(upbeat music) >> Back the cube here. I'm John Furrier with the cube. Thanks Adam in the studio. We've got two entrepreneurs here. Co-founders of LastMileXchange, Andrew Hoskin and James Grant. Guys, thanks for coming on the cube, >> John. Good to be here. >> Love to get the entrepreneur, both co-founders making it happen. I mean, the pandemic was either a tailwind or a headwind for companies and certainly the internet didn't break. Everything worked out great. So, let's just jump in, why don't we get into some of the questions. What does LMX do? Who are you guys? Take a quick minute to explain what you guys do. >> Sure. So, we're a software provider. We have a cloud-based SAS platform, which effectively it's a bit like a Skyscanner or an Expedia for networks. Carriers need to buy and sell networks from each other and we help them do that. And we have been in the cloud since day one. And so, that's what we do while we're here and it's a good place for us to tell you about it. >> I got it. I got to ask you, because one of the things being entrepreneur, you've got to read the tea leaves. One of the secrets of being a co-founder and doing anything entrepreneurial these days is you got to see the future, but then you've got to come back to the present and convince everybody, what's going on. >> Entrepreneurs: Yeah. >> What is the core value proposition? What's the day in the life of a conversation? I mean you're talking to Martians now, like, huh? What's the public cloud it's like, is it like, isn't it just the internet? It's changing. What's the value proposition? What's the conversation like? >> So, the value position for us is that we, you know, we work with our customers to accelerate the sales cycle through cloud based services. So, a lot of our customers are global tier one carriers. So, we're looking to automate their connectivity pricing, and we do that via a cloud-based solution. So it is vital to us. And particularly with having customers all across the globe, being able to sort of deploy cloud-based services makes life much easier. >> I got to ask you, one of the things that we love about cloud is the agilities. >> Yeah. >> Can you talk about the impact of what you guys are offering for the agility side. What's the impact of the consumer, the application developer, what's the impact? >> Clouds have a big play for us, big impact for our customers. So we provide our solution effectively, almost a plug and play for them. So, we do quoting really, really well. You want to know where a network is, you want to know the connectivity, we'll sort that out for you, and we can give you a solution that they can plug into their systems really quickly. In terms of, for us, when we first started, we had servers in data centers and managing software on that, but we moved to Amazon pretty early. And what we now have is, we can spin up a new customer environment in a day, which you know, from previously two, three weeks. So, cloud has been transformational for us and hopefully for our customers as well. >> And you guys target mainly carriers? >> Very much so, yeah. We're very much in the big carrier Telco space. The people that provide the fabric upon which all of this sits. >> Yeah. And then by the way, it's magic and this, it's robust. It's what we need, utilities, it's important. Last mile, obviously, as we all, some people look at it and say, go back decades, rug ban, you know, last mile is always that last nut to crack. 5G's here, the mobile sector is looking at massive growth. You're starting to see the cloud providers recognize that the edge is just another network connection. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> How do you guys see that evolving? What's going on? How do you see that affecting your business, the customers on the market? >> Well, so network, I mean, access is all about getting onto the network, whether you're talking cloud or whatever. So, if you can't get into the network, cloud is nothing. If you can't sort of back haul your 5G, you're stuck. So, what we're seeing is, even with 5G, as it rolls out, as people look to densify their networks, they still need to get all that voice stuff, all that data traffic onto fiber. So, we're seeing a lot of interest there still in knowing where connectivity options are, knowing where the network is. With James also, I mean, that other aspect of access, 10 years ago was all about fiber. But you were just telling me before about how increasingly carriers are using 5G as effectively a router in a box, ship it in by a DPD or FedEx out to a customer. >> Yeah. So typically we'll think about mobile as connecting your mobile phone, but now we're looking at sort of, mobile connecting buildings. And one of the key challenges when you're connecting a building with mobile is what the actual connectivity within the building is. So, often we will see mobile maps that show you that sort of connectivity at sort of, the outside level. But of course, you're actually going to have your infrastructure in the building. So, you need to know what the straight signal strength is there. So, we're actually working with a partner at the moment so that we can identify within a building, what the quality of the signal is. >> I mean, that's class, if you think about like, most people think of, oh, it just drops to the end point and then you've got more network behind it, wireless. You got now to work at home dynamics, IOT devices. So, you guys have the buy-sell side of things going on, you got the carriers buying and selling there. >> Entrepreneurs: Yeah, absolutely. >> And then, SD WAN is a huge market, >> Andrew: Absolutely. >> That's growing and, as well. >> And all of that relies on access. Do you know what I mean? Like, you can talk 5G, you can talk IOT. And of course, those are the exciting, sexy things in the industry. But underpinning all of that is a network. And you mentioned the word before and it's right, utility, you know, maybe it's not the sexy side of things, but you've got to have it, otherwise, nothing else works. >> You know, one of the things we do a lot of cloud cover, we cover all of Amazon shows here coming into Telco, the Telco, digital revolution that's going on here, you can see it. And some people aren't ready for it. Almost like, reminds me of the mainframe days back when I was growing up in college, it's like, oh, I'm not, I don't want to do the mainframe. I'm the new guy, I'm the young kid. I love this, a PC and mini computers. Here, it's the same thing. It's kind of like, okay, I see the cloud, but when you have infrastructure as code, >> Yeah. >> Everything gets fuzzy. >> Yeah. >> I mean, now you're talking about programmability. So, that edge at the application level, some say it's going to be a massive innovation enabler, which is going to change that infrastructure's code, which means that guys like you guys got to be able to provide programmable routes, programmable and, >> Yeah. And APR is our, and the programmability of the network, the whole interplay from whether it's quoting, whether it's ordering, whether it's delivering services, whether it's kind of somebody going into somewhere and saying, "I'd like a, a hundred gig into this building", pressing a button and 15 minutes later, everything rolls together to turn it up, is where the whole industry is going. >> Let's take that for a second. >> Sure. >> Just a mind blowing scenario right there. Sounds simple. >> Yeah. >> Compared to where we were just 15 years ago. >> Yeah. >> That scenario didn't exist. >> No. >> And it's hard. It's not trivial. >> No. >> It's not non-trivial. All right. So what's this mean for customers? Are they like buying this level now, like, are they like, where are they on the spectrum of, you know, buying and the progression of operationalizing their business to be fully robust, network end to end, visibility on workloads to network? >> I would say it often depends where the customer is. So, obviously we deal with global customers and that's one of our big selling points is that, you know, a lot of people are focusing on the US, the Western European market, you know, and the connectivity challenges that they're trying to solve there. Our customers have global customers who are looking for connectivity all throughout world. And often there'll be things like mining companies who don't have fiber going into them. And so, we need to be able to work with our customers and their suppliers to be able to automate everything, because you can only fully quote a network when you've got all the locations back. And if you're waiting for information coming back from Africa or from the former CIS, then you know, you're going to have a problem. And we're working with companies in Africa and Russia, Kazakhstan, at the moment to help them automate everything. >> You know what's interesting, I just, my mind just goes nuts here when thinking about what you guys do, because as people start rolling their own with applications, they're going to need to have this programmability, like almost on demand, they're going to need to have, I want to do a digital TV network, I want to provision something or something's hybrid or at the edge. >> You've got a football game, or you've got something like this where you need capacity, you need it quickly. You need it for an event. >> Yeah, exactly. And 5G's perfect. I mean, how many times we've all been at a soccer game or a football game. It's like, I got bars but I have no back haul. Like we all been there. >> Yeah. >> Why, oh? >> Saturated the network and everyone's doing the same thing. >> The radios working, the back haul's choking. I mean, this is real. >> Absolutely. >> How does, does 5G solve that? I mean, where does that get, how does that get solved? I mean, is it going to be ubiquitous? Truly 5G going to make us all work better? I mean, certainly for the end use of 5G is it provides speed, it provides capacity. And also for the operators it provides being able to get more people onto it. And so, and 5G is not my core strength, but it absolutely will be transformative. What I can comment on is, like you say, for an event like this or the football or anything, the Euros, it ultimately goes into a pipe. So, you've got to make sure that you've got to have the right connectivity there and the right capacity there, from the user's phone, through the towers, all the way into the network, all the way to the data center and back again. So the edge, everything, has to play together to do that, and probably, rolling it out quickly and making sure it's agile and making sure it's fast and making sure it's quick and reliable. That's what needs to all work together. I liked how you said you know, the Expedia of the networks. >> Andrew: Yeah. >> That immediately in my mind says, okay, ease of use. >> Andrew: Yeah. >> From consumption standpoint, what's the next level of growth for you guys? I'm almost imagining is programmability or cloudifying or amplifying it, make it rain. >> Yeah, certainly we are going to continue to push into, yeah, effectively digital transformation in fact, across telecoms is happening. You would think there would be a lot further ahead than it is. It's not. There are a lot of people still quoting, ordering manually. So, we're very much part of that, but certainly the ordering and the provisioning, like we've mentioned, that's a big part, but for the industry, and we're going to hopefully be part of that, or we expect to be part of that. So that's, and making sure that connectivity is there when you need it. You know, I'm here, what's there? A bit like flights, I'd like to fly to New York. Who can do it, how much will it cost? I'll buy that one please. And that's what networks should be as well. >> James, what's your vision on how the customers are progressing in their mindset? Obviously, you've got the blocking and tackling to do, you're in the market. Where are they going with the use case and the application? >> The customers are getting to the stage where they're expecting to be able to go into a portal and turn up services. So, as with many things that we're seeing throughout life today, you can go into an app, you can press a couple of buttons and you can, you can order something. So, that's what they're expecting is to be able to just go and say, I need a hundred mg here, press a few buttons. And in 10 minutes time, the circuit's not only quoted, but it's provisioned. At the moment, there's this sort of a digital divide between those that have the digitization in place and those that don't. And that's the sort of the key that we're trying to sort of help the industry with is the sort of the, the outliers and, and also the main carriers to make sure that it's not a sort of, a digital haves and a digital have-nots. >> I was just going to say that. So, if you have the digital haves and have-nots, is that a function of them just not being operationalized in their digitization? Or is it they're not set up for it or they don't have you guys? What's that have-not side of it? How do they become the haves? >> One of the biggest challenges is actually around the sort of, identifying the connectivity at a particular location. So, in some countries it's very easy to do, like the US, UK, Netherlands. We have nice sort of standard address formatting, and you can identify a building at roof level. And when it comes to turning up connectivity straight away, you want to make sure that you turn up the connectivity to the right building. And that's one of the challenges that we're seeing throughout sort of, some of the Eastern European and the LatAm, the Asian and the African markets. >> I mean, we saw what happened with Amazon instances. You've got spot instances, you get reserved instances, you're starting to see that mindset. That's a SAS mindset. >> Yeah. >> That's kind of where things are going. Is that, you guys see the same thing here or is it different? >> Yeah. Well, certainly at the enterprise space, they tend to make decisions over a longer scale. So there, maybe not so much that you sign contracts in a year's term et cetera, but yeah, certainly as a provider, a SAS provider, using all those things, the ability to to tune your expenses, tune your costs, even your resource, you know, you're turning up servers by the hour, by the minute is a big thing. And it takes a mindset change for us and our customers. >> If you don't mind me asking, how long have you guys been doing business as co-founders, when did it start? What was the guiding principle? How do you guys look back now? >> James and I met working for Verizon many years ago. You might've heard of them. And, we sort of did what we do now, in as much as James ran the commercial side of things, I ran the software side of things and we saw that connectivity was a universal problem. And so we saw our opportunity. We went out, we started LastMileXchange. We pivoted once or twice, still in the same space, but we eventually realized that where we are now was what the industry needed. And that's where we've been pushing now for quite a few years. >> I want to give you guys a lot of credit and a lot of props, congratulations. I think, you know, the digital divide has been a broadband challenge for many, many years and decades. Now, you've got that urban divide where people don't have access. And I heard stories during the pandemic that people had access in the region, but couldn't get it to the home, affordability, access, devices. These are new issues, the digital divide, they have connectivity options. >> Andrew: Yeah. >> But it's not really clear yet. So, you're starting to see a lot more of that going on. Of course, the rural areas. >> Andrew: Yeah. >> I live out in the countryside on a farm. So, I'm quite used to their challenges of connectivity. You know, when I first moved into my house, I ended up having to get to way satellite broadband and things have improved now. But when we're talking about 5G, you have people in London, they have 5G. 5G is something that I'm not going to see for three, four years probably. >> Globally, it'll democratize access because like we were saying, we're sitting in an enterprise. You can send out a rooter or a router with a SIM card in it. I mean, you can give a kid a mobile phone in the middle of, you know, Kenya, and he can have access to the world through the internet. So, you know, that increased capacity, that increased densification of networks. Okay, they're not all going to be on 5G today. James hasn't got 5G and he only lives 30 minutes out of London. But 3G, 4G, I think the gentlemen on one of the keynotes was talking there about 3G Plus. You know, effectively, that's going to roll out. The 5G's are going to be in New Yorks and London, but, >> Like, it's going to be bring your own G to your house soon. And I think this space ops is going to be great. And I think overall, just overall, the challenges and the topologies, you're going to start to see diversity in the network topology, and actually it's going to explode. >> Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. >> Going to be super exciting. Well, again, I think you guys are under something big. I think this idea of sasifying, making things programmable, infrastructure as code is going to be pretty big. So, thanks for coming on. And what's your take, real quick, of Cloud City. >> It's been great. We've just walked in. We both said, as we came in, we came in yesterday to set up and we were really blown away and the rest of our team arrived today and they were very impressed as well. I was going to say Telco D on the team, have done a really impressive job. >> I think you have to come here and see it to believe it because when we walked in, it was just like, this place is stunning. >> Awesome. Well that's the cube coverage, we're rocking and rolling here. We're going back to the studio to see Adam and the team. Back to you.