left behind. So you named a few places, they're all technology innovators, but even if some of them are having challenges, and then I think you're constantly asking yourselves, how do you move from being a point product to a platform with more and more services where you're getting, you know, many of them moving really fast. In the case of Roe, I like him a lot. He's probably one of the most savvy operators, also that I respect. He calls these speedboats, and you know, his core platform started off with the firewall network security. But he's built now a very credible cloud security, cloud AI security business. And I think that's how you need to be thinking as a tech executive. I mean, if you got core, your core beachhead 10 x better than everybody else. And as you move to adjacencies in these new platforms, have you got now speedboats that are getting to a point where they are competitive advantage? Then as you think of the go-to-market perspective, it really depends on where you are as a company. For a company like our size, we need partners a lot more. Because if we're going to, you know, stand on the shoulders of giants like Isaac Newton said, "I see clearly because I stand on the shoulders giants." I need to really go and cultivate Amazon so they become our lead partner in cloud. And then appropriately Microsoft and Google where I need to. And security. Part of what we announced last week was, last month, yeah, last couple of weeks ago, was the data security alliance with the biggest security players. What was I trying to do with that? First time ever done in my industry was get Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Wallace, Tenable, CyberArk, Splunk, all to build an alliance with me so I could stand on their shoulders with them helping me. If you're a bigger company, you're constantly asking yourself "how do you make sure you're getting your, like Amazon, their top hundred customers spending more with that?" So I think the the playbook evolves, and I'm watching some of these best companies through this time navigate through this. And I think leadership is going to be tested in enormously interesting ways. >> I'll say. I mean, Snowflake is really interesting because they... 67% growth, which is, I mean, that's best in class for a company that's $2 billion. And, but their guide was still, you know, pretty aggressive. You know, so it's like, do you, you know, when it when it's good times you go, "hey, we can we can guide conservatively and know we can beat it." But when you're not certain, you can't dial down too far 'cause your investors start to bail on you. It's a really tricky- >> But Dave, I think listen, at the end of the day, I mean every CEO should not be worried about the short term up and down in the stock price. You're building a long-term multi-billion dollar company. In the case of Frank, he has, I think I shot to a $10 billion, you know, analytics data warehousing data management company on the back of that platform, because he's eyeing the market that, not just Teradata occupies today, but now Oracle occupies or other databases, right? So his tam as it grows bigger, you're going to have some of these things, but that market's big. I think same with Palo Alto. I mean Datadog's another company, 75% growth. >> Yeah. >> At 20% margins, like almost rule of 95. >> Amazing. >> When they're going after, not just the observability market, they're eating up the sim market, security analytics, the APM market. So I think, you know, that's, you look at these case studies of companies who are going from point product to platforms and are steadily able to grow into new tams. You know, to me that's very inspiring. >> I get it. >> Sanjay: That's what I seek to do at our com. >> I get that it's a marathon, but you know, when you're at VMware, weren't you looking at the stock price every day just out of curiosity? I mean listen, you weren't micromanaging it. >> You do, but at the end of the day, and you certainly look at the days of earnings and so on so forth. >> Yeah. >> Because you want to create shareholder value. >> Yeah. >> I'm not saying that you should not but I think in obsession with that, you know, in a short term, >> Going to kill ya. >> Makes you, you know, sort of myopically focused on what may not be the right thing in the long term. Now in the long arc of time, if you're not creating shareholder value... Look at what happened to Steve Bomber. You needed Satya to come in to change things and he's created a lot of value. >> Dave: Yeah, big time. >> But I think in the short term, my comments were really on the quarter to quarter, but over a four a 12 quarter, if companies are growing and creating profitable growth, they're going to get the valuation they deserve. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Do you the... I want to ask you about something Arvind Krishna said in the previous IBM earnings call, that IT is deflationary and therefore it is resistant to the macroeconomic headwinds. So IT spending should actually thrive in a deflation, in a adverse economic climate. Do you think that's true? >> Not all forms of IT. I pay very close attention to surveys from, whether it's the industry analysts or the Morgan Stanleys, or Goldman Sachs. The financial analysts. And I think there's a gluc in certain sectors that will get pulled back. Traditional view is when the economies are growing people spend on the top line, front office stuff, sales, marketing. If you go and look at just the cloud 100 companies, which are the hottest private companies, and maybe with the public market companies, there's way too many companies focused on sales and marketing. Way too many. I think during a downsizing and recession, that's going to probably shrink some, because they were all built for the 2009 to 2021 era, where it was all about the top line. Okay, maybe there's now a proposition for companies who are focused on cost optimization, supply chain visibility. Security's been intangible, that I think is going to continue to an investment. So I tell, listen, if you are a tech investor or if you're an operator, pay attention to CIO priorities. And right now, in our business at Cohesity, part of the reason we've embraced things like ransomware protection, there is a big focus on security. And you know, by intelligently being a management and a security company around data, I do believe we'll continue to be extremely relevant to CIO budgets. There's a ransomware, 20 ransomware attempts every second. So things of that kind make you relevant in a bank. You have to stay relevant to a buying pattern or else you lose momentum. >> But I think what's happening now is actually IT spending's pretty good. I mean, I track this stuff pretty closely. It's just that expectations were so high and now you're seeing earnings estimates come down and so, okay, and then you, yeah, you've got the, you know the inflationary factors and your discounted cash flows but the market's actually pretty good. >> Yeah. >> You know, relative to other downturns that if this is not a... We're not actually not in a downturn. >> Yeah. >> Not yet anyway. It may be. >> There's a valuation there. >> You have to prepare. >> Not sales. >> Yeah, that's right. >> When I was on CNBC, I said "listen, it's a little bit like that story of Joseph. Seven years of feast, seven years of famine." You have to prepare for potentially your worst. And if it's not the worst, you're in good shape. So will it be a recession 2023? Maybe. You know, high interest rates, inflation, war in Russia, Ukraine, maybe things do get bad. But if you belt tightening, if you're focused in operational excellence, if it's not a recession, you're pleasantly surprised. If it is one, you're prepared for it. >> All right. I'm going to put you in the spot and ask you for predictions. Expert analysis on the World Cup. What do you think? Give us the breakdown. (group laughs) >> As my... I wish India was in the World Cup, but you can't get enough Indians at all to play soccer well enough, but we're not, >> You play cricket, though. >> I'm a US man first. I would love to see one of Brazil, or Argentina. And as a Messi person, I don't know if you'll get that, but it would be really special for Messi to lead, to end his career like Maradonna winning a World Cup. I don't know if that'll happen. I'm probably going to go one of the Latin American countries, if the US doesn't make it far enough. But first loyalty to the US team, and then after one of the Latin American countries. >> And you think one of the Latin American countries is best bet to win or? >> I don't know. It's hard to tell. They're all... What happens now at this stage >> So close, right? >> is anybody could win. >> Yeah. You just have lots of shots of gold. I'm a big soccer fan. It could, I mean, I don't know if the US is favored to win, but if they get far enough, you get to the finals, anybody could win. >> I think they get Netherlands next, right? >> That's tough. >> Really tough. >> But... The European teams are good too, but I would like to see US go far enough, and then I'd like to see Latin America with team one of Argentina, or Brazil. That's my prediction. >> I know you're a big Cricket fan. Are you able to follow Cricket the way you like? >> At god unearthly times the night because they're in Australia, right? >> Oh yeah. >> Yeah. >> I watched the T-20 World Cup, select games of it. Yeah, you know, I'm not rapidly following every single game but the World Cup games, I catch you. >> Yeah, it's good. >> It's good. I mean, I love every sport. American football, soccer. >> That's great. >> You get into basketball now, I mean, I hope the Warriors come back strong. Hey, how about the Warriors Celtics? What do we think? We do it again? >> Well- >> This year. >> I'll tell you what- >> As a Boston Celtics- >> I would love that. I actually still, I have to pay off some folks from Palo Alto office with some bets still. We are seeing unprecedented NBA performance this year. >> Yeah. >> It's amazing. You look at the stats, it's like nothing. I know it's early. Like nothing we've ever seen before. So it's exciting. >> Well, always a pleasure talking to you guys. >> Great to have you on. >> Thanks for having me. >> Thank you. Love the expert analysis. >> Sanjay Poonen. Dave Vellante. Keep it right there. re:Invent 2022, day four. We're winding up in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (lighthearted soft music)

(upbeat music) >> We're back at AWS re:Invent 2021. It's the biggest hybrid event of the year. One of the few physical events and we're psyched to be here. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm really pleased to bring back the host emeritus, Stu Miniman, somebody I worked with side-by-side, Stu, for 10 years in a setting much like this, many like this. So, good to have you back. >> Dave, it's great to be here with theCUBE team, family here and re:Invent, Dave. I mean, this show, I remember back, Dave, going to you after the first re:Invent we talked, we were like, "We got to be there." Dave, remember the first year we came, the second year of re:Invent, this is the 10th year now, little card tables, gaming companies, all this stuff. You had Jerry Chen on yesterday and Jerry was comparing like, this is going to be like the next Microsoft. And we bet heavy on this ecosystem. And yeah, we all think this cloud thing, it might be real. 20,000 people here, it's not the 50 or 75,000 that we had in like 2018, 2019, but this ecosystem, what's happening in the cloud, multiple versions of hybrid going on with the event and the services, but yeah, phenomenal stuff. And yeah, it's so nice to see people. >> That's for sure. It's something that we've talked about a lot over the years is, and you remember the early days of re:Invent and to this day, just very a strong developer affinity that AWS has done a tremendous job of building that up and it's their raison d'etre, it's how they approach the market. But now you've been at Red Hat for a bit, obviously as well, developer affinity, what have you learned? Specifically as it relates to the cloud, Kubernetes, hottest thing going, you don't want to do an OpenShift commercial, but it's there, you're in the middle of that mix. What have you learned generally? >> Well, Dave, to the comment that you made about developers here, it's developers and the enterprise. We used to have a joke and say, enterprise developer is an oxymoron, but that line between developers doing stuff, early as a cloud, it was stealth computing. It's they're often doing this stuff and central IT is not managing it. So how do the pieces come together? How do apps and infrastructure, how do those pieces come together? And it's something that Red Hat has been doing a long time. Think about the Linux developer. They might've not have been the app developers, the people building Linux and everything, but they had a decent close tie to it. I'm on the OpenShift team. What we do is cloud, Dave, and we've got a partnership here with Amazon. We GAed our native cloud service earlier this year. Andy Jassy helped name it. It is the beautifully named Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS or ROSA. But we've done OpenShift on AWS for more than five years, basically since we were doing Kubernetes, it's been here because of course customers doing cloud, where are they? A lot of them are here in Amazon. So I've been loving talking to a lot of customers, understanding how enterprise adoption is increasing, how we can enable developers and help them move faster. And yeah, I mean the quick plug on OpenShift is our service. We've got an SRE team that is going to manage all of that. A friend of the program, Corey Quinn, says, "Hey, an SRE team like that, because you don't want to manage as an enterprise." You don't want to manage Kubernetes. Yeah, you need to understand some of the pieces, but what is important to your business is the applications, your data and all those things and managing the undifferentiated heavy lifting. That's one of the reasons you went to the cloud. So therefore changing your model as to how you consume services in the cloud. And what are we seeing with Amazon, Dave? They're trying to build more solutions, simplify deployments, and offer more solutions including with their ecosystem. >> So I want to ask you. You said enterprise developer is kind of an oxymoron, and I remember, years ago I used to hang around with a lot of heads of application development and insurance companies and financial services, pharmaceutical, and they didn't wear hoodies, but they didn't wear suits either. And then when I talked to guys like Jeff Clark, for instance. He talks about we're building an abstraction layer across clouds, blah, blah, blah, which by the way, I think it is the right strategy. I'm like, "Okay, I'll drink some of that Kool-Aid." And then when I come here, we talked to Adam Selipsky. John flew out and I was on the chime. He goes, "Yeah, that's not hybrid. No, this is nothing like, it's not AWS, AWS is cloud." So, square that circle for me, 'cause you're in both worlds and certainly your strategy is to connect those words. Is that cloud? >> Yeah, right. I mean, Dave, we spent years talking about like is private cloud really a cloud? And when we started coming to the show, there is only one cloud. It is the public cloud and Amazon is the paragon of, I don't know what it was. >> Dave: Fake clouds, cloud washing. >> So today, Amazon's putting lots of things into your data center and extending the cloud out to that environment. >> So that's cloud. >> That's cloud. >> What do we call that cloud? What about the reverse? >> What's happening at the edge is that cloud is that extension of what we said from Amazon. If you look at not only Outpost, but Wavelengths and Local Zones and everything else like that. >> Let's say, yes, that's cloud. The APIs, primitives, check. >> Dave, I've always thought cloud is an operating model, not a location. And the hybrid definition is not the old, I did an ebook on this, Dave earlier this year. It's not the decade old NIS definition of an application that spans because I don't get up in the morning as an enterprise and say, "Oh, let me look at the table of how much Google is charging me or Microsoft or Amazon," or wake up one morning and move from one cloud to the other. Portability, follow the sun type stuff, does it ever happen? Yes, but it is rare thing. Applications oftentimes get pulled apart. So we've seen if you talk about AI, training the cloud, then transact and do things at the edge. If I'm in an autonomous vehicle or in a geosynchronous satellite, I can't be going back to the cloud to process stuff. So I get what I need and I process there. The same thing hybrid, oftentimes I will do my transactional activity in the public cloud because I've got unlimited compute capability, but I might have my repository of data for many different reasons, governance or security, all these things in my own data center. So parts of an application might live there, but I don't just span to go between the public cloud in my data center or the edge, it's specific architectural decisions as to how we do this. And by the way the developer, they don't want to have to think about location. I mean, my background, servers, storage, virtualization, all that stuff, that was very much an infrastructure up look of things. Developers want to worry about their code and make sure that it works in production. >> Okay, let me test that. If it's in the AWS cloud and I think it's true for the other hyperscale clouds too, they don't have to think about location, but they still have to think about location on-prem, don't they? >> Well, Dave, even in a public cloud, you do need to worry about sometimes it's like, "Okay, do I split it between availability zones? How do I build that? How do I do that?" So there are things that we build on top of it. So we've seen Amazon. >> I think that's fair, data sovereignty, you have to think about okay. >> Absolutely, a lot of those things. >> Okay, but the experience in Germany is going to be the same as it is in DC, is it not? >> More or less? There are some differences we'll see off and Amazon will roll things out over time and what's available, you've got cloud. >> For sure, though that's definitely true. That's a maturity thing, right? You've talked a bit, but ultimately they all sort of catch up. I guess my question would be is the delta between, let's say, Fed adoption and East Coast, is that delta narrower, significantly narrow than what you might see on-prem? >> The services are the same, sometimes for financial or political things, there might be some slight differences, but yes, the cloud experience should be the same everywhere from Amazon. >> Is it from a standpoint of hybrid, on-prem to cloud, across cloud? >> Many of the things when they go outside of the Amazon data centers are limited or a little bit different or you might have latency considerations that you have to consider. >> Now it's a tug of war. >> So it's not totally seamless because, David Foyer would tell us there, "You're not going to fight physics." There are certain things that we need to have and we've changed the way we architect things because it's no longer the bottleneck of the local scuzzy connection that you have there, it is now (indistinct). >> But the point I'm making is that gets into a tug of war of "Our way is better than your way." And the answer is depends in terms of your workload and the use case. >> You've looked at some of these new databases that span globes and do things of the like. >> Another question, I don't know if you saw the Goldman Sachs deal this morning, Goldman Sachs is basically turning its business into a SaaS and pointing it to their hedge funds and allowing people to access their data, their tools, their software that they built for their own purposes. And now they're outselling it. Similar to what NASDAQ has done. I can't imagine doing that without containers. >> Yeah, so interesting point, I think. At least six years ago now, Amazon launched serverless and serverless was going to take over the world. I dug into the space for a couple of years. And you had the serverless with camp and you had the container camp. Last year at re:Invent, I really felt a shift from Amazon's positioning that many of the abstraction layers and the tools that help you support those environments will now span between Lambda and containers. The container world has been adding serverless functionality. So Amazon does Fargate. The open-source community uses something called Knative, and just breaking this week. Knative was a project that Google started and it looks like that is going to move over to the CNCF. So be part of the whole Kubernetes ecosystem and everything like that. Oracle, VMware, IBM, Red Hat, all heavily involved in Knative, and we're all excited to see that go into the CNCF. So the reason I say that, I've seen from Amazon, I actually, John and I, when we interviewed Andy Jassy back in 2017, I asked him a follow-up question because he said if he was to build AWS in 2017, "I would start with everything underneath it serverless." I would wonder if following up with Adam or Andy today, I'd said, "Would it be all serverless or would containers be a piece of it?" Because sometimes underneath it doesn't matter or sometimes it can be containers and serverless. It's a single unit in Amazon and when they position things, it's now that spectrum of unit, everything from the serverless through the containers, through... James Hamilton wrote a blog post today about running Xen-on-Nitro and they have a migration service for a mainframe. So what do we know? That one of the only things about IT is almost nothing ever goes away. I mean, it sounded like Amazon declared coming soon the end of life of mainframe. My friends over at IBM might not be quite ready to call that era over but we shall see. All these things take time. Everything in IT is additive. I'm happy to see. It is very much usually an end world when I look at the container and Kubernetes space. That is something that you can have a broad spectrum of applications. So some of my more monolithic applications can move over, my cool new data, AI things, I can build on it, microservices in between. And so, it's a broad platform that spans the cloud, the edge, the data center. So that cloud operating model is easier to have consistency all the places that I go. >> Mainframe is in the cloud. Well, we'll see. Big banks by the next site unseen. So I think Amazon will be able to eat away at the edges of that, but I don't think there's going to be a major migration. They claim it. Their big thing is that you can't get COBOL programmers. So I'm like, "Yeah, call DXC, you'll get plenty." Let's talk about something more interesting. (Stu laughs softly) So the last 10 years was a lot of, a lot about IT transformation and there was a lot more room to grow there. I mean, the four big hyperscalers are going to do 120 billion this year. They're growing at 35%. Maybe it's not a trillion, but there's a $500 billion market that they're going after, maybe more. It looks like there's a real move. You saw that with NASDAQ, the Goldman deal, to really drive into business, deeper business integration in addition to IT transformation. So how do you see the next decade of cloud? What should we be watching? >> So, one of the interesting trends, I mean, Dave, for years we covered big data and big data felt very horizontal in it's approach thing. Hadoop take over the world. When I look at AI solutions, when I look at the edge computing technologies that happen, they're very vertically driven. So, our early customers in edge adoption tend to be like telco with the 5G rollout manufacturing in some of their environments. AI, every single industry has a whole set of use cases that they're using that go very deep. So I think cloud computing goes from, we talked about infrastructure as a service to it needs to be more, it is solution, some of these pieces go together. When Adam got up on stage and talked about how many instance types they have on Amazon, Dave, it's got to be 2X or 4X more different instant types than if I went to go to HPE or Dell and buy a physical server for my environment. So we need to have areas and guidance and blueprints and heck, use some of that ML and AI to help drive people to the right solutions because we definitely have the paradox of choice today. So I think you will find some gravity moving towards some of these environments. Gravatar has been really interesting to watch. Obviously that Annapurna acquisition should be down as one of the biggest ones in the cloud era. >> No lack of optionality to your point. So I guess to the point of deeper business integration, that's the big question, will Amazon provide more solution abstractions? They certainly do with Connect. We didn't hear a ton of that this show. >> Interestingly. (Dave speaking indistinctly) So the article that you and John Furrier wrote after meeting with Adam, the thing that caught my eye is discussion of community and ecosystems. And one of the things coming after, some, big communities out there like, you and I lived through the VMware ecosystem in that very tight community. There are forming little areas of community here in this group, but it's not a single cloud community. There are those focus areas that they have. And I do love to see, I mean, obviously working for Red Hat, talking about the ecosystem support. I was very happy to hear Adam mention Red Hat in the keynote as one of the key hybrid partners there. So, for Amazon to get from the 60 million, the 60 billion to the trillion dollar mark down the road, it's going to take a village and we're happy to be a part of it. >> Hey, great to have you back, enjoy the rest of the show. This is, let's see, day three, we're wrapping up. We're here again tomorrow so check it out. Special thanks to obviously AWS is our anchor sponsor and of course, AMD for sponsoring the editorial segments of our event. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. See you tomorrow. