(bright music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS Summit 2022. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Two days of coverage, AWS Summit 2022 in New York city's coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. Events are back. theCUBE is back. Of course, with theCUBE virtual, CUBE hybrid, the cube.net. Check it out, a lot of content this year more than ever. A lot more cloud data, cloud native, modern applications, all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, CUBE alumni, CEO of Observe, Inc. in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data, observability. Jeremy, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Always great to come and talk to you on theCUBE man. It's been a few years. >> Well, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability space, hot area, but also you've been a senior executive. President of Dell, EMC, 11 years ago you had a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> And it's here. You predicted it 11 years ago. Look around, it's cloud meets big data. >> Yeah, the cloud thing I think was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for sort of catching that bus early, We were on the bus early and I think it was only inevitable. Like if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you could find out things you could never possibly imagine. >> So you're close to a lot of companies that we've been covering deeply. Snowflake obviously are involved. The board level, the founders, the people there, cloud, Amazon, what's going on here? You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, chief of Observe, Inc., which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data, engineering, large scale integrations, data as code, integrating into applications. It's a whole another world developing, like you see with Snowflake, it means Snowflake is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's this wave we're on? How would you describe the wave? >> Well, a couple of things. People are, I think, riding more software than ever before. Why? Because they've realized that if you don't take your business online and offer a service, then you become largely irrelevant. And so you you've got a whole set of new applications. I think more applications now than any point, not just ever, but the mid nineties. I always looked at as the golden age of application development. Now, back then people were building for Windows. Well now they're building for things like, AWS is now the platform. So you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data and the transactions, what you bought today or something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry data, all the exhaust fumes. And I think people really are realizing that their differentiation is not so much their application. It's their understanding of the data. Can I understand who my best customers are? What I sell today? If people came to my website and didn't buy, then why not? Where did they drop off? All of that they want to analyze. And the answers are all in the data. The question is, can you understand it? >> In our last startup showcase, we featured data as code. One of the insights that we got out of that, and I want to get your opinion on or reaction to is, is that data used to be put into a data lake and turns into a data swamp or throw into the data warehouse, and then we'll do some queries, maybe a report once in a while. And so data, once it was done, unless it was real time, even real time was not good anymore after real time. That was the old way. Now you're seeing more and more effort to say, let's go look at the data, 'cause now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once, they're iterating. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting That's a Silicon Valley story. That's like how startups were, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have this data concept that's now part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole new cycle of data being reused and repurposed, then figure it out. >> Yeah, yeah, I'm a big fan of, years ago, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee, at the MIT labs. I spent time with and he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look, he said, I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you have enough data, you can answer any question. And this has going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and certainly, research is on the forefront. But I think starting to see that mindset of the MIT research be mainstream in enterprises. They're realizing that, yeah, it is about the data. If I can better understand my data better than competitor, then I've got an advantage. And so the question is how? What technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to allow me to do that? >> So let's talk about Observe, Inc. You're the CEO. Given you've seen the waves before, you're in the front lines of observability, which again is in the center of all this action. What's going on with the company? Give a quick minute to explain Observe for the folks who don't know what you guys do. What's the company doing? What's the funding status? What's the product status? And what's the customer status? >> Yeah, so we realized, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago. Look, the way people are building applications is different. They're way more functional. They change every day. But in some respects there are a lot more complicated. They're distributed, microservices architectures. And when something goes wrong, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not going to fly because you had so much change going into production on a daily basis. It was hard to tell like where the problem was. And so we thought, okay, it's about time. Somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and all the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot and make sense of the problems that they're seeing. So that's observability. It's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was, a guy called, like everything in tech, it's a reinvention of something from years gone by, but there's a guy called Rudy Coleman in 1960s, kind of term. And the term was been able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for the best part of four years now. It took us three years just to build the product. I think what people don't appreciate these days often is the barrier to entry in a lot of these markets is quite high. You need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. So yeah, this last year, we did our first year selling. We've got about 40 customers now. We got great investors Sutter Hill Ventures. Mike Speiser who was really the first guy in the Snowflake and the initial investor. We're fortunate enough to have Mike on our board. And part of the Observe story is closely knit with Snowflake because all of that telemetry data, we store in there. >> So I want to pivot to that. Mike Speiser, Snowflake, Jeremy Burton, theCUBE kind of same thinking. This idea of a super cloud or what Snowflake became. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> Snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. And now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of Snowflake. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> So that's become an entrepreneurial story that we think that to go big in the cloud, you can have a cloud on a cloud, like as Jerry Chen in Greylock calls it, castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you're doing some stuff with Snowflake's. So as a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a Snowflake or an AWS, because again, you got to go where the data is. You need all the data. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> What's your take on that? >> Having enough gray hair now. Again, in tech, I think if you want to predict the future, look at the past. And 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a smaller company called Oracle. And an Oracle was the database company and their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms. One, Windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operating system was the platform. And then that was the ecosystem that you would compete on top of. And then there were companies like SAP that built applications on top of Oracle. So then wind the clock forward 25 years, gray hairs, the platform isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, Google cloud. I probably look around if I say that in. >> It's okay. But Hyperscale. >> Yeah. >> CapEx built out. >> That is the new platform. And then Snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generated data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. And I think they they've done an amazing job doing for the, I'd say the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and of course my ambition would be, look, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of Snowflake, as they were on top of Oracle, then we'd probably be quite happy. >> So you're building on top of Snowflake? >> We're building on top of Snowflake a hundred percent. And I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that's a risk. >> Are you still on the board? >> Yeah, I'm still on the board. Yeah. That's a risk I'm prepared to take. I am long on Snowflake. >> It sounds, well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board then you'll know as going on. Okay, seriously, this is a real dynamic. >> Jeremy: It is. >> It's not a one off. >> Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS, it is an order of magnitude more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows. And so I believe the opportunity for folks like Snowflake and folks like Observe, it's an order magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old world. >> Yeah, and I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you got to be on a platform. >> Yeah and it's quite easy. >> Or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how many seats are at that table left. >> Well, value migrates up over time. So when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, rack space and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure for service, platform as a service. My old employee EMC, we had Pivotal. Pivotal was a platform as a service. You don't hear so much about it these days, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to extract a real business, you got to move up, you got to add value, you got to build databases, then you got to build applications. >> It's interesting. Moving from the data center to the cloud was a dream for starters 'cause they didn't have to provision the CapEx. Now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on top of that, you got Snowflake. Now you got on top of that. >> The assumption is almost that compute and storage is free. I know it's not quite free. >> Yeah, it's almost free. >> But as an application vendor, you think, well, what can I do if I assume compute and storage is free, that's the mindset you've got to get into. >> And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm going to get a serious multiple of value in what I'm paying. Most people don't even blink at their AWS bills unless they're like massively huge. Then it's a repatriation question or whatever discount question. But for most startups or any growing company, the Amazon bill should be a small factor. >> Yeah, a lot of people ask me like, look, you're building on Snowflake. You're going to be paying their money. How does that work with your business model? If you're paying them money, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. We could build a database as well in Observe, but then I've got half the development team working on something that will never be as good as Snowflake. And so we made the call early on that, no, we want to innovate above the database. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and the same is true with something like Amazon, like Snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >> Yeah and what's interesting is that Dave Vellante and I have been pointing this out and he's obviously more on Snowflake. I've been looking at Databricks and the same dynamics happening. The proof is the ecosystem. >> Yeah. >> If you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and Databricks, it's exploding. The shows are selling out. This floor space is booked. That's the old days at VMware. The old days at AWS. >> One and for Snowflake and any platform provider, it's a beautiful thing because we build on Snowflake and we pay their money. They don't have to sell to us. And we do a lot of the support. And so the economics work out really, really well if you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of ecosystems. >> And then also you get a trajectory of economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of Snowflake, integrations, new products, you're scaling and step function with them. >> Yeah, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. When I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had one petabyte customer. And so at Observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so being able to rely on a platform that can manage that is invaluable. >> Well, Jeremy, great conversation. Thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. We got a couple minutes left, put a plug in for Observe. What do you guys do? You got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You get in traction. >> Yeah >> Scales around the corner sounds like. Is that where you at? Pre-scale? >> We've got a big announcement coming up in two or three weeks. We've got new funding, which is always great. The product is really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, at which point can you just start hiring salespeople and the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. We've got about 40 SaaS companies that run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting enterprise type customers. We're F5 networks. We're POC in right now with Capital One. We've got some interesting news around Capital One coming up. I can't share too much, but it's going to be exciting. And like I said, Sutter Hill continue to stick. >> And I think Capital One's a big Snowflake customer as well, right? >> They were early and one of the things that attracted me to Capital One was they were very, very good with Snowflake early on and they put Snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. And today that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts. >> Capital One, very innovative cloud. Obviously, AWS customer and very innovative. certainly in the CISO and CIO. On another point on where you're at. So you're pre-scale meaning you're about to scale. >> Jeremy: Right. >> So you got POCs. What's that trajectory look like? And you see around the corner, what's going on? What's around the corner that you're going to hit the straight and narrow and gas it fast? >> Yeah, the key thing for us is we got to get the product right. The nice thing about having a guy like Mike Speiser on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage. His questions at the board are always about like, is the product right? Is the product right? Have you got the product right? 