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel AWS and our community partners. Welcome everyone to the Cube virtual and our coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit, which is part of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Today we're talking about the green Cloud and joining me is Kishore Dirk. He is Accenture Senior Managing director Cloud First Global Services lead. Thank you so much for coming on the show Key Shore. >>Nice to meet you, Rebecca. >>Great to have you. Yeah. So I want to start by asking you what it is that we mean when we say green cloud. We know the sustainability is a business imperative. So many organizations around the world are committing to responsible innovation lowering carbon emissions. But what does this? What does it? What does it mean when they talk about cloud from a sustainability perspective? >>E think it's about responsible innovation. Green Cloud is a thoughtful cloud first approach that helps boost profits and benefit the clients for helping reduce carbon emissions. Think about it this way. And you have a large number of data centers and each of these data centers are increasing by 14% every year, and this double digit growth comes with the price of Becca. What you're seeing is these global data centers consume a lot of power on the consumption is nearly pull into the consumption of a country like Spain. So the magnitude off the problem that is out there and and how do we pursue a green approach if you look at this hour? Accenture Analysis In terms of the migrations to public crowd, we have seen that we can reduce that by 59 million tons of CO two per year and with just the 5.9% reduction in top lighting emissions. And he creates this toe 22 million cars off the road. And the magnitude of reduction can go a long way. Meeting climate change commitments, particularly poor data sensitive businesses. >>Wow, that's incredible. What you're the numbers that you're putting forward are absolutely mind blowing. So how does it work? Is it a simple cloud migration? So, you know, >>when companies begin their cloud journey and and then they confront off with them a lot of questions. The decision to make uh, in this particular element sustainable in their solution and benefits. They drive and they had to make vice choices. And then they will gain unprecedented level of innovation, leading to both greener planet as well as a a green of balance sheet. I would say eso effectively. It's all about ambition. Greater the ambition, greater the reduction in carbon emissions. So from a cloud migration perspective, we look at it as a simple solution with approaches and sustainability. Benefits are that very based on things. It's about selecting the right cloud provider, very carbon thoughtful provider and the first step towards a sustainable cloud journey. And here we're looking at clown operators. You know, obviously they have different corporate commitments towards sustainability and that determines how they plan, how they build their the data centers, how they our and consume connections that operate there and how they retire their data centers. Then, uh, the next element that you want to do is how do you build it? Ambition, You know, for some of the companies, on average on Prem drives about 65% energy reduction and the carbon emission reduction of about 84% which is kind of OK and good I would say, But then, if you could go up to 98% by configuring applications to the cloud, that is significant benefit for for the world. And obviously it's a greener cloud that we're talking about. And then the question is, How far can you go? And, you know, obviously the companies have to unlock greater financial, societal environmental benefits. And essential has this cloud based circular operations and sustainable products and services that that you bring into play. So it's a It's a very thoughtful, broader approach that we're bringing and in terms off just a simple concept off migration s. >>So we know that in the covert era, shifting to the cloud has really become a business imperative. How is Accenture working with its clients at a time when all of this movement has been accelerated? How do you partner and what is your approach in terms of helping them with their migrations? >>Yeah, I mean, let me talk a little bit about the pandemic and the crisis that is there today, and and if you really look at that in terms of how your partner with a lot of our clients in terms of the cloud first approach. I'll give you a couple of examples. We've worked with Rolls Royce, McClaren, DHL and others as part of the ventilator UK Charon Consortium again to, uh, coordinate production of medical ventilators urgently needed for the UK Health Service. Many of these firms have taken similar initiatives in terms off, you know, from perfume manufacturers hand sanitizers. And to answer it is, is and again leading passion levels, making BP and again at the U. N. General Assembly. We launched the end to end integration Guy that helps company essentially to have a sustainable development goes. And that's how we're parting at a very large scale. Andi, if you really look at how we work with our clients and what's Accenture's role there? Uh, you know, from in terms of our clients, you know there are multiple steps that we look at. One is about planning, building, deploying and managing an optimal green color solution. And Accenture has this concept off helping clients for the platform to kind of achieve that goal. And here we're having. We're having a platform called Minor, which has a model called Green Clad Advisor, and this is the capability that helps you provide optimal green cloud, you know, a business case and obviously blueprint for each of our clients. And right from the start in terms off, how do we complete lower migration recommendation toe on improve solution accuracy to obviously bringing in the end to end perspective? You know, with this green clad adviser capability, we're helping our clients capture what we call it the carbon footprint for existing data centers and provide, uh, I would say the current cloud C 02 emissions core that you know, obviously helps them with carbon credits that can further their green agenda. So essentially, this is about recommending a green index score reducing carbon footprint for migration, migrating for green a cloud. And it really look at how accentuate itself is practicing. What we preached. 95% of the applications are in the cloud, and this migration has helped us. Uh, toe lied to about $42.5 million in benefit and in the third year, and and another three million analyzed costs that are saved through rightsizing service consumption. So it's a very broad umbrella and a footprint in terms of having engage societally with the U. N our clients. And what is it that we exactly bring to our clients in solving a specific problem? >>Accenture isn't is walking the walk as you say? >>Yes, So that that is that we we practice what we preach, and that is something that we take it to heart. We want toe have a responsible business and we want to practice it. And we want to advise our clients around that >>you are your own use case, and so they they know they can take your advice. So talk a little bit about the global, the cooperation that's needed. We know that conquering this pandemic is going to take a coordinated global effort and talk a little bit about the great reset initiative. First of all, what is that? Why don't we? Why don't we start there? And then we could delve into it a little bit more. >>Okay, so before we get to how we're cooperating, the great recent initiative is about improving the state of the world, and it's about a group of global stakeholders cooperating to simultaneously manage the direct consequences of their Cohen 19 prices andan spirit of this cooperation that you're seeing during Court 19 which will obviously either toe post pandemic project will the worth pressing issues. As I say, we're increasing companies to realize combined potential of technology and sustainable impact, to use enterprise solutions to address with urgency and scale and obviously multiple challenges that are facing our world. One of the ways that you're increasing, uh, companies to reach their Venus cloud with extensions cloud strategy is to build a solid foundation that is resilient. I would prefer to faster to the current as well as future times. Now, when you think of Cloud as the foundation that drives the digital transformation, it's about scale, speed, streamlining your operations and obviously reducing costs. And and as these businesses sees the construct of cloud first, they must remain obviously responsible and trusted. Now think about this right as part of our analysis that profitability can co exist with responsible and sustainable practices. Let's say that on the data centers migrated from on from the cloud based, we estimate, you know, that would reduce carbon emissions globally by 60 million tons for years. Andi, think about it this way, right? Easier Metric will be taking out 22 million cars off the road Thea Other examples that you've seen right in terms off the NHS work that they're doing in UK to build, uh, you know, a Microsoft teams were in based integration and the platform he rolled out for 1.2 million in it. Just users Onda. About 16,000 users there were able to secure instant messages, you know, obviously complete audio video calls and host working meetings across England. So this this work that we did with NHS is is something that we're collaborating with a lot of fools and powering businesses, not marriage. >>Well, you're vividly describing the business case for sustainability. What do you see as the future of cloud when thinking about it through this lens of sustainability and also going back to what you were talking about in terms of how you are helping your fostering cooperation within these organizations? >>That's a very good question, because so if you look at today, right, businesses are obviously environmentally aware, and they are expanding efforts to decrease power consumption, carbon emissions, and they want to run a sustainable operational efficiency across all elements of the business. And this is an increasing trend. And there is that option off energy efficient infrastructure in the global market. And this trend is the cloud. First thinking and with the right cloud migration that we've been discussing is what unlocking new opportunity, like clean energy transitions enabled, enabled by cloud based geographic analysis, material based reductions and better data insights. And this is something that, well, we'll drive with obviously faster analytics platform that is out there now. The sustainability is actually the future of business, which is companies that have historically different the financial security or agility benefits to cloud. Now sustainability becomes an imperative for them and our own experience. Accenture's experience with cloud migrations We have seen 30 to 40% total cost of ownership savings on its driving. Ah, greater workloads, flexibility, better service, somebody utilization and obviously more energy efficient public clouds that cost obviously well, that that drive a lot of these enterprise own data centers. So in our view, what we're seeing is that this this, uh, sustainable cloud position helps helps companies to a drive a lot of the goals, in addition to their financial and other goals. >>So what should organizations who are who are watching this interview and saying, Hey, I need to know more. What do you recommend to them and what? Where should they go to get more information on Green Cloud. >>You know, if you're if you're a business leader and you're thinking about which cloud provider is good, how should applications be modernized to meet our day to day needs Which cloud driven innovation should be priorities? Uh, you know, that's why Accenture, uh, from the Cloud First organization and essentially to provide the whole stack of cloud services to help our clients become a cloud first business. You know, it's all about exhibition. The digital transformation innovating faster, creating differentiated and sustainable value for our clients. And we're powering it up with 70,000 cloud professionals, $3 billion investment and bringing together unmasked depth and breadth of cloud services for our clients in terms of plant solutions and obviously the ecosystem partnership that we have that we're seeing today, Andi assets that help our clients realize that goes on and again toe do reach out to us way can help them to two men, obviously an optimal, sustainable cloud for solution that meets the business needs and being unprecedented levels of innovation. Our experience will be an advantage. And now more than ever, Rebecca. >>So just closing us out here, Do you have any advice for these companies who are navigating a great deal of uncertainty? We What? What do you think? The next 12 to 24 months. What do you think that should be on the minds of CEOs as they go >>forward. So as CEOs are thinking about rapidly leveraging cloud migrating to cloud off, one of the elements that we want them to be thoughtful about is can they do that with unprecedented level of innovation, but also build a greener planet and a greener balance sheet? If we can achieve this balance and and kind off have, ah, have, ah, world, which is greener. I think the world will win and we all along with extension of clients, will win. That's what I will say, Rebecca. >>That is an optimistic outlook, and I will take it. Thank you so much. Key shore for coming on the show. >>Thank you so much. >>That was Accenture's Key Shore. Dirk Rebecca. Night. Stay tuned for more of the Cube virtual coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit

>>from around the globe. It's >>the Q with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. Hello. I'm John for a host of the Cube. We're here covering A W. S s international public sector virtual event. We have a great guest. The star of the program is Max Peterson, Good friend of the Cube. Also Vice President of A W s International for Public Sector Max. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on this virtual remote interview. Cuban interview. Hey, >>John. Great to be back on the Cube, even if it is virtual >>well, you know, we're not face to face. We have to go virtual. So the cube virtual, you've got to public sector summit. Virtual. Um, this is the time of the year where normally we'd be out on the road in Bahrain, Japan, Asia, Pacific Europe. We'd be out on the summits talking to all the guests and presenting that the update on public sector. But we have to do it remotely. Um, a little bit of trade off. The good news is with cove it for at least you guys. It's a global media network. And with these remote interviews. Uh, public sector is seeing a lot more global activity, and that's what I want to get your thoughts on. What is the business update internationally for public sector? I'm sure that with CO over the pandemic, you're seeing a lot of activity. How is the public sector business doing internationally? >>John, You know, you mentioned one of the silver linings of a pretty bad situation with the Koven pandemic. And that's been that it has meant that people have to be resourceful. Governments have to be resourceful on DSO. There's been a tremendous amount of innovation people have gotten used to now using modern cloud technology to support remote work and remote war learning. Um, out of necessity, we've had to figure out how do we deliver far greater health care services using digital technology, telemedicine, digital social care, uh, chime rooms? Uh, it really, in a nutshell, has been a tough six months for people, but a relative relatively busy six months for innovation. And for i t for the public sector customers, >>you know, I did an interview a few months ago for one of the award programs in Canada. Um, with the center had a customer on disk customers. The classic customer, a Amazon. You know, I'm not sure we do it all internally. He deployed A W S Connect in literally days that saved the lives of many of his countrymen and women by getting the entitlement checks out. And he was a glowing endorsement because, he said, with Cove in 19 they were crippled. He said they will. They stood up a call center and literally he was converted. That's just one example again. That's Canada of the kind of solutions that you guys air, enabling with Cloud to quickly respond to the crisis, to use technology to solve other technology problems and also business problems. Can you give an example on the international front of where you're seeing some activity? Because this seems to be the same pattern we're seeing, People who have used in the cloud we cube virtual. Will there be no Cuba's wasn't for our cloud implementations, but this is, um, obvious, but I want to call it out. It's important. Can you share some examples of people internationally using the cloud to get and respond to the to the cove in 19 pandemic in delivering services? >>Yeah, In fact, John, we're focusing a lot on that at the public sector summit online that comes up here in October. Um, a couple of quick examples. In fact, one of the top learnings is speed matters. And so we have Eve Curry from Australia, who talks about social and health care and how they were able to get a complete