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:invent 2021. I'm here with my co-host John Furrier and we're running one of the largest, most significant technology events in the history of 2021. Two live sets here in Las Vegas, along with our two studios. And we are absolutely delighted. We're incredibly delighted to welcome a returning alumni. It's not enough to just say that you're an alumni because you have been such a fixture of theCUBE for so many years. Annie Weinberger. And Annie is head of product marketing for applications at AWS. Annie, welcome. >> Thank you so much, it's great to be back. >> It's wonderful to have you back. Let's dive right into it. >> Okay. >> Talk to us about Connect. What does that mean when I say Connect? >> Yes, well, I think if we talk about Amazon Connect, we have to go back to the beginning of the origin story. So, over 10 years ago, when Amazon retail was looking for a solution to manage their customer service and their contact center, we went out and we looked at different solutions and nothing really met our needs. Nothing could kind of provide the scale that we needed at Amazon, or could really be as flexible as we needed to ensure that we're our customer obsession could come through in our customer service. So we built our own solution. And over the years, customers were coming to us and asking, you know, what do you use for your customer service technology? And so we launched Amazon Connect, our omni-channel cloud contact center solution just over four years ago. And it is the one of the fastest growing services at AWS. We have tens of thousands of customers using it today, like Capital One into it, Bank of Omaha, Mutual of Omaha, Best Western, you know, I can go on and on. And they're using it to have over 10 million interactions with customers every day. So it's, you know, growing phenomenally and we just couldn't be more proud to help our customers with their customer service. >> So, yeah. Talk about some of the components that go into that. What are the sort of puzzle pieces that make up AWS Connect? Because obviously connecting with a customer can take a whole bunch of different forms with email, text, voice. >> Yeah >> What's included in that? >> So it's an omni-channel cloud contact center. It provides, you know, any way you want to talk to your customers. There's traditional methods of voice. There's automated ways to connect. So IVRs or interactive voice responses where you call with voice prompts, there's chat, you know. We have Lex Bots that use the same technology that powers Alexa for natural language understanding. And I think customers really like it for a few reasons. One is that unlike kind of other contact center solutions, you can set it up in minutes. You know, American Preparatory Academy had to set up a contact center, they did it in two days. And then it's very, very easy to customize and use. So another example is, you know, when Priceline was going through COVID and they realized their call volume went up 300% overnight, and everybody was just sitting near the queue waiting to talk to an agent. So in 20 minutes, we were able to go in and very easily with a drag and drop interface, customize the ad flow so that people who had a reservation in the next 72 hours were prioritized. So very, very easily. >> You just jumped the gun on me. I was going to ask this because we never boarding that Connect during the pandemic was a huge success. >> Annie: Yes. >> It was many, many examples where people were just located, disrupted by the pandemic. And you guys had tons of traction from government public sector to commercial across the board. Adam Solecki told me in person a couple weeks ago that it was on fire, Connect was on fire. So again, a tailwind, one of those examples with the pandemic, but it highlights this idea or purpose built, ready to go. >> Pre-built the applications. >> Pre-built application. This is a phenomenon. >> It's moving up the stack for AWS. It's very exciting. I think, yeah, we had over 5,000 new contact centers stood up in March and April of 2020 alone. >> Dave: Wow. >> Give it some scale, just go back to the scale piece. Cause this is like, like amazing to stand up a call center like hours, days. Like this is like incredible to, give us some stats on some examples of how fast people were standing up Connect. >> Yeah, I mean, you could stand it up overnight. American Preparatory Academy, as I mentioned did it in two days, we had, you know, this county of Los Angeles did theirs I think at a day. You could go and right now you don't need any technical expertise, even though you have some. >> theCUBE call center, we don't need people calling. >> We had everyone from a Mexican restaurant needed to take to go orders. Cause now it's COVID and they don't have a call. They've been able to set that up, grab a phone number and start taking takeout orders all the way to like capital one, you know, with 40,000 agents that need to move remote overnight. And I think that it's because of that ease to set up, but also the scale and the way that we charge. So, you know, it's AWS consumption-based pricing. You only pay for the interactions with customers. So the barrier to entry is really, really low. You don't have to migrate everything over and buy a bunch of new licenses. You can just stand it up and you're only charged for the interactions with customers. And then if you want to scale down like into it, obviously tax season they're bringing on a lot more agents to handle calls, when those agents aren't really needed for that busy time, you're not paying for those seats. >> You're flex. Take me through the, okay, that's a win, I get that. So home run, great success. Now, the machine learning story is interesting too, because you have the purpose-built platform. There's some customizations that can happen on top of it. So it's not just, here's a general purpose piece of software. People are using some customizations. Take us through the other things. >> Well, the exciting thing is they're not even real customizations because we're AWS, we can leverage the AML services and built pre-built purpose-built features. So there it's embedded and you know, Amazon Connect has been cloud native and AI born since the very beginning. So we've taken a lot of the AI services and built them into you don't need any knowledge. You don't have to know anything about AIML. You can just go in and start leveraging it. And it has huge powerful effects for our customers. We launched three new features this year. One was Amazon Wisdom. That's part of Amazon Connect. And what that does is, you know, if you're an agent and you're on the phone and customer's asking questions, today what they have to do is go in and search across all these different knowledge repositories to find the answer or, you know, how do I issue a refund? You know, we're hearing about this feature that's broken on our product. We're listening behind the scenes to that call and then just automatically providing the knowledge articles as they're on the call saying, this is what you should do, giving them recommendations so we can help the customer much more quickly. >> I love them moving up the stack. Again, a huge fan of Connect. We've highlighting in all of our stories. It's a phenomenon that's translating to other areas, but I want to tie back in where it goes next cause on these keynotes, Adam Solecki's and today was Swami, the conversations about a horizontal data plane. And so as customers would say, use Connect, I might want, if I'm a big customer I want to integrate that into my data because it's voice data, it's call centers, customer data, but I have other databases. So how do you guys look at that integration layer snapping it together with say, a time series database, or maybe a CRM system or retail e-commerce because again, it's all data but it's connected call center. Some may think it's silo, but it's not really siloed. So, I'm a customer. How do I integrate call center? >> Yeah and it's, you know, we have a very strong partner with Salesforce. They're actually a reseller of Connect. So we work with them very, very closely. We have out of the box integrations with Salesforce, with your other, you know, analytics databases with Marketo with other services that you need. I think again, it's one of the benefits of being AWS, it's very extensible, very flexible, and really easy to bring in and share the data that we have with other systems. >> John: So it's not an issue then. >> One of the conversation points that's come up is the, this idea that a large majority of IT Spend is still on premises today. In other words, the AWS total addressable market hasn't been tapped yet. And, you imagine going through the pandemic, someone using AWS Connect to create a virtual call center, now as we hopefully come out and people some return to the office, but now they have the tools to be able to stay at home and be more flexible. Those people, maybe they weren't in the cloud that much before. But to John's point, now you start talking about connecting all of those other data sources. Well, where do those data sources belong? They belong in AWS. So, from your perspective, on the surface it looks like, well, wait, you have these products, but really those are gateways to everything else that AWS does. Is that a fair statement? >> I think it's very, yeah. Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> The big thing I want to get into is okay, we're, I mean, we don't have a lot of people calling for theCUBE but I mean, we wouldn't use the call center, but there's audio involved. Are people more going back to the old school phones for support now with the pandemic? Cause you've mentioned that earlier about the price line, having more- >> I think it's, you know, when we talk to our customers too, it's about letting, letting any customer contact you the way they want to. You know, we, you know, I was talking to Delta, spoke with us yesterday in the business application leadership session. And she said, you know, when someone has a flight issue, I'm sure you can attest to this. I did the same thing. They call, you know, if your, if your flight got canceled or it's looking like it's going to keep pushing, you don't necessarily want to go, you know, use a chat bot or send an email or a text, but there's other use cases where you just want a quick answer, you know, if you contact, I haven't received my product yet, you know, it said it was shipped, I didn't get it. I don't necessarily want to talk to someone, but so, it's just about making that available. >> On the voice side, is it other apps are integrating voice? So what's the interface to call center? Is it, can I integrate like an app voice integrated through the app or it's all phone? >> Because for the agents, there's an agent UI. So they'll see kind of calls that they have in their queue coming up, they'll see the tasks that they have to issue or refund. They'll see the kind of analytics that they have. The knowledge works. There's a supervisor view, so they could go see, you know, we with contact lens for Amazon Connect, we had a launch this, you know, this week, every event around contact lens, it lets you see the trends and sentiment of what's going on the call. It gives them like those training moments. If people aren't using the standard sign-off or the standard greeting on the call, it's a training moment and they can kind of see what's happening and get real-time alerts. If two keywords of a customer saying they cancel into the call, that can get a flag and they can go in and help the agent if necessary. So. >> All kinds of metadata extraction going on in real time. >> Yeah. >> How do you, how would AWS to go through the process of determining what should be bespoke solution hearing versus something that can be productized? And we know there are 475 different kinds of instances. However, you can come up with a package solution where people could pick features and get up and running really quickly. How is that decision making process? >> Well, I mean, you know, 90% at least of what we do build, it comes from what our customers ask for. So we don't, it's the onus is not on us. We listen to our customers, they tell us what they want us to build. Contact center solutions are their line of business applications are purchased by business decision makers and they're used to doing more buying than building. So they wanted to be more out of the box, more like pre-built, but we still are AWS. We make it very, very extensible, very easy to customize, like pull in other data sources. But when we look at how we are going to move up the stack and other areas, we just continue to listen to our customers. >> What's the biggest thing you learned in the pandemic from the team? What's the learnings coming out of the pandemic as hybrid world is upon us? >> I mean, I think a few things with, you know, starting, as you mentioned with the cloud, that the kind of idea of a contact center being a massive building, usually in the middle of America where, you know, people go and they sit and they have conversations. If that was really turned on its head and you can have very secure and accessible solutions through the cloud so that you can work from anywhere. So that was really fantastic to see. >> That's going to be interesting to see moving forward. How that paradigm shifts some centralized call centers, but a lot of this aggregated work that can be done. >> I mean, who knows the, you know, gig economy could be in the contact center, you know. >> Yeah, absolutely >> Yeah >> Maybe get some CUBE hosts, give us theCUBE Connect. We get some CUBE hosts remote. >> That's important work, yeah. >> We need, we need to talk. I got to got my phone number in that list. Annie, it's been fantastic to have you. >> Thank you guys so much. I really appreciate it. >> For John Furrier, this is Dave Nicholson telling you, thank you for joining our continuous coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. Stick with theCUBE for the best in hybrid event coverage. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You are watching theCube's coverage of AWS reinvent 2021. I'll tell you this place is packed. It's quite amazing here over 20,000 people, I'd say it's closer to 25, maybe 27,000. And there's a little overflow, lots going on in the evenings. It's quite remarkable. And we're really happy to be part of this. Jay Turner is here, he's the vice president of development and ops at PCCW Global. He's joined by Garrett Lowell, vice-president of ecosystem partnerships for the Americas at PCCW Global. Guys, welcome to theCube. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much. >> So, Jay, maybe you could take us through for those people who aren't familiar with your company, what do you guys do? What do you all about? >> Yes, so PCCW Global is the international operating wing of Hong Kong Telecom. So if it's outside of Hong Kong, it's our network. We've got about 695,000 kilometers of diverse cable. We've got about 43, 44 terabit of capacity. Came into business in 2005 if my brain is serving me correctly right now. So we have a very diverse and vast portfolio ranging all the way from satellite teleports, all the way to IP transit. We're a tier one service provider from that perspective as well. So we do one of everything when it comes to networking and that's really what was the basis of Console Connect, was inventing a platform to really enable our users to capitalize on that our network and our assets. >> Okay, so 2005, obviously you predated cloud, you laid a bunch of fibers, it's getting in the ocean, I mean, global networks, I mean, there was a big trend to do that and you had to think, you had to go bigger or go home and that business. >> Jay: Yes you had to do. >> So and Console Connect is your platform, is that right? So explain. >> Yeah, sorry. Yeah, Console Connect is our software defined interconnection platform. So we built a user self-service portal. Users can allocate ports, they get the LOAs issue to them directly from the platform. And then once they've got an active port or they've come in via one of our partnerships, they can then provision connectivity across our platform. And that may be extending to their data centers or extending or their branch office, or it could be building a circuit into the cloud via direct connect, could be building a circuit into an internet exchange. And all of those circuits are going to be across that 685,000 kilometers of diverse fiber rather than going across the public internet. >> So, when you started, it took some time obviously to build out that infrastructure and then the cloud came into play, but it was still early days, but it sounds like you're taking the cloud model, AWS Cloud model and applying that to your business, eliminate all that undifferentiated, heavy lifting, if you will, the visioning and management. >> Yeah, we've heard many people and that's kind of the impetus of this was, I want to be directly connected to my end point. And how do I do that? And AWS, yes, they had direct connect, but figuring out how to do that as an enterprise was challenging. So we said, hey, we'll automate that for you. Just tell us what region you want to connect to. And we'll do all the heavy lifting, and we'll just hand you back a villain tag. You're good to go. >> So it's a classic case of, okay, AWS has direct connect, people they go, "Ah, that's directly competitive, but it's not, you're adding value on top of that." Right. So describe where you fit Garrett inside of the AWS ecosystem. You look around this hall and it's just a huge growing ecosystem, where you fit inside of that ecosystem and then your ecosystem, what's that like? >> Okay, so where we fit into the AWS ecosystem, as Jay alluded to, we're adding value to our partners and customers where they can come in, not only are they able to access the AWS platform as well as other cloud platforms, but they're also able to access each other. So we have a marketplace in our platform, which allows our customers and partners to put a description of their services on the marketplace and advertise their capabilities out to the rest of the ecosystem of PCCW Global and Console Connect. >> Okay, so and you're doing that inside of AWS? I that right? Or at least in part? >> No, that's not inside of AWS. >> Okay, so your platform is your platform. >> Yes. >> And then, so your relationship with AWS is to sort of superpower direct connect, is that right or? >> So we're directly connected to AWS throughout the globe. And this allows our customers and partners to be able to utilize not only the PCCW Global network, but also to expand that capability to the AWS platform in clouds. >> Wherever there's a cloud you plug into it? Okay. >> That's correct. >> And then another advantage there is the customer, obviously doesn't have to be directly co-located with AWS. They don't have to be in the same geographic region. If for some reason you need to be connected to US West, but you're in Frankfurt, fine, we'll back all the traffic for you. >> Does that happen a lot? >> It actually does. >> How come? Why, what's the use case there? >> Global diversity is certainly one of them, just being able to have multiple footprints. But the other thing that we're seeing more of late is these cloud-based companies are beginning to kind of be attracted to where their customers are located. So they'll start seeing these pockets of use and they'll go, well, okay, we're going to go into that region as well, stand up a VPC there. And so then we want to our customers then being able to directly connect to that asset, that's closest to them. And then still be able to back call that traffic if necessary or take it wherever. >> What are the big, sort of macro trends in your business? I mean, broadly you see cost per bit coming down, you see data consumption and usage going through the roof. How does that affect you? What are some of the big trends that you see? >> I think one of the biggest ones and one that we targeted with Console Connect, we were hearing a lot of customers going, the world's changing so dynamically. We don't know how to do a one-year forecast of bandwidth, much less a three-year, which is what a lot of contracts are asking us for. So we said, hey, how about one day? Can you do one day? (Dave laughing) Because that's what our granularity is. So we allow for anything from one day up to three years right now, and then even within that term, we're dynamic. So if something happens, suddenly some product goes through the roof and you've suddenly got a spike in traffic. If a ship drags its anchor through a sub sea cable, and suddenly you're having to pivot, you just come into the platform, you click a couple of buttons, 20 seconds later, we've modified your bandwidth for you, or we've provisioned a new circuit for you. We've got your backup going whatever. Really at the end of the day, it's the customer paying for their network, so the customer should be the one making those decisions. >> How's that affect pricing? I presume, so I can have one date or a three-year term. Presume if I commit to three years, I get a better deal, is that right or? >> You do, but I mean, at the end of the day, it's actually pretty much a moderate, a better deal. We don't want to force the hand of the customer. So yeah, if you signed a 12 month contract with us, we're going to give you a 3% discount. >> Yeah, so it's not really, that's not a motivation to do it. Is just you want to reduce the transaction complexity. And that's why you would sign up for a longer term not to get the big discount. >> Correct. And then, like I said, even within a longer contract, we're still going to allow you to flex and flow and modify if you need to because it's your network. >> What kind of constraints do you put on that? Do I have to commit to a floor and then everything above that is I can flex up? Is that how it works? Okay. And then the more I commit to the better the deal is, or not necessarily? >> No, it's pretty much flat, right. >> So, okay. So I'm going to come in and I'm going to say, all right, I know I'm going to use X, I'll sign up for that and anything over it. You're pretty flexible, I might get a few points if I sign up for more, somebody might want to optimize that if they're big enough. >> And another really neat advantage, and the other complaint we heard from customers, they go, I need three different direct connect, or I need to be connected to three different parties, but I don't want to run three different cross-connects and I don't want to have three different ports. That's just an expense I don't want. And we say, fine, take your one gig port, run one gig of services on it, if that's 20 different services, we're fine. So we allow you to multiplex your port and provision- >> It's awesome. I love that model. I know some software companies who I would recommend take a look at that pricing model. So, Garrett, how do you segment the ecosystem? How do you look at that way? Maybe you could draw paint a picture sort of the, the ideal partners and what they look like. I know there's not just one category, but. >> Sure, so our ideal partners are internet exchanges, cloud partners, and SAS providers, because a big piece of our business is migration to the cloud. And the flexibility of our platform allows and encourages our SAS providers and SI partners to perform migration to the cloud much easier and flexible in a flexible format for their customers. >> Yeah, so what can you tell us, any kind of metrics you can give us around your business to give a sense of the the scope, the scale. >> Well, of our business, kind of one of the driving factors here, Gardner says that about 2023, I think 40% of the enterprise workloads will be deployed in the cloud, which is all fine and dandy, except in my head, you're just trading one set of complexities for another. So now, instead of having everything in a glass house and being able to kind of understand that now you're going, well, okay, so it's in the cloud now I need to manage my connectivity there. And, oh, well, wait a minute, are my security policies still the same? Do they apply if I'm going across the public internet? What exposure have I just, bought into myself to try to run this? So the platform really aims at normalizing that as much as possible. If you're directly connected to AWS, at the end of the day, that's a really long ethernet cable. So you're a glass house just got a lot bigger, but you're still able to maintain and use the exact same policies and procedures that you've been using. So that's really one of our guiding principles is to reduce that complexity and make it very simple for the user. >> Well, I don't understand, 'cause in the early days of cloud, a lot of enterprises, CIO they were concerned about security. And I think they realized that AWS has pretty good security, well, CIA is using it. But still people would say to me, it's not that it's bad security, it's just different. We move slow, Dave. So how do you accommodate, now I don't know, does that diversity, I mean, AWS has obviously matured, but are you suggesting that you can take my security edicts in my glass house and bring those into your networks and ultimately into the cloud? Is that kind of how it works? >> That's the goal. It's not going to be a panacea more than likely, but the more edicts that we can allow you to bring across and not have to go back and revamp and the better for you as a customer and the better really for us, because it normalizes things, it makes it much easier for us to accommodate more and more users. >> It is such now in the eco, it was all the diversity in the ecosystem. Is it such that there's enough common patterns that you you guys can kind of accommodate most of those use cases? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think the, one of the key components is the fact that the platform runs on our MPLS network, which is inherently secure. It's not on the public internet anywhere. Now we do have internet on demand capability. So in the event that a customer wants access to the internet, no problem, we can accommodate this. And we also have 5G capability built into the platform to allow flexibility of location and flexibility of... I would say, standing up new customer locations. And then the other component of the security is the fact that the customers can bring their own security and apply anywhere. So we're not blocking, we don't have any port filters or anything of this nature. >> Well, I would think 5G actually, I mean, I could see people arguing both sides, but my sense is 5G is going to be a huge driver for your business, 'cause it's going to just create so much more demand for your services I think, I could see somebody arguing the counter, but what's your point of view on that? >> No. I think that's a fair assessment. I think it's going to drive business for everyone here on the show floor. And it's pushing those workloads more toward the edge, which is not an area that people were typically concerned with. The edge was just the door that they walked through. That's becoming much different now. And we're also going to start seeing, and we're already seeing it, huge trends of moving that data at the edge, rather than bringing it all the way back to a central warehouse in Hare pending it. So, again, the ability to have a dynamic platform where you can see exactly what your network's doing and in the push of a button, modify that, or provision new connectivity in response to how your business is performing. >> Yeah, and ultimately it's all about the applications that are going to be driving demand for more data. And that's just a tailwind for you guys. >> Yeah, yeah and then you look at some of the car companies are coming on, you know, Tesla, you're driving around with like eight CPU's in that thing, communicating back over the air. >> Dave: Yeah right. >> You start scaling that, and you start getting into some real bottleneck. >> Amazing business you guys having, obviously capital intensive, but once you get in there, you've got a big moat, and then it's a matter of getting on a flywheel and innovating. Guys, congratulations on all the progress and thanks so much for coming on theCube. >> Yeah. No, thanks for the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Yeah, great to meet you guys. Good luck. All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCube, the leader in high-tech coverage, right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage, day one wrap-up. I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante. We have Jerry Chen, special guest who's been with us every year on theCUBE since inception. Certainly every AWS re:Invent, nine years straight. Jerry Chen, great to see you for our guest analyst's wrap up VC general partner, Greylock partners, good to see you. >> John, Dave, it's great to see you guys. Thanks for having me again. It wouldn't be re:Invent without the three of us sitting here and we missed last year, right, because of COVID. So we have to make up for lost time. >> John: We did a virtual one- >> Dave: we did virtual stuff= >> John: wasn't the same as in-person. >> Dave: Definitely not the same. >> Jerry: Not the same thing. So, it's good to see you guys again in person, and less than 6 feet apart. >> Cheers, yeah. >> And 7,000 people here, showing that the event's still relevant. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> Some people would kill for those numbers, it's a bad year for Amazon, down from 60,000. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> So, ecosystem's booming. Okay, let's get to it. Day one in the books, new CEO, new sheriff in town, his name's Adam Selipsky. Your take? >> Well, Adam's new, but he's old, right? Something, you know, like something new, something old, something blue, right? It's so, Adam was early Amazon, so he had that founding DNA. Left, you know, CEO of Tableau, acquired by Salesforce, came back few months ago. So I think it was a great move, because one, he's got the history and culture under Jassy, so he's definitely the Bezos Jassy tree of leadership, but yet he's been outside the bubble. Right? So he actually knows what it means to run a company not on the Amazon platform. So, I think Adam's a great choice to lead AWS for what we call it, like maybe act two, right? Act one, the first X years with Jassy, and maybe this is the second act under Adam. >> Yeah. And he's got- and he was very technical, hung around all the techies, James Hamilton, DeSantis, all the engineers, built that core primitives. Now, as they say, this cloud next gen's here, act two, it's about applications. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> Infrastructure as code is in place. Interesting area. Where's the growth come from? So, look, you know, the ecosystem has got to build these super clouds, or as you say, Castles on the Cloud, which you coined, but you brought this up years ago, that the moats and the value has to be in there somewhere. Do you want to revise that prediction now that you see what's coming from Selipsky? >> Okay, well, so let's refresh. Greylock.com/castles has worked out, like we did, but a lot of thought leadership and the two of you, have informed my thinking at Castles in the Cloud, how to compete against Amazon in the cloud. So you'd argue act one, the startup phase, the first, you know, X years at Amazon was from 2008 to, you know, 2021, the first X years, building the platform, digging the moats. Right? So what did you have? You have castle the platform business, economies of scale, which means decreasing marginal costs and natural network effects. So once the moat's in place and you had huge market share, what do you for act two, right? Now the moats are in place, you can start exploring the moats for I think, Adam talked about in your article, horizontal and verticals, right? Horizontal solutions up the stack, like Amazon Connect, CRM solutions, right? Horizontal apps, maybe the app layer, and verticals, industrials, financials, healthcare, et cetera. So, I think Jassy did a foundation of the castle and now we're seeing, you know, what Adam and his generation would do for act two. >> So he's, so there's almost like an act one A, because if you take the four hyperscalers, they're about, maybe do 120 billion this year, out of, I don't know, pick a number, it's many hundreds of billions, at least in infrastructure. >> Jerry: Correct. >> And those four hyperscalers growing at 35% collectively, right? So there's some growth there, but I feel like there's got to be deeper business integration, right? It's not just about IT transformation, it's about deeper- So that's maybe where this Connect like stuff comes, but are there enough of those? You know, I didn't, I haven't, I didn't hear a lot of that this morning. I heard a little bit, ML- >> Jerry: Sure. >> AI into Connect, but where's the next Connect, right? They've got to do dozens of those in order to go deeper. >> Either, Dave, dozens of those Connects or more of those premise, so the ML announcement was today. So you look at what Twilio did by buying Segment, right? Deconstruct a CRM to compete against Adam Selipsky's old acquire of Salesforce.com. They bought Segment, so Twilio now has communicates, like texting, messaging, email, but all the data come from Segment. >> Dave: With consumption-based pricing. >> With consumption-based pricing. So, right? So that's an example of kind of what the second act of cloud looks like. It may not look like full SaaS apps like Salesforce.com, but these primitives, both horizontally vertically, because again, what does Amazon have as an asset that other guys don't? Install based developers. Developers aren't going to necessarily build or consume SaaS apps, but they're going to consume things like these API's and primitives. And so you look around, what's cloud act two look like? It may not be VM's or containers. It may be API's like Stripe and Billing, Twilio messaging, right? Concepts like that. So, we'll see what the next act at cloud looks like. And they announced a bunch of stuff today, serverless for the data analytics, right? So serverless is this move towards not consuming raw compute and storage, but APIs. >> What about competition? Microsoft is nipping at the heels of AWS. >> Dave: John put them out of business earlier today. [John and Dave Laugh] >> No, I said, quote, I'll just- let me rephrase. I said, if Amazon goes unchecked- >> Jerry: Sure. >> They'll annihilate Microsoft's ecosystem. Because if you're an ISV, why wouldn't you want to run on the best platform? >> Jerry: Sure. >> Speeds and feeds matter when you have these shifts of software development. >> Jerry: You want them both. >> So, you know, I mean, you thought about the 80's, if you were at database, you wanted the best processor. So I think this Annapurna vertical integrated stacks are interesting because if my app runs better and I have a platform, prefabricated or purpose-built platform, to be there for me, I'm going to build a great SaaS app. If it runs faster and it cost less, I'm going to flop to Amazon. That's just, that's my prediction. >> So I think better changes, right? And so I think if you're Amazon, you say cheaper, better, faster, and they're investing in chips, proprietary silicon to run better, faster, their machine learning training chips, but if you're Azure or Google, you got to redefine what better is. And as a startup investor, we're always trying to do category definition, right? Like here's a category by spin. So now, if you're Azure or Google, there are things you can say that are better, and Google argued their chips, their TensorFlow, are better. Azure say our regions, our security, our enterprise readiness is better. And so all of a sudden, the criteria "what's better" changes. So from faster and cheaper to maybe better compliance, better visibility, better manageability, different colors, I don't know, right? You have to change the game , because if you play the same game on Amazon's turf, to your point, John, it- it's game over because they have economies of scale. But I think Azure and Google and other clouds, the superclouds, or subclouds are changing the game, what it means to compete. And so I think what's going on, just two more seconds, from decentralized cloud, being Web 3 and crypto, that's a whole 'nother can of worms, to Edge compute, what Cloudflare are doing with R2 and storage, they're trying to change the name of the game. >> Well, that's right. If you go frontal against Amazon, you're got to get decimated. You got to move the goalposts for better. And I think that's a good way to look at it, Dave. What does better mean? So that's the question that's on the table. What does that look like? And I think that's an unknown, that's coming. Okay, back to the start-ups. Category definition. That's an awesome term. That to me is a key thing. How do you look at what a category is on your sub- on your Castles of the Cloud, you brought up how many categories of- >> Jerry: 33 markets and a bunch of submarkets, yeah. >> Yeah. Explain that concept. >> So, we did Castle in the Clouds where my team looked at all the services offered at Azure, Google, and Amazon. We downloaded the services and recategorized them to like, 30 plus markets and a bunch of submarkets. Because, the reason why is apples to apples, you know, Amazon, Google, Azure all have databases, but they might call them different things. And so I think first things first is, let's give developers and customers kind of apples to apples comparisons. So I think those are known markets. The key in investing in the cloud, or investing in general, is you're either investing in budget replacement, replacing a known market, cheaper, better database, to your point, or a net new market, right? Which is always tricky. So I think the biggest threat to a lot of the startups and incumbents, the biggest threat by startups and incumbents, is either one, do something cheaper, better in a current market, or find a net new market that they haven't thought about yet. And if you can win that net new market before the rest, then that's unbelievable. We call it the, you know, the blue ocean strategy, >> Dave: Is that essentially what Snowflake has done, started with cheaper, better, and now they're building the data cloud? >> Jerry: I think there's- it's evolution, correct. So they said cheaper, better. And the Castle in the Cloud, we talked about, they actually built deep IP. So they went a known category, data warehouses, right? You had Teradata, Redshift, Snowflake cheaper, better, faster. And now let's say, okay, once you have the customers, let's change the name of the game and create a data cloud. And it's TBD whether or not Snowflake can win data cloud. Like we talked about Rockset, one of my investments that's actually move the goalpost saying, oh, data cloud is nice, but real time data is where it's at, and Snowflake and those guys can't play in real time. >> Dave: No, they're not in a position to play in real time data. >> Jerry: Right. >> Dave: I mean, that's right. >> So again, so that's an example of a startup moving the goalpost on what previously was a startup that moved the goalpost on an incumbent. >> Dave: And when you think about Edge, it's going to be real-time AI inferencing at the Edge, and you're right, Snowflake's not set up well at all for that. >> John: So competition wise, how do the people compete? Because this is what Databricks did the same exact thing. I have Ali on the record going back years, "Well, we love Amazon. We're only on Amazon." Now he's talking multicloud. >> So, you know, once you get there, you kind of change your tune cause you've got some scale, but then you got new potential entrants coming in, like Rockset. >> Jerry: Correct. >> So. >> Dave: But then, and if you add up the market caps of just those two companies, Databricks and Snowflake, it's much larger than the database market. So this, we're defining new markets now. >> Jerry: I think there's market cap, especially Snowflake that's in the public market, Databricks is still private, is optimism that there's a second or third act in the database space left to be unlocked. And you look at what's going on in that space, these real-time analytics or real-time apps, for sure there's optimism there. But, but to John's point, you're right, like you earn the right to play the next act, but it's tricky because startups disrupt incumbents and become incumbents, and they're also victims their own success, right? So you're- there's technical debt, there's also business model debt. So you're victims of your own business model, victims of your own success. And so what got you here may not get you to the next phase. And so I think for Amazon, that's a question. For Databricks and Snowflake, that's a question, is what got them here? Can they play to the next act? And look, Apple did it, multiple acts. >> John: Well, I mean, I think I- [Crosstalk] >> John: I think it's whether you take shortcuts or not, if you have debt, you make it a little bit of a shortcut bet. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> Okay. That's cool. But ultimately what you're getting at here is beachhead thinking. Get a beachhead- >> Jerry: Correct. >> Get in the market, and then sequence to a different position. Classic competitive strategy, 101. That's hard to do because you want to win the beachhead- >> I know. >> John: And take a little technical debt and business model debt, cheat a little bit, and then, is it not fortified yet? So beachhead to expansion is the question. >> Jerry: That's every board meeting, John and Dave, that we're in, right? It's called you need a narrow enough wedge to land. And it is like, I don't want the tip of the spear, I want the poison on the tip of a spear, right? [Dave and John Laugh] >> You want, especially in this cloud market, a super focused wedge to land. And the problem is, as a founder, as investor, you're always thinking about the global max, right? Like the ultimate platform winner, but you don't get the right to play the early- the late innings if you don't make it out of the early innings. And so narrow beachhead, sharp wedge, but you got to land in a space, a place of real estate with adjacent tan, adjacent markets, right? Like Uber, black cars, taxi's, food, whatever, right? Snowflake, data warehouse, data cloud. And so I think the key with all startups is you'll hit some ceiling of market size. Is there a second ramp? >> Dave: So it's- the art is when to scale and how fast to scale. >> Right. Picking when, how fast, in which- which best place, it was tough. And so, the best companies are always thinking about their second or third act while the first act's still going. >> John: Yeah. And leveraging cloud to refactor, I think that's the key to Snowflake, was they had the wedge with data warehouse, they saw the position, but refactored and in the cloud with services that they knew Teradata wouldn't use. >> Jerry: Correct. >> And they're in. From there, it's just competitive IP, crank, go to market. >> And then you have the other unnatural things. You have channel, you have installed base of customers, right? And then you start selling more stuff to the same channel, to the same customers. That's what Amazon's doing. All the incumbent's do that. Amazon's got, you know, 300 services now, launching more this week, so now they have channel distribution, right? Every credit card for all the developers, and they have installed base of customers. And so they will just launch new things and serve the customers. So the startups had to disrupt them somehow. >> Well, it's always great to chat with Jerry. Every year we discover and we riff and we identify, in real time, new stuff. We were talking about this whole vertical, horizontal scale and kind of castles early on, years ago. And now it's happened. You were right. Congratulations. That's a great thesis. There's real advantages to build on a cloud. You can get the- you can build a business there. >> Jerry: Right. >> John: That's your thesis. And by the way, these markets are changing. So if you're smart, you can actually compete. >> Jerry: I think you beat, and to Dave's earlier point, you have to adapt, right? And so what's the Darwin thing, it's not the strongest, but the most adaptable. So both- Amazon's adapt and the startups who are the most adaptable will win. >> Dave: Where are you, you guys might've talked about this, where do you stand on the cost of goods sold issue? >> Jerry: Oh, I think everything's true, right? I think you can save money at some scale to repatriate your cloud, but again, Wall Street rewards growth versus COGS, right? So I think you've got a choice between a dollar of growth versus a dollar reducing COGS, people choose growth right now. That may not always be the case, but at some point, if you're a company at some scale and the dollars of growth is slowing down, you definitely have to reduce the dollars in cost. And so you start optimizing cloud costs, and that could be going to Amazon, Azure, or Google, reducing COGS. >> Dave: Negotiate, yeah. >> John: Or, you have no visibility on new net new opportunities. So growth is about new opportunities. >> Correct. >> If you repatriating things, there's no growth. >> Jerry: It's not either, or- >> That's my opinion. >> Jerry: COGS or growth, right? But they're both valid, definitely, so you can do both. And so I don't think- it's what's your priorities, you can't do everything at once. So if I'm a founder or CEO or in this case investor, and I said, "Hey, Dave, and John, if you said I can either save you 25 basis points in gross margin, or I can increase another 10% top line this year", I'm going to say increase the top line, we'll deal with the gross margin later. Not that it's not important, but right now the early phase- >> Priorities. >> Jerry: It's growth. >> Yeah. All right, Jerry Chen, great to see you. Great to have you on, great CUBE alumni, great guest analyst. Thanks for breaking it down. CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas for re:Invent, back in person. Of course, it's a virtual event, we've got a hybrid event for Amazon, as well as theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, you're watching the leader in worldwide tech coverage. Thanks for watching. (Gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent! 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host for the theCUBE, a lot of great action here. A lot of great solutions. Great keynote. The future of cloud's going to be all about purpose-built software platforms, enabling more and more SaaS, faster performance with custom chips, all enabling great stuff. I have two great guests here. Who are going to talk about it from Accenture. We've got Karthik Narain, global lead of Accenture's Cloud First. Welcome to the program. Good to see you and Chris Wegmann, AABG Accenture Amazon Business Group. Technology leads senior manager. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here. >> I was commenting before we came on about Accenture's work you guys been doing with the clouds in my article, I posted before re:Invent!. Dave Vellante coined the term superclouds, which we kind of just put out there, but the idea that people can build really strong platforms that enable a new kind of Saas has been the big wave. Connect has been a great example. We heard on stage from Adam, the CEO. Chris, this has been something that's been a real change where it's not just lift and shift and refactor, it's build value in a platform and new SaaS capabilities. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, I would absolutely agree. We've seen this change over time. We've seen the lift and shift and modernize and it's definitely moved into the Superclouds. I like the term, but you know, we call them cloud continuums, which we'll talk a little bit about, it's about building these purpose-built solutions. I think if you look at the keynote today, you look at, everybody that was on stage. United and everyone talking about what they're building, their technology companies now, they're not just the business. >> You guys did some new research, coining new terms and Cloud First. What is this all about? What is this new wave you guys are talking about? >> Yeah, so John, you know, few years ago, when people talked about cloud, they generally meant public cloud. I think the definition of cloud is changing and expanding. And from now on, whenever people talk about cloud, it's actually a cloud continuum. It's a continuum of capability from public to Edge and everything in between all seamlessly connected by Cloud First networks, which means all the capabilities that customers used to get from one public cloud destination. They can actually access that across the continuum, whether that be in their own private data center, using the capability of cloud with AWS's Outpost and other capabilities. Or they could use the capability in their Edge location, whether it's their retail centers, their warehouse locations, manufacturing and so on and so forth. So organizations are using the power of cloud beyond one purpose and one destination, but more as an operating system going forward. >> Chris, what's your take on this redefinition of cloud what's your take on it? >> I think it's much needed. I think Andy kicked it off last year when he recognized the term hybrid. We all, who've has been around a while kind of chuckled because they finally said the word. But if you look at the keynote today, they just continued it. Adam picked it up and ran with it. If you look at all the services, Wavelength and all the different services, there's not a single customer that I have, that's just using EC2 or S3 right. They're using all these different services you saw today. You saw all the different services that United put up on the screen. That DISH put up on the screen. So yeah, it's how people and companies, if they're truly going to transform and truly use cloud to transform, you have to use the whole continuum. >> Yeah. And I think the continuum message is a good one because if you look at what the evolution is, that was interesting to. Adam went on and did kind of a history lesson in the beginning, it felt like I was in the Star Wars movie, like back in the old days. And then you kind of progressed. You had to be really elite to roll your own cloud. And the hyperscalers did that, you saw that. Now you still have elite technical people, but now it's general purpose, or purpose built. It's like having prefabricated platforms and open source. We've learned that why do you want to reinvent the wheel if you don't have to? So if I want a call center I get Connect, if I want to have a big plugin platform, I can still build on top of and have that SaaS unique application. This seems logical. This is new. (laughter) This is the continuum. I mean, it seems obvious now looking at it, but how far along in are people getting this. Karthik, what's your take on this? >> I think customers are getting it. They are looking at cloud more as an operating system for their future innovation. They liked the concept that they got from the public cloud, which is easy configurability, consumability and automatability of their infrastructure assets. And when you can get that capability as an operating system for your entire enterprise, and you could innovate across the spectrum, that's extremely powerful. We see companies accelerating their adoption to cloud, but we are also seeing over the last three years, a lot of that adoption was using cloud as a migration destination. But now with the power of the cloud continuum, where innovation is available, that so many new services that Adam launched today, you could use truly cloud as an innovation engine. And we're actually seeing that the clients who are using the cloud continuum for innovation are doing much better than the ones that are using cloud as a migration destination. In fact, they're doing two X to three X use of cloud for innovation and uplifting knowlEdge where they are actually using three X more cloud for sustainability purposes. So huge, huge value. >> Yeah, I mean, this is a great point. Great insight, because what you're saying is essentially you can't hide anymore. The projects are either going to be successful or not. You can see whether it's useful or not, and now you're tying cloud adoption and outcomes together. Where you can look it and saying, we need to make this outcome work. Not for building, for building sake. Those projects were discovered during the pandemic. Why are we doing that? So you can't hide that ball anymore. >> Right and everybody's got to do it now, right? I mean, you don't have a choice. The pandemic is now forcing companies to change. They've changed. And that the research shows that the companies that have truly adopted the whole continuum are doing much better than the companies that didn't. >> What's pattern in this continuum research you guys, what's the big takeaway that you guys have found in that study, in that customer experience that you're having. What's the big, Aha moment. >> I think there are a few things. Number one surprising aspect is that the companies that use cloud for a broader innovation objective, actually, were saving more than the ones that use cloud just as a cost saving initiative. That was a big, Aha moment. Number two, when you talk about all of this innovation that AWS provides, sometimes it's easy for organizations to shrug it off saying, this looks like this is only for the elite companies, or this is only for the digitally native companies to follow. But our research showed that the companies that were successful adopting cloud continuum, the ones that we call less continuum competitors, 60% of them are pre-digitally born organizations. And they were reaping the benefits and they were growing