'Cause we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and the revenue will take care of itself. So right now all the attention is on the product. This year, the exciting thing is we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that back in the day you could do with the New Relics and AppDynamics, the last generation of APM tools. You're going to be able to do that within Observe. And we've already got the logs and the metrics capability in there. So for us this year is a big one 'cause we complete the trifecta, the logs. >> What's the secret sauce of observe if you put it into a sentence, what's the secret sauce? >> I think, an amazing founding engineering team, number one. At the end of the day, you have to build an amazing product and you have to solve a problem in a different way and we've got great long term investors. And the biggest thing our investors give is, actually it's not just money, it gives us time to get the product right. Because if we get the product right, then we can get the growth. >> Got it. Final question while I got you here. You've been on the enterprise business for a long time. What's the buyer landscape out there? You got people doing POCs, Capital One scale. So we know that goes on. What's the appetite at the buyer side for startups and what are their requirements that you're seeing? Obviously, we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their business, restructure. So a lot of happening in cloud. What's the criteria? How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >> Yeah, enterprises, they know they've got to spend money transforming the business. I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but what we were saying five years ago is happening. Everybody needs to figure out a way to take their business to this digital world. Everybody has to do it. So the nice thing from a startup standpoint is they know at times they need to risk or take a bet on new technology in order to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that A, have money, B, are prepared to take risks, and it's a race against time to get their offerings in this new digital footprint. >> Final, final question. What's the state of AWS? Where do you see them going next? Obviously, they're continuing to be successful. How does cloud 3.0? Or they always say it's day one, but it's maybe more like day 10, but what's next for AWS? Where do they go from here? Obviously, they're doing well and they're getting bigger and bigger. >> Yeah, it's an amazing story. We are on AWS as well. And so I think if they keep nurturing the builders and the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They have an early leads. And if you look at where, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the late nineties, it was they stopped really caring about developers and the folks who are building on top of their ecosystem. In fact, they started buying up their ecosystem and competing with people in their ecosystem. And I see with AWS, they have an amazing head start. And if they did more, if they do more than that, that's what's going to keep this juggernaut rolling for many years to come. >> They got the Silicon and they got the Stack developing. Jeremy Burton inside theCUBE, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called Observe, Inc. In the middle of all the action and the board of Snowflake as well. Great startup. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Always a pleasure. >> Live from San Francisco's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Stay with us. More coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. (soft music)

>>Well, hi everybody, John Walls here, continuing our coverage on the cube of splunk.com 21. And then we talked a lot about data these days of companies and enterprise all the way down to small business and the importance of day to day to security data protection. But the public sector also has those very same concerns and some unique worries as well. And with me to talk about the public sector and its data transformation, and of course what's going on in that space is Jeremy Reesey, who was the group vice president of the public sector at Splunk. Jeremy. Good to see you today. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. >>Thanks for making time for me, John. You bet. >>Glad to have you. Well, let's, let's just, if first off, let's just paint the picture for those watching who are kind of focused on the private sector a little bit, just share with some general thoughts about the public sector and what's going on in terms of its digital transformation and what kind of concerns or, um, I guess, challenges you think there are broadly speaking first in the public sector around. >>Thanks, John. There's quite a bit of transformation going on right now in our government. And just like in industry, we've seen the pandemic as a catalyst for a lot of that transformation. Uh, you may have seen that Splunk recently released a report on the state of data innovation. And what we found is that, um, a lot of good things are happening, but the government still has a lot of work to do. And so there were pockets of excellence that we saw in the last 18 months where agencies really responded to things like the requirement for vaccinations and the requirement for monitoring, uh, health status in general. Uh, and we saw tremendous, um, speed in rolling out things like tele-health across, uh, the veterans affairs administration. But, uh, we also saw in our report that there were many agencies that haven't yet been able to modernize in the way that they want. And one of the inhibitors to that, frankly, John is their ability to adopt software as a service. And so we've seen a lot of things happening in the last year that, um, moved agency customers towards software as a service, but there's work yet. >>So, and why is that? So when you're talking about SAS, is it, is it, um, bureaucratic, uh, red tape as a regulatory issues? Or is it just about, uh, this is a large, huge institution that makes independent decisions, you know, HHS might make decisions separate from state separate from deity, uh, and then it's fragmented. I mean, what are those challenges? >>Sure. Well, I think there are two sides of a John. I think that our government is inherently designed to move cautiously and to move in such a way that we don't make mistakes. Uh, you use the word re bureaucratic. I'm not a huge fan of that word, but I understand the sentiment. Uh, I think that there are layers to any decision that any part of the government makes and certainly that support of, um, inhibiting speed. But I think the other part of it is our acquisition rules and regulations. And I think we've seen a number of positive changes made, uh, not only in the last administration, but even in this current administration that are helping our government agencies to take advantage of software as a service. Um, but there's still work to do there as well. Uh, we've seen the rise of things like, uh, other transactional authorities, OTAs. Uh, we've seen the establishment of an agile procurement office inside the general services administration, GSA, uh, but uh, other parts have heritage systems, systems that are working really well. And you don't want to change something that's not broken just for the sake of changing it. You want to change it in such a way, uh, that you really do transform and deliver new capabilities. >>Yeah. And I guess, um, you know, it's a matter of obviously of developing an expertise and, and maybe confidence too, right? Because this is, this is a new world, a new tech world, if you will here in the 21st century. And, um, and maybe I misused the word bureaucratic. Um, and I know you said you don't like it, but, but there's a certain kind of institutional energy or whatever you want to call it that kind of prohibits fast changes and, and is cautious and is conservative because, I mean, these are big dollar decisions and they're important decisions to based on security. So, I mean, how do you wrap your arms around that from a Splunk perspective to deal with the government, you know, at large, uh, when they have those kinds of, um, uh, I guess considerations >>Certainly, well, the beauty of where we find ourselves today is that data is incredibly powerful and there's more data available to our agency customers or to any company than ever before. So Splunk is inherently a data platform. We allow our customers be the agency customers, or be the industry customers to ask questions of data that they collect from any