digital suite up and running for supporting 5000 elderly patients and over 3000 employees in less than a week, and that included getting up and running a video conferencing and tele consultation capability using AWS chime. It involved getting up and running collaboration space for the remote workers using work work docks. And it involves setting up a complete call center on the cloud, using Amazon time and literally that was done in less than a week. Another example, really ambitious example, which again is a testament to the innovation and, uh, the capability, the capability that AWS brings to customers. I'm in India. They had a number of tele medicine applications. They were available for a fee, but they didn't have a universal way to reach the vast population in India. And so when the pandemic hit three organization that was responsible for the public health component was challenged to get a no cost tele consultation hella medicine system up and running for outpatient services that could scale to reach a billion people. Um, they did that in 19 days. They got the system up and running Now hasn't gotten to a billion people online at one time. But there right now, doing 6000 consultations a day with about 4000 doctors, and they're headed toward 100,000 consultations today. Eso just to your point, speed and scale. We're seeing it across the board from from our public sector customers. >>You know, it's just mind boggling just to kind of pinch myself from it in 19 days. It's crazy, right? I mean, crazy fast If you throw back to the eighties and nineties when I broke into the business, you know, young gun client server was all the rage back then. And if you wanted to do, like a big apt upon an oracle s a p, whatever it was years, it was months just to do planning. E mean, I mean, think about the telemedicine example 19 days. That's huge. I mean, just the scale is just off the charts. So So I mean, even if you're not a believer in cloud I don't feel should be should just go home and retire at this point because it's just obvious. Uh, the question I wanna ask you specifically because Theresa brought this up on my last interview with her. And I wanna ask you the same question is, what is AWS doing specifically to help customers? I know customers are helping themselves. You mentioned that. What are you guys doing? Toe? Accelerate this. How are you helping of you guys changed a little bit. Can you just share what you guys specifically doing to help customers pivot toe not only solving it, but having a growth strategy behind it? >>Yeah, John, that's a great question. Some of the things that we're doing our long standing programs and so customers from day one have had a need for skills and workforce development. We keep on doubling down on those programs. Things like a W s academy aws educate our restart programs in different countries. So number one is we continue to help customers double down on getting the right cloud skills to enable the digital workforce. The second thing, in fact, if I can, for just amendment, um, there is actually a section of the public sector online called the New Workforce, which talks about both the digital skills that are required and then also some of the remote working skills that we need to help folks with. So So workforce is a big one. Um, the second one. Yeah, and I'm super excited about this because we've opened up the opportunity, form or customers around the globe to participate in our city on the Cloud Challenge Onda That gives a great opportunity to showcase and highlight the innovation of public sector customers and, you know, win some AWS credits and technical assistance to help them build their programs. But I think one of the most the things I'm most proud about in the last 6 to 9 months was when the when this pandemic struck and we listen to our customers about what they needed. We came out with something called the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative, and that was a program specifically aimed at providing technical assistance. Um, a ws cloud credits all to researchers to help them, um, tackle the tough questions that need to be answered to help us deal with and then hopefully resolve the pandemic. >>So on the international front, like I said earlier in the open, we would've been in Bahrain. That's a new region, only a couple of years old, Obviously the historic, um this, um, geopolitical things happening there, opening things up, that's been a very successful region. This is the playbook. Can you just give us an update on some of the successes in the different regions by rain and then a pack and other areas? What? Some of the highlights? >>Sure, John, One of the things that I think it's super exciting is that all of these customers are developing new capabilities right now. Um, one example from Egypt. Uh, they had to get literally an entire student population back to school. When the pandemic hit on DSO. They quickly pivoted to bringing a online learning management system or LMS up on the cloud on AWS. Um, and they have been able to continue to teach classes, literally to millions of students there. We've seen that same sort of distance learning online education across the globe. Another example would be when countries needed to figure out how to beam or effective in that sort of time tested, contact tracing process. So So when ah person has been found to have the the flu or the illness the subject illness, um, they typically have a lot of manual contact tracers that have to try to identify kind of where that person's been and see if they can. Then, um, helped to control the spread of whatever the diseases Kobe 19. In this case, um, we put together with governments across the world with a W s partners across the world again in very fast order, automated systems to help governments manage this, um, Singapore is a super example. India's a massively scaled example, but we did it in countries of across the globe, and we did it by working with them and the partners there to specifically respond to their needs. So everybody's case, while similar at a high level, you know, was unique in the way that they had to implement it. >>And it's been a great, great ride international us with co vid. You guys have ah current situation. You guys are providing benefits and I'll see the cloud itself for the customer to build those modern APS. The question I wanna ask you, Max, as an executive at eight of yourself. So you've been in the industry, Um, with public sector pre covert, it's, you know, it's before Cove. And there's after Govind is gonna be kind of like that demarcation line in the society. Um, it has become a global thing. I just did an event with Cal Poly was mentioned before we came on, um, small little symposium that would have been, you know, face to face. But because we did it virtually it's now global reinvents coming up. That's gonna be essentially virtual. So it's gonna be more global, less physical, space to face. Everything is introduced, no boundaries. So how >>does that >>impact? How do you How do you guys, How do you look at that? Because it impacts you, I guess a little bit because there's no boundaries, >>right? You know, John, I think this plays into what we're talking about in terms of people and governments and organizations getting used to new ways of working on de so some of our new workforce development is based around that, not just the digital skills in the cloud skills a couple of the things that we've recognized by the way, Um, it's different, but done well, there's new benefits. And so so one of the things that we've seen is where people employ chime, for instance, Uh, video conferencing solution or solutions from our partners like Zoom and others. Onda people have been able to actually be Maurin touch, for instance, with elder care. Um, there were a number of countries that introduced shielding. That meant that people couldn't physically go and visit their moms and dads. Um and so what we've seen is a number of systems on care organizations that have responded andare helping thing the elderly, uh, to use this new tech on. But it's really actually, uh, heartwarming, uh, to see those connections happen again, even in this virtual world. And the interesting thing is, you can actually step up the frequency on DSO. You don't have to be there physically, but you can be there, Andi and interact and support with the number of these thes tools. I think one of the other big learnings that we've seen for many organizations and just about every public sector group has toe work with, um uh, their constituents on the phone. Of course, we've got physical offices, you know, whether it's a hospital or a outpatient center or a social care center. Um, but you always have to have a way to work on phones. What's happened during the Cove in 19 Pandemic is there's been a surge is where information needed to get out to citizens or where citizens literally rushed the phone lines to be able to get the most current information back. Andi, the legacy called systems have been completely overwhelmed, their inadequate. And we've seen customers launch the online call center in the cloud piece, using Amazon connect as their starting point. But then, you know, continuously innovating. And so starting to use things like Lex to be able to deliver a chat box function, Um, in the in the US, for example, one of our partners, Smartronix, was able to automate the welfare and social care systems for a number of different states to the point now where 90 plus percent of those calls get initially handled, satisfied using a chat bots, which frees up agents the deal, you know, with the more difficult inbound calls that they get. >>I gotta ask you, where do we go from here? What's next for these organizations? Post Covad World. You know, if we're sitting at a cocktail party was sitting down having dinner or where he talking remotely here, how would you? How would you explain to me what's what's next? Where do we go from here? And how do organizations take that next post co vid recovery and growth? What's your take? >>And John? I think that's a fantastic question to ask. Let me tell you what we learn from our customers every day because we see them try and do new things. If I had to take my sort of crystal ball, I think we're in version one of figuring out How do we work in this new environment? I think there's a couple of key things that we're going to see. Number one. Um, resilience and continuity of service is not gonna be optional. Everybody is coming to expect that government care, not for profits. Education is going to be able to seamlessly continue to deliver the core services irrespective of these world events or emergencies on B C customers. Now you know, really getting that right. It used to take. You talked about it? Um, heck, you couldn't get a system up and running in 19 days. You'd be lucky if you cut a purchase order in 19 days and citizens and constituents that aren't going to accept that anymore, right? That's one big, uh, change that I think is with us. And we'll keep on driving cloud adoption. I think the next one is how do we start putting the pieces together in ways that make some of this invisible and an example? Um, you know, kind of starts with that with that example in the US with partner that was building systems to help, uh, welfare and social care call centers operate smoother. But if you think about the range of AWS services and the building blocks that customers have, we'll find customers starting to create that virtual experience in aversion to dot away where they tie the contact center into chat box and into transcription. Like, for instance, being able to have a conversation with the parents and using comprehend medical actually get a medically accurate transcription. So the doctor can focus on that patient interaction and not on actually data captured, right, and then if that patient asks. Well, g Doc, could you give me more information about, you know, X y z, uh, medication, or about what a course of treatment sounds like? Instead of tying up the doctors time, you could go and use a tool like Amazon Polly to then go text to speech and give all of that further rich information to that citizen. Um e think some of them things. Same scenarios, right? How do we go from this? This very fast version one dot response to a a mawr immersive, less tech evident capability that strings these things together that to meet kind of unique use cases or unique needs. >>Yeah, I think that's totally right. I think you know the 19 days. Yeah, I'm blown away by that. But I think you know, we thought about agility. That was a cloud term. Being more agile with your code business. Agility has come on the scene and then with business agility you have I call I call business latency. Andi, you went from years to months, months, two days. And I think now, as you get into the decks versions, it's days, two hours, hours, two minutes, hours two seconds Because when you look at the scale of the cloud some of things we were talking what's going on? Space force and globally around with space Leighton See, technically and business late and see this is the new dynamic and it's gonna be automation. Ai these air. This is the new reality. I think co vid points that out. Uh, what's your reaction to that? And give a final message to the AWS international community out there on on how to get through this and what you guys are doing? >>Yeah, John, I think your observation is you know that increasingly, uh, there needs to be a connectedness between the services that thes public sector customers deliver on dso Um, that connectedness can be in terms of making sure that a citizen who eyes on their life journey doesn't need to continuously explain to government where they're at. But rather, government learns how to create secure, scalable data stores so that so that they understand the journey of the citizen and can provide help through that journey. Eso it becomes mawr citizen centric. I think another example is in the entire healthcare arena where what we have found is that the ability thio to securely collaborate on very complex problems and complex data sets? Uh, like like genomes, um is increasingly important on DSO. I think what you'll find is you'll find we're seeing it today, right? With customers like, uh, Genomics England and the UK Bio Bank were there, in fact, creating these secure collaboration spaces so that the best researchers can work against these very important data sets in a secure, yet trusted collaboration environment. So I think we're seeing much more of that on I would say The third thing that we're probably learning from our customers is just how important that skills and workforce pieces. Um, with the accelerated pace, we continue to see pressure on smart skills, and resource is that our customers need. Fortunately, we've got a great global partner ecosystem, Um, but you'll see us continuing to push that forward as a zone agenda that will help customers with eso. I guess my parting comment would be how could it not be? I hope that the customers that attend the summit are from all over the world. I hope they find something that's useful to them in pursuing their mission and in their journey to the cloud. And John, I just This is always a pleasure to join the Cube. Thanks very much for the time today. Thank >>you, Max. Great. Call out. Just I'll call it out. One more time to amplify the learnings in the workforce development starting younger and younger. The path to get proficiency is quickly. You could be a cloud computing cybersecurity application, modern application development, all hot areas. Uh, the new playbook is cloud. It's all there online. And, of course, Max. Global footprint with the regions, the world has changed, and it's gonna be pretty busy. Time for you. We'll be covering it. Thanks for coming on. >>That's great. Thanks, John. >>Okay, I'm John. Free with the Cube. You're watching any of US? Public sector summit, The international online event. I'm John. Hard to keep your host. Thank you for watching