faster, saving more, being more innovative than all others. So this is truly usable across the spectrum of the G 2000 enterprise. >> Yeah, and I think it's a no brainer, but now that you have, customers are transforming, they have multiple clouds. You have AWS, Azure, Google cloud, people were trying to find their swim lane. We heard about skill gap shortage. We did some reporting on that, that this idea of multi-cloud maybe not, I can't hire enough people. I'm going to bet on this cloud, maybe use that cloud. How are people looking at that? How do you guys see that the cloud competitive continuum, or how is the cloud competition affecting the cloud continuum from a customer standpoint? >> Yeah. I mean, you got to look at it, do you use the whole continuum? You've got a lot of cases, you got to be on the same cloud, right. You can use the whole, you got to use all the different components, all the different services. So I think we are seeing customers that are picking one and starting with one and then adding others. I see a lot of my customers who are using multiple clouds, but they're using them in different business units, right? So they may pick one business unit to go deep with AWS on, they may go use another business unit to go deep on another cloud, right? So yeah, I mean, everyone is getting multiple, but a lot of they're starting with one and then adding a second one or a third along the way. >> Karthik, this is what I was trying to get out of my story. It's a hard, very nuanced point. But if you look at the success of say Snowflake and Databricks, all bet on Amazon and their superclouds, they are on Amazon, but they're now working with Azure as well, because why wouldn't you want to open up your market? >> Exactly. And even the industry companies that want to monetize their capabilities using the digital ecosystems are doing that. For example, Siemens wanted to bring all their capabilities in manufacturing and machine operating system into a platform called MindSphere. And they knew that their end goal was going to be multi-cloud, but they want to practice, leveraging the power of cloud with one platform. And when they created MindSphere, they started with AWS and they created that solution in the public cloud and private cloud also at the Edge by leveraging the power of cloud from public to Edge and proved it out. And once it started working and they were able to roll it out for customers. Now they are giving customers the choice to be able to use it in other clouds as well. >> Yeah Karthik, you mentioned earlier at the top of our interview about the platform of the cloud and Dave and I were talking on our keynote review. We did a little history lesson of when Microsoft owned the monopoly of windows, the system software, and they had the application suite with office, but they still wanted developers to build on top of windows. Okay. But now with cloud that's one big windows platform like thing. So the developers ecosystem is evolving. And so one of the things we're watching, I want to get your reaction to this. Is in every major inflection point in the computer industry, when new ways to build and write code rolled out, the application owners always wanted their software to run on the fastest platform. Speeds and feeds matter in these shifts, because why would I want to have my software run slower? >> Yeah. >> What is your reaction to that? >> Yeah, absolutely. And again, there's a lot of things that the industry is going through and we are pushing the envelope on digitization. And today's keynote. When you saw the CEO of NASDAQ talking about the technology bottlenecks that were preventing the matching algorithm to be finally taken to cloud. Now that capability that's available at with AWS is what is enabling that matching algorithm to be taken to cloud through the power of Edge. So there's so much technology innovation, that's happening. That's constantly expanding the boundaries of posibilities. >> I mean, that's exactly the point. And I wrote this in my story and it came out on the keynote today, which was Adam saying, the clouds expanding that's the continuum. If it's running cloud operations, does it matter what it is? I mean, it's, if you're at the Edge and you're running cloud, maybe cause you want latency, of course you want to have low latency. Why wouldn't you want outposts. Again, this is all cloud operations. DevSecOps data is now kind of cloud operationalized. That seems to be what's happening. >> Yeah, I think the developers love the fact that they can write for one and put it anywhere, right? And whether it's a EKS on Inside, I don't even know what you call anymore, the public cloud, right? Or all the way out at the Edge, right? You write it once, you can deploy it there and it makes their lives a lot easier. And you know, as you said, it's all about performance. So they get the best option. >> Well, We love having you guys on the theCUBE, Accenture. You guys have really smart, talented people, always great commentary. Dave and I were looking at reviewing the tape so to speak. It's not really tape anymore. It's it's digitally stored on a S3, but we were looking back at 2016 when we first started talking about horizontally scalable cloud and vertically specialized applications. If you look at the keynote today and squint through the announcements, Amazon's going to offer full horizontal scalability and vertical specialization at the app level with machine learning capabilities. This means that you need data to be horizontally addressable, which is kind of counterintuitive, but you're seeing all the success on data lakes and lakes. This is the new architecture. It's kind of proven now, what do you guys think? >> Yeah, again, the aspect of cloud is about democratised innovation. The first element is, even though there's so much infrastructure build-out and infrastructural elements where there's continuous innovation going on, the enterprises and developers are moving from Bivives built decisions to assembling and consuming options. And when they assemble and consume, they want newer and newer services to be available. That is very specific to their industry and specific to functions, whether it is supply chain function or manufacturing function or so on and so forth. For this, there are going to be specific data that is going to be required, or operational for that particular use-case. But the whole idea of predictive analytics and AI and machine learning and data science is about how do you find correlations between operational data for a particular capability, with things that in the previous world was unrelated. For that you need to bring all of this data together. Time will tell whether all the data is going to move to one location or is there going to be distributed computing of that data with more technology, but that's the role that data is going to play in these verticalized solutions. >> Yeah, I mean, that's awesome. I want to get you guys while I got one, a couple of minutes left. Advice to people that look into go this next level. They know the continuum is coming, you guys been providing great solutions and advice to your customers. For the folks watching, what advice can you give where they're just putting their toe in the water or want to go full in? >> Yeah, so, we found in that research that there were some common patterns that were followed by these continuum competitors, the ones that were succeeding or winning in the cloud. And there was namely four of them, the first one, and these four can be adopted by others for them to also win in the continuum. The first one was looking at the power of the continuum, how the technology is evolving and creating a strategy to take advantage of the evolution of the continuum. That's number one. Number two, this is about organizational change. So don't go about this change in a soft manner. There are elements that you need to change within your organization to imbibe this wholeheartedly. That's the second thing. Third thing is one common aspect that all the continuum competitors followed was they put experience at the forefront for everything. For their end customers. Last but not the least. This is a holistic journey and an enterprise wide journey. And this would require CSO level, CEO level commitment on a longer term to achieve this. So with these four things, most companies can achieve the successes that the continuum competitors are seeing. >> Awesome insight, Chris, real quick, 30 seconds. What's your advice. >> Chris: Don't be afraid. (laughter) It's pretty simple. >> The water's warm, come on in >> Yeah, come on in. A lot of gone before you, right? It can be scary. It can be daunting, right? A lot of services. Don't be scared to get in and go at it. >> Yeah, one of the jobs I love about being theCUBE host is, you talk to people many years earlier, you guys got it right at Accenture. Congratulations. You were deploying, you saw this wave of purpose-built before anyone else and congratulations. Great success. >> Thanks, thanks for having us on theCUBE. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier. You're watching us here live in Las Vegas, for AWS re:Invent 2021 coverage. TheCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Oh, welcome back to theCube coverage of AWS re:Invent Executive Summit presented by Accenture. I'm John,  your host of theCube. We're joined by two great guests, Leo Barella, Chief Technology Officer of Takeda and Don Heiliger Managing Director at Accenture. Gentlemen, welcome to theCube. >> Thank you. Great to be here.  >>Last year, Karl Hick joined us to discuss Takeda's cloud journey. I know a lot's gone by the pandemic. Didn't go away as fast as we hoped, but we're starting to see visibility of the future with cloud at narrow and seeing cloud scale. Um, it's refactoring of business models, new opportunities. How's it gone? >>Well, I think it's a, it's going wonderful, as planned actually.  I can, I can share with you that there are definitely some lessons learned, uh, what the plan was quite structured. We definitely discovered that  maybe we should have actually had about 50% of our time, uh, in the planning for organizational change management and communication. And because we definitely, uh, want to, uh, be able to kind of explain why, uh, moving to cloud is actually important to, to our business. Uh, and so, so if you were to actually do it again, uh, I think we would have probably put a lot more time in communicating the value of the program and wild visibly. Now, uh, we're going to be able to move a lot faster than a, than a year ago. Uh, seeing that the community of the Qaeda is, uh, is already, you know, kind of come around, uh, to, to truly understand the value of, uh, of, uh, moving to cloud >>No last year, any Jessie gave up on stage the keys to success for the cloud journey, you guys were in the middle of it. Um, what was the big takeaway, um, on the, on, on your, your journey, because a lot of people are having real situational awareness and doubling down on successes, identifying what's not working and being real agile. This has been the big aha. What's the big aha moments you had, uh, this year? >>Well, I can tell you that. I say from the, the migration of our applications to cloud, which, which is basically table stakes for elimination of our data centers. So at the end of the program, we're likely gonna retain only few application in our data centers, but move more than 80% of our application workloads to cloud. What actually most excited about is, uh, is really our new strategy around data as a digital platform enabler. Uh, so from now on we're, we're really going to be focusing on the value stream of the Qaeda at the understanding of, of digital platforms that we actually want to able to, to, to further consolidate, um, and, um, uh, you know, and globally expand, uh, the, the, the technologies that we have, but old built on a data foundation, uh, that, that is actually governed across the community of the Qaeda. So data actually becomes the center of our strategy. Uh, and then digital is basically just a way for us to actually interact with data, uh, which includes applications, such as machine learning and AI, which we were heavily investing in. And, uh, and we definitely plan on now leveraging more and more. >>And just to real quick, before we go to a central for a second, I want you to double down on that journey dynamics because we're seeing and maybe reporting, and the theme here this year at reinvent is multiple workloads in the cloud changing workloads. You have evolution of workloads, data as the center of it. And then this cultural shifts where you got the, you know, these modern applications at the top of the stack. So you were AIS contributing. So you've got three major innovation theaters kind of exploding. I mean, this is pretty, I mean, one of those is, is mindblowing. Nevermind, all three. >>Yeah. And I can tell you that, uh, you know, um, I'd like to achieve further expand the circle, uh, beyond the Qaeda. We don't necessarily believe that the digital transformation is just about, I don't want enterprise. That is definitely a fundamental, uh, but the digital transformation is truly about, um, connecting the Qaeda as a digital, uh, pharmaceutical company to the overall healthcare ecosystem and be able to basically transact with our partners, uh, in real time, which is the reason why we actually put data at the center because at the end of the day, uh, when other partners wants to interact with our data, the should in real time be able to transact as if they were transacting on their own systems with our own data, especially DCPS and patients, >>Don your, your reaction, because a lot of learnings, new opportunities, you're at the center of essentially doing a lot of great work. We've been documented a lot of it as well. What's your reaction? >>I mean, I just to amplify a lot of Leo's comments already, I think if I, if I think back and on this journey with, with the Qaeda and AWS and Accenture as the power of three, I think, you know, leaning in to that has been a recipe for success. So as Leo said, we've definitely had some lessons learned, but you know, being there with this power of three, I think has been, uh, enabling us to, uh, attack those challenges that have, uh, that have come up and, and really gotten ahead of those. I think the other thing you talked about is this, um, you know, all these different things coming together, you know, before the pandemic, we had, uh, done done some research at Accenture that kind of had two groups of companies with the leader leaders and the laggards. And, uh, it showed, know the difference in revenue growth of the leaders that adopt technology and those that are falling behind and really, um, that gap has widened, but there's a new entrance of companies that have emerged, which is the, leapfroggers the ones that take advantage of all of the things that like AWS has to offer in terms of the AI capabilities, the data capabilities, the foundational elements that are enabling them to really do this compressed transformation journey in a much shorter timeline. >>I think that's been the element that, uh, you know, I think we know you and I have firsthand together with our AWS colleagues of us being able to really do this on a pace that I think has just been on, on the unseen or unmatched in the past. >>Well, we get to the innovation pilots you guys are doing. I want to just jump on that topic for a quick second time. If you don't mind, that's a really important point. I think the people who shifted to the cloud and replatformed, and then learned all the goodness and then refactored their businesses have done great. This notion of leapfrog is people who move and say, Hey, I don't need, I'm going to replatform and refactor at the same time, get the learnings from others. Okay. They get the best practice is so what's the scar tissue from all the pioneers who have been playing in the cloud, who got the benefits are also paving the path for others. This is actually a motivating, cultural and personal kind of impact motivation. People are happier. What's your guys' reaction to this culture of the cloud, this cloud reef, leapfrogging and refactoring. >>Yeah. I mean, uh, w what I'm saying, uh, and, and lovely, or your perspective on this too, but frankly, you know, I think, uh, you know, with, with the, uh, the war on talent right now, that's out there. I think, you know, companies are investing, whether they're leaders, whether they're leapfroggers in this digital, uh, you know, platform I think are attracting the best talent and actually making it a place where people can innovate. And I know we're going to talk about some of the innovations here in a second, but I think that is, um, you know, some, a way to differentiate, uh, right now in the marketplace, given everything that we're seeing around, uh, retention and attraction of talent. I mean, being able to be on the front edge of this is quite critical in any company's view, but, you know, especially when you're trying to attract the best talent in, in, uh, developing, uh, medicines that actually say lots, >>Leo jumping on this wave and moving leapfrogging, what's your perspective on this? >>Yeah. You know, I, I agree to, uh, you know, talent is that talent is key. Uh, and quite frankly, uh, you know, Takeda, we've been at, you know, pharmaceutical company for the past 240 years. Uh, and now what should you really, uh, you know, starting to become a digital, um, pharmaceutical, uh, power. Uh, and, and so, uh, part of the attractiveness of, uh, of joining Takeda for instance, is the fact that, uh, not only you actually get to, uh, you know, uh, be with a company that is investing heavily, uh, in, in, in digital re-skilling and actually training of people, but also you're connecting to the mission of, uh, of literally saving saving lives, right? So basically, uh, the, the, the connection of really this transformation to become a digital superpower, uh, and also, uh, the, the mission of, uh, of really finding new medicines were, uh, for people that actually experienced, you know, for instance, you know, order of disease, uh, it's quite exciting because it's, uh, it's the application of artificial intelligence machine learning, uh, where now you're actually really trying to find someone that is, that is struggling. Uh, and we're now actually connecting them to a cure that, that is drastically changing their lifestyle. >>It's interesting, the agile agility and the speed of innovation really kind of puts away the old analysis of like, what's the payback. I mean, if you, if you can't see the value right away, then you, then you don't know what you're doing. Basically people in the cloud that say I can contribute and leapfrog and get that value. This has been a big part of the business model. And one of the ways people are doing it is just getting involved, starting pilots, doing the projects. Um, so I'd like to have you guys share the project that you guys have got going on with nurse line. Can you share what you're trying to achieve and how has the cloud enabled you to, to innovate, but also capture the value and can, and can you see it, is there, is there a big analysis there's like a big payback it's like you're buying this 20 year project, or how do you guys look at this? >>I mean, the nimbleness of, uh, of cloud, uh, in our ability to come in and fail fast is what's extremely attractive to, uh, to, to the business, right? Because now all of a sudden we can quickly spin up a prototype. We can quickly actually put it out as a product and actually see how effective it is compared to traditional processes. Uh, so for instance, nurse line is actually what we, uh, it's one of the many, uh, innovation initiatives that we actually have going on, but specifically addressing, uh, one of our, um, uh, therapy areas, which is, uh, our plasma derived therapies, uh, plasma and other therapies is actually, uh, the supply chain actually really starts with, uh, the good wheel of a innovative individual like yourself, um, deciding to actually not donate plasma that eventually is being processed and fractionated to deliver medicines that are life savings in most cases is actually the, the literally life savings. >>Um, and, uh, so what we're trying to do is actually really make that experience as flawless as, uh, in, as seamless as possible. Uh, if you, if you, if you have ever experienced, you know, going into Amazon go, uh, where you kind of, you know, walk in, you get some groceries and walk out and don't pass through a register. And, uh, it's the same type of experience that we actually want to provide where, uh, in the past, um, when you're actually donating plasma, obviously it's a, it's a fairly invasive procedure because obviously you need to actually be in a, being a bad and your, your plasma is getting distracted, but there's a lot of paperwork that you need to actually fill in. And, uh, and what we actually did, uh, is now actually enabled that through a digital experience where a donor, uh, they do a short approaching the center can now actually initiate a chat with, uh, with Amazon connect the ILX. >>Uh, and then, uh, depending on the priority, uh, the donor is going to assign to a nurse that can actually be anywhere in the country. Uh, in all of a sudden the nurse can actually initiate, uh, through, through Amazon connect, um, a dialogue with the, you know, with, with the donor, uh, answering some of the questions in the, you know, in the regular questionnaire. So, so now all of a sudden the nurse is actually feeding up the people work for you. Uh, and, uh, and that is actually done through the initiation of a video call. Uh, and we're actually using chime, which is, again, a part of like, you know, the, the, you know, the, the Amazon AWS services. And then basically upon the, the completion of a, of the questionnaire that is action, analytic, Tronic signature, that has been applied to, um, you know, to the form. >>Uh, and so did, this is actually all happening while basically the person is actually walking through the center or walking into the center. Uh, and now all of a sudden, the only thing that they need to do is actually having a signed bat and, uh, and actually initiate the process of, uh, of plasma donation. So all of this is actually done through microservices. Uh, now everything that we do now is actually API enabled and, you know, obviously like many other companies right now, what I should really think about microservices and the usability of, of technology and, and reusable components. So we're extremely excited about the fact that now, uh, that experience can actually be carried on, uh, to, to other parts of the business and that, that, that can actually leverage these technologies. >>That's a great example of refactoring. What's next for you guys, a division Accenture, what's the plans? >>Well, again, uh, the Google got done. >>Well, I was going to say, I mean, I think, you know, we, we started touching on it, uh, experience, right. And, uh, how do we embed more technology experiences that we're all used to? I mean, you know, to get into some of the return to office, the easiest way for me to do some of the COVID testing has been using my, uh, my trusty iPhone. Right. And so, as, as Liam talked about that experience, uh, part of this beyond just the therapies and, and attracting donors is really key for any business to succeed and thrive. Um, yeah, I think it, you know, if you think about, um, you've got the natives that are really more technology-based, you've got the, the Peloton of the world that obviously have, you know, a platform, but also a product you're going to see product and specifically life sciences companies get more into platform enabled, uh, services that they can provide outside, uh, as a, uh, service to others. And I think, um, you know, the, the platform, uh, experience and the user experience, the donor experience, all that I'd say innovating in, in more use cases like, uh, some of the ones you just heard that's what's next, and being able to, uh, use those guys more even externally to, uh, to do even more good for society, >>Leah, your thoughts with that. >>Well, um, you know, what I should really just getting started, right? So it's not a, you know, this transformation is now cloud enabled, uh, but, but w we're systematically actually going through our value chain, uh, and trying to throw the, understand, uh, you know, our customers, you know, again, as a business, we don't actually sell directly to consumers. So we're, we're, we're basically brokering through, but primarily through CPS and hospitals, right, to basically be able to diagnose a disease that can actually be cured with our products. Uh, and we do feel that, uh, you know, there is actually a huge role that we can actually play because obviously we're are experts in the, of, uh, you know, of the disease that we actually cure with our products. So basically the interactions, like the one that I just described nurse line, uh, can actually be directed, uh, not only to the HCPs, but also to the patients, uh, and the access to communities. >>Uh, and so we want to actually continue to provide platforms by which, you know, people that experienced, you know, especially a rare disease can now actually already connect and, uh, and, and, and share, um, you know, th th the sense of community that, that the business is, is so, so very important, right? For someone that physically has, uh, you know, the diseases that we cure. Uh, so again, uh, I think that the systematic approach of API APIs, and actually making sure that the data is actually ready for say the FDA to actually consume, to accelerate the clinical trials or to an hospital to kind of already understand if there is maybe a clinical trial that can be applied to one of the patients that is, that is actually showing some, some side effects that, uh, you know, or, or symptoms that visibly can be cured with, you know, with our, with our products, I think is going to be, uh, you know, ultimately the, the value that we can provide to society. So >>You guys did a great work and a great example. And to me, and this really showcases the management philosophy of cloud and the culture of cloud, where you take something like connect, and you can refactor and reconfigure these existing resources in a way that creates value, that saves lives. And this is the new, this new playbook. Congratulations on an exceptional story. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming on the cube coverage rapist, reinvent executive summit presented by Accenture I'm John ferry, your host, thanks for watching.