source, be it a structured data or unstructured data using Splunk, a customer can say, what's happening. Why is it happening? Where is it happening? And that's incredibly powerful. And I think, um, in this current age where, uh, the pandemic is forcing us to rethink how we deliver services and citizen services specifically, uh, having a data platform is incredibly powerful because the way that we're answering questions today is different than the way we answered questions last year. And it may be very different the way we have to ask questions a year from now. Uh, and that's really what Splunk's is delivering to our customers is that flexibility to be able to ask any question of any data set, uh, and to ask those questions in the context of today, not just the context that they knew yesterday. >>Yeah. W w and you mentioned the pandemic, what has that impact then? Um, obviously the need of, uh, I think about, you know, vaccination of disease, monitoring of outbreak monitoring, uh, emergency care, ICU units, all these things, um, critically important to the government's role right now, um, and continue to be, so what kind of impact has the, the pandemic had in terms of their modernization plans? Um, I'm guessing some of these had to be put on hold, right? Because you've, you've got, uh, you've got an emergency and so you can't conduct business as usual. >>Sure. So it's caused a shift in priorities as you know, John, and then it's also caused us to rethink what has to be done in person and what can be done remotely. And when we think about what can be done remotely, we're seeing a proliferation of devices. Um, we're seeing a proliferation of, uh, the, the level of network access, uh, that is enabled and supported. And with that, we see new security concerns, right? We are seeing, uh, uh, really, uh, an intriguing rise of thought around authentication and making sure that the right person is coming in from the right device, uh, using the right applications at the right time, that is incredibly challenging for our agency customers. Uh, and they have to think about what's happening in, in ways that they didn't have to last year. >>Let's talk about certification a little bit, and I know you announced a FedRAMP a couple of years ago, and now you've come out with a new iteration, if you will. Um, I hear about that. So walk me through that a little bit in our audience as well. And then just talk about the value of certification. Why does that really matter? What's the importance of that? >>Thanks, John. We did recently announced that we've received a provisional authority to operate, uh, in aisle five impact level five. And that's incredibly exciting. I've, I've never worked for a software company that had FedRAMP certification previously. And I think it demonstrates Splunk's commitment to this market, the public sector market. Uh, we are absolutely, um, committed to delivering our software in any environment at any level of classification that our customers need, and that allows them to rest assured that they can decide anything they want to about their data without worrying about the sanctity of that data itself, or the platform that they're using to process that data. That's incredibly exciting. I hope, >>Yeah. You mentioned, uh, the current administration just a little bit ago, you know, the Biden administration, um, no executive orders, you know, focusing in on, on, um, use of, of, uh, or I guess taking appropriate measures, right. To protect your data cyber from a cyber security perspective. Um, what exactly has that done to change the approach the government is taking now, uh, to protecting data and then how have you adapted to that executive order to provide the right services for governments looking to, to make sure they meet those standards and that criteria? >>Well, it's an exciting time as you, as you point out on May 12th, president Biden's son and executive order on improving the nation's cybersecurity. So, uh, from the highest levels, we're seeing the government sort of set a baseline for what makes sense. And they went further in a memo just released on August 27th, uh, by releasing what they call an enterprise logging maturity model. And it has four levels. And it, it indicates what sorts of data agencies should be storing from, and in their systems and for how long they should be storing it. And that's incredibly exciting because a lot of agencies are using Splunk, uh, to make sense of that data. And so this gives them sort of a baseline for what data do they need to collect? How long do they need to keep it collected for what questions do they need to ask of it? And as a result, um, we're making some offers to our customers about how they use Splunk, uh, how they take advantage of our cloud-based storage within our product, um, how they take advantage of our services in mapping their data strategy to this enterprise logging maturity model. And it represents a great opportunity to sort of take a step forward in cybersecurity for these agency customers. >>Yeah. I'm kind of curious here. I mean, I, I came from the wireless space and we had an active dialogue with the government in terms of, uh, communications, emergency communications, um, and, um, and also in, in services, the rural areas, that kind of thing. But sometimes that collaboration didn't go as smoothly as we would've liked, frankly. And, and so maybe lessons have been learned from that in terms of how the private sector melds with the public sector and works with the policy makers, you know, in that respect, what, how would you characterize just overall the relationship, you know, the public private sector relationship in terms of, you know, the sharing of resources and of information and collaboration? >>Well at the federal government level, uh, there's always been pretty incredible collaboration between industry and government, but I think, um, we at Splunk have been engaged through organizations like the Alliance for digital innovation, uh, the us chamber of commerce, um, act by act the American council for technology and the industry advisory council. And we're seeing a rise actually in university partnerships as well, particularly at the state level where, uh, let's say local governments are saying, Hey, we don't have the capacity to do some of these things that we now know we need to do. And we know that, uh, some of those things could be done in collaboration with our university partners and with our state partners. Um, and that's exciting. I think that it is an era where everyone realizes there are new threats. Uh, there are threats that are, um, hard to handle in a silo and that the more we collaborate, whether it's government industry collaboration, or whether it's cross government collaboration, or whether it's cross industry collaboration, the better, and the more effectively, uh, we'll solve some of these problems that face us as a nation. >>What do you make a great point too? Because, uh, it is about pulling resources at some point, and everybody pulling together, uh, in order to combat what has become a certainly vaccine, uh, challenge to say the least Jeremy, thanks for the time. Uh, I appreciate it. And, uh, wish you all the success down the road. >>Thanks for having me, John, you >>Bet Jeremy Risa joining us, talking about the public sector and sparks just exemplary work in that respect. You're watching the cube. Our coverage continues here of.com for 21.