(fast intro music) >> Narrator: From London England, it's the Cube, covering Coupa Inspire 19 EMEA. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Hey, welcome to The Cube. Lisa Martin coming to you from Coupa Inspire 19 in London. Pleased to welcome one of Coupa's spend setters, joining me now is James Wagstaff, the chief procurement officer of Provident. James, welcome to the Cube. >> Hello, Lisa, nice to be here. >> So you had a very busy day. Thank you for taking some time to talk to me about Provident, what you doing with Coupa. But give our audience an overview of Provident and what you guys do and deliver to your customers. >> Very good, so Provident is a ftse 250 UK financial services business. It lends money to people without access to mainstream lending. Um, so it's real focus is to do that in a responsible, caring way. So if you can't borrow money from Barclays or HSBC, then Provident is a company that will help you get back to access to that mainstream market. >> Individuals as well as like small businesses? >> Consumers, around two million people in the UK currently use Provident, either the credit card or our home credit or our car leasing business. >> Okay, so how long have you been there? >> I have been at Provident now since April of 2018. >> Okay. >> So we're coming up now to, I think 19 months, and we put Coupa into the bank, which is the credit card business in April or April/May. >> Okay talk to me, though, about about your journey in business and finance. One of the things I read about you is that you were encouraged from an early age to really understand all aspects of a business from operations to finance to marketing to truly provide value through procurement. Talk to me about the history there that you have. >> So I'm a big fan of mentor programs. So I think everyone should have a mentor, and I lucked into mine, a chap called Terry, who, for reasons best known to him, took me under his wing. I was quite old when I came to procurement. I was around late 20s, maybe 30, and he had a vision about what great procurement looked like, and it was a holistic view. So procurement at its worst can be very tactical, very cost focused, and Terry was very focused on the bigger picture, about top-line growth not just bottom line, and right from day one, he seeded that in me, and it's been the strength of my career. So I owe Terry, Terry Western, if he's watching, I owe Terry, I owe Terry everything for that. And then I spent the last 10 years as an expat. So prior to Provident, I had three years as the group CPI for VimpelCom, which is the Russian equivalent of Vodafone or AT&T, who have businesses throughout Soviet Union, CIS, and Asia-Pac. And then seven years with Huawei, who are China's largest private company, telecoms company, and I was traveling around the world on the sales side facing procurement. So that was a very sobering enlightening experience to see procurement from the supplier side of the table, and I think it's made me a different procurement person as a result in terms of the way the I treat people and relate to people. So that holistic nature combined with, I think, a very business-centric view of what procurement should do. >> Interesting, though, that you that you said, I got a late start in procurement, but your start was founded upon someone giving you very solid advice of look beyond that because this is an element of the business that can, somebody that clearly was seeing how transformative, but also how it was important for procurement to partner and understand different requirements and needs within each division within an organization, so it sounds like you didn't really grow up in that traditional siloed approach of procurement. >> I did not, and I think that for me it makes my life interesting. So I think if you're in procurement and the danger is you become quite siloed, you're very narrow, and I did my MBA quite recently while I was traveling just to get that bigger perspective. It makes the job fun. I mean, I think you know you can negotiate contract after contract after contract, but it's the context of what that's doing for the business. And I think when I looked at Coupa as a system, it was with that in mind. So looking at Coupa, not from the perspective of what it did for procurement, but how it was for end-user customers. So as a service, was it really, really simple to use? Did it feel like an Amazon shopping experience? Because that drives adoption, and if you can get people wanting to use the system because it's easy, then the data's in the system, and then the data's in the system you can do something with it. So you're not, you're not fighting that adoption issue that you would be on a lot of systems. So if you go to some of the big ERP systems, they can be really hard for people to change and adopt, and Coupa's not been like that. It's been relatively easy. >> Interesting that you talk about it as it needs to be as simple as an Amazon marketplace. As consumers we're so used to that, right. I mean, people transact daily and get fulfillment of whatever product or service they're ordering from Amazon within... Sometimes it's within an hour or two. So we have this expectation and this demand. To your point, though, about wanting to have software that would be as easy for your teams to take up, that consumer effect. Talk to me about that as an influence. Because you know, kind of right away experience with other systems that might be bigger legacy systems that are challenging to get folks to use because they're not that intuitive. Did you know right away when you came into Provident that I need to have something that is more consumer-like. >> I knew that we needed a system and because as a regulated industry, we had to control our spend. So the fact that we needed a procurement system was a given, so then the choice is what do you buy? I think you don't really need a big ERP unless you really want to spend a lot of money on assistant inspirations and complexity. So your then into the mid-market space. And, um, there's a lot of vendors out there that have had an on-premise model, been around a long time, but you can feel that when you use it. So I didn't do a paper-based RFP. I think this is probably a terrible way of evaluating systems because you can get a function list on paper, but that doesn't really tell you what it's like to use. So the procurement process was around video online demos. So getting users into the room, three hours for an online demo walk through the system. So it's a very non-traditional procurement process to buy a procurement system. And I think at the end of that, I think it was a more valuable process for it. >> Was that something that was driven by you or was that something that was driven by Coupa? Is that how they deliver that type of experience? >> It was driven by me, but I think it was welcomed by Coupa. I think, I think from the sales guys I think they do an awful lot of paper-based RFP, and I think it's a challenge because it's very hard to differentiate on paper. Actually, a lot of the systems kind of do the same stuff, but it's not what they do. It's how they do it. And you can't, you can't get that out of the paper. You have to see it and feel it and touch it. >> Exactly. One of the things that Rob Bernshteyn talks about, and he spoke about it this morning, is that the best UI is no UI. And he really talked about what they've done to be user-centric and talked proudly about the adoption that they've had. And you know, it's... We all know whatever software you're putting in an organization, all these, you know, whether its marketing, finance, operation, sales, if people aren't going to use it, it's not going to be able to deliver the value that whoever purchased it and brought it on needs it to do. Talk to me about that user-centric. Did you see and feel that right away in those demos? >> I think if you're a procurement guy, you have suppliers every day send you certain messages, and those messages are fairly consistent around, you know, delivering value and solutions. I mean, Rob's great. He's a bit of a force of nature. Um, you got to say that. But what I like about it is that he's got a very clear sense of vision about what the system should be, and I think he's done a great job of getting that throughout the company, top to bottom. And to date we've felt that. So normally what happens is you buy the software license, you sign the agreement, there's lots of love and care, and then kind of the vendor disappears a little bit, and you're on your own. And to date, Coupa done a great job. We got Damian Pinnell, who's our success manager. I get the sense that he really cares about whether the system is going to do what it promised to do. And how do we get more value out of it? Some of it is about selling more licenses because Coupa have got other modules they want you to buy, but that's kind of okay if the modules are delivering more value, then you don't mind paying for them. But even the modules we own, there is a real sense of are you exploiting it to the max? And that's pretty cool. >> What are some of the key values that you have gleaned so far in just the, what, maybe six months or so that you guys have been using the platform? >> So I'm getting, I'm quite surprised at the extent to the insights, the value I'm getting out of the insights. So as an example, and I'll be honest. Coupa told me that said your, your spend-through catalog is 27% and your industry top quartile is 95. And I kind of went, "Nah, I don't believe you." And then they said, "Your electronic invoicing could be 77%, and you're currently single digits." And I went, "Nah, I don't believe you." And then through the community we spoke to Co-Oper, another Coupa customer, and Marley there was saying, "No, we're doing it. We're at this. "We're at 95% or 97% even." And I went "Well, how are you doing it?" And she just talked me through how they sell it to suppliers and how, in my head, the reluctance to adopt actually evaporated because she was able to sell the idea to suppliers, sell the value as. She didn't force them to do it. She just said this is what you're going to get out of it if you do it this way, and she's genuinely got to 97. So what it's done for me is it's remove my own blockers in my own mind, you know, in my own head "You can't do this." Well, insights and speaking to other communities. Yes, I can. So it's opened my, changed my targets, changed what I think is possible. And I think that's cool. >> You look back to the beginning of your journey in procurement, business, and finance, when you were given this great advice, like "Be open-minded, understand how different parts of the business work," from then to where you are now and what you're able to deliver, in just a short time, leveraging Coupa, would have believed you'd been able to go from there to there? >> Uh, yeah, so Terry would always say to me, you know, if you're going to negotiate a deal, before you even pick up a contract, you would spend an hour with the business owner or the techie or whoever it is, and you just white board, at a technical level, what the solution is. I think that, years and years and years of doing that, of going deeper into technology and software and integration and through deal after deal after deal, when you come to run the project, to implement Coupa, you have that as a foundation. So you're not just at the surface and relying on other technical people because you're lost when you get to this level of detail. You've already got a little bit more depth. So I think that was the big spin-off, in a way. That you're able to have more in-depth conversations at a technical level, which you need to unblock stuff. >> So some of the news that came out today. They talked about what they're doing to expand Coupa Pay with American Express. I was just talking with Barclays. Barclays card been on that for a little while. Looking at the payment space for instance, on the BDC side, we have this expectation as consumers. We can do any transaction, we can pay bills. It hasn't been as... On the B2B side, it hasn't been as innovative. Some technology gaps, large scale. Where do you see Coupa in that respect with what they're doing with Coupa Pay? Do you see that influence from the consumer side that might eventually become an important part of what you're able to do at Provident? >> We haven't enabled Coupa Pay, so I'm in a position to talk authoritatively about it. >> In terms of taking the consumer and demand? >> So I look at the one-time-use credit cards, and I'm really quite excited about what that could do, and I kind of get the business sense and the use case behind that. So that's certainly on our radar. I like the risk-aware products as well, using the big data and AI stuff. So, there's a few things in the road map I've got my eye on. We're deploying expenses module in December/January, so that'll keep us busy on that. And then we'll need to route six months of data through Coupa so that we've got enough of a data pool to do the analytics. So we've got a busy road map, that's for sure. >> For a last question for you, James, for peers of yours, whether they're in financial services industry or not that are facing similar challenges and opportunities to transform procurement, what's you're best advice? >> Mmm, go and spend a few years as a supplier. I think procurement suffers a little bit from people who have only ever been in procurement. And I think that different perspective would be enormously powerful. So I think if we could get more marketing people, more lawyers, more different people and different professions into procurement, I think it would give you a broader perspective rather than a "I've grown up in procurement the last 20 years" sort of perspective. So go and get that holistic, global view would be my suggestion. >> Well, James, that's great advice for anybody, anywhere, and I'm sure Terry would be proud to hear you say that. >> I'm sure he would. >> Thank you so much for joining me on The Cube and sharing with us what Provident is doing with Coupa. We appreciate your time. >> It's been a real pleasure. Thank you, Lisa. >> Excellent. To James Wagstaff, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching The Cube from Coupa Inspire 19. Thanks for watching. (computerized tune)

>> Announcer: From Seattle, Washington it's The Cube covering AWS Imagine. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We're here in downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine Education Conference. It's the second year of the conference. It's really successful so much now they have another education conference, excuse me, Imagine Conference coming up for nonprofits, but this is the education one. About 800 people and we're excited to have, I think they had representatives from like 40 countries here. It's amazing, such a small conference with such great global representation. We've got our first guest, all the way from Valencia, Spain. He is Inaki Bilbao Estrada and the Vice Chancellor for Internationalization and Innovation at the CEU Universidad Cardenal Herrera. It's a mouthful, welcome. >> Thank you very much. >> So first off, impressions from the show, from the keynotes this morning. >> It was very impressive, the keynote by Andrew Co Intersession by Amazon. We were impressed, we were included in the keynote and we are very proud of having been included in the keynote for our Alexa skill. >> Great, so before we get into kind of what they talked about, let's back up a few steps in terms of what you are trying to accomplish as an institution. So give us a little bit of background on the college, how big it was, and kind of what was going on and what you wanted to really do differently. >> We are a Spanish University. We belong with CEU San Pablo Foundation which owns three universities in Spain, Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia. We are a not for profit universities and in Valencia, in our case, we are very proud that we used to be a local university with only 300 international students eight years ago and right now we have reached 2500 international students which represents around 30-33% of the population of the university. We are right now 8000 undergraduate students and 3000 graduate students. >> So that's pretty amazing. So as you said, you were really kind of a regional university and you decided you wanted more international students. Why did you want more international students and then once you made that goal, what were some of the major objectives at the beginning of this process or problems that you had to overcome? >> It was a trend in higher education institutions but for us it was very important for two reasons, one the sustainability of the university, but also and I think the main reason is that we wanted to have our students to have a global experience. We wanted to become a global university based in Valencia, but we have right now more than 80 countries represented on campus. >> Wow, so what were some of the big hurdles that you saw that were going to get in the way of attracting more of these international students? >> So it was very important for us to adapt all our processes to our students. For this we have a very helpful firm partnered on campus. It was the IT department with Jose Roch in charge of this department and through technology we have been able to escalate and automate, get the automation of all of this process in order to reach bigger number of international students. So we have adapted all the processes to the needed of our international students, our new population of international students. >> Right, so you were highlighted today for a very specific thing, for a very specific device, which is Alexa, and voice as an interface and we saw some of the Alexa stuff last year, in terms of the kids asking it, you know, when is my test, is my homework due, these types of things, but you guys are actually taking it to the next level. Explain to the folks what you guys have done with Alexa. >> So we have used Alexa to introduce a virtual assistant for all our students national and international students and one other things that have been highlighted in the keynote is that is not only in English, but also in Spanish. Like this we are covering the two most speaked language on campus, English and Spanish. >> So it's bi, so you've got a bilingual Alexa in the room. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for us it was very important as explained before that technologies had been asked to cover all the population of students, not only part of them. >> Right and using English is kind of universal language, regardless of what their native tongue is. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So did you have to build all this from scratch? How much was Amazon helping you to do the English to Spanish translation, was it written in Spanish, how did some of those logistics work out? >> So we began six months ago with the project with the help of Amazon, they were very, very, very helpful for us. With Ana Cabez and Juan Manuel Gomez from the UK team of Amazon and they guided us how to develop the Alexa skills for the goals that we set with them, what we wanted to achieve with the virtual assistant for our students. >> And yeah, so the skills are the things that you actually write, so how many different skills did you write especially for your students? >> So we, what we are doing is to build only one, but we are integrating all the services in one only skill. So we are integrating services related with what my next assignment on Blackboard, which are my grades, how can I book a room in the library or another space of the university, locations of the different services or professors of the university. We are integrating a lot of services, but in one skill because we don't want the students to have to switch between skills. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So we're aiming to have one virtual assistant for the students in only one skill. >> So that's interesting, I didn't even think about all the integration points that you have. But you've got integration points in all these other systems. The room booking services, the library services, Blackboard and the other educational services. >> The learning management system. >> So how many points of integration are there? >> A lot we are working right now, we are focusing around five, seven integration points, because also we are integrating it with our CRM in order to have personalized message to different segments of our students, depending of if they are due to get some documentation to the registrar office. We think that integration with CRM allows us to give personalized message and notification to our students depending on the situations. >> Jeff: Right. >> So it's not a general notification for all of the students on campus. >> Right, that's awesome. Again, highlighted in the keynote really I think is the first kind of bilingual implementation of Alexa. So that's terrific. I want to shift gears a little bit about innovation and transformation. We go to a lot of tech shows, talk to a lot of big companies, everybody wants to digitally transform and innovate. Traditionally education hasn't been known as the most progressive industry in terms of transforming. You said right off the bat, that's your job is about transformation and innovation. Where's that coming from? Is that from the competitive world in which you live? Is that a top-down leadership directive? What's kind of pushing basically the investment in this innovation around your guys' school? >> So I believe that education can be disrupt in the next five, ten years. So what we think at the university is that we have to be closer to this disruption and in this sense we are working a lot to improve the students' experience of our students on campus because if not we think that it makes no sense to study on campus when you can go online. >> Jeff: Right. >> So that's why we're using technology to improve the students' experience on campus. So we are trying to avoid those things that have no value added for the students through technology and through the digital transformation. In order that we have more time for these value added interaction between the staff, academic and nonacademic staff, with the students. >> Right, and then how has the reception been with the staff, both the academic staff and the nonacademic staff because clearly the students are your customers, your primary customer, but they're a customer as well. So how have they embraced this and got behind it? >> So I seen all the institutions and you have a part of the institution that is not so in favor of these innovations, but the big number of professors and staff have seen the benefits of not to have to answer email Saturday night because the virtual assistant is 24 hours seven days a week. So they've seen the benefits of how technology can give them more time for these value added interaction with their students. For this in order to avoid only top-down decisions we have created digital ambassador programs which this program what we do is to share with our professors and with our nonacademic staff what we are planning and how they see the project. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And we are integrating their opinions and their suggestions in the program. >> So you're six months into it you said since you launched it. >> Yeah. >> Okay, I'm just curious if you could share any stories, biggest surprises, things that you just didn't expect. I always like long and unintended consequences, you know, as you go through this process. >> So one of things is in Spain, Alexa was launched in November, last November so it's very new. >> Jeff: Very new. >> Very new in Spain. There's no voice assistant in the last nine months, it have exploded, but we didn't have before. So the students have been very impressed that the university were working at this level with the technology so new because it was even new for them, even if they are younger and they knew a lot about this technology. They were impressed that the university so quickly reacted to the introduction of the technology. The other point is through innovation, we are also using Alexa for the digital transformation of learning and teaching. We have launched an innovation program for quizzes for the students. And we have the huge amount of volunteers that they want to see how it works. >> Right, right, just curious too, to get your take on voice as an interface. You made an interesting comment before we turned the cameras on that email just doesn't work very well for today's kids. They don't use it. They're not used to using it. But voice still seems to really be lagging. I get an email from Google every couple of days saying, here ask your Google Assistant this or ask your Alexa this, you know, we still haven't learned it. From where you're sitting and seeing kind of this new way to interact and as you said get away from these emails in the middle of the night that ask, when's my paper due and I could ask the assistant. How do you see that evolving? Are you excited about it? Do you see voice as really the centerpieces of a lot of these new innovations or is it just one of many things that you're working on? >> So I think the difference is that usually higher education institutions would have use of email for communication with students with so massive amount of emails. I think what they feel with the voice assistants is that they have the freedom to choose what they want to know or not to know. So if they can ask voice, virtual assistant, as in one case, they have the freedom when they want the information. >> Jeff: Right. >> So I think its a big difference between emails, in an email you decide when you send the information to the students, with voice technologies, the student, it's the student who is asking when they want the information. >> Jeff: Right. >> So I think it's important for them. >> It's huge because they never ask for the email. >> No, they, and after they tell us that it wasn't important information that they didn't check the email. >> Right. >> They complain that they don't have the right information. >> Right, well Inaki, thank you for sharing your story and congratulations on this project. Sounds like you're just getting started, you've got a long ways to go. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, thank you. He's Inaki, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube, we're in downtown Seattle at AWS Imagine Education Conference. Thanks for watching. See you next time. 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>> from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue. Now, here's your host. Day Volonte. >> Hi, >> everybody. Welcome to this cute conversation. I'm Dave Volonte and Stew Minuteman is here with me. We're gonna break down a w s kind of give you Ah, midyear What's happened so far this year with all the events that we've been covering and what to look forward to? Uh, the N Y C Summit is coming up stew. It's been a big year. Obviously. What we came off a re invent. Amazon's got $30,000,000,000 run rate business growing at 40 plus percent per year. That means they're putting 9,000,000,000 of incremental revenue every year into the cloud business. The marketplace, That growth that's roughly as large is tthe e entire Microsoft cloud business, which is astounding >> day that that that's that's the point Amazon definitely has been making for a couple of years. And you're absolutely right. Microsoft is definitely growing at a faster pace than Amazon, and they're running about 75 87 but off a much smaller number. So the incremental add that Amazon has been throwing off the last couple years. Every year they're adding more than an azure every year. So absolutely Amazon, you know, is the lead horse out there. And while you know, the horses on the track behind them are trying fast to catch up Amazon. If you talk about Infrastructures service, AWS is still the lead. >> Well, the big question is. Will that attenuate? And we were at Remember the Nutanix inaugural Nutanix Stop next? Do you rush Pandey, who's very smart guy, somebody we respect a lot. One of the fundamental assumptions they were making is eventually the law of large numbers will catch up to them and know it very well May. But it hasn't yet. I asked John Lovelock, can a company the size of Amazon $30,000,000,000 company grow it for 42% a year? Is that sustainable? And he said, Absolutely. There's nothing to stop them now. Who knows who has the crystal ball? What are your thoughts? >> Yeah, So, Dave, what we saw is Amazon's not sitting still. You know, they always like to say it's always Day one, and if you look at where they're going, the products that they keep throwing off the innovation that they keep moving on and the flywheel that they've had first of customer acquisition with all of the innovations that they're putting out there and the flight well. But I've been talking about the last couple of years the label of data, which is something we want to be a little concerned about. How much data Amazon actually does have both Amazon AWS and Amazon, with all those intelligent devices that are in your homes and connecting everything together. Some people are a little concerned about that. The government's a little bit concerned about that, but absolutely Amazon is going everywhere. We've seen Amazon going into sub segments of the market, going into verticals and going just really broad, really deep. So absolutely I don't see anything slowing a bit on down. It is a company that continues to impress one of >> the challenges. I think those do that that Amazon does have, and this came out of the reinforced >> conference a couple weeks ago in Boston, which was, Ah, conference for security practitioners, a lot of si SOS chief information security officers. The number one challenge that came out of that when you talk to practitioners was their ability to keep up with the innovations that Amazon is putting forth. So, you know, I wonder if we're gonna talk to some commercial customers. You'll see them down the summit probe to see if, in fact, that's part of their challenge. Just the pace at which Amazon brings out new features. But we've done Gosh, we've covered eight events or will have covered eight events this year. Eight productions. It started in the U. K. Where we covered a public sector health care. And then we did the AWS summit London really all about both public sector in the UK as well as the summit in the UK Innovations in the UK around cloud, etcetera, cloud adoption. 12,000 people at the AWS London summit. Now you covered re Mars, which was not the Cube wasn't there, but you were there. What was that show? >> Yes. So, first of all, it's an Amazon >> show, not a native US show, but absolutely showed underneath where eight of us fits into the fulfillment centers of Amazon. And it was about re Marceau Mars A play of course on space. But it was a machine learning automation, robotics in space. So you had the cool blue origin stuff that actually brought in. Robert Downey Jr talked about how he's going to save the planet with, you know, robotics and intelligence out there to help clean up pollution in the globe on and the like. But it was a phenomenal show, but what I said is actually going to show a little bit underneath the covers of Amazon similar what we've seen from eight of us at the reinvent shows over the years. Because, you know, we all know how many boxes air coming to our, you know, our place of home every day and how fast that's going. And so this is what's happening underneath the robotics and machine learning a lot of those Air AWS Service's that are powering that. So it was a fascinating show, Dave and absolutely showed other relationship between Amazon, the parent company. Eight of us, all those cloud service is that helped feed the bigger business. >> Now, June, the Cube covered the D. C. Public sector summit. This is Teresa Carlson's gig. She's the host. Actually, Andy Jassy was there this time. He wasn't there last year when you and I recovering it. And of course, that's all about bringing cloud to public sector, not just federal but all public sector. It includes AH, non profit and education, which talk about in a minute. The big story. There is a jet. I we're talking about tens of billions of dollars going to ah, contract. Oracle, of course, is fighting it. It's going into the courts. I guess they've been a number of reviews or could won't give up its oracle. Amazon clearly is the front runner. Last I read, it was down to AWS and Microsoft, with AWS being the lead contender there. We'll see what happens. I think the decision is coming down this month, July 2019. But it's really again about bringing cloud innovations to public sector. Public sector tends to take things a little bit later than the commercial like. For instance, last year they announced the the VM wear on AWS was available, so you'll see those kinds of things come maybe a year later. But its again. Another big show there 12. 13,000 people there at the D. C Convention center. >> Yeah, Davey, when you talked about the critique of what's happening in Amazon as Amazon goes deeper into all of these verticals How do they help get that information to the user in a way that they need to run their businesses? So my co host for New York City's Cory Quinn was listen to his podcast this morning and he said, That's where Amazon's got dozens of blog's. They've got so many announcements, they haven't done a really good job, something we've seen many companies do. How do I get to you know that business roll and put it in, you know, verbal that they understand, as opposed to just >> Hey, we had 1000 new features >> come out this year and they're awesome. Then you should use everything s o. You know, that's something that, you know the industry as a whole needs to do better at an Amazon. Just in the nature of how fast they're moving is something that they should be able to do a better job. >> And Jennifer is also gonna be in New York City. And one of things he was stressing at reinforce was the marketplace. We had Dave McCann on the just rocketing. I think it was 100,000 census of security subscriptions. I think it was 1,000,000 subscriptions in total so just an amazing ah momentum in the marketplace. But reinforce was all about security. Deep dives on security, chief information, security officers. What came out of that show the big takeaway was was head of AWS is, uh, security. The chief information security officer, Schmidt said. This narrative in the industry that the sky is falling doesn't do anybody any good. Um, it's not productive. We should be more positive. The state of the cloud union is good, like the president of states is State of the Union is strong. Um, having said that, Amazon talks about the shared security model. The practitioners that we talked to said, Yeah, shared model Amazon's going to secure the the infrastructure of the storage, the compute of the database. We are responsible for our end, and it really is on us to make sure that we are secure. So again, back to that point about the pace of innovation that Amazon is putting forth is a challenge for people. AWS imagine is also going down. I think this week what's that you're >> so it's in Seattle and it's you mentioned the public Sector one in D. C, which is government agencies, nonprofits and education. So imagine is a subset of that. My understanding is the education, a nonprofit piece of that from when you and I were in D. C. Last year for the Public sector summit. It's It is impressive how deep Amazon is going into these spaces, the affinity they have. And really, you know how happy the customers are to be able to move fast. So, you know, when you think about nonprofits and think about education, innovation is not the first thing that usually comes to mind because budgets are tight and I don't have enough people. And usually you've got, you know, whatever's left over. But imagine is them. How do we move these forward? How do we You know, we know we need to help transform education. It's so important to train the next generation. So, you know, imagine there are some great stories that come out of that. Jeffrey loves getting those stories, helping us tell those stories through the Cube platform. And so it's the second year we're doing >> Yes, it would be covering that. And then, of course, reinvent will have two sets again that reinvent this year. The Super >> Bowl of our industry, >> right? Sure. Um, something's going on. So unfortunate incidents in Southern California. Big earthquakes, actually. Multiple earthquakes, Right? You had the physical earthquake, and then you had CO I, leonard going to the Clippers. But so I'm interested in