(electronic music) >> Welcome to theCUBE. This is the AWS Executive Summit presented by Accenture and our coverage of this great event continues. Lisa Martin here, I've got two guests with me here to talk about Amazon Connect. Please welcome from Hawaiian Airlines, Will Van Devender, Senior Director of IT Engineering. Will, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having me here. >> And from Accenture, Erich Chen is here as well, the Hawaii Regional Lead at Accenture. Erich, it's great to have you on the program. >> It's great to be here. >> I feel very overdressed. You can tell I'm on the mainland with my turtleneck and you guys are on Oahu, which is fantastic. And I'm excited that I have a seat on Hawaiian Airlines in just a few weeks. So you guys, let's talk about this technology solution that you put together. Will, I want to start with you. Talk to me about some of the challenges that Hawaiian Airlines was having prior to working with Accenture and Amazon. >> Well, nothing really unique to us. We had the challenges that everybody had with the pandemic and scaling out to work from home, as well as an old legacy stack that had been around for a long, long time. The specific ones that drove us to launch this particular project was we had been running into some talent acquisition issues. We're not of size where we have a huge telecom team that can specialize in IDRs and other things like that. So we need folks that can play a lot of different spaces. And in this particular case, we had a situation where we had really old technology and the people we were bringing in were a lot more savvy on Cloud and those kinds of things. And so AWS Connect was a way for us to take talent that traditionally wasn't inside the telephony space and use them and bring them to bear for that business need. So it kept us from having to scale up to do this. The other thing we had was a big issue with work from home that actually predated COVID. So we had been, we're in a hurricane zone, we had been doing hurricane preparedness exercises and we realized that we had a difficult time scaling our environment to large scale work from home. So even prior to COVID, we had been started looking at the technologies that we had, which ones worked well outside of an office for a distributed workforce. And we had been moving technology in that direction. And so telephony was one of the ones that we had to beef up. And so it was nice to have a good leg up on it when the pandemic hit us. >> Absolutely. I can't imagine how advantageous that was when it struck. And of course we all know how much the airlines were affected. Talk to me about an interesting catalyst for this solution in terms of challenge with talent acquisition and work from home. Interesting impetus for this solution. Talk to me about, are you long time partners, Hawaiian Airlines with Accenture? Talk to me about how you went about looking for the right solution with them as a partner. >> Ah, okay. So Hawaiian Airlines and Accenture had been partnering for many years, but in a much bigger way in 2019, when we solidified a new managed services deal. So Accenture came in to help us out with our day to day operations. And one of the big reasons for that was actually cloud adoption. So we needed a partner that was much more up to date technology wise. And as we started ramping up our engineering and architecture designs and releasing things on new stacks, we needed folks in the operation side that could keep up with that. And not only that, actually enable and push us in those directions. And so when we went out to RFP, Accenture kind of stood out in that area and that's been a good thing. We've had very little friction as we've been going out and acquiring new technology with being able to bring that out to our run and operation space. >> That's critical, especially given the tumultuous times in which we are still living. Erich, let's go ahead and bring you into the conversation. Now, talk to me about you guys at Accenture developed and deployed this solution quickly. We're talking an eight week timeframe. Talk to me about the solution that you architected, about that delivery, and what some of the challenges were along the way that you tackled and mitigated. >> Yeah. Thanks Lisa. I mean, it was, you know, eight weeks when you look back on it, it's hard to believe we did complete it in that timeframe, but, you know, we were able to do it with some strong experts from our side. Some of the challenges we ran into along the way were probably at the very beginning, just securing the right team for Hawaiian to deliver the kind of the proper designs and development upfront, and then helping to kind of manage through the delivery process itself. You know, they were great. They had some great people with some deep expertise, kind of from a business process side of things, kind of paired with our technical and then also industry knowledge of the airlines as well. It made for a really nice, you know, strong partnership where we could get it through in eight weeks. So it was pretty amazing. >> And then walk me through the actual, oh Will, sorry. Did you want to say something? >> Yeah, I was actually going to comment on that, that was exactly what we were looking for was that sort of wholesale partner. So when we went out to modernize our entire telephony stack, it wasn't just call centers. It was the conference rooms, it was the telephony, we went to new phone providers and circuit providers, we moved everyone off of Skype over on to Teams, all the desk phones. And so there was this scope of work that was simply larger than our team. And so what we were looking for from a partner was one, who's done this before, and then two, could you manage the whole piece of work? And so what was nice for Accenture, because they owned our existing operation space, they not only did the AWS Connect piece, they got on the old systems and they brought up all the specs of how the call queues worked, how the call flows worked, they found the old voice talent, they brought those, imported them without us having to do anything over onto the new stack, and then brought it over for testing. So it was just a very minimal lift from the Hawaiian Airlines side. And since they ran our operations, they then moved it over to the run space. And it was just very few man hours on the Hawaiian Airlines side expended for that outcome. >> Wow. It sounds fairly seamless. Erich, how did you guys accomplish that? >> I mean, that's a type of experience and partnership we like to have with our clients, more of an all-inclusive type service. But we're sometimes accused of not having the cheapest prices on the block, but you know, you do get a great, you know, a pretty holistic experience with us and we do try to make it as easy as possible for our clients and bring kind of the full breadth of Accenture to fill in a lot of gaps. >> Well, one of the things, Will, that you mentioned is we were looking for a partner that had done this before, where there's actual proof in the pudding, especially given the, like I mentioned before, the tumultuous market. Erich talk to me about, if we look at Hawaiian Airlines as an example, as a template here, how common or how often are you seeing these same challenges with respect to talent acquisition and work from home? Is that something that really skyrocketed in the last year and a half? >> Sure. I mean, it's maybe a blessing in the type of business that we're in, right. But whenever there are, you know, big, you know, kind of market issues and kind of pandemics as an example, right. Our clients do turn to us for, you know, support to help them through, you know, smaller times of need. And, you know, maybe very compressed issues. So we're very happy to, you know, reach into our larger organization to make sure that we can bring the best of Accenture to them and help them get through these tough times. >> Will, let's talk about how this solution is helping employees, agents get through these tough times. As we know, Hawaii had some really strict travel restrictions on COVID. And of course, one of the things that a lot of people lost during this time, was patience. Talk to me about how the workforce is improving, the employees, the agents, now that you have this solution implemented and a leg up probably on your competitors. >> Yeah, the whole pandemic hit us in a hard way. So we found ourselves, you know, all of a sudden one day waking up and finding that our customer facing support desks couldn't be staffed. People couldn't get into the office and actually get there. At the same time, as you and everyone else knows, flights were getting canceled and customers were calling at a level we'd never seen before trying to reschedule their flights or get credit back or get money back. And so AWS Connect was interesting in that it was one of the things we could ramp up new call centers very quickly. And so we knew we wanted something that was consumption-based because we didn't know how long it was going to last. And we wanted to be able to spin it up, get new agents going, respond to our customers, scale up to the volume, and then be able to decrease it out. So it was a good win there. What wasn't talked about much was the reliability aspect of it. Being on a really old system, our telephony was pretty stable, but our call center internal business facing ones were not. We had a series of outages out there and those outages directly impact our ability to get planes out in the air. There's the sort of customers calling about tickets and about help with flights, but there's also things like cruise, trying to get cruise scheduling done, trying to get staffing to a plane, trying to get things moved around in an airport. And there's a lot of internal desks that deal with those kinds of things. And having that on an incredibly stable technology and stack is key for us. And so we were able to get Connect deployed, and we were also able to front that with a number of other technologies that allowed us to have DR plans. So even if we lost that desk, how can we quickly move that over to manual calls and desk phones and those kinds of things. And so that's been, that part has been very well received. That has helped us out a lot. Our confidence, knowing that if anything should happen, our ability to recover and get back into full operations now is just night and day from where it was 12 months ago. And so thank you all very much for your assistance in getting us to this point. >> Getting that stability and that reliability during a time of chaos that's, and also in a time that can really affect brand reputation, it sounds to me like IT is really helping drive the business forward. This is something that you did in partnership with the business side, because of course during the last year and a half, so many brands have had challenges with reputation and the ability to not do things. Talk to me about that business IT relationship. And was this a facilitator of making that even better? >> Well, it's certainly better. Yeah, we have far better conversations internally than I can ever remember in my time here in Hawaiian Airlines. But you know, when these kinds of emergencies hit, I don't think about it as IT or business. I mean, there's a problem and you got to go fix it. And so we're all in there and IT is one piece of that. How do we get a solution stood up almost overnight in this, you know, very, very difficult pandemic business time? But you know, the business is trying to get talent together and trying to get agents trained and being able to do things like handle these customer calls is very, very skill intensive. So there's a lot of partnership coming in and getting solutions, demoing with the business, dialing them in back and forth, and a lot of collaboration there. And so that builds stronger teams. And that's one of the outcomes I like more than anything else, is we're working together and dialing in the IT and the business needs very much in unison. >> That's probably one of the best outcomes you can hope for. Erich, talk to me about, are you seeing similar things with customers in other industries? Are you seeing that business IT coming together, especially during these challenging times we've been living through? >> Yeah, to varying degrees, you know, that's always the crux of, you know, a successful IT department, right. You know, you're there to serve and support the business side of things, right. We don't do technology for technology sake. But yeah, I think the better ones are getting better, better at, you know, being more fully integrated and it's not a business or IT decision, right, it's a collective kind of team decision. And I think as long as you have people who respect and understand the other side of the coin sometimes, easier the conversation will go. And I think that's what our team was able to do is express, you know, very clearly and concisely kind of what the decisions they had to make were and they could make a decision a little bit easier that way. >> And talk to me, Erich, about the solution, what impressed you? What are you most excited about in terms of what Accenture has helped to accomplish for Hawaiian Airlines? >> Yeah, I was really happy that even, you know, within a short eight week period itself, you know, things always come up as you go throughout a project. And I think the business team was getting excited about the possibilities once they saw kind of the potential of the platform. And so some, you know, requests came up in the middle of the way, you know, in flight. And, you know, our team was able to accommodate a number of the kind of minor enhancements or tweaks to the system to make it even better and serve the business in a better fashion there. >> Gotcha. Will, what is next for Hawaiian Airlines, besides my flight on it in a few weeks? Talk to me about where you guys are going from an IT perspective. >> Well we've rolled out a solution quickly 'cause we needed to, but there's a lot still to be done to dial it in for the business. Where reliability and speed were key, we got those done, but there was some aspects of the old system that were still a little easier. For those call centers where people needed to dial in, get ahold of an agent, and then pass it onto an internal employee, there's still a disconnect between our call center technology, AWS Connect, and the internal collaboration, Microsoft Teams. And that's because Teams really wasn't up to all of the call center technology needs at the time we started this. Things like call recording and things like that just weren't there at the time. So we've got some of our internal desks that still need to be tweaked and integrated more seamlessly between the two platforms or maybe as Teams gets ready, moved back over onto that. So that's, again, the part of it, being able to have this deep conversation with the business, understand their needs, having a partner where you can quickly go respond and go dial it in. And so we don't look at it as our telephony migration is complete. We look at it as we got our first big hurdle done, moving off decades old tech onto our modern stack. And now we're looking at refining it with our partners over the future. >> Right. Phase one, it's always that journey that we talk about. Erich, last question for you. What are some of the things that are coming up next as you help Hawaiian Airlines to continue on this modernization journey? >> Yeah, so more broadly we're really excited because this effort was one of the first or probably more platform centric system integration type projects we've done for Hawaiian. We've been on the operation side, we've done some business consulting worked with them for various business functions already, but this was really more on the application modernization side of things. And, you know, we see that Hawaiian has a number of areas that they're looking to kind of modernize and improve along the way. And we're very excited about, you know, being a strong partner for them in that journey coming up. >> Awesome guys, great work. Congratulations on a huge transformation accomplished during a very chaotic world time period and done so quickly. We appreciate your comments, your feedback, and look forward to seeing what you dial in next. Thanks for joining me today. >> Thank you. >> Thanks very much. >> For Will Van Devender and Erich Chen, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of the AWS Executive Summit presented by Accenture. (soft music)

>>Okay. We're here at the cube covering Couchbase connect online 2021 modernized. Now this is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Couchbase CEO, Matt Kane. We just saw them at your keynote, blending out the journey to the modern enterprise. Thanks for taking some time with us. >>Hey, thanks, Dave. Great to see you again. Hope everything's well with you. >>Good. Thank you. You know, hanging in there. So look, the big themes from my standpoint, where it's not just about what I call paving the cow path. What I mean by that is just moving old to new, you know, that's good. And it's gonna allow you to simplify and be more agile. But the point I take away is you should also build a new capabilities, maybe share some of your thoughts and add some color, please, to those takeaways. >>I think that's a great takeaway, Dave. And when we think about this, we step back and we put ourselves in the shoes of our customers and whether it's retail customers or next generation financial services or healthcare providers, or what have you each and every one of our customers around the world are thinking about how to create better experiences for their customers. And Dave, we go through this every day, whether it's on our personal lives or in our professional lives, we expect our technology to help us and create better, highly interactive, personalized experiences via the applications that we leverage throughout the day. And you and I have probably access tens if not, hundreds of applications up to this point, uh, today. And we'll, we'll do that as we continue to go forward. And so if you think about, well, what are the challenges of these enterprises to create those experiences? >>Well, at the end of the day, they're writing applications and those applications need to draw upon massive amounts of data and to provide the experiences that we're talking about today. It's not just structured information, but it's unstructured information. And how do I put that together in a seamless way that I create real-time runtime experiences? Well, at the end of the day software, um, developers can, can write code to do anything, but on the critical path of all that is a database. And if you don't have a database that can serve these applications, you're dead in the water. And so as the enterprise thinks about building applications, they're constantly thinking about new capabilities. How can I provide a recommendation engine for Dave, or how can I ensure that the promotion fits the needs of him and his family when he's booking a particular trip, but at the same time, there's legacy applications that have been built and optimized for many, many years, that that are storing critical information and algorithms that need to be combined with those new capabilities to create the experience of people are after. >>And so when you really look at it from a database perspective, you have to modernize your application stack, but you also have to combine that with new capabilities. Now that's easier said than done. The challenge is to do at a database layer are fundamentally sophisticated and some of the most advanced computer science challenges that exist in all of technology. And that is what Couchbase is about. We have carefully architected a platform that bridges some of the best of relational technology with that of modern, no SQL technology in a single integrated platform that services not only enterprise architects, but application developers to provide the very experiences that you and I have come to expect, and that we're going to expect to increase as, as we go forward. So you're absolutely right. It is about putting those two things together. So is that, >>Is that w what you just described is that what you mean by multimodal two-part question? And then the second part is, are you seeing any industry patterns where that appears to be more relevant? >>So when we, when we talk about multimodal, Dave, we're very specific in, in what that means, and, and that's essentially taking a platform approach to data management. So how do we ensure that we have multiple ways to manage data inside of our platform? Couchbase is a key value cache or a document data store. We support, uh, acid transactions, and we've also added operational analytics. And so if you think about all of those modalities, a lot of application teams would think, well, do I need disparate solutions, uh, you know, to, to solve those problems. We think it's of fundamental importance as the modern database for enterprise applications, that we put that together in a single platform, because that's how applications want to be, uh, developed on top of that. We layer on additional services that developers can take advantage of to right, you know, these really rich, personalized, uh, applications. >>And so, as we think about our path forward and some of the market dynamics, we see one of the dynamics that we think is going to play out over the next few years is enterprises. Can't continue to proliferate point solutions for all these disparate problems that they solve. They need to bet on strategic solutions that are going to be platforms to support many of these needs as these go, as they go forward, particularly as they think about long-term total cost of ownership. And when we think about the modalities we're supporting and the enterprise applications we support, we want to ensure that we are a tool that can be leveraged for the right use cases, and then make sure that we have the connection points to other solutions that were not built and optimize for, to have a complete solution for our enterprise customers. So multi-modal layer consolidation platform approach. We think this is going to be absolutely critical as we get into the next chapters of the database transition. >>Great. Thank you for that. So you just described, you know, your UVP to me anyway, your unique value proposition. And I wonder if you could, in thinking about the market big waves that are occurring now, the hybrid work, digitization, the reliance on cloud and cloud migration, how does your unique value prop tie in if you will vector in to those trends that we also often talk about? >>Yeah. Great question, Dave. I appreciate you raising that. So what, what I was articulating, um, were some really important attributes of what may Couchbase Couchbase that were multimodal. We take a platform approach under the hood. Dave, we take great pride in the architectural approach that we have, um, up to this point in building that platform, uh, we're an in-memory shared nothing scale out cloud native architecture that has been designed for today and the future scale and performance. We've architected our platform to run anywhere. So enterprises enjoy the benefits of running in all major public clouds. They can run in private data centers and they can run all the way out to the edge in a single integrated platform with continuity between any point of that network. Topology, if I'm an active, active, active, fail over active, active, passive, any one of those configurations, that is the dependency of distributed applications. >>And we as users want the application to be up and running with the appropriate amount of data wherever. And whenever we are Couchbase has been built for the highest scale and performance to run in that distributed environment. With those modalities that I talked about now to increase, uh, our relevance in the enterprise. There are two personas that we think about a lot. One of them are the architects who are responsible for ensuring that things run in public clouds, that they scale and perform that they meet the SLS of the businesses they serve. But critically important. As you know, Dave is the role of application developers. They got to write killer apps. And so if you think about the needs of enterprise architects, scale performance, reliability, GDPR, CCPA security, those are really, really important. Developers are focused on flexibility, ease of use agility also really, really important, putting those together in an integrated platform. That's what makes Couchbase Couchbase. And there is no other vendor that can bring those capabilities tied to the themes of data, explosion, everything happening at the edge, a single platform that can leverage structured and unstructured information. When we talk about being ready for this moment and why we're so excited about our future and why you're hearing customers say the amazing things they are at our show, it's because of that unique architecture and, and the fact that Couchbase is truly differentiated as a modern database for enterprise applications for the future. >>You know, sometimes those things are counter poised, right? The architectural Providence, and the need for developer agility. That is a nontrivial challenge. Um, in, in one the computer science challenge that obviously you're focused on your big news here, uh, at the show is Couchbase Capella, Capella, by the way, as the brightest star in the constellation, or I go for those of you space nuts. Well, what are the critical aspects of Capella related to Couchbase's cloud strategy? And what does this announcement mean for your customers, Matt? Yeah, >>We couldn't be more excited about a Capella and I'd like to take a moment to congratulate the teams that have been working so hard at Couchbase to, to get to this moment. Um, also want to thank our customers for all the input, uh, that, that we take very seriously. And in thinking through our innovation, um, is we think about all the things we've talked about up to this point. Those are fundamentally important. And we think about the capability of a database that enterprises need. What we also spend a lot of time thinking about is how do customers consume all of that capability, right? And, and enterprises want freedom of choice on how they consume deploy, run, and manage their database for a lot of our customers, they're very happy leveraging our platform and managing that. And they're very diverse, very customized, specific environments, but there are a lot of customers that want us to take over the management and the operation of the database. >>They want the fastest path to D developer, agility and productivity, uh, and they want the best TCO relative to other databases of service offerings. And that is exactly what we have provided with Couchbase Capella. So customers can now come to us, they're up and running with the best database in the industry. Self-serve easy to use up and going, you know, the, the, the most simple experience and the fastest path to value, but that TCO point is fundamentally important. And what's interesting the way we've architected this, the more you scale with Couchbase Capella, the better the TCO gets. And I think that demonstrates our focus on enterprise, the mission critical nature of, of the applications that we support. Um, but you know, we're, we're really excited about Capella. We think it's going to be a great experience for our existing customers, our new customers, um, along with the announcement of the product today, you've heard some things about some of the packaging and ways in which developers can try out the solution in a really unique and cool way. We're providing other great experiences for developers on technical integrations and ideas from other customers on how to take advantage of the Couchbase platform. So we're thinking pretty holistically about consumption, uh, experience. Uh, and again, the fact that it's built on a kind of the foundation of, of Couchbase server seven oh, and, and our, our core platform with all the advantages that that brings with it. Uh, we're, we're pretty excited about the, uh, the announcement and all that that has for, for the company in front of us. So let's on >>For a minute and I want to double click on the, how you see the uniqueness of Capella. So when I think about Couchbase's heritage, the idea of next-generation not, not only SQL database, the acid properties that you talked about, the scale and the performance required for mission critical workloads and your focus on sequel fluency, these tenants of differentiated Couchbase, is it sort of the same kind of approach for Capella and what specifically differentiates Capella in your mind from the spate of other database databases, a service offerings that are out there in the marketplace? >>Well, look at it. When, when enterprises are thinking about applications, particularly the applications that they're running their business on, I like to say the good enough is not a viable strategy for the database. And what that means is you've got to have high performance, you've got to have scale, you've got to have, you know, distributed, uh, attributes. We believe fundamentally that you need to go cloud to edge. Um, that's going to be paramount and we're going to continue to innovate on our core database. So to take all of that power and then put it in a consumption model, as easy as Capella, I mean, Dave, we now have people being able to get up and running in a matter of minutes and, and they're writing applications, uh, on Capella leveraging the full power and breadth of all the capabilities, uh, in, in Couchbase. And going back to something that we talked about earlier dynamics in, in the industry will enterprise is really need to think about total cost of ownership. >>So how am I innovating and solving some of my most fundamental application challenges, but mindful of, you know, the cost and the return of that over time for us to come out with the highest performing database at the lowest TCO for those applications. I mean that that's pretty radical innovation and, and pretty true differentiation that our enterprise and other customer segments are really looking forward to. And then you layer in the fact that we're doing all of this in the de facto language that everybody in the world, the database speaks, which is cul you know, we like to say, it's easy SQL you get up and running, you're going, we speak your dialect. And we give you all of the benefits of this modern platform that are gonna make your job easier. Uh, you know, I think there's a reason why it's the brightest star in, uh, in, in the hemisphere. >>You know, it's funny, you, you, you, you used to talk about your, your S your SQL prowess. And, and that was that, that was the epiphany to me in the early days of big data. It was like the killer app for big data was SQL. And that changed. Everybody's thinking, let's talk about what's next for Couchbase you're a public company now, what are your priorities? How are you spending your time met? >>Well, look, Dave, we're, we're, uh, we're, we're gonna main remain maniacally focused on ensuring that we continue to innovate and solve the biggest problems, the biggest database challenges for enterprise customers. Um, we believe deeply in architecting differentiation that can be sustained over time. Uh, we've done that up to this point and we're going to remain steadfast in that mission. Uh, at the same time, we are entirely focused on satisfying our customers and, uh, demonstrating that we're a business partner, not just, just a vendor. So, you know, building partnerships, making sure we have the appropriate technical integration, supporting customers on their digital transformation strategies, continuing to invest in those capabilities to support customer journeys and make sure they're successful through that through their transformation. I mean, we're investing across all aspects of the business, across all aspects of the world. Uh, we're going to continue to be extremely proud of not just what we do, but how we do it. >>We are a values based organization. We have an incredible world-class team that we continue to grow on on a daily basis. And I'm going to make sure that we're spending time on each one of those and those things are in harmony. So we can continue to build a very vibrant, uh, company that's going to be around for a long, long time and continue to do great things for our customers. When we think about next generation technology, we are in the early innings of what we believe to be truly a generational market transition and the demands of applications and all things digital and combining, you know, technology that goes truly out to the edge and redefining what the edge is even, uh, and, and really thinking through how a platform needs to go, where the data resides to provide people, the experience and machines, the experiences that they need, uh, to, uh, complete their mission of digital transformation. Uh, there's some really mind-bending stuff that we're thinking through as we get, as we get way out there. Uh, but we're gonna continue to do it through the lens of solving big customer problems, making sure they're successful and then continuing to innovate as we go forward. >>Well, we're really excited to follow you guys report on this. And the database is no longer just kind of a bespoke bucket. It's a fundamental component of, of a digital fabric that's growing and becoming ubiquitous as part of a new data era. So we want to thank everybody for watching this keynote summary with Matt Kane, CEO of Couchbase Matt. We wish you all the best in the years ahead, and we look forward to seeing you in person, hopefully in the near future. >>Thanks a lot. See you soon, Dave. Appreciate >>It. All right. Thank you for watching our coverage at Couchbase connect 2021 modernized. Now keep it right there for more coverage that educates and inspires. You're watching the cube.