>>from the cube studios in Palo alto >>in boston >>connecting with thought leaders all around the >>world. This >>is a cute conversation. Hello and welcome to today's session of the AWS Global Public sector Partner Awards. I'm your host Natalie ehrlich. Today we're going to focus on the following award for best partner transformation. I'm pleased to introduce our guests, josh door smith, vice president of public sector at Effectual and jeremy Yates, deputy technology architect at jenny May. Welcome gentlemen so glad to have you on our show. >>Hi there. Very nice to be here. Thank you so much for having me >>terrific. Well josh, I'd like to start with you. How can companies leverage cloud native solutions to deliver higher quality services? >>So Natalie, that's a great question. And in the public sector and our our government customers, we run into this all the time. It's kind of our bread and butter. What what they can do is the first thing they need to be aware of is you don't have to be afraid of the cloud as some very obscure technology that is just emerging. It's been out for 10, 11 years now, customers across government space are using it lock stock and barrel to do everything from just managing simple applications, simple websites all the way through hosting their entire infrastructure, both in production and for disaster recovery purposes as well. So the first thing to note is just don't be afraid of the cloud. Um secondly, it's, it's imperative that they select the right partner who is able to kind of be there Sherpa to go into however far they want to dip their toe into the, into the proverbial cloud waters. Um to select somebody who knows whatever it is that they need to go do. So if they want to go Aws as we are talking about today, pick a partner who has the right experience, past performance designations and competencies with the cloud that they're interested in. >>Terrific. Well, you know, Jeremy, I'd love to move to you. What does modern modernization mean to jenny May? >>Sure, Thanks Natalie, great to be here. Thanks josh as well, you know. So for jenny May, modernization is really, it's not just technology is holistic across the organization. So that includes things like the business, um not just you know, the the I. T. Division. So we're looking at the various things to modernize like our culture and structural changes within the organization. Um moving to implement some, some proven practices like def sec ops and continuous integration and continuous delivery or deployment. Uh and then, you know, our overall overarching goal is to give the best and most secure technology to the business that we can to meet the Jeannie Mai mission and the needs of our customers >>terrific. Well josh, how is Effectual planning to support jenny Maes modernization plans? >>So we have been supporting jenny May for about 14 months now. Uh and back in september of last year, we rewarded a co prime 10 year contract for Jeannie Mai to do exactly that. It's to provide all things cloud to Jeannie Mai for 10 years on AWS and that's including reselling AWS. That's including providing all sorts of professional services to them. And it's, it's providing some third party software applications to help them support their applications themselves. So what Effectual is doing is kind of a threefold. We are supporting the modernization of their process, which jeremy mentioned a moment ago and that includes in stan shih ating a cloud center of Excellence for jenny May, which enables them to modernize the way they do cloud governance while they're modernizing their technology stack. We're also providing a very expert team of cloud architects and Dempsey cops engineers to be able to, to design the Jeannie Mai environment, collaborating with our co prime uh to ensure that it meets the security requirements, the compliance requirements that jerry mentions. Uh, Jeannie Mai is a federal entity, but it also has to adhere to all the finance industry uh compliance requirements as well. So very strenuous from that perspective. And then the third thing that we're doing to help them kind of along their modernization journey is in stan shih aging infrastructure as code. So in the cloud, rather than building everything in the AWS management console, we script everything to build it automatically, so it improves consistency, it improves the customer experience regardless of which resource is working on it. And it improves disaster recovery capability as well. And also, just quite frankly, the speed by which they can actually deploy things. >>And jeremy, how is this transition helping your security really enhancing it now? >>Uh From a security perspective we're implementing a number of various tools um both, you know, a W. S based as well as other software that josh mentioned. Um So we're able to utilize those in a more scalable manner than we could previously in the traditional data center. Um we've got a number of things such as we're looking at multiple vulnerability management products like 10 of Ohio and Wallace. Um we're using uh tools such as Centra fi for our our pam or privileged access management capabilities. Um Splunk a pretty industry standard. Um software for log and data correlation and analysis um will also be using that for some system and application monitoring. Um as well as uh the Mcafee envision product for endpoint and other cloud service security. So being able to pull all those in in a more scalable and more cost efficient way as well from cloud based services. Uh, it's really helped us be able to get those services and integrate them together in a way that, you know, we may not previously been able to. >>Yeah, terrific. Well, josh, let's move back to you and talk further about compliance. You know, any insight here, how Effectual is building a modern cloud infrastructure to integrate AWS services with third party tools to really achieve compliance with the government requirements. Just any further insight on that >>front? That's a great question. Natalie and I'm gonna tag team with Jeremy on this one if you don't mind, but I'll start off so jenny may obviously I mentioned earlier has federal requirements and financial requirements so focused right now on on those federal aspects. Um, so the tools that Jeremy mentioned a moment ago, we are integrating all of them with a W. S native meaning all of the way we do log aggregation in the various tools within AWS cloudwatch cloud trail. All of those things were implementing an AWS native, integrating them with Splunk to aggregate all of that information. But then one of the key requirements that's coming up with the federal government in the very near future is tick three dot or trusted internet connection. Basically in the first iteration a decade or so ago, the government wanted to limit the amount of points of presence that they have with the public facing internet fast forward several versions to today and they're pushing that that onus back on the various entities like jenny May and like hud, which Jeannie Mai is a part of but they still want to have that kind of central log repository to where all of the, all of the security logs and vulnerability logs and things like that. Get shipped to a central repository and that will be part of DHS. So what effectual has done in partnership with jenny May is create a, a W. S native solution leveraging some of those third party tools that we mentioned earlier to get all of those logs aggregated in a central repository for Ginny MaE to inspect ingest and take action from. But then also provide the mechanism to send that to DHS to do that and correlate that information with everything coming in from feeds across the government. Now that's not required just yet. But we're future proofing jenny Maes infrastructure in order to be able to facilitate adherence to those requirements when it becomes uh required. Um, and so jeremy, I'll pass it over to you to talk a little bit further about that because I know that's one of the things that's near and dear to your sister's heart as well as jenny may overall. >>Yeah, absolutely. Thanks josh. Um, so yeah, we, as you mentioned, we have implemented um, uh, sort of a hybrid tech model right now, um, to to handle compliance on that front. Um, so we're still using a, you know, some services from the legacy or our existing T two dot x models. That that josh was mentioning things such as m tips, um, uh, the Einstein sensors, etcetera. But we're also implementing that take 30 architecture on our own. As