sort of poking at this notion of ground stations. So at reinvent last year, Amazon announced on his own ground station, which essentially was ground station is a service. So if I understand it, one of the challenges okay, You launched the satellites, but you still need a ground station to collect the data and then uploaded and analyze it. That's what AWS is is partnering to put in infrastructure that allows you to essentially rent ground station infrastructure. So, you know, they worry about building it in securing it yourself. Because you think about it. It's got to be a secure location. You gotta have fencing. You got a physical security. You got to get the data in. You gotta upload it to the toe. Where we gonna upload it? So Amazon is basically building this service out, saying Don't worry about the ground station piece. Rent that from us, you know, swipe your credit card. Your ground station as a service, and then we'll ingest that data uploaded to the cloud and then apply all of the tooling that we have to allow you to analyze that data. So if you think about the earthquake of devastation, if you don't have a ground station there, you can, in theory, go to AWS and actually spin up a ground station in jest. You know, on the ground, you know, the ground truth as we like to sometimes talk about and actually get satellite imaging and telemetry in that region, you know, this comes into play things like forest fires and all kinds of of natural disaster. >> Dave, even at the remarks show, I attended a session where one of the Amazon partners was talking about not only just getting the satellite data down, but Justus. They have the snowball edge today, which is, you know, for you know, I ot or some remote sites, but some of these satellites are gonna have the compute and storage at in satellite themselves. So if you think about I'm gonna have these geosynchronous satellites. I'm gonna have all this connectivity. And if I could get a gigabit of Ethernet, you know, traffic going to the satellites and I could do the processing at the edge, which is now up in space. I can process that. And you know, that edge that we talked about get to hold another dimension, you know, off off the terra firma to be able to do those kind of analysis. As you said, earthquakes, you know, all the all the climate discussion that's going on, we should be able to have tap into even more. Resource is, and we'll have to rename Cloud if it even goes beyond the Earth. >> And then, um, outpost is the other story that we've been tracking, attracting a lot of stories, but but outpost is starting to ship in beta form. We've seen instances of >> so, so seeing >> it. We just did a little quick right up. >> I mean, Dave, you know, just a ripple went through the >> industry when they showed Hey, here's Iraq and what they're like. This is the exact same rack that we have in the Amazon data centers and why it's a little surprising because we're allowed to see inside the Amazon Data Center. So it's like, Okay, this is what they're computed awaited to 24 in tracking, supposed to a 19 in track. But that line between the public cloud and my on premises environment absolutely is blurring. So everybody wants to see where Amazon's going. They have the big partnership with VM, where Veum, where is already shipping the solution? That is the same software for that Veum wear on AWS in my data center. So, you know, I can have you know, the Dell hardware with the Veum where code or I can have the Amazon hardware with the VM where code coming later this year without post. So that line between public in private is absolutely blurring. And where to my applications live, You know that that future of how fast is eight of us continue to grow? Absolutely. There are applications and data and things that will stay in my own data center and under my control. But that line is definitely blurring. And there's gonna be some re architectures. It's definitely still gonna take a couple of years to sort some of these things out. But we're at some of those inflection points where we'll see some of >> us. So I wrote a post its upon wicked bond kind of analyzing that video, and there's some interesting things that are unique. There's certainly a lot of goodness in there. Not some of the things they talk about are completely unique. Thio, aws. But things like Nitro and their special virtual ization engine and their special chip on Do you want to get a look at that? You take a look at that video and thence to New York City Summit this week. Um, we mentioned some of the innovations that we've seen up to date this year. A lot of talk I'm sure about the marketplace. >> Yeah, I'm wondering if there'll be any ripples, Dave, because the 1/2 of a chick you, too, was supposed to be in New York City. And now it's not, doesn't mean they don't have a strong presence in New York City like London and believe it's somewhere around 12 to 15,000 people. When I went to New York City two years ago was quite impressive. It is a free show, which means if your customer you get in for free. If you're a partner, of course, you're still paying for everything that goes there. But the regional summits are quite impressive and a great way to get in touch with Amazon and all that they're doing. If you don't want to go to the Super Bowl itself, which is, you know, 50,000 plus now in Las Vegas towards the end of the year. >> Yeah, these air, like many reinvents and they're actually quite good. A lot of a lot of practitioner focused on you're gonna you're gonna see that New York City >> did what I always love about every Amazon show I go to. There are customers that are interested learning new things. How can you do better with what I'm doing? But also, how can I change what I'm doing? How can I move forward? So even if it's not adopting the latest and greatest from AWS, the entire ecosystem is going there to meet with those customers and talk about digital transformation? Modern workforce? All of these hot trends definitely play out. Ground zero is the AWS. >> Yeah, and this is by design. As I said before, the pace of innovation is a challenge for people. It's an adoption blocker and so Amazon wants to educate and share the knowledge so that they can get more adoption. OK, stew. Thanks very much. Good luck. This week. Check out silicon angle dot com For all the news, the cube dot net is where the videos will live and watch. Do on John Ferrier and Corey Quinn. Live and check out the cuban dot com for all the research. Thanks for watching Everybody Day, Volonte and Stupid Event. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody, welcome back to London. I'm Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise and we've been following AWS generally and the public sector specifically for a number of years now. We've seen the ascendancy of an expansion of public sector. We've covered the career of Teresa Carlson, and we're here in London ahead of AWS Summit London. There's a pre-day here, there's a number of public sector companies, there's a focus on healthcare. Kieron James is here, he's the founder of Wonderful.org. Wonderful.org is a fundraising vehicle, it's a really setup platform essentially for self-service. Kieron, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming up. >> Hello. >> So, tell me about Wonderful, why you started this organization? >> Wonderful was kicked off when I got to my 50th birthday, essentially, it's a way to give back. I've been involved in the tech sector for many years and we were sitting on quite a lot of infrastructure. We thought we had some spec paucity as well and we thought what we can do with the resource, human and physical, in terms of giving something back to charities. So, one of the things that looked like a great opportunity was to setup a completely fee-free fundraising platform. And essentially, that's what we kicked off with a brief of concept in 2016. >> So, fee-free meaning I can come in, I can setup my own fundraising vehicle so all the money goes to the recipients. >> A 100%, we have no charges whatsoever to charities, to donors, to fundraisers. And essentially, all the card processing fees as well are covered, and through the generosity of AWS and its NPO program, we've been able to also cover things like hosting as well which has been phenomenal for us, 'cause it really does enable us to give every single penny to charity. >> So, how do you fund your staff? >> The staff currently on our model going forward, if it's one that we continue, if we can continue to support is through secondment. So, we seconded our technical resource from my day job which is essentially running a telecoms business, and those guys are incredibly generous with their time. So, evenings and weekends have been devoted to setting up and maintaining the platform. We've called in favors from people we have networked with over the years. So again, when we moved beyond proof of concept into the current website now, the current build, we were able to get that done with some cost but albeit, a fraction of what we would've paid commercially. And essentially as we move forward, we want the whole concept to Wonderful.org to be something much bigger than just the organization. It's a vehicle for commercial organizations to do good. >> So, lots of in-kind contributions, lots of your time obviously so, when did you start the organization? >> 2016 and essentially, we went through what I describe as a proof of concept. We set three broad milestones, one was the first 100 charities onboard, first 100,000 pounds of a revenue or charity not really revenue but charity donations through the website. And we launched our first Wonderful week where we brought some sports celebrities including Phil Neville, now the manager of the England women's football team. He came on board to do some charity work for us with his family. Once we passed through those three milestones, it was then a case of saying, okay we've achieved all of these now, let's push the button and actually do this properly in inverted commas, and that's when we looked at hosting the thing properly, looked at the commercial build and so on. >> So that those milestones were really the prove the concept. >> Yeah. >> But they're pretty substantial milestone, >> Sure. >> And you hit them pretty fast though. >> We did hit them fast but again to give you some context on that, the first 100,000 through the website probably took us I would guess between 12 and 14 months. In the last 28 days, we've processed about a quarter of a million pounds through the website. So, the growth's been phenomenal and the appetite from the charities is enormous. What's particularly interesting about our sector is that whilst the lot of the events that take place like the London Marathon and so on, are very predictable, we know exactly the date and time that people are gonna be donating. Clearly, you get events that are completely unpredictable. We've gotta be able to respond and be available for donors to give when those kinds of things happen. >> Okay so, this leads me to the conversation about your infrastructure and obviously the Cloud. When you started the organization, you had your own owned premises infrastructure, correct? >> Correct. >> So take us through what that looked like and your decision to move to the Cloud. >> Expensive, disjointed, very complex. So, we were running essentially a full stock on a number of servers that were hosted independently. Co-location was expensive, maintenance was expensive, even things like getting to site were expensive, and if the rare occasions when you do have to do that in a hurry it can be quite time-consuming, particularly as I say given our profile where these guys are really doing it for love not money. So, it became apparent to us, I think learning from some scenarios that we've seen in the real world with other platforms as well when even the predictable events had still created some concerns for some of the charities in terms of availability. So, we've took a long hard look at what we had and said, are we scalable, are we fully available? Probably not, we need to look at this in some detail now. So, that was when we completely re-architected the website and looked at AWS. >> So, it was not only a matter of say scaling up for high demand and unpredictability but you had a fragile infrastructure. >> We did. >> And essentially, (chuckles) you're volunteers trying to keep it together. >> Exactly. >> So that's not a good formula for high availability, right? >> No, absolutely not. >> So, how does that change with the Cloud? >> With the Cloud, I think what we've got now is we've got a really good view of everything. We've got a view of the whole of our infrastructure in one place, so it gives our operations director a lot more peace of mind 'cause he can see all of the resources at his disposal. I think in terms of security, it's far far better for us as well, because we can manage access to various components, available US, depending on who needs access. So, our web developers are currently remote, they're not formally part of the organization. So, we can strict access to things that we don't want 'em to have access and so on and give them full access where it's required. So, I think that's been a lot of peace of mind for the operations director. And just having that confidence in clearly a brand that's got a huge reputation and people feel immensely confident about seeing. So, for us being to put the AWS badge on the website to reinforce to our users, to our donors that we're here, we're solid, we're stable, we're not going anywhere, it's really really important. >> Anyway, you said upfront that Adobe has some skin in the game, they're providing some services, >> They are. >> Some contributions. >> Yeah. >> So, that's gotta be pretty substantial. >> Massive. >> For you guys, yeah. >> Absolutely massive. I mean in all honesty, it's second only to card processing which is a significant cost of doing our business and one which is paid for by our other corporate sponsors. It's our second biggest cost without a doubt or would be if it were a cost but mercifully, AWS has come to the rescue and we're able to do what we're doing now. >> So corporate sponsors, give a little commercial, how does that work? >> Well essentially, our biggest corporate sponsor, our main partner at the moment is The Co Operative Bank and they have underwritten all of our card processing fees for the duration of that partnership. The big caveat with that is that we don't know what they will be and whilst we can provide some forecast based on empirical evidence, worst case scenario, there's another tragedy, people reach for their wallets and give, and suddenly that can go through the roof in the course of a couple of weeks. So, the difficulty in bringing corporate sponsors on for us is just that kind of unpredictability of the sector that we're operating in, but they've been tremendous. >> That's amazing right? >> Yeah. >> 'cause I could say that's a big junk of your cost >> For sure. >> Along with your infrastructure but, I'm fascinated by this organization and just wanna congratulate you on the mission and actually getting it off the ground because we all when we give to a charity, we always ask okay, what are the administrative cost behind this? You go to the website and you look it up and sometimes you just don't feel comfortable, and so what you've done is actually just eliminated that overhead. >> Completely. >> And where do you see this going? I mean you've got like 15 hundred registered charities now. >> Yes, yeah we're up to 15 hundred, again we've had a couple of fairly major events we were endorsed by the Money Saving Expert at number one but how could they not put us at number one. (they both laugh) Would've been very odd if they hadn't, given that we're the only completely fee-free platform. That clearly creates the demand and I think that endorsement was a huge catalyst to the growth. More recently, we've seen other things, BT MyDonate actually pulled out of this sector which has caused a lot of charities to migrate to our platform as well. In terms of where we see it going, we will need to continue to raise money from corporate sponsors to support it. But, there is a real step game in that, we have to manage that growth to meet their expectations as best as we can. But equally, new corporate sponsors coming onboard will want to see that we've got enough eyeballs to make it worth their while getting behind the organization. So, it's that constant game of trying to bring on the next round of funding and getting people through. >> How global do you see this getting? How is it today and in the future? >> Conceptually, there's no reason at all why this shouldn't be a global phenomenon but, we're now very concentrated on the UK, just because of our resource and we do get requests all of the time for international charities, for international fundraisers and so on, but we've gotta be realistic about what we can support. But going back to the point that I made earlier, it really isn't about Wonderful.org, it's about just corporations, fundraisers, charities, donors, we see all of the last three being wonderful all of the time by the nature of what they do, we're just trying to get more corporations to be as wonderful as, sounds terribly sick and fancy, but as AWS has been in supporting what we're doing, it's that sense of what we're trying to achieve here goes beyond one organization. >> Well, and the Cloud allows you to scale potentially to the extent that you can get the resource. There's no reason you can't go global. >> No. >> I'm gonna check it out and see even for a little local charity, can I (he chuckles), >> Absolutely. >> Can I participate, what does that involve? Do you have to have some minimum threshold or? >> No? >> No, anybody can-- >> Anybody, but you need to be a registered UK charity with one of the UK registrars. Beyond that, we go through a little bit of due diligence with the charity, so we will need to see some documentation. So, there's a little manual step in onboarding charities, but for all the right reasons, we wanna be diligent about the people using the platform to give the fundraisers the confidence that they're donating to a charity. So, we don't do any peer-to-peer fundraising, it is literally you'll register as a charity and the fundraisers can support your charity, often led by the fundraisers rather than the charities, interestingly, so the fundraisers will be saying to the charities, why are you not on this platform which gives you everything and you're already on this platform which doesn't. So, there's quite a lot of pressure now coming from the fundraisers to pull the charities in. >> So, there's a lot of word-of-mouth, a lot of peer-to-peer. >> Absolutely. >> Right, you don't really have the funding. >> There is no. >> The budget to go market. >> Not at all. >> Yeah, that's remote. >> Absolutely not. >> Well, hopefully this will help. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Alright, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante, you're watching theCUBE. We'll be back right after this short break from AWS HQ in London, right back. (upbeat music)