>> Welcome to the Cubes coverage of Couchbase connect online 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. I have a first timer here on the cube Priya Rajgopal, the director of product management from Couchbase joins me next. Priya, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. Thanks for having me here and glad to be here. First timer. So really excited. >> Yeah. Well, we'll make sure that you're going to have fun. We're going to talk about edge computing and what I'd love to get is your perspectives on what's going on and the evolution in the last 18 months. I'm sure so much has changed, but talk to me about edge computing what's going on >> Sure. >> Sure. there's 6 lot of literature on there and different there's a lot of literature on there and different interpretations and the way we see it at Couchbase, it's a distributed computing paradigm, that brings compute and storage to the edge. And what is the edge? The edge is the location where data is generated or consumed. And so the edge, again, the taxonomy is varied, but it's really a continuum. So it's not a thing, right? So it's a location. So it could be a single device or it could actually be a data center. And so it's getting a lot of traction with the proliferation of a lot of applications around AR, VR, IOT, and mobile devices and mobile applications. Because it delivers on the promise of ultra low latency access to data because you know, the edges where the data is generated and consumed, data privacy, governance, residency to network disruptions, low bandwidth usage. So to your question on how does mobile fit into the space of edge computing? In my view, mobile application, mobile devices are a classic example of edge computing because think about mobile devices, right, they're generating data, they're processing data, applications are processing data right there on the devices. You can store data in offline mode on those devices. So it is a classic edge device. And of course, the data doesn't have to be generated on the device itself. There's mobile applications could sort of be gateways to other external like variables for instance, and other IOT devices, which can connect to these mobile applications. And these mobile applications could process that data. >> Got it. So thank you for sharing Couchbase's definition. And it's a good point to do that as so many times, there's so many different terms and solutions and technologies that can be interpreted and explained many different ways. Let's now go through Couchbase's role in edge computing. Help the audience understand where you fit into that. >> Sure. So if you recap the definition, right? edge computing is all about storage and compute to the edge. So clearly a database has a key role to play in this model, Right? Or in this paradigm, because when you think about it, a classic application architecture, you've got three tiers, you've got an application tier, it includes your business logic, some of the UI elements, that's optional. You've got your database tier, which drives the application, Does the obligation needs data? It's driven by the database tier. And then you've got the infrastructure tier, that includes your network storage compute. Now, when you're talking about an edge computing architecture, you're talking about distributing all these three tiers. Your application tier, a database tier, as well as your infrastructure tier and a Couchbase is a fully distributed, no sequel database solution. So it fits in right into this paradigm of edge computing. Now, when we are talking about distributing our storage, that's just one aspect of it, right? You have to distribute it to these edge devices. You may have to distribute it to edge data centers, You need to be able to sync or move data between these You need to be able to sync or move data between these distributed cloud environments, right? So data synchronization is a key component of the tier of of edge computing architectures. And then finally, there's data management. That's all about enforcement of policies, when it comes to data privacy, you know what, data needs to be resident at the edge, what data needs to be filtered, what needs to be aggregated? what data needs to be filtered, what needs to be aggregated? So you need a solution that can provide those hooks that allows you to enforce those policies. So, a database like Couchbase has a critical role to play solution that can be deployed in the cloud, or it can be deployed at the edge. And again, or it can be deployed at the edge. And again, the edge could be a data center or it could be a device. So what about device? We have an embedded database solution for mobile desktop and embedded platforms. And then of course, data movement, comprehensive data synchronization technology. comprehensive data synchronization technology. >> Let's go through specifically some of the database capabilities that are required for businesses in any industry to be successful in edge computing. >> Sure, absolutely. Right. to do sort of reiterate or reinforce the three concepts, right? Data storage, data movement, data management, right? And Couchbase technology because that the stack consists of couchbase server, our flagship fully distributed, no sequel data platform. It can be containerized. It can be deployed in any public or private cloud. It could be deployed at the edge cloud. And then you've a Couchbase lite. Again, no sequel embedded database full featured, right? Anything that you can do with a standalone database, you can do it with the embedded database. Now you can embed that within your mobile applications, within your other embedded applications or desktop applications. And that's great, right? That's the data storage part of it. And, and that's one part of it, but what about the data movement? And that's where you got a data synchronization technology where we facilitate a high throughput, high performance, highly scalable data synchronization, between the edge and the cloud. And of course, as I mentioned, data management is a critical aspect of all this, right? And so the synchronization technology has got components that allow you to set filters, access control policies. And there's a lot of hooks when it comes to data governance. So for instance, if an edge goes out of commission, or if there's a security breach, for instance, you want to isolate the edge, you can do that. The data that was previously synchronized to that edge, you want to be able to poach that data. So we have options the automatically poach the data, if the device is no longer in the hands of the right recipient for instance. those are the critical aspects. Of course, the overarching theme is security, right? And, that goes hand-in-hand with encryption of the data at rest, encryption of the data in motion, then authentication, authorization, access control. >> Security is even more important in given the events of the last 18 months where we've seen a massive rise in ransom, where we've seen a huge rise in DDoS attacks. Let's, double-click more on the security aspect of what Couchbase is delivering. >> Sure, absolutely. So when it comes to security of data at rest, right, even when the Couchbase lite, which is our embedded device, your entire database is encrypted AES-256 data encryption, and then data, when it leaves the device through our data synchronization protocol, everything is encrypted. And of course, when it goes to a sync gateway, the sync gateway is sort of, as I mentioned, the middle tier component, that is responsible for data synchronization between the embedded devices and Couchbase server. That entity is responsible for enforcement of access control policies. So you are guaranteed that only users who should have access to those documents or data are granted access to that. And in fact, we are NoSQL Json database. So which means, everything is modeled in the form of documents, Json documents. And so when we're talking about read, write access control, read access is at the granularity of a document, and write access can be enforced at the granularity of a property within the document. So you may have access to an entire document, but you may only be allowed to update a certain property within the document. So, as I mentioned, when it comes to distributed computing architectures like edge computing, security is even more paramount, right? You have devices going offline, coming back online and, you might have a breach point at one edge environment, whether it is a data center or an edge device, you need to be able to ensure that you have isolated all the other edge components from that breach. And as I mentioned, when it comes to data governance and so on, data retention, for instance, even if it is not a security breach, let's say you do have, for some reason, the owner of a device should no longer have access to that content. You know, their role has changed, they have transitioned to a different company for instance. Then you will have a way of automatically purging all that data that was previously synchronized to the user's device. >> Got it. Okay. Let's continue talking about the events of the last year and a half. Because we saw this massive scatter, 18 months ago of an explosion at the edge when a lot of people went from the office to this work from home, work from any anywhere environment in which we're still in. So how has the pandemic and the events that related to it changed mobile apps and edge computing and what are some of the new requirements that customers have? >> Sure. Well, as you rightly said, right? In fact, if anything, the relevance of mobile devices and applications has just grown in significance through the pandemic. And it's kind of interesting, there are some surveys that have suggested that through the pandemic people have been using their mobile devices as their primary communication device for accessing the internet. And it's kind of interesting because you think, well, everyone is cooped up in their homes. They probably will have access to other forms of data consumption, but no, it's mobile devices. That's what they have primarily been using. So with that, there is also a new range of use cases and applications, which are driven in large part by the events of the pandemic. But I think that's just made things much more efficient. Customer satisfaction, user experience is paramount, is number one. And I think a lot of that is here to stay even following or post pandemic because it's just made things a lot more efficient. And we've seen that through different industries, right? Healthcare, there was always telemedicine medicine, but now for non-essential care, it's always telemedicine, Of course, specific to the pandemic. there was the, tracking, the contact tracing application, right? That's enabled through technologies like Bluetooth and GPS, so they track the whereabouts of infected persons. But then even if you arrive at your doctor's office, right, you wait in your car and you get notified when the doctor's ready to check you in. And then retail sector, E-commerce right? Of course everything was going online, but everything is overwhelming People are shopping online through their mobile devices, than the traditional web based applications. And you order on your phone, you pick up at the store, right? So curbside pickup, you pull into the store, the store clerk is notified of your arrival. They come out to the curb with your order. And here's the interesting bit, you know, it's kind of intuitive that it's going to be e-commerce applications. They got a huge boost through the pandemic. But interestingly, even the experience when it comes to retail in store, that's undergone a transformation because it was all about how do we make the process very efficient. So customers are in and out of the store really quick, right? there was the reason for that. But now we can translate to making the whole shopping experience much more easy. So you walk into the store, you meet a sales associate who can bring up information about the catalog inventory right there on the iPad. And so if you have any questions, whether it's something is available in the store or an access for you're looking for, they can give answers to you immediately. Right? And of course there are companies like Walmart, they have been rolling out applications. Mobile scan and go sort of applications, which is all about, you know, you scan items as you walk through the aisle, do a self checkout, totally contact-less experience. And, the list goes on, right? We talked about healthcare retail, same thing in, in a restaurant, right? A curbside that delivery and pickup, you can now track your delivery order because now it's just a huge surge in order deliveries. And then the same pickup concept, curbside pickup concept, you arrive in your car, the kitchen is notified of your arrival and they come out with your order, very streamlined drive-through. You've got people now coming to your car, taking the order, right there from the car on their tablets, that synced in real time to the backend kitchen, your order. And you get notified when your order is ready. So I think all this is about making things a lot more efficient. It's about customer experience, and edge computing has a big role to play in that. And so I think, if anything is just propelled the growth of mobile applications and use cases. >> Yeah. That that propulsion is something that we've been hearing a lot about the acceleration in the last year and a half. You did a great job there of painting a picture of some of the positives that come out of this accelerating the efficiencies that we all as consumers and in our business life expect to have. And this explosion at the edge that's really become even more of a lifeline for millions and millions and billions of people globally. I got to ask you that from a connectivity perspective, that's another area where we had this expectation as again, consumers or in our business lives we have connectivity. Where does all that talk about 5G; What does 5G fit into edge computing? >> Sure. That's a good question. Because 5G and edge computing sort of go hand in hand so much so that they are being used synonymously in some cases and that's inaccurate. Okay? So because every time people talk about edge computing, there are folks talking about 5G in the same breath, right? But really 5G, as we all know, is a cellular next generation cellular technology, promises, ultra low latency, very high bandwidth. Now we talked about this huge surge, right in mobile applications and new sort of use cases where a lot of the data is generated at the edge. IOT applications are just data intensive applications, right gaming apps and so on. And all of these applications, they demand ultra low latency, right? And they're generating a lot of this data and all that data needs to be processed in real time. So if you have to send all of that data back to the cloud, and then you get the responses, that's a really bad experience. So that's what 5G is here to solve, right? I mean, it's like low latency, high bandwidth, high concurrency. Now that's all great. But then the coverage of 5G, it terminates at the edge of the mobile operator network. So you have all these massive influx of devices generating all that data. And all that stuff is transmitted under a very low latency conditions over a 5G network. But then if all that data from the mobile operator network has to be back hauled to the internet, to the backend servers, then you kind of defeat the whole purpose of ultra low latency applications. So that's where edge computing comes into play because edge computing is really an architecture, right? It's a distributed architecture. So now what mobile operators are doing is deploying what they refer to as NDCs, but it's effectively micro data centers at the edge of the mobile operator network. So you have all this data coming in over the 5G network. Great. They get analyzed, they get processed locally at the edge of the mobile operator network and you get real-time responses. And of course, as needed that data in aggregated or filter form goes back to the cloud. And so that's where the two relate. So in my view, I think edge computing architectures are important to deliver on the promise of 5G, but 5G has propelled the relevance or importance of edge computing as a solution, as a deployment architecture. So very interrelated. >> Very interrelated, very symbiotic. And of course the need for real time data real-time analytics in every industry became very prominent in the last year and a half. We had this expectation that we're going to be able to understand things in real time. And that's often a huge differentiator for businesses. We're out of time, but I want to ask you one more question Priya, and that is where can customers go to get started with Couchbase? >> Oh, absolutely. So Couchbase servers and gateway, you can deploy that, it's available as software. You can download it from our website. Couchbased lite is available for all your mobile applications. So it is available as a download, but you also have the classic package management systems through which you can download Couchbase Lite. And then of course, as I said, you can deploy this standalone, but you can also deploy it in the cloud. So we have marketplace offerings for both Couchbase server and sync gateway. So if you want to deploy it on AWS, as your Google, you can do that as well. >> Excellent. Priya, thank you so much for joining me on the program, talking about Couchbase the evolution, the changes, the opportunities with edge computing and mobile and how Couchbase is involved. I appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. And thanks for having me. >> For Priya Rajgopal, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cubes coverage of Couchbase connect, online 2021.

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of Couchbase connect online, where the theme of the event is, or is modernized now. Yes, let's talk about that. And with me is Ravi, who's the senior vice president of engineering and the CTO at Couchbase Ravi. Welcome. Great to see you. >>Thank you so much. I'm so glad to be here with you. >>I asked you what the new requirements are around modern applications. I've seen some, you know, some of your comments, you gotta be flexible, distributed, multimodal, mobile edge. It, that those are all the very cool sort of buzz words, smart applications. What does that all mean? And how do you put that into a product and make it real? >>Yeah, I think what has basically happened is that, uh, so far, uh, it's been a transition of sorts. And now we are come to a point where, uh, the tipping point and the tipping point has been, uh, uh, more because of COVID and there COVID has pushed us to a world where we are living, uh, in a sort of, uh, occasionally connected manner where our digital, uh, interactions, precede our physical interactions in one sense. So it's a world where we do a lot more stuff that's less than, uh, in a digital manner, as opposed to sort of making a more specific human contact that has really been the, uh, sort of accelerant to this modernized. Now, as a team in this process, what has happened is that so far all the databases and all the data infrastructure that we have built historically, are all very centralized. >>They're all sitting behind. Uh, they used to be in mainframes from where they came to like your own data centers, where we used to run hundreds of servers to where they're going now, which is the computing marvelous change to consumption-based computing, which is all cloud oriented now. And so, uh, but they are all centralized still. Uh, but where our engagement happens with the data is, uh, at the edge, uh, at your point of convenience at your point of consumption, not where the data is actually sitting. So this has led to, uh, you know, all those buzzwords, as you said, which is like, oh, well we need a distributed data infrastructure, where is the edge? Uh, but it just basically comes down to the fact that the data needs to be where you are engaging with it. And that means if you are doing it on your mobile phone, or if you are sitting, uh, doing something in your body or traveling, or whether you are in a subway, whether you're in a plane or a ship, wherever the data needs to come to you, uh, and be available as opposed to every time you going to the data, which is centrally sitting in some place. >>And that is the fundamental shift in terms of how the modern architecture needs to think, uh, when they, when it comes to digital transformation and, uh, transitioning their old applications to, uh, the, the modern infrastructure, because that's, what's going to define your customer experiences and your personalized experiences. Uh, otherwise people are basically waiting for that circle of death that we all know, uh, and blaming the networks and other pieces. The problem is actually, the data is not where you are engaging with. It has got to be fetched, you know, seven seas away. Um, and that is the problem that we are basically solving in this modern modernization of that data, data infrastructure. >>I love this conversation and I love the fact that there's a technical person that can kind of educate us on, on this, because date data by its very nature is distributed. It's always been distributed, but w w but distributed database has always been incredibly challenging, whether it was a global SIS Plex or an eventual consistency of getting recovery for a distributed architecture has been extremely difficult. You know, I hate that this is a terrible term, lots of ways to skin a cat, but, but you've been the visionary behind this notion of optionality, how to solve technical problems in different ways. So how do you solve that, that problem of, of, of, uh, of, uh, of a super rock solid database that can handle, you know, distributed data? Yes. >>So there are two issues that you're a little too over there with Forrest is the optionality piece of it, which is that same data that you have that requires different types of processing on it. It's almost like fractional distillation. It is, uh, like your crude flowing through the system. You start all over from petrol and you can end up with Vaseline and rayon on the other end, but the raw material, that's our data in one sense. So far, we never treated the data that way. That's part of the problem. It has always been very purpose built and cast first problem. And so you just basically have to recast it every time we want to look at the data. The first thing that we have done is make data that fluid. So when you're actually, uh, when you have the data, you can first look at it to perform. >>Let's say a simple operation that we call as a key value store operation. Given my ID, give him a password kind of scenarios, which is like, you know, there are customers of ours who have billions of user IDs in their management. So things get slower. How do you make it fast and easily available? Log-in should not take more than five minutes. Again, this is a, there's a class of problem that we solve that same data. Now, eventually, without you ever having to, uh, sort of do a casting it to a different database, you can now do a solid, uh, acquire. These are classic sequel queries, which is our next magic. We are a no SQL database, but we have a full functional sequel. The sequel has been the language that has talked to data for 40 odd years successfully. Every other database has come and try to implement their own QL query language, but they've all failed only sequel as which stood the test of time of 40 odd years. >>Why? Because there's a solid mathematics behind it. It's called a relational calculus. And what that helps you is, is, uh, basically, uh, look at the data and any common tutorial, uh, any, uh, any which way you look at the data. All it will come, uh, the data in a format that you can consume. That's the guarantee sort of gives you in one sense. And because of that, you can now do some really complex in the database signs, what we call us, predicate logic on top of that. And that gives you the ability to do the classic relational type queries, select star from where Canada stuff, because it's at an English level, it becomes easy to, so the same data, you didn't have to go move it to another database, do your, uh, sort of transformation of the data and all this stuff. Same day that you do this. >>Now, that's where the optionality comes in. Now you can do another piece of logic on top of this, which we call search. This is built on this concept of inverted index and TF IDF, the classic Google in a very simple terms, but Google tokenized search, you can do that in the same data without you ever having to move the data to a different format. And then on top of it, they can do what is known as a eventing or your own custom logic, which we all which we do on a, on programming language called Java script. And finally analytics and analytics is the ability to query the operational data in a different way. I'll talk budding. What was my sales of this widget year over year on December 1st week, that's a very complex question to ask, and it takes a lot of different types of processing. >>So these are different types of that's optionality with different types of processing on the same data without you having to go to five different systems without you having to recast the data in five different ways and find different application logic. So you put them in one place. Now is your second question. Now this has got to be distributed and made available in multiple cloud in your data center, all the way to the edge, which is the operational side of the, uh, the database management system. And that's where the distributed, uh, platform that we have built enables us to get it to where you need the data to be, you know, in a classic way, we call it CDN in the data as in like content delivery networks. So far do static, uh, uh, sort of moving of static content to the edges. Now we can actually dynamically move the data. Now imagine the richness of applications you can develop. >>The first part of the, the answer to my question, are you saying you could do this without skiing with a no schema on, right? And then you can apply those techniques. >>Uh, fantastic question. Yes. That's the brilliance of this database is that so far classically databases have always demanded that you first define a schema before you can write a single byte of data. Couchbase is one of the rare databases. I, for one don't know any other one, but there could be, let's give the benefit of doubt. It's a database which writes data first and then late binds to schema as we call it. It's a schema on read things. So because there is no schema, it is just a on document that is sitting inside. And Jason is the lingua franca of the web, as you very well know by now. So it just Jason that we manage, you can do key lookups of the Jason. You can do full credit capability, like a classic relational database. We even have cost-based optimizers and the other sophisticated pieces of technology behind it. >>You can do searching on it, using the, um, the full textual analysis pipeline. You can do ad hoc wedding on the analytic side, and you can write your own custom logic on it using our eventing capabilities. So that's, that's what it allows because we keep the data in the native form of Jason. It's not a data structure or a data schema imposed by a database. It is how the data is produced. And on top of it, we bring different types of logic, five different types of it's like the philosophy is bringing logic to data as opposed to moving data to logic. This is what we have been doing, uh, in the last 40 years because we developed various, uh, database systems and data processing systems of various points. In time in our history, we had key value stores. We had relational systems, we had search systems, we had analytical systems. >>We had queuing systems, all the systems, if you want to use any one of them, our answer has always been, just move the data to that system. Versus we are saying that do not move the data as we get bigger and bigger and data just moving this data is going to be a humongous problem. If you're going to be moving petabytes of data for this is not one to fly instead, bring the logic to the data. So you can now apply different types of logic to the data. I