josh mentioned that that will allow us to sort of future proof and and seamlessly really transitioned to once we make that decision or guidance comes out or, you know, mandates or such. Um, so that effort is good to future proof house from a compliance perspective. Um, also, you know, the tools that I mentioned, uh, josh reiterated, those are extremely important to our our security and compliance right. Being able to ensure, you know, the integrity and the confidentiality of of our systems and our data is extremely important. Not both, not just both on the r not only on the government side, but as josh mentioned, the finance side as well. >>Terrific. Well, I'd love to get your insight to on AWS workspaces. Um, if either one of you would like to jump in on this question, how did they empower the jenny May team to work remotely through this pandemic? >>That's a great question. I guess I'll start and then we'll throw it to jeremy. Um, so obviously uh effectual started working with jenny May about three weeks after the pandemic formally started. So perfect timing for any new technology initiative. But anyway, we, we started talking with Jeremy and with his leadership team about what is required to actually facilitate and enable our team as well as the government resources and the other contractors working for jenny May to be able to leverage the new cloud environment that we were building and the very obvious solution was to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure uh type solution. And obviously Jeannie Mai had gone all in on amazon web services, so it became the national natural fit to look first at AWS workspaces. Um, so we have implemented that solution. There are now hundreds of jenny May and jenny make contractor resources that have a WS workspaces functioning in the GovCloud regions today and that's a very novel approach to how to facilitate and enable not only our team who is actually configuring the infrastructure, but all the application developers, the security folks and the leadership on the jenny may side to be able to access, review, inspect, check log etcetera, through this remote capability. It's interesting to note that Jeannie Mai has been entirely remote since the pandemic initiated. Jeremy's coming to us from, from west Virginia today, I'm coming to us from national harbor Maryland And we are operating totally remotely with a team of 60 folks about supporting this specific initiative for the cloud, not to mention the hundreds that are supporting the applications that Jamie runs to do its day to day business. So jeremy, if you wouldn't mind talking about that day to day business that jenny may has and, and kind of what the, the mission statement of Jeannie Mai is and how us enabling these workspaces uh facilitates that mission >>or you know, so the part of the overall mission of jenny Maes to, to ensure affordable housing is, is made available to uh, the american public. Um that's hud and, and jenny may as part of that and we provide um mortgage backed securities to help enable that. Um, so we back a lot of V A. Loans, um, F H A, those sort of loans, um, workspaces has been great in that manner from a technology perspective, I think because as you mentioned, josh, it's really eliminated the need for on premise infrastructure, right? We can be geographically dispersed, We can be mobile, um, whether we're from the east coast or west coast, we can access our environment securely. Uh, and then we can, you know, administer and operate and maintain the technology that the business needs to, to fulfill the mission. Um, and because we're able to do that quickly and securely and effectively, that's really helpful for the business >>Terrific. And um, you know, I'd like to shift gears a bit and uh you know, discuss what you're looking ahead toward. What is your vision for 2021? How do you see this partnership evolving? >>Yeah, you >>Take that 1/1. >>Sure. Yeah. Um you know, definitely some of the things we look forward to in 2021 as we evolve here is we're going to continue our cloud journey um you know, through practices like Deb said cops, you realize that uh that journey has never done. It's always a continual improvement process. It's a loop to continually work towards um a few specific things or at least one specific thing that we're looking forward to in the future, as josh mentioned earlier was our arctic three Oh Initiative. Um, so with that we think will be future proofed. Um as there's been a lot of um a lot of recent cyber security activity and things like that, that's going to create um opportunities I think for the government and Jeannie Mai is really looking forward to to leading in that area. >>Mhm and josh, can you weigh in quickly on that? >>Absolutely. Uh First and foremost we're very much looking forward to receiving authority to operate with our production environment. We have been preparing for that for this last year plus. Uh but later on this summer we will achieve that 80 oh status. And we look forward to starting to migrate the applications into production for jenny May. And then for future proof, it's as jerry jerry mentioned, it's a journey and we're looking forward to cloud optimizing all of their applications to ensure that they're spending the right money in the right places uh and and ensuring that they're not spending over on any of the one given area. So we're very excited to optimize and then see what the technology that we're being able to provide to them will bring to them from an idea and a conceptual future for jenny may. >>Well thank you both so very much for your insights. It's been a really fantastic interview. Our guests josh duggar smith as well as jeremy Gates. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much. >>Thank you so much. >>Terrific. Well, I'm your host for the cube Natalie or like to stay tuned for more coverage. Thanks so much for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, I'm John Furrier with The Cube, we're here in Palo Alto, California for a remote interview and session for The Cube presents AWS startup showcase, the next big thing in AI security in life sciences. I'm John Furrier. We're here with a great segment on cloud. Next big thing in Cloud with Chaos Search, Thomas Hazel, Chief Technology and Science Officer of Chaos Search joined by Jeremy Foran, the head of data analytics, the bad boy of data analyst as they say, but BAI communications, Jeremy Thomas, great to have you on. >> Great to be here. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So we're going to be talking about applying large scale log analytics to building the future of the transit industry. Obviously Telco's a big part of that, smart cities, you name the use case self-driving trucks, cars, you name it, everything's now edge. That the edge is super valuable, it's a new kind of last mile if you will, it's moving fast, it's mobile. This is a huge deal. Let's get into it, Thomas. What's this big story around this, this session? >> Well, we provide unique ability to take all that edge data and drive it into a data lake offering that we provide data analytics, both in logs, BI and coming out with ML there this year into next. So our unique play is transforming customers' cloud outer storage into an analytical platform. And really, I think with BIA is a log analytics specifically where, you know there's a lot of data streams from all those devices going into a lake that we transform their lake into analytics for driving, I guess, operational analysis. >> You know, Jeremy, I remember back in the day, I'm old enough to remember when the edge was the remote switch or campus hub or something. And then even on the Telco side, there was no wifi back in 2000 and you know, someone was driving in a car and you got any signal, you're lucky. Now you got, you know, no perimeter you have unlimited connectivity everywhere. This has opened up more of an Omni channel data problem. How do you see that world? Because you