>> fly from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering Google Club next nineteen, right Tio by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. You watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. And we're here at the new improved Mosconi Center covering Google next twenty nineteen. I'm Dave along with my co hosts. Two minutes to get to see you. Russell Warming is here. He's the head of infrastructure at AutoTrader UK. Russell, Thanks for coming on the Cube. You very welcome. AUTOTRADER uk not to be confused with the U. S. Not a lot of you guys. They're separate cos >> yet completely separate. So way operate the largest automotive marketplace in the UK something like the sixteenth busiest website in the UK around fifty five million cross platform visits each month on average. Probably about five hundred thousand vehicles that were advertising out. Tio consumers >> are traitors. Awesome website If your eyes are second biggest purchase typically behind the home and and so Stew was asking you earlier if you if digital transformation meant anything to you and you said Well, we kind of went through a ten years ago yet, and it's kind of true You guys were like born in the Internet company would talk about >> that. So our heritage is that we've been around for forty forty years. We started producing magazines back in nineteen seventy seven. And then in ninety six, we would launched our first website on DH. We've basically just migrated those revenues from our print business online. And then about two thousand thirteen. We stop printing magazines all together. So we're truly digital business now, >> and people talk about digital transformation oftentimes in the context of data. So maybe talk about some of the things that you're doing in your business, some of the challenges that you face, where data fits in and we'Ll really get into it. >> Okay, so I'm we've got a couple of areas where we've been on premise for our data centers. Wave had that strategy for probably about fifteen years, and we've started to reach limits in terms of how we manage capacity within their on what we found is using cloud services as really enables so unlock capabilities, particularly around things like data on their. More recently, when we're thinking about using Cuban eaters and SDO, we've been able to take advantage of things like some of the security features, mutual tear less and service discovery. >> All right, so they also bring us inside your organization a little bit. You're head of infrastructure? Yeah. What does that mean to your business today? >> So way basically run the platform that runs auto trader dot co dot uk on were responsible for making sure that's available twenty four seven three six five So way. Want to make sure that we're able to give our internal customers the ability to release new applications new features as quickly as they want, but also that we're ensuring that our consumers are retailers get a great experience that it's fast performance secure. >> Yeah, and it could give us tease out a little bit, just kind of the scope, how many people you have and how do you balance the stuff that kind of is under your purview and the stuff that you manage that is outside of your four walls. >> So there's about twenty five people within the team. There's probably about ten people building the infrastructure and about fifteen people that are responsible for monitor in it. So we're not a big organization in terms of operations in infrastructure on. We have to work very closely with our product squads because we manage some elements of it. But we're dependent on them managing other elements as well. So we're trying to unlock platform capabilities so that we've got consistency that we're trying to provide those those capabilities rather than going off on finding something else. >> You've got infrastructure on Prem and you've got infrastructure in the cloud to cloud services, right? Yes. So oftentimes those aren't the same. But talk about your situation and you're on a journey, I presume. >> Way started about forty months ago, building out our cloud services on DH. Probably in the last four months, we've really started accelerating that that migration plan of applications moving it up into into Google Cloud on DH. Our ambition is to get that done in eighteen months because the complexity of managing multiple environments is something that we want to try and avoid. Minimize that. >> So is the aspiration to go all in >> waiting absolutely way. We've taken a view that for services that we can we'll take money services and then everything else will be cloud first >> believe I heard you say Cooper Netease is in the mix now. Can you explain where that fits? How you're using it? >> So that see, that's the platform that we're using. Teo. Build out all our applications in the clouds so that that's that's That's a lot of important >> air using any communities in your data center today? No, not all from a cloud. That's the platform layer that using the >> public? Absolutely so when we talked about should we use Cuban? It is way did discussed. Should we do it on Prem or do it in the cloud? And we just figured that we didn't want the overhead of managing it ourselves on prime, we thought it be better just to take it as a service almost and manage up in the cloud. >> Most of the shows we go too many of them, anyway. It's too, and I and the Cube they talk about multi cloud, and we often say multi cloud as a function of multi vendor. But certainly way heard today from Google. A multi cloud. What's your cloud strategy? Because there there's another camp that says, Well, if you do, multi cloud is more complex, it's less secure, it's more expensive. Are you trying to be kind of unit cloud or is that horses for courses? >> So we're three clouds today. So our data platforms, it's partly in G C P. But then partly in another cloud provider on then we're also for our enterprise applications were using another cloud provided because it makes sense to do so. So we want to use the right cloud for the right applications. I think that most of our customer facing applications will end up in G C. P. But some of the back end services my end up in of the cloud provide us >> Okay, so it's strategic fit based on the application? Absolutely. So what is the wheelhouse of of of? Of Google, in your view, from a customer's perspective. >> Um, so the fact that Cuban eighties was developed by Google is a really strong play there. It gives you confidence that they know Teo to look after it. Things like SDO have made a massive difference to our organization as well. We part of the reason why we've ended up using GDP was based on using SDO, and that was around solving a specific problem that we had so that those of the sort to to solve areas that we focused on. >> Just when you look at you know, you've got that hybrid, multi cloud environment that we find is pretty much the standard today. Can you speak a little bit of the management layer? How you look at that, you know, Is it good enough today? And what what? What could the industry do to make it even better? >> It's good enough for our needs. I think that the challenge that you've always got is data ingress and egress between between clouds as you want to move data or query data, making sure that you could do that in a secure way. That's probably the biggest challenge that you'd have on also around the cost of doing so. Those you know, those are probably the bigger challenges >> in the challenges. The cost in time of moving data is its security or the above. Maybe you could dig into that little bit. >> It's probably a little bit of all the above. If I'm honest, I think you could do so much to security plight. Private VP ends Between Between the cloud providers It's I guess that's the time and actually moving some of that data between the clouds is that there's a challenge, and then they cost. Like I say, it's difficult to predict how much it might cost you two to move some of that >> big challenges and from a business perspective that a driving your technology strategy, obviously you want consumers coming to your site. You want to make that as rich as possible for them. You've gotta monetization strategy as well. But you talk a little bit about the business drivers that are affecting your technology. >> Okay, so consumer demand is constantly changing. Technology is massively disrupting how people think about search for cars. We can see that there's a demanding in the in the marketplace for people just to be ableto choose it, choose a car on DH, have that customizing delivered. They want tohave complexity around how they look for finance on their cars. They want all that sort of taken away. They don't wanna have to turn up tio a car showroom and then go through the same conversation that live with salesperson that they've just gone through online. They want that journey to be seamless, so there's some challenges that the industry facing trying to do that where we're trying to help our retailers, providing those services that customers want. So to be able to understand what the part ex valuation is on their car before they turned up to the dealership and know that it's going to get honored because they've got to trust in it so they can understand what, what making spend on a monthly faith on what cars are available. So we're trying to change what we provide to our consumers on also to support our retailers. Manage that changes well, >> Russell thinks a really great point. You make way. No many industries, and especially your industry, is changing really fast. So what are those stresses and strains mean to the infrastructure team in Oak and maybe talk a little bit about the relationship of kind of business? Tow it how that's changed in the last few years. >> So probably over the last ten years, it has always been seen as the sort of the blocker in terms of making sure that new products and features become become available quickly on our role is really to make sure that we're providing the infrastructure at the right time for people so that they can basically just dial it in when they need it. So if they want to release a new application, they don't need to come and speak to somebody in ops to stop provisional server. They just create a pipeline, deploy their application and then the service provisioned at the same time. On we do things like checking for a Wasp Bonham abilities at the same time and making sure that the application and the infrastructure is working hand in hand. So we've taken a lot of that dependency away from people, sort of with handoff points and everything. >> You're a business that has obviously transformed over the years. I think you said you started in the sixties seventies seventies is a publisher basically, paper printing presses and the like. Nineteen ninety six is when you went online. Is that right? So that early days pretty much of the Internet. So the heart, uh, and so you've proven that you could transform forward thinking. I'm wondering what the conversation might be like inside the company about things like autonomous vehicles. Is there a day that comes where owning your own vehicle is the exception rather than the norm? What implications that might have for your business. It's very hard to predict, obviously, But are you having those kind of conversations? You have other lines of business that you're launching toe >> say you're absolutely right. Those those things are area of concern on wave people, constantly looking at new and emerging changes in threats across the whole industry. On DH, they are absolutely looking at how that might impact our business. What we're actually seeing, though, through research that we've done is people still aspire to own car. So car ownership is still something that people want to want to look at with regards to the second part of your question. We are ultimately focus, that is, that's where we are. We don't operate outside of the UK and Ireland. We absolutely focus on our core on making sure that the services that we offer around that really support our customers need, whether that be consumer or retailer. >> Well, it's interesting that the auto industry really has it been wildly disrupted. I mean, you certainly see Tesla and people talk about autonomous vehicles, but still, the big car makers, they're still doing quite well. They dominate the market so and so it's going to take some time, you know, and there's some skeptics out there, but it's very interesting to see how you guys evolve, what other opportunities you go after. I want to ask you. So Google next is coming to tow London in November. How important is it for you? As somebody is based in the UK tohave, Google have local events like that? I mean obviously a traveling a far distance to come to this event. How important is that to you as a customer? >> It's important for us to be able Teo, get more people involved in the conversation. There's obviously a cost on time effort in terms of coming out tio something here. But it's in The scale of this is enormous in comparison to what we see in the UK, but it just means that having that presence in the U. K. Means that we can just get more of our engineers in front of the right people tohave a better conversation, understand more about what's coming and how we might be able to use that within our business >> things that so you just sort of near early on in your cloud journey. But knowing what you know, and you get it early on, I think you might do differently if you had a mulligan, you want to do over again our advice you give to your colleagues and piers. >> So I think the big thing that we found is modest modernizing applications Before you start moving them into the cloud, I think there is a tendency, Probably way we're in the in the cloud, probably about nine years ten years ago and we bought those workloads back on prime. And the reason why we did that is because we didn't treat them differently way manage those instances in the same way that we managed on prime, which is completely do a wrong way to do it, in my opinion. So we needed to change our mind set in terms of how we manage the infrastructure. You need to make sure that you re architect your applications, that you are taking advantage off the features and functionalities things like auto scaling, that you plan for failure. All those things that you typically control on Prem. You have to think about differently in the clouds. >> We will talk about this a lots to changing, the operator >> said that the long pole in the tent is, you know, modernized those applications. Any change? Migrations is really tough. So but do you have a time for him? How long would take you to get to that? All in that you're planning on >> eighteen months, Cesar, that's >> not just a lift, Did Shift >> S O. That is a modernization. But the approach that we've taken and is to try and give the people the confidence and courage really to go at it is we've picked ofsome easier applications. So this journey about being cloud native, we started six or seven years ago, and we've started getting people building their applications on our private cloud. And those ones have been really easy to move on to the public cloud and some of the applications that I've been a little bit trickier that I've been on our short traditional virtual ization platform. We're trying to pick those off in parallel, so you do one that's really easier one that's a bit harder. So you give people confidence and then you're trying to solve some tricky problems alongside it, and I think that just incrementally gives you more confidence that you're moving in the right direction. >> Right straight. Just like skiing on the then the blacks. And they go into the greens and they're making your moves. >> Just just a little bit. A little bit harder each time you got it, but yeah. >> Russell, thanks so much for coming in. The queue was great. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you for watching. We'll be right back from Google next in San Francisco.