think that's what, in one sense, the optionality piece of this, >>As you know, there's plenty of schema-less data stores. They're just, they're called data swamps. I mean, that's what they, that's what they became, right? I mean, so this is some, some interesting magic that you're applying here. >>Yes. I mean, the one problem with the data swamps as you call them is that that was a little too open-ended because the data format itself could change. And then you do your, then everything became like a game data casting because it required you to have it in seven schema in one sense at the end of the day, for certain types of processing. So in that where a lot of gaps it's probably flooded, but it not really, uh, how do you say, um, keep to the promise that it actually meant to be? So that's why it was a swamp I need, because it was fundamentally not managing the data. The data was sitting in some file system, and then you are doing something, this is a classic database where the data is managed and you create indexes to manage it, and you create different types of indexes to manage it. You distribute the index, you distribute the data you have, um, like we were discussing, you have acid semantics on top of, and when you, when you put all these things together, uh, it's, it's, it's a tough proposition, but they have solved some really tough problems, which are good computer science stuff, computer science problems that we have to solve to bring this, to bring this, to bear, to bring this to the market. >>So you predicted the trend around multimodal and converged, uh, databases. Um, you kind of led Couchbase through that. I want to, I always ask this question because it's clearly a trend in the industry and it, it definitely makes sense from a simplification standpoint. And, and, and so that I don't have to keep switching databases or the flip side of that though, Ravi. And I wonder if you could give me your opinion on this is kind of the right tool for the right job. So I often say isn't that the Swiss army knife approach, we have a little teeny scissors and a knife. That's not that sharp. How do you respond to that? Uh, >>A great one. Um, my answer is always, I use another analogy to tackle that, but is that, have you ever accused a smartphone of being a Swiss army knife? No. No. Nobody does that because it's actually 40 functions in one is what a smartphone becomes. You never call your iPhone or your Android phone, a Swiss army knife, because here's the reason is that you can use that same device in the full capacity. That's what optionality is. It's not, I'm not, it's not like your good old one where there's a keyboard hiding half the screen, and you can do everything only through the keyboard without touching and stuff like that. That's not the whole devices available to you to do one type of processing when you want it. When you're done with that, it can do another completely different types of processing. Like as in a moment, it could be a Tom, Tom telling you all the directions, the next one, it's your PDA. >>Third one, it's a fantastic phone. Uh, four, it's a beautiful camera, which can do your f-stop management and give you a nice SLR quality picture. Right? So next moment is a video camera. People are shooting movies with this thing in Hollywood, these days for God's sake. So it gives you the full power of what you want to do when you want it. And now, if you just taught that iPhone is a great device or any smartphone is a great device, because you can do five things in one or 50 things in one, and at a certain level, they missed the point because what that device really enabled is not just these five things in one place. It becomes easy to consume and easy to operate. It actually started the app is the economy. That's the brilliance of bringing so many things in one place, because in the morning, you know, I get the alert saying that today you got to leave home at eight 15 for your nine o'clock meeting. >>And the next day it might actually say 8 45 is good enough because it knows where the phone is sitting. The geo position of it. It knows from my calendar where the meeting is actually happening. It can do a traffic calculation because it's got my map and all of the routes. And then it's gone there's notification system, which eventually pops up on my phone to say, Hey, you got to leave at this time. Now five different systems have to come together and they can because the data is in one place without that, you couldn't even do this simple function, uh, in a, in a sort of predictable manner in a, in a, in a manner that's useful to you. So I believe a database which gives you this optionality of doing multiple data processing on the same set of data allows you will allow you to build a class of products, which you are so far been able to struggling to build, because half the time you're running sideline to sideline, just, you know, um, integrating data from one system to the other. >>So I love the analogy with the smartphone. I w I want to, I want to continue it and double click on it. So I use this camera. I used to, you know, my kid had a game. I would bring the, the, the big camera, the 35 millimeter. So I don't use that anymore no way, but my wife does, she still uses the DSLR. So is, is there a similar analogy here? That those, and by the way, the camera, the camera shop in my town went out of business, you know? And so, so, but, but is there, is that a fair, where, in other words, those specialized databases, they say there still is a place for them, but they're getting >>Absolutely, absolutely great analogy and a great extension to the question. That's, that's the contrarian side of it in one sense is that, Hey, if everything can just be done in one, do you have a need for the other things? I mean, you gave a camera example where it is sort of, it's a, it's a slippery slope. Let me give you another one, which is actually less straight to the point better. I've been just because my, I, I listened to half of the music on the iPhone. Doesn't stop me from having my full digital receiver. And, you know, my Harman Kardon speakers at home because they haven't, they produce a kind of sounded immersive experience. This teeny little speaker has never in its lifetime intended to produce, right? It's the convenience. Yes. It's the convenience of convergence that I can put my earphones on and listen to all the great music. >>Yes, it's 90% there or 80% there. It depends on your audio file mess of your, uh, I mean, you don't experience the super specialized ones do not go away. You know, there are, there are places where, uh, the specialized use cases will demand a separate system to exist, but even there that has got to be very closed. Um, how do you say close, binding or late binding? I should be able to stream that song from my phone to that receiver so I can get it from those speakers. You can say that, oh, there's a digital divide between these two things done, and I can only play CDs on that one. That's not how it's going to work going forward. It's going to be, this is the connected world, right? As in, if I'm listening to the song in my car and then step off the car and walk into my living room, that's same songs should continue and play in my living room speakers. Then it's a world because it knows my preference and what I'm doing that all happened only because of this data flowing between all these systems. >>I love, I love that example too. When I was a kid, we used to go to Twitter, et cetera. And we'd to play around with, we take off the big four foot speakers. Those stores are out of business too. Absolutely. Um, now we just plug into Sonos. So that is the debate between relational and non-relational databases over Ravi. >>I believe so. Uh, because I think, uh, what had happened was the relational systems. Uh, I've been where the norm, they rule the roost, if you will, for the last 40 odd years, and then gain this no sequel movement, which was almost as though a rebellion from the relational world, we all inhibited, uh, uh, because we, it was very restrictive. It, it had the schema definition and the schema evolution as we call it, all those things, they were like, they required a committee, they required your DBA and your data architect. And you have to call them just to add one column and stuff like that. And the world had moved on. This was the world of blogs and tweets and, uh, you know, um, mashups and, um, uh, uh, a different generation of digital behavior, digital, native people now, um, who are operating in these and the, the applications, the, the consumer facing applications. >>We are living in this world. And yet the enterprise ones were still living in the, um, in the other, the other side of the divide. So all came this solution to say that we don't need SQL. Actually, the problem was never sequel. No sequel was, you know, best approximation, good marketing name, but from a technologist perspective, the problem was never the query language, no SQL was not the problem, the schema limitations, and the inability for these, the system to scale, the relational systems were built like, uh, airplanes, which is that if, uh, San Francisco Boston, there is a flight route, it's so popular that if you want to add 50 more seats to it, the only way you can do that is to go back to Boeing and ask them to get you a set in from 7 3 7 2 7 7 7, or whatever it is. And they'll stick you with a billion dollar bill on the alarm to somehow pay that by, you know, either flying more people or raising the rates or whatever you have to do. >>These are called vertically scaling systems. So relational systems are vertically scaling. They are expensive. Versus what we have done in this modern world, uh, is make the system how it is only scaling, which is more like the same thing. If it's a train that is going from San Francisco to Boston, you need 50 more people be my guests. I'll add one more coach to it, one more car to it. And the better part of the way we have done this year is that, and we have super specialized on that. This route actually requires three, three dining cars and only 10 sort of sleeper cars or whatever. Then just pick those and attach the next route. You can choose to have ID only one dining car. That's good enough. So the way you scale the plane is also can be customized based on the route along the route, more, more dining capabilities, shorter route, not an abandoned capability. >>You can attach the kind of coaches we call this multi-dimensional scaling. Not only do we scale horizontally, we can scale to different types of workloads by adding different types of coaches to it quite. So that's the beauty of this architecture. Now, why is that important? Is that where we land eventually is the ability to do operational and analytical in the same place. This is another thing which doesn't happen in the past, because you would say that I cannot run this analytical Barre because then my operational workload will suffer. Then my friend, then we'll slow down millions of customers that impacted that problem. We will solve the same data in which you can do analytical buddy, an operational query because they're separated by these cars, right? As in like we, we fence the, the, the resources, so that one doesn't impede the other. So you can, at the same time, have a microsecond 10 million ops per second, happening of a key value or equity. >>And then yet you can run this analytical body, which will take a couple of minutes to run one, not impeding the other. So that's in one sense, sort of the, part of the, um, uh, problems that we have solved here is that relational versus, uh, uh, the no SQL portion of it. These are the kinds of problems we have to solve. We solve those. And then we yet put back the same quality language on top. Y it's like Tesla in one sense, right underneath the surface is where all the stuff that had to be changed had to change, which is like the gasoline, uh, the internal combustion engine, uh, I think gas, uh, you says, these are the issues we really wanted to solve. Um, so solve that, change the engine out, you don't need to change the steering wheel or the gas pedal or the, you know, the battle shifters or whatever else you need, or that are for your shifters. >>Those need to remain in the same place. Otherwise people won't buy it. Otherwise it does not even look like a car to people. So, uh, even when you feed people the most advanced technology, it's got to be accessible to them in the manner that people can consume. Only in software, we forget this first design principle, and we go and say that, well, I got a car here, you got the blue harder to go fast and lean back for, for it to, you know, uh, to apply a break that's, that's how we seem to define, uh, design software. Instead, we should be designing them in a manner that it is easiest for our audience, which is developers to consume. And they've been using SQL for 40 years or 30 years. And so we give them the steering wheel on the, uh, and the gas bottle and the, um, and the gear shifter is by putting cul back on underneath the surface, we have completely solved, uh, the relational, uh, uh, limitations of schema, as well as scalability. >>So in, in, in that way, and by bringing back the classic acid capabilities, which is what relational systems, uh, we accounted on and being able to do that with the sequel programming language, we call it like multi-state SQL transaction. So to say, which is what a classic way all the enterprise software was built by putting that back. Now, I can say that that debate between relational and non-relational is over because this has truly extended the database to solve the problems that the relational systems had to grow up the salt in the modern times, but rather than get, um, sort of pedantic about whether it's, we have no SQL or sequel or new sequel, or, uh, you know, any of that sort of, uh, jargon, oriented debate, uh, this, these are the debates of computer science that they are actually, uh, and they were the solve and they have solved them with, uh, the latest release of $7, which we released a few months ago. >>Right, right. Last July, Ravi, we got to leave it there. I, I love the examples and the analogies. I can't wait to be face to face with you. I want to hang with you at the cocktail party because I've learned so much and really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming to the cube. >>Fantastic. Thanks for the time. And the Aboriginal Dan was, I mean, very insightful questions really appreciate it. Thank you. >>Okay. This is Dave Volante. We're covering Couchbase connect online, keep it right there for more great content on the cube.

>>Welcome back to Couchbase connect. My name is Dave Vellante and we're going to dig into a customer case study of sorts with two software engineers from a company called trendy all the largest e-commerce platform in Turkey. And with me are in MRA, tan Rivera, both software engineers at trendy. All welcome. Good to see you guys. Hey, before we get into the story, maybe you can tell us a little bit about trendy all. >>Let me answer that question first. Um, tri-annual uh, today is, um, 10 years old. Uh, actually, uh, it starts with them, um, e-commerce company, uh, Jen, uh, especially, uh, for clothing, uh, today, uh, it's serves several, uh, services, uh, mainly still e-commerce right. Um, we, uh, we do our business mainly on technology and we even have a say in technology, uh, technology is our main concern actually. Um, just like that actually now, >>So thank you for that. I mean, you started, I think, I think the company was founded in 2009, 2010. So you weren't, you were just, you know, kind of which we would consider the, sort of the modern era at the same time. When you look back 10 years, you know, major challenges, major advancements from a technology standpoint. So you at, at the time you had a, uh, a legacy database and you, you had a migraine, maybe you could describe the business conditions that drove you to think about actually making a change. What was the before, and then we can get into the after and what was driving that change? >>Um, maybe I could start it a bit. Well, uh, we have a recommendation domain and try new. It's like when you, when you look at a certain product, like for example, you look at a pencil, it it's commanding you, uh, any razor, uh, if you are going to buy a pink dress, it's going to recommend you a yellow dress. So if you're going to maybe buy pants, it will show you some t-shirts according to it. So, uh, since the recommendations, domain group larger, uh, we, we have struggled, uh, to keep it high scale, and it wasn't a relational DB at first, but that's even as product count increased and, uh, our right frequency increased day by day, uh, and our reef performance was affected very dramatically. Uh, I believe. Yeah. >>So you were using a traditional RDBMS, uh, and then, and, and the issue was you quite, you couldn't make the recommendations fast enough. And, you know, we always say what's real time. Real time is before you lose the customer. So you, you have to make those recommendations in time for the customer to act otherwise, you know, what do you do? Send an email after the fact, Hey, you bought this, nobody's going to pay attention to that. Right? You want to catch them in the moment. Um, and so, so what was it that, that led you to, to Couchbase and w and what was the experience of that? You know, whether it was onboarding, you know, the technology, you know, how difficult was it to get up and running to where you are today? >>Um, we were using ch Couchbase in, uh, in inter-annual, um, for several years, and we had experienced on that. Uh, and, uh, we actually, we need performance as described. So, uh, we convert our data structure to, from relational DB to, um, noise, Carol Levy, um, them actually on our recommendation, uh, platform, the main problem was, uh, invalidation process. You know, um, we are selling things and, um, in seconds they can be sold out and we, we shouldn't be recommend them anymore. And we are, we are keeping track of this by invalidation process and relational DB writing those data to our relationship Libby was, uh, was taking two, two minutes too much time. And, um, by changing this structure to, uh, pathways, we, we, we see that benefits, uh, and it takes so, so, uh, uh, short time, actually, >>I'm so sorry if, if I can just clarify w what was taking a long time, the, the updating the actual records, so that you could actually inform a customer that it was out of stock, or was it the coding that was too complicated? >>Well, it was, it was not because, um, there are millions of products intangible, and, uh, those issues are coming huge, actually. So we are keeping track of time if it's sold out or it's, it can be sellable, uh, when, when a product, uh, detail is seen by the customers, we are recommending some other products too, but those other products must be sellable too. So the main, the main problem was that, and, uh, we are writing them in our relational DB. There is a huge rights law actually. So it was not coding. It was the amount of data actually. >>Okay. And so it was the update intensity, um, within the database and the ability of the database to actually return accurate results quickly. So what was the after, like, uh, can you talk about sort of the, the business impact? What were the, the improvements that you've experienced? >>Yeah. Maybe I can ask her that, uh, like parties said that the main reason we switched is because that, uh, there are so many products coming near in trend, and many of them are being stopped being sold out and the updates to it, it was on a relational, the vendor rights, or too much that you couldn't, uh, dur customers that fast reply because the database was getting effected by the amount of high rights. Because when you think about it, there are millions of products coming, and there are millions of rights, uh, operations on the database. So those affecting the reach performance. So, uh, it, it could occur to you that when you click on a product, you would see maybe as took out product as a recommendation, or maybe a product that is not in the website anymore. So, uh, when we switched to, uh, Couchbase that, uh, we saw that, uh, it's using less resources, which, uh, using less posts, active, alive, and it's also, uh, giving responses faster. >>The main reason, uh, we were using relational DB at first was the invalidation process like five. He said, because it was, we had a consumer that was listening to messages, uh, the innovation messages, and then, uh, and then the writing them into database. But, uh, in the part, uh, it meant that actively writing to database that for every product document that you would need to update the document, but for, uh, for, for, uh, for relational DB, it would be vetoed easier to just make this product, uh, every available, false, or true. So that's why we were sticking with relationship with DB at first. And that's why we made it that first as a relational DB, but as time increased and our product count, and our sellers increased, we realized that, uh, we should find another solution to the invalidation process, and we should, uh, switch because, uh, I mean, it CA it has come to a point at one point that it would just maybe, uh, take a solid, so much time that, uh, we were scaling our consumers at nighttime to just not affect daily users anymore. >>Uh, so that's why that's the main reason we switched. And, uh, after switching, we had in, uh, like I said, the response time and high write throughput, and also one of the reasons is also because that the, uh, the application that was with the use of Couchbase because, uh, since strangled is growing larger than our main data centers. And, uh, like we can see that every day, sometimes we deploy our, uh, apps to yet another cluster. And we, that's why we sometimes need to have backups or different data centers, and Couchbase was providing very good relations, very good solutions to this, which is. Yeah. That's why we switched actually. So we asked >>Couchbase running it's if I understand it, it's running the recommendation engine. And do you still use a traditional RDBMS for the transaction system or is Couchbase doing both? >>Yeah, okay. Uh, we are, uh, actually inter-annual, we are in discovery a team, actually, we call it tribe and in discovery, tribe, uh, relational DB, I think, uh, now, uh, very small, uh, small, uh, teams are using it. Um, it's personally just very low actually. Uh, but, uh, other other tribes, for example, orders, checkout, and maybe, uh, uh, promotions, uh, something like other teams are still using RDBMS, but in discovery team, it's very important to serve customers very fast. We need to show them the products immediately. We need to personalize them. Uh, we sh we should, uh, show them, uh, related products in the meantime, in real time, actually. So in this current Stripe, we are, um, barely using it, uh, RDBMS systems, actually. >>How hard was it to migrate from the RDBMS? Because you hear a lot of stories about how difficult that is to do. You've got to freeze the code, you bringing up new code, you've got to synchronize the functionality. How did you manage that? >>Well, to be honest with you, just ask the data science team to just send the products. Uh, at the same time, we were like, we were keeping the legacy API open that the clients were still coming there. And, um, to be honest, there were lots of legs on that, too. So even if, uh, the, the newer products came a bit later, uh, it shouldn't be seen because it was always coming late. So, uh, we had, we made a new API that is connecting to Couchbase and we wanted the data science team to start feeding it, but we asked the clients to switch it by time. I mean, we were still supporting the old one, but, uh, when we, when we asked the clients to switch to the new API, we just closed the last one. So we didn't really migrate any data to be honest. Like we, we, it was from scratch. And since it's a, it's a recommendation domain, uh, we believe it's better to, uh, add data's from scratch because in our new domains, we are storing them in documents. They are always sending a new list to us. So that's how it gets updated all the time. So since it's not a user related data, it wasn't really like a migration process. >>Is this is part of the secret sauce that you're doing. Schema lists, no schema on, right to Couchbase. And is that correct? And how are you handling it? I'm like, how are you getting that awesome write performance? >>Well, the main reason we believe is that, uh, before, when it was relational DB, like for example, loan product to one product and a second product to first product, third product, first of all, that like you were duplicating the records so that when the product gets removed, uh, from, from a product recommendation, or maybe one of, if a product is getting invisible, for any reason, it should be removed, or maybe it could be a stockout that it means it's not that for every record, you are sending your records for invalidation, but in our new system, it means that this, uh, for this content, there are 24 contents let's say, and like four of them that's finished. It's not there. It's okay. You're just replacing the whole list so that you are not duplicating the records. I mean, this is not like first product first and first, the second, and first to third, and first changes you are replicating this, this change three times, like a delete, uh, product one from three, three product, one from two, and you are deprecating the deletion record, but now we are just replacing the list. So you are doing that all of the operation in 1, 1, 1, uh, Kafka queue message. If I should be able, if I was able to, uh, tell about it. So it's a bit hard to explain it in, uh, in speech, but, uh, we have a nice graphic that's showing how we are doing it now. >>That makes sense. Okay. Thank you for that. And so, as you think about, you're modernizing your application infrastructure, where are you at today? How do you see this modernization effort going forward >>Actually, um, today, uh, we are mainly looking for, um, cross cluster replication. Uh, all our products are, uh, uh, deployed, uh, different clusters and different geographical locations. Uh, we, we always using ch um, we try to always use, um, modern products and, uh, uh, try to avoid, uh, old relational databases, especially for our discovery. Right. And, uh, my mandala is modernizing it, uh, all, uh, engineer's keeping up to date with recent technologies and, uh, our customers are happier. They are not seeing some glitches, some, uh, rates, uh, or while they're using our products. >>Okay. So maybe I could double click on that. So, cause you mentioned the impact of customers and I'm interested in your organizational impact and what it means for you internally, but, but when you talk about cross cluster replication, is that to scale, uh, is that a performance impact? Is that for availability? What's the impact of that effort? That modernization effort? >>Uh, I believe it's, it's all, uh, main reason is availability. I believe. Uh, like we can't know when a cluster can go down, we can't be sure about it, uh, in a, in a system we can, but that we should be up and running all the time. And, uh, there should be some, uh, some backups that, uh, that can switch when a cluster goes down. But also the main reason, uh, well, one of the main reasons is to be able to scale because, uh, the, the clusters that we had wasn't enough, uh, considering our user base. So, uh, let's say you want to even extend your user base, but, uh, like the cluster is being a bottleneck to you because you can't get that much users, but, uh, when you do post cluster that you have backup and you have scalability and it's, uh, considering how new considering if the machines are newer, maybe faster response times. I don't know, uh, maybe, uh, network part would know that better, but, uh, yeah, but all of them, I will leave. >>Great guys. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story, uh, uh, MRA and Fati. Uh, appreciate you guys coming on the cube. >>Thanks a lot. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you for, uh, hosting. >>Yeah, it's our pleasure. And thank you for watching. Couchbase connect online on the cube, keep it right there for more great content from the event.