still got more devices pushing out at this edge and it's getting super local, right? Even on the body, even on people in the car. So certainly a lot of change on the infrastructure side. What does that pose for data challenge? >> Yeah, I, I would say that, you know users always want more, more bandwidth, more performance and that requires us to create more systems that require more complexity to deliver that user experience that we're, we're very proud of. And with that complexity means, you know exponentially more data. And so one of the wifi networks we offer in the Toronto subway system, T-connect, you know we see a 100-200,000 unique users a day and you can imagine just the amount of infrastructure to support that so that everyone has a seamless experience and can get their news and emails and even stream media while they're waiting for the subway. >> So you guys provide state of the art infrastructure for cell, wifi, broadcast, radio, IP networks, basically I mean, I call it the smart city kind of go-to. But that's basically anything involving kind of that edge piece. This is a huge thing. So as smart cities are on the table, which and you seeing 5G being called more of an enterprise app where there's feeding large dense areas of people this is now a new modern version of what I would call the, the smart city blueprint. What's changed in your mind on this whole modernization of this smart city infrastructure concept? What's new? What's cutting edge? >> Yeah. I would say that, you know there was an explosion of data and a lot of our insights aren't coming from one system anymore. It's coming from collecting data from all of the different pieces, the different infrastructure whether that's your fiber infrastructure or your wireless infrastructure, and then to solve problems you need to correlate data across those systems. So we're seeing more and more technologies that allow you to do that correlation. And that's really where we're finding tons of value, right? >> Thomas, take us through what you guys do as a, as a, as a product, a value proposition, the secret sauce, and and why I'm here with Jeremy? Why is this conversation important for the folks watching? What's the connection between Chaos Search and BAI communication? >> Well, it's data, right? And lots of it. So our unique platform allows people like Jeremy to stream all this data, right? In you know, today's world terabytes go to petabytes really easily, billions go to trillion really easily, and so providing the analysis of that data for their operations is challenging particularly based on technology and architectures that have been around for a long time. So what we do here at Chaos Search is the ability for BIA to stream all these devices, all these services into one centralized data lake on their cloud outer storage, where we connect to that cloud outer storage and transform it into an analytical database to do, in this case log analytics and do it seamlessly, easily where a new workload a new stream just streams into that lake. And we, as a service take over, we discover we index it and publish well-known open API and visualization so that they can focus on their business, not all the operational data pipeline, database and data engineering type work that again, at these types of scales is is frankly a nightmare. >> You know, one of the things that we've always observed on The Cube when you see new things come out that are really cool groundbreaking products like you guys are doing it's always a challenge to manage the cost and complexity of bringing in the new. So Jeremy, take us through this tech stack here because you know, it's, sometimes it might be unwieldy just in from a tech stack perspective, nevermind the business logic or the business processes that got to be either unwound or changed. Can you take us through the IT stack that's critical to support your, your area? >> Yeah, absolutely. So with all the various different equipment you know, to provide our public wifi and and our desks, carrier agnostic, LT and 5G networks, you know, we need to be able to adhere to PCI compliance and ISO 27,000, so that, you know, requires us to keep a tremendous amount of our data. And the challenge we were facing is how do we do that cost effectively, and not have to make any sort of compromises on how we do that? A lot of times you'll find you don't know the value of your data today until tomorrow. An example would be COVID. You know, we, when we were storing data two years ago we weren't planning for a pandemic, but now that we were able to retain that data and look back we can see a tremendous amount of value with trying to forecast how our systems will recover when things get back to normal. And so when I met Thomas and we were sort of talking about how we were going to solve some of these data retention problems, he started explaining to me their compression in some of the performance metrics of their profession. And, you know, I said, oh, middle out compression. And it was a bit, it's been a bit of a running joke between me and him and I'm sure others, but it's incredibly impressive the amount of data we're able to store at the kind of cost, right? >> What, what problem does, did he solve for you? Because I mean, these guys, honestly, you know the startups have a lot and the Cloud's enabling more value now, we're seeing this, but when you look at this what was your, what was your core problem that you had? >> Yeah, so we, when you we want to be able to, I mean, primarily this is for our CIS log server. And CIS long servers today aren't what they were 10, 15 years ago where you just sort of had a machine and if something broke you went and looked, right? Now, they're very complex, that data is feeding to various systems and third-party software. So, you know, we're actively looking for changes in patterns and we have our, you know security teams auditing these from, for penetration testing and such. And then the getting that data to S3 so that we could have it in case, you know, for two, three years of storage. Well, the problem we were facing is all of that all of these different systems we needed to feed and retain data, we couldn't do that on site. We wanted to do use S3 but when we were doing some projections, it's like, we, we don't really have the budget for all of these places. Meeting Thomas and, and working with Chaos Search, you know, using their compression brought those costs down drastically. And then as we've been working with them the really exciting thing is they we're bringing more and more features to that surface or offering. So, you know, first it was just storing that data away. And now we're starting to build solutions off of that sitting in storage. So that's where it gets really exciting because you know, there, it's nothing to start getting anomaly detection off those logs, which, you know originally it was just, we need to store them in case somebody needs them two, three years from now. >> So Thomas Thomas, if I get this right then what I'm hearing is obviously I've put aside the complexity and the governing side the regulations for a minute just generally. Data retention as, as a key value proposition and having data available when you need it and then to do that and doing it in a very cost-effective simple way. It sounds like what you guys are offering. Is that right? >> Yeah, I mean, one key aspect of our solution is retention, right? Those are a lot of the challenges, but at the same time we provide real time notification like a classic log analytic type platform, alerting, monitoring. The key thing is to bringing both those worlds together and solving that problem. And so this, you know, middle in middle out, well, to be frank, we created a new technology called what we call Chaos Index that is a database index that is wonderfully small as as we're indicating, but also provides all the features that makes Cloud object storage, high performance. And so the idea is that use this lake offering to store all your data in a cost effective way but our service allows you to analyze it both in a long retention perspective as well as real-time perspective and bringing those two worlds together is so key because typically you have Silo Solutions and whether it's real-time at scale or retention scale the cost complexity and time to build out those solutions I know Jeremy knows also, well, a lot of folks come to us to solve those problems because you know when you're dealing with, you know terabytes and up, you know these things get complicated and to be frank, fall over quite often. >> Yeah. Let me, let me just ask you the question that's probably on everyone's mind who's watching and you guys probably have both heard this many times, because a lot of people just throw the data lake solution around like it's, you know why they whitewash their kind of old legacy solutions with data lake, store it on data lake. It's been called a data swamp. So people are fearful that, okay. I love this idea of a data lake, who doesn't like throwing data into a repository, having it available at will with notifications, all this secret magic beans that just magically create value. But I doubt that, I don't want to turn into a data swamp. So Thomas and Jeremy, talk about that, that concern. How do you mitigate that? How do you talk to that? Because if done properly, there's huge value in having a control plane or some sort of data system that is going to be tied in with signals and just storage retention. So I see the value. How do you manage the concern that people might say, Hey, I don't want to date a swamp? >> Yeah, I'll jump into that. So, you know, let's just be frank, Hadoop was a great tool for a very narrow scenario. I think that data swamp came out because people were using the tooling in an incorrect way. I've always had the belief that data lakes are the future. You just have the right to have the right service the right philosophy to leverage it. So what we do here at Chaos Search is we allow you to organize it, discover it, automatically index that data so that swamp doesn't get swampy. You know, when you stream data into your lake how do you organize it, such that it's has a nice stream? How do you transform that data into a value? So with our service we actually start where the storage begins, not a end point, not an archive. So we have tooling and services that keep your lake from being swampy to be, to be clear. And, but the key value is the benefits of the lake, the cost effectiveness, the reliability, security, the scale, those are all the benefits. The problem was that no one really made cloud offer storage a first-class citizen and we've done that. We've dressed the swamp nature but provided all the value of analysis. And that cost metrics, that scale. No one can touch cloud outer storage, it just, you can't. But what we've done is cracked the code of how you make it analytical. >> Jeremy, I want to get your thoughts on this too, on your side I mean, as a practitioner and customer of, of of these solutions, you know, the concern is am I missing anything? And I've been a big proponent of data retention for many, many years. You know, Dave Alondra in our Cube knows all know that I bang on the table all the time, store your data, be a data hoarder, because it's going to come back and be valuable. Costs are going down so I'm a big fan of data retention. But the fear might be on, what am I missing? Because machine learning starts to come in down the road you got AI, the more data you have that's accessible in real time, the more machine learning is effective. Do you, do you worry about missing anything or do you just store everything? >> We, we store everything. Sometimes it's, it's interesting where the value and insights come from your data. Something that see, might seem trivial today down the road offers tremendous, tremendous value. So one of the things we do is provide because we have wifi in the subway infrastructure, you know taking that wifi data, we can start to understand the flow of people in and out of the subway network. And we can take that and provide insights to the rail operators, which get them from A to B quicker. You know, when we built the wifi it wasn't with the intention of getting Torontonians across the city faster. But that was one of the values that we were able to get from the data in terms of, you know, Thomas's solution, I think one of the reasons we we engaged him in the first place is because I didn't believe his compression. It sounded a little too good to be true. And so when it was time to try them out, you know all we had to do was ship data to an S3 bucket. You know, there's tons of, of solutions to do that. And, and data shippers right out of the box. It took a few, you know, a few minutes and then to start exploring the data was in Cabana, which is or their dashboard, which is, you know, an interface that's easy to use. So we were, you know, within a two days getting the value out of that data that we were looking for which is, you know, phenomenal. We've been very happy. >> Thomas, sounds like you've got a great, great testimonial here and it's not like an easy problem that he's living in there. I mean, I think, you know, I was mentioning this earlier and we're going to get into it now. There's regulations and there's certain compliance issues. First of all, everyone has this now problem now, it's not just within that space. But just the technical complexities of packets moving around I got on my wifi and the stop here, I'm jumping over here, and there's a ton of data it's all over the place, it's totally unstructured. So it's a tough, tough test for you guys, Chaos Search. So yeah, it's almost like the Mount Everest of customer testimonials. You've got to, it's a big, it's a big use case here. How does this translate to other clients? And talk about this governance and security controls because I know this highly regulated and you got there's penalties involved on his side of the world and Telco, the providers that have these edge devices there's actually penalties and, and whatnot so, not just commercial, it's maybe a, you know risk management, but here there's actually penalties. >> Absolutely. So, you know centralizing your data has a real benefit of of not getting in trouble, right? So you have one place, you store one place that's a good thing, but what we've done and this was a key aspect to our offering is we as Chaos, Chaos Search folks, we don't own the customer's data. We don't own BIA's data. They own the data. They give us access rights, very standard way with Cloud App storage roll on policies from Amazon, read only access rights to their data. And so not owning a customer's data is a big selling point not only for them, but for us for compliance regulatory perspective. So, you know, unlike a lot of solutions where you move the data into them and now they are responsible, actually BIA owns everything. We, they provide access so that we could provide an analysis that they could turn off at any point in time. We're also SOC 2 type 1 and type 2 compliant you got to do it, you know, in this, this world, you know when we were young we ran at this because of all of these compliance scenarios that we will be in, but, you know, the long as short of it is, we're transient service. The storage, cloud storage is the source of truth where all data resides and, you know, think about it, it's architecturally smart, it's cost effective, it's secure, it's reliable, it's durable. But from a security perspective, having the customer own their own data is a big differentiation in the market, a big differentiation. >> Jeremy, talk about on your end the security controls surrounding the log management environments that span across countries with different regulations. Now you've got all kinds of policy dimensions and technical dimensions and topology dimensions. >> Yeah, absolutely. So how we approach it is we look at where