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum, DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> We are back this afternoon here in Washington, D.C., at the Walter Washington Convention Center. As we continue our coverage here of Inforum 2018 along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, and we now welcome Mr. Cormack Watters to the program today, EVP of Emea and APAC at Infor. Cormack, good to see you sir. >> Nice to be here. >> So, we're going to talk about Guinness, over in Ireland (chuckling). Cormack's from Dublin, so we had a little conversation. We're getting a primer here. >> It's actually the best conversation we should have, right? >> Right, we'll save that for the end. How about that? So, you're fairly new, right? About a year or so. >> Ten months or so, not that I'm counting it by the day >> No no no, always going forward, never backward. But a big plate you have, right, with EMEA and APAC? Different adoptions, different viewpoints, different perspectives... We've talked a lot really kind of focusing domestically here for the past couple of days. Your world's a little different than that though, right? >> It is. It is. And it's very good that you've actually recognized it because that's actually the biggest challenge that we have. To be a little bit humble about it, I think we've got world-class products and solutions. I actually fundamentally believe that. But we have lots of different languages, cultures, and localization requirements in the multiple Countries that we look after. So, it's great to have great products, but it needs to be in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Finish, Arabic, which most of them are. Customers realize that we are actually international and localized for many, many markets. But now we've become an intriguing option for them, if you're a multi-national business, with subsidiaries all over the world. So, it's good that Infor is big enough to do that. We need to do a better job of letting everybody know that we've done that, if that makes any sense. >> Sure. >> So what's happening in Europe? Europe's always pockets, there's no..I mean.. Yes, EU but there's really still no one Europe. What's going on? Obviously, we have Brexit hanging over our head. I felt like U.S. markets are maybe a little bit overheated in Europe has potential upside. >> Yeah >> And it seems like others seem to agree with that. What happening on the ground? Any specific, interesting areas? Is Southern Europe still a concern? Maybe you can give us an update? >> Yeah, so Brexit is quite a dominant conversation. I am from Ireland. I live in Dublin, but I'm working all over Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Far East. So, I don't get to be at home very often, except the weekends. London is really our regional headquarters from a European perspective, and Brexit is on everybody's mind. Interestingly, when you go outside the UK, Brexit is not such a big topic because... That's Europe. And they kind of go, "Well if you don't want to be here, then you don't need to be here." Right? So it's a little bit of that, and they're saying, "Well, we'd like for them to stay, but if they don't want to stay, well, don't wait around." But in the UK, it's causing a lot of uncertainty. And the UK's one of our biggest markets. It's a lot of uncertainty, and what would be best is if we just knew what was going to happen, and then we could deal with it. And actually, once we know what's going to happen, that's going to bring a degree of change. And change, from our industry perspective means there's going to be some requirements that emerge. So, we need to be ready to serve those, which is opportunity. But the uncertainty is just slowing down investment. So, we need that to be resolved. >> So, clarity obviously is a good thing obviously a good thing in any market. Are there any hotspots? >> Yeah, actually for us, we're doing, for us the Hotspots right now, we're doing incredibly well in Germany. Which, one of our lesser known competitors is a small Company called SAP. And they're headquartered in Germany. It's quite interesting to see that we're actually taking a lot of market there in Germany, which is fantastic. That's a little bit unexpected, but it's going very well right now. We're seeing a ton of activity in the Asia Pacific, I would say that region is probably our fastest growing in all of Infor. And consistently so for several quarters and maybe past a year at this point. So Asia Pacific, Germany, U.K., and then as it happens, we are doing very well in Southern Europe, which is a combination of countries really. France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. Hard to put it down to which particular Country is doing well, but there seems to be a general uplift in that region. Because they were hit the hardest, arguably, by the crash back in 2008. So they've definitely come out of that now. >> And when they come out, excuse me I'm sorry John, but, they come out, Cloud becomes more important to them, Right? >> Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Anyone who's been delaying investment for years, can actually leapfrog what's been happening and jump straight to what you might call the future. So lots of Companies, lots of our Customers, are trying to simplify their Business. So Cloud is a great equalizer. We believe in your, what we call Last Mile of Functionality per industry. And that should make the projects shorter, more compact more predictable and the infrastructure worries go away, because that's our responsibility to the Customers. >> We definitely so that in the U.S., 2008-2009, CFO's came in said shift to the Cloud, because we want to shift Capx to Opx, and when we came out of the downturn, they said "wow this stuff works pretty well, double down on it" and then there were other business benefits that they wanted to accelerate, and so maybe Southern Europe was a little bit behind >> I think that may be the case right, and they are picking up. And what we're seeing are a lot of other advantages. Not to make this a sale's pitch, but, I am here so >> Go for it >> You've got a microphone >> I've got a microphone and I'm Irish, so I've got to talk right? What the Cloud is actually doing is, lots of Companies have put in big ERP over the years, the decades. And then they get stuck at various points and maybe years behind, because upgrades become painful and really want to avoid them. So what they're seeing is, if they can get onto the Cloud, they never need to upgrade again. Because it's always current, because we upgrade it every week, or every month and they're never falling behind. So they want to be ready to take advantage of the innovations that they know about and those that they don't even know about. So by keeping on the latest version, that opportunities open to them. Also, there's a big issue in Europe specifically about a thing called GDPR, which is data protection. Security. So we believe that we can do a better job of providing that, than any individual Company. Because we provide it for everybody, our resources can be deployed once and then deployed many times. Where as if you're an individual customer, you've got to have that speciality and put it in place. So GDPR is a genuine issue in Europe, because, the fines are absolutely huge if a Company is found to breach it. >> It's become a template for the globe now, California's started moving in that direction, GDPR has set the frame work. >> Well and just to follow up on that, and now you're dealing with a very different regulatory climate, then certainly here in the United States. And many U.S. Companies are finding that out, as we know. Overseas right now. So how do you deal with that in terms of, this kind of balkanized approach that you have, that you know that what's working here doesn't necessarily translate to overseas, and plus you have, you know, you're serving many masters and not just one or two. >> What's happening is the guys in our RND have done very well, is they understand the requirement of, in this instance, GDPR. They look at the other regulatory requirements, lets say in Australia, which is subtly different, but it is different, and they can take, well what do we have to do? What's the most extreme we have to achieve? And if we do that across our suite into our platform suite, the N4RS, that can then be applied to all the applications. And then becomes relevant to the U.S. So it's almost like some requirement across the seas, being deployed then becoming really relevant back here because over here you do need to be aware of the data protection, as well, it's just not as formalized yet. >> It's coming >> A Brewing issue right? >> What about Asia Pacific? So you have responsibility for Japan, and China, and the rest of the region. >> Right >> Which you are sort of re-distinct... >> Really are right? There are several sub regions in the one region. The team down there, as I say, arguably the most successful team in Infor right now, so Helen and the crew. So you see Australia, New Zealand then you see Southeast Asia, then you see China, Japan and so on. So different dynamics and different markets, some more mature than others, Japan is very developed by very specific. You do need very specialized local skills to succeed. Arguably Australia, New Zealand is not that similar from say some of the European Countries. Even though there are differences and I would never dream to tell an Australian or a New Zealander that they are the same as Europeans, cuz I get it. I smile when people say "you're from the U.K and you're not from Ireland?" I understand the differentiation. (laugher) And Southeast Asia, there's a ton of local custom, local language, local business practice that needs to be catered for. We seem to be doing okay down there. As I say, fastest growing market at scale. It's not like it's growing ridiculously fast but from a small base. It's as a big market already and growing the fastest. >> And China, what's that like? You have to partner up? >> Oh yeah >> To the JV in China? >> You have to partner up, there are several of the key growth markets that it's best to go in with partners. Customers like to see we've got a presence. So that they can touch and feel that Infor entity. We can't achieve the scale we need, and the growth we want fast enough without partnering. So we have to go with partners to get us the resources that we need. >> And in the Middle East, so my business partner, Co-Host, John Furrier, is on a Twenty Hour flight to Bahrain. The Cube Bahrain. Bahrain was the first Country in the Middle East to declare Cloud first. AWS is obviously part of that story, part of your story. So what's going on over there? Is it a growing market? Is it sort of something you're still cracking? >> No, no, again it's growing. We have several key markets down there, big in hospitality in that part of the world. Hotels, tourism obviously. Shopping, very interesting markets, and Healthcare, interestingly enough. I think arguably some of the worlds best Hospitals are in that region. Definitely the best funded Hospitals. >> Probably the most comfortable. (laughter) >> So again part of our stent is the number of industries we serve, so if you can put in our platform as it were, then you could have multiple of the industry flavors applied. Because what's interesting in that part of World, there seem to be a number of, I guess we call them conglomerates. So maybe family owned, or region owned, and they have just a different array of businesses all under the one ownership. So you would have a retailer that's also doing some tourism, that's also doing some manufacturing. So we can put our platform in, and then those industry flavors they can get one solution to cover it all. Which is a little bit unusual, and works for us. >> Your scope is enormous. I mean essentially you're the head of Non-U.S. I mean is that right? >> Yeah, and Latin America as well. >> That's part of it? That's not... >> Excluding the Americas. So there's Americas and then everything else, and you're everything else. >> I missed a meeting you see so they just gave it to me >> What you raised your hand at the wrong time? >> I wasn't there (laughter) >> So how do you organize to be successful? You obviously have to have strong people in the region. >> Right. So the key is people, right. We organize somewhat differently to over here. We've gone for a regional model, so I have six sub-regions, that I worry about. So four in Europe, the Nordic Countries. Scandinavian, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark. We call Western, which is Ireland, U.K. and the Benelux. Germany is Central and East, and then Southern is the Latin Country, Spain, Portugal, Greece and so. Then we've got the Middle East, and Africa, and then we got Asia Pacific. I've got six regional teams, all headed by a regional leader, and each of them are trying to be as self contained as they can. And where we see we've got an opportunity to move into something new, we've got one team working with me directly as an incubator. For example, we're driving a specific focus on Healthcare, in our part of the world, because it's very big over here. We haven't quite cracked the code over there. When we get some scale, then it'll move into the regions, but for now that's incubating under me. >> And, what about in Country? Do you have Country Managers? One in the U.K., one in France, one in Germany. >> We have what we call local leaders, right? So in some cases it could be a sales oriented individual, it could be consulting, others it could be the local HR guy. So that's more for us to make sure we're building a sense of community within Infor. Rather than it being more customer facing. We're still trying to make sure that there is a reasonably scarcity of senior skills. So regionalizing lets us deploy across several Countries, and that works with the customer base, but for employees we need local leaders to give them a sense of feeling home and attached. >> So the regions are kind of expertise centers if you will? >> Yes >> So I was going to ask about product expertise, where does that come from? It's not parachuted in from the U.S. I presume? >> No, we're pretty much self-sufficient actually, which is great. So from both what we call solution consulting, which is the product expertise, and then consulting which is the product deployment. And we're doing more and more of our deployments with Partners. As I say, we need to really rapidly embrace that partner ecosystem to give us the growth opportunity. RND, is all over the World. That's not under my direct control. So for a major suites, take for example, LN, happens to be headquartered out of Barneveld, in the Netherlands. From a Historic perspective, which is great. And Stockholm, which is also great. But a lot of the development resource room in Nila and in India. So we work closely with the guys, even though they don't actually report to me. >> And out of the whole area, the area of your responsibility what's the best growth opportunity? We all think of China, but that's been fits and starts for a lot of people. >> Yeah, yeah I think we've got multiple opportunities, you can look at it a few ways. You can look at it geographically, and you would say China. You can look at Eastern Europe, and you can look at Africa. There's a ton of opportunity in those regions, geographically. Interestingly we are also at a point where I think the Nordics, and we've got a very solid base Historically, and so on. But we probably haven't put enough focus on there in recent times, that the opportunities are really scaled in Nordics is really quite significant. And then they can look at it from a Product Perspective. So for example, we have, what we believe to be World Leading, and actually a Company called Gartner would equally agree with us. Enterprise Asset Management, EAM, that's a product suite that can fit across all of our industries. I think that could well be the significant growth area for us across the entire six regions. And it's a huge focus for us here at the conference actually. So we can do it by product, EAM, Healthcare, or by Region. I think Eastern Europe, China, and Africa, as well as the Nordics. >> And the other big opportunity is just share gains, market share gains, particularly in Europe, I would think, with your background. >> Yup. Completely, I mean, that's why I said, it's really interesting that we are winning market share in Germany. Who'd of thought that a few years ago? That's a big market, I mean, Germany, U.K., France, Italy. They're huge. Right, I mean U.K., is what, Sixty-Five Million People? It's a big economy, so we've got many of the worlds G7, in our backyard. So we just really need to double down on those, and give them the opportunities to grow that we need. >> And just back to Japan for a second. Japan has traction, it takes a long time to crack Japan. I know it first from personal experiences. >> Yeah, Okay, Interesting. >> Yeah you just got to go many many times and meet people. >> That's it, Right. And it's a different culture, of when you think they're saying yes and you think they're there, that's just yes to the next step. (laughter) >> Alright, so it does take time to get there. We've actually cracked it to some extent, that we've now got some solid referenceability, and some good wind. We need local leaders in Japan, to really crack the code there. >> And then once you're in, you're in. >> I think that once you've proven yourself, it's a lot of word of mouth and referencing. >> Well I hope you get home this weekend. Are you headed home? >> Yes! Actually I'm lucky enough. My Wife is originally from Chicago. So she and our Daughter have come over for the weekend, to go sight seeing in Washington. So that'll be fun. So we'll be going home on Sunday. >> Your adopted home for the weekend then. >> That's exactly right. >> Well we'll talk Guinness in just a bit. Thanks for the time though, we appreciate it. >> Thank you Gentlemen. >> Good to see you, Sir. Alright, back with more here from Inforum 2018, and you're watching Live, on theCube, here in D.C. (electronic music)