>>Mhm Yeah, this is Dave valentin. I'd like to welcome you back to the cubes coverage of couch base connect online with the theme of this event is modernized now and one of the big announcements is Capella which of course as you all undoubtedly know is the brightest star in the constellation Auriga, which is latin for charioteer, yep, you can find that in the constellation of that constellation of the night sky in late february, early March in the northern hemisphere. So with that little tidbit, I'd like to welcome in scott Anderson to the cube, who is the senior vice president of product management and business operations. That couch base scott welcome. Good to see you. >>Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. >>That's our pleasure. So you've launched couch based cappella if I understand correctly, it's built on couch based server seven which he launched just a few months ago in the middle of the summer. Can you give us an overview of Capella? >>Yeah, absolutely. So couch based Capellas are fully managed databases. Service for enterprise applications. One of the goals of launching Capella and our databases is service offering that we just announced today is about increasing the accessibility of couch base so it's about making it easy for a developer or an enterprise to get up and running in just a few clicks in a couple of minutes Um and about making it more affordable and accessible through the development phase through the test phase, the production phase. So really it's about ease of use having the right offerings aligned to the phase of development that customers in and eventually into the production of their enterprise application leveraging capella and couch based Server seven. >>So let me ask you, I I went pretty deep with ravi on the, on the technical side and I want to understand what makes Capella different from some of the competitive offerings. Is it the sort of the fundamentals that I learned from Ravi about how you guys have have have really done an awesome focus on on on sequel but been able to maintain acid compliance deal with distributed architectural challenges and then bringing that over to database as a service. Is that the fundamental, what are some of the other differentiators? >>Yeah, that that is the fundamental, we have an amazing platform that Roddy and our core engineering team built and we've talked about that and I think Robbie mentioned that the ease of sequel and applying that to a documented oriented database, then combining some of those capabilities with the ease of use, the ability that you can get up and running, signing up for our free trial couple minutes later you've got a database endpoint that is fully managed by couch base. And so we're doing the monitoring, we're doing alerting, we have calls to action based off what events are occurring within the database environment, ensuring it's always available as well as doing kind of the mundane tasks of backup and recovery, uh scaling the environment, upgrades and so forth. So it's really about ease of use, making it um leveraging are incredibly robust, broad platform um and then making that in different consumable model for our customers and developers and getting started really easily. The other thing that we have done is really leverage the best practices over the last 10 or 11 years of some of the largest enterprises in the world using couch based for the mission critical applications. So we've codified those best practices and that's how we keep that service, high performance, always on highly available. And that's one of the core value propositions that were able to bring with Capella. It's really about management capability, global visibility of your clusters coupled with what we believe is the best no sequel database in the marketplace today. >>What about what about cost, total cost of ownership as you scale a lot of times when you scale out, you get dis economies of scale, it's kind of like, you know, you get that negative curve, uh what are you seeing? >>Yeah, we've done a third party benchmark studies which have proven out how we are able to literally scale the environment uh and continue on that curve as you add notes, you're getting that incremental performance that you would expect. The other thing that we do that's really unique within couch bases are multidimensional scaling and this allows you to place our services, things like data index, query, full text search indexes and analytics, you can co locate those on single nodes within a cluster or you can have dedicated notes for each one of those services. The reason that is important is you get work line isolation for those specific services within our cluster. The other thing that you can do is you can match the compute infrastructure to the needs of each one of those services. So some services like query are much more core, compute intensive and that allows you to have a specific instance type that is optimized for that, reducing your costs, indexes where you want very fast performance, you may want to have a higher amount of memory relative to the number of course. So that ability to mix and match the infrastructure with an existing cluster allows us to lower overall costs. That coupled with their blazing fast performance with our in memory architecture allows people to get incredible performance at scale. Um, what we've proven out in the study that I mentioned earlier is we have that linear scalability and you're able to do more for less at the end of the day, you're getting more operations per second per dollar if you want to use that as a metric. >>Got it. Thank you for that. What do customers need to think about when they want to get started with Capela? How difficult is it for people to jump in? >>It is incredibly simple. It's as simple as going to couch base dot com clicking on start your free trial, You're going to that free trial, you provide a minimal set of information for us and it's literally a few clicks and you're going to have a database endpoint within three minutes and that's really been a foundation of, of what we've been focused on over the last 6-9 months is removing any friction we can in the process because our goal is to give a tremendous user experience and get people up and running as quickly as possible. So we're really, really proud of that. And then from a paid offering perspective, we have a number of offerings which are really aligned to the needs of each customer, some individuals who want a larger cluster and they want to be able to pay for that. We've optimized service levels around that in terms of level support and the features that we think are appropriate for a dev cycle, a test cycle and then into production and lastly we will be announcing a number of promotional starter pack bundles, really trying to couple the overall service that we have with Capella with some of our expertise, so helping new users get up and running in terms of things like index definitions, what's the best way to do document design and schema within within couch base. Our end goal is to match these services and bundles with the life cycle of application development. So in my development phase what's the offering for me as I move for production readiness, what services capabilities I need and then production and the ongoing if I expand my use. So we've been really focused on, how do we get people up up and running as quickly as possible and how do we get them to production as quickly as possible at the lowest total cost? >>That's nice. That's a nice accelerant for customers. Um, so as you heard upfront, I did a little research about the name Capella. How did you choose it and why? >>Well, one thing I learned early in my career is naming is not a strong suit of mine. I leave that to John or our chief marketing officer in the overall team. Um, we all have opinions, but I trust John and we went through, I think it was over 60 names, seven rounds of debate to come up with capella, but we want to name of strength. We like the alliteration couch, basic capella together. Um, one of the little facts may have tipped it over is I believe in latin, it means little goats. So we kind of played from the barriers. Always think to jerry rice goat, greatest of all time. So that was a nice play on that also. Um, but I leave it to them and really happy with the overall name, love the liberation, Love some of the hidden meanings within that. Um, and we're really, really excited about getting going. So you wouldn't want me to pick the name. Um, I get a vote. Um, but I would say my overall influence is a little bit lower than where john's is and matt cain, who I know you spoke with previously. >>I love it, jerry rice definitely is a little go because I'm from New England. So of course tom we think tom brady is the big goat. I >>know we've, I grew up in that joe Montana era, so maybe you can take that off line after this interview. We can have our own debate, but I guess super bowl trophies or the ultimate measure at the end of the day. >>Now I've got a little stat for you. So, so Capella is also one of the 88 modern constellations as adopted by the International Astronomical Union. I. E. Not one of the ancient constellations. Pretty clever. Right. >>Exactly. >>Scott is great to have you on the cube. Thanks so much. Really, >>thank you so much. >>All right. And thank you for watching. Thank you for watching. Our pleasure. Thank you much of the cubes coverage of couch based connect 2021. Keep it right there for more great content. Mm mhm

>>And welcome to the cubes coverage of Couchbase connect online, Mary Roth, VP of engineering operations with couch basis here for Couchbase connect online. Mary. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on remotely for this segment. >>Thank you very much. It's great to be here. >>Love the fire in the background, a little fireside chat here, kind of happening, but I want to get into shooting, you know, engineering and operations with the pandemic has really kind of shown that, you know, engineers and developers have been good working remotely for a while, but for the most part it's impacted companies in general, across the organizations. How did the Couchbase engineering team adapt to the remote work? >>Uh, great question. Um, and I actually think the Couchbase team responded very well to this new model of working imposed by the pandemic. And I have a unique perspective on the couch space journey. I joined in February, 2020 after 20 plus years at IBM, which had embraced a hybrid in-office rewrote remote work model many years earlier. So in my IBM career, I live four minutes away from my research lab in almond and valley, but IBM is a global company with headquarters on the east coast and SU. So throughout my career, I often found myself on phone calls with people around the globe at 5:00 AM in the morning, I quickly learned and quickly adopted to a hybrid model. I'd go into the office to collaborate and have in-person meetings when needed. But if I was on the phone at >> 5: 00 AM in the morning, um, I didn't feel the need to get up at 4:30 AM to go in. >>I just worked from home and I discovered I could be more productive. They're doing think time work. And I really only needed the in-person time for collaboration. These hybrid model allowed me to have a great career at IBM and raise my two daughters at the same time. So when I joined Couchbase I joined a company that was all about being in-person and instead of a four minute commute, it was going to be an hour or more commute for me each way. This was going to be a really big transition for me, but I was excited enough by couch facing what it offered that I decided to give it a try. Well, that was February, 2020. I showed up early in the morning on March 10th, 2020 for an early morning meeting in person only to learn that I was one of the only few people that didn't get the memo. >>We were switching to a remote remote working model. And so over the last year, I have had the ability to watch cow's face and other companies pivot to make this remote working model possible and not only possible, but effective. And I'm really happy to see the results. Our remote work model does have its challenges that's for sure, but it also has its benefits better work-life balance and more time to interact with family members during the day and more quiet time, just to think we just did a retrospective on a major product release Couchbase server 7.0 that we did over the past 18 months. And one of the major insights by the leadership team is that working from home actually made people more effective. I don't think a full remote model is the right approach going forward, but a hybrid model that IBM adopted many years ago and that I was able to participate in for most of my career, I believe is a healthier and more productive approach. >>Well, great story. I love the, um, the, uh, you come back and now you take leverage all the best practices from the IBM days, but how did the, your team and the Couchbase engineering team react and were there any best practices or key learnings that you guys pulled out of that, >>Uh, the, the initial reaction was not good. I mean, as I mentioned, it was a culture based on in-person people had to be in person in person meetings. So it took a while to get used to it, but the, there was a forcing function, right? We had to work remotely. That was the only option. And so people made it work. I think the advancement of virtual meeting technology really, really helps a lot over earlier days in my career where I had just bad phone connections, that was very difficult. But with the virtual meetings that you have, where you can actually see people and interact, I think is really quite helpful. >>What's the DNA of the culture. What's the DNA. Every company's got the DNA entails Moore's law. Um, and at what's the engineering culture at Couchbase like if you could describe it. >>Uh, the engineering culture at Couchbase is very familiar to me. We are at our heart, a database company, and I grew up in the database world, which has a very unique culture based on two values, merit and mentorship. And we also focus on something that I like to call growing. The next generation. Now database technology started in the late sixties, early seventies with a few key players and institutions. These key players were extremely bright and they tackle it and solve really hard problems with elegant solutions long before anybody knew they were going to be necessary. Now, those original key players, people like Jim gray, Bruce Lindsey, Don Chamberlin, pat Salinger, David Dewitt, Michael Stonebraker. They just love solving hard problems. And they wanted to share that elegance with a new generation. And so they really focused on growing the next generation of leaders, which became the Mike caries and the Mohans and the lower houses of the world. And that culture grew over multiple generations with the previous generation cultivating, challenging and advocating for the next, I was really lucky to grow up in that culture. And I've advanced my career as a result, as being part of it. The reason I joined Couchbase is because I see that culture alive and well, here are two fundamental values on the engineering side, our merit and mentorship. >>One of the things I want to get your thoughts on, on the database questions. I remember, you know, back in the old glory days, you mentioned some of those luminaries, you know, there wasn't many database geeks out there, Zuri kind of small community now is databases are everywhere. So you see there's no one database that's ruling the world, but you starting to see a pattern of database kinds of things, and more emerging, more databases than ever before. They're on the internet, they're on the cloud. There are none the edge it's essentially we're living in a large distributed computing environment. So now it's cool to be in databases cause they're everywhere. So, I mean, this is kind of where we're at. What's your reaction to that? >>Uh, you're absolutely right there. There used to be a, a few small vendors and a few key technologies and it's grown over the years, but the fundamental problems are the same data, integrity, performance and scalability. And in the face of district distributed systems, those were all the hard problems that those key leaders solve back in the sixties and seventies. They're not, they're not new problems. They're still there. And they did a lot of the fundamental work that you can apply and reapply in different scenarios and situations. >>It's pretty exciting. I love that. I love the different architectures that are emerging and allows for more creativity for application developers. And this becomes like the key thing we're seeing right now, driving the business and a big conversation here at the, at the event is the powering, these modern applications that need low latency. There's no more, not many spinning disks anymore. It's all in Ram, all these kinds of different memory, you got decentralization and all kinds of new constructs. How do you make sense of it all? How do you talk to customers? What's the, what's the, what's the main core thing happening right now? If you had to describe it? >>Yeah, it depends on the type of customer you're talking to. Um, we have focused primarily on the enterprise market and in that market, there are really fundamental issues. Information for, for these enterprises is key. It's their core asset that they have and they understand very well that they need to protect it and make it available more quickly. I started as a DBA at Morgan Stanley back, um, right out of college. And at the time I think it was, it probably still is, but at the time it was the best run it shop that I'd ever seen in my life. The fundamental problems that we had to solve to get information from one stock exchange to another, to get it to the sec, um, are the same problems that we're solving today. Back then we were working on mainframes and over high-speed data comm links today, it's the same kind of problem. It's just the underlying infrastructure has changed. >>You know, the key has been a big supporter of women in tech. We've done thousands of interviews on why I got you. I want to ask you, uh, if you don't mind, um, career advice that you give women who are starting out in the field of engineering, computer science, what do you wish you knew when you started your career? And you could be that person now, what would you say? >>Yeah, well, there are a lot of things I wish I knew then, uh, that I know now, but I think there are two key aspects to a successful career in engineering. I actually got started as a math major and the reason I, I became a math major is a little convoluted. Is it as a girl, I was told we were bad at math. And so for some reason I decided that I had to major in it. That's actually how I got my start. Um, but I've had a great career and I think there are really two key aspects first. And is that it is a discipline in which respect is gained through merit. As I had mentioned earlier, engineers are notoriously detail oriented and most of our perfectionist, they love elegant, well thought out solutions and give respect when they see one. So understanding this can be a very important advantage if you're always prepared and you always bring your a game to every debate, every presentation, every conversation you have build up respect among your team, simply through merit. While that may mean that you need to be prepared to defend every point early on say, in your graduate career or when you're starting over time, others will learn to trust your judgment and begin to intuitively follow your lead just by reputation. The reverse is also true. If you don't bring your a game and you don't come prepared to debate, you will quickly lose respect. And that's particularly true if you're a woman. So if you don't know your stuff, don't engage in the debate until you do. That's awesome. >>That's >>Fine. Continue. Thank you. So my second piece of advice that I wish I could give my younger self is to understand the roles of leaders and influencers in your career and the importance of choosing and purposely working with each. I like to break it down into three types of influencers, managers, mentors, and advocates. So that first group are the people in your management chain. It's your first line manager, your director, your VP, et cetera. Their role in your career is to help you measure short-term success. And particularly with how that success aligns with their goals and the company's goals. But it's important to understand that they are not your mentors and they may not have a direct interest in your long-term career success. I like to think of them as say, you're sixth grade math teacher. You know, you're getting an a in the class and advancing to seventh grade. >>They own you for that. Um, but whether you get that basketball scholarship to college or getting to Harvard or become a CEO, they have very little influence over that. So a mentor is someone who does have a shared interest in your longterm success, maybe by your relationship with him or her, or because by helping you shape your career and achieve your own success, you help advance their goals. Whether it be the company success or helping more women achieve, we do put sip positions or getting more kids into college, on a basketball scholarship, whatever it is, they have some long-term goal that aligns with helping you with your career. And they gave great advice. But that mentor is not enough because they're often outside of the sphere of influence in your current position. And while they can offer great advice and coaching, they may not be able to help you directly advance. >>That's the role of the third type of influencer. Somebody that I call an advocate, an advocate is someone that's in a position to directly influence your advancement and champion you and your capabilities to others. They are in influential positions and others place, great value in their opinions. Advocates stay with you throughout your career, and they'll continue to support you and promote you wherever you are and wherever they are, whether that's the same organization or not. They're the ones who, when a leadership position opens up will say, I think Mary's the right person to take on that challenge, or we need to move in a new direction. I think Mary's the right person to lead that effort. Now advocates are the most important people to identify early on and often in your career. And they're often the most overlooked people early on, often pay too much attention and rely on their management chain for advanced managers, change on a dime, but mentors and advocates are there for you for the long haul. And that's one of the unique things about the database culture. Those set of advocates were just there already because they had focused on building the next generation. So I consider, you know, Mike Carey is my father and Mike Stonebraker is my grandfather. And Jim gray is my great-grandfather and they're always there to advocate for me. >>That's like a scheme and a database. You got to have it all white. They're kind of teed up. Beautiful, great advice. >>Thank you for that. That was really a masterclass. And that's going to be great advice for folks really trying to figure out how to play the cards they have a and the situation and to double down or move and find other opportunities. So great stuff there. I do have to ask you Maira, thanks for coming on the technical side and the product side Couchbase Capella was launched, uh, in conjunction with the event. What is, what is the bottom line for that as, as an operations and engineering, you know, built the products and roll it out. What's the main top line message for about that product? >>Yeah, well, we're very excited about the release of Capella and what it brings to the table is that it's a fully managed in an automated database cloud offering so that customers can focus on development and building and improving their applications and reducing the time to market without having to worry about the hard problems underneath and the operational database management efforts that come with it. Uh, as I mentioned earlier, I started my career as a UVA and it was one of the most sought after and highly paid positions in it because operating a database required so much work. So with Capella, what we're seeing is, you know, taking that job away from me, I'm not going to be able to apply for a DBA tomorrow. >>That's great stuff. Well, great. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate congratulations on the company and public offering this past summer in July and thanks for that great commentary and insight on the QPR. Thank you. >>Thank you very much. >>Okay. Mary Ross, VP of engineering operations at Couchbase part of Couchbase connect online. I'm John furry host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> This is Dave Vellante, and I'd like to welcome you back to The Cube's coverage of Couchbase ConnectONLINE, where the theme of this event is Modernize Now. And one of the big announcements is Capella, which of course, as you all undoubtedly know, is the brightest star in the constellation Auriga, which is Latin for Charioteer. Yup, you can find that in the constellation, that constellation in the night sky in late Feb, early March, in the Northern hemisphere. So with that little tidbit, I'd like to welcome in Scott Anderson to The Cube, who's the Senior Vice President of Product Management and Business Operations at Couchbase. Scott, welcome. Good to see you. >> Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, it's our pleasure. So, you've launched Couchbase Capella. If I understand correctly, it's built on Couchbase server 7, which you launched just a few months ago in the middle of the Summer. Can you give us an overview of Capella? >> Yeah, absolutely. So Couchbase Capella, is our fully managed databases service for enterprise applications. One of the goals of launching Capella and our database as a service offering that we just announced today is, about increasing the accessibility of Couchbase. So, it's about making it easy for a Developer or an Enterprise to get up and running in just a few clicks and a couple of minutes. And about making it more affordable and accessible through the development phase, through the test phase, the production phase. So really it's about ease of use, having the right offerings aligned to the phase of development that a customer's in, and eventually into the production of their enterprise application, leveraging Capella and Couchbase Server 7. >> So let me ask you, I went pretty deep with Ravi on the, the technical side, and I want to understand, what makes Capella different from some of the competitive offerings? Is it the, sort of the fundamentals that I learned from Ravi about how you guysbhave really done a awesome focus on SQL. But been able to maintain acid compliance, deal with distributed architectural challenges, and then bringing that over to database as a service? Is that the fundamental? What are some of the other differentiators? >> Yeah, that, that is the fundamental. We have an amazing platform that Ravi and our core engineering team have built. And we've talked about that, and I think Ravi mentioned that, the ease of SQL and applying that to a documented oriented database. and combining some of those capabilities with the ease of use. The ability that you can get up and running, signing up for our free trial. Couple of minutes later, you've got a database endpoint that is fully managed by Couchbase. And so we're doing the monitoring. We're doing alerting. We have calls to action based off what events are occurring within the database environment, ensuring it's always available, as well as doing kind of some of the mundane tasks of backup and recovery, scaling the environment upgrades and so forth. So it's really about ease of use making it, leveraging our incredibly robust broad platform, and then making that in different consumable model for our customers and developers and getting started really easily. The other thing that we've done, is really leveraged the best practices over the last 10 or 11 years, if some of the largest enterprises in the world using Couchbase for the mission critical applications. So we've codified those best practices. And that's how we keep that service high performant, always on, highly available. And that's one of the core value propositions that we're able to bring with Capella. It's really that management capability, global visibility of your clusters, coupled with what we believe is the best, no SQL database in the marketplace today. >> What about, what about costs total cost of ownership as you scale, a lot of times when you scale out and you get diseconomies of scale, it's kind of like, you know, you get that negative curve. What are you seeing? >> Yeah, we've done third party benchmark studies, which have proven out how we were able to linearly scale the environment and continue on that curve, as you add nodes, you're getting that incremental performance that you would expect. The other thing that we do that's really unique within in Couchbase is, our multi-dimensional scaling. And this allows you to place our services, things like data index query, full-text search, indexes and analytics. You can co-locate those on single nodes within the cluster, or you can have dedicated nodes for each one of those services. The reason that is important is, you get work-life isolation for those specific services within our cluster. The other thing that you can do is, you can match the compute infrastructure to the needs of each one of those services. So some services like query are much more core compute intensive, and that allows you to have a specific instance type that is optimized for that, reducing your cost. Indexes, where do you want very fast performance? You may want to have a higher amount of memory relative to the number, of course. So that ability to mix and match the infrastructure within the existing cluster, allows us to lower overall costs. That coupled with our blazing fast performance with our in-memory architecture, allows people to get incredible performance at scale. What we've proven out in the study that I mentioned earlier is we have that linear scalability, and you're able to do more for less, at the end of the day. You're getting more operations per second, per dollar, if you want to use that as a metric data. >> Thank you for that. What do customers need to think about when they want to get started with Capella? How difficult is it for people to jump in? >> It is incredibly simple. It's as simple as going to couchbase.com Clicking on start your free trial. You go into that free trial. You provide a minimal set of information for us, and it's literally a few clicks and you're going to have a database endpoint within three minutes. And that's really been a foundation of, of what we've been focused on over the last six to nine months is removing any friction we can in the process. Cause our goal is to give a firm a tremendous user experience and get people up and running as quickly as possible. So we're really, really proud of that. And then from a paid offering perspective, we have a number of offerings which are really aligned to the needs of each customer. Some individuals who want a larger cluster and they want to be able to pay for that, we've optimized service levels around that, in terms of level of support and the features that we think are appropriate for a dev cycle, a test cycle, and then inner production. And lastly, we'll be announcing a number of promotional starter pack bundles. Really trying to couple the overall service that we have with Capella, with some of our expertise. So helping new users get up and running in terms of things like index definitions, what's the best way to do document design and schema within Couchbase. Our end goal, is to match these services and bundles with the life cycle of application development. So in my development phase, what's the offering for me, as I move for production readiness, what services capabilities I need and then production and the ongoing, if I expand my use. So we've been really focused on how do we get people up and running as quickly as possible and how do we get them to production as quickly as possible at the lowest total cost. >> That's nice. That's a nice accelerant for, for customers. So as you heard upfront, I did a little research about the name, Capella. How did you choose it and why? >> Well, one thing I learned early in my career is naming is not a strong suit of mine. I leave that to John our Chief Marketing Officer in the overall team. We all have opinions, but I trust John. And we went through, I think it was over 60 names, seven rounds of debate to come up with Capella. But we wanted a name of strength. We liked the alliteration, Couchbase and Capella together. One of the little facts may have tipped it over is, I believe in Latin, it means little goats. So we kind of played, I'm from the bay area. So I was thinking to Jerry Rice, goat, greatest of all times. So that was nice play on that also. But I leave it to them and really happy with the overall name, love the, literation, love some of the hidden meanings within that. And we're really, really excited about getting it going. So you wouldn't want me to pick the name. I get a vote, but I would say my overall influence is a little bit lower than where John's is and, and Matt Cain, who I know you spoke with previously. >> I love it. Jerry Rice definitely is the little goat. I'm from New England. So of course, we think Tom Brady is the big goat. >> I know, I grew up in that Joe Montana era. So maybe you can take that offline after this interview, we're going to have around debate, but I guess a Superbowl trophies are the ultimate measure at the end of the day. >> Oh wait, I got a little stat for you. So, so Capella is also one of the 88 modern constellations as adopted by the international astronomical union. I.e not one of the ancient constellations. Pretty clever, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Scott, it's great to have you on the cube. Thanks so much, really appreciate it. >> Thank you so much. I really appreciate it All right. Thank you for watching. Our pleasure. Thank you for watching The Cubes coverage of Couchbase Connect 2021. Keep it right there for more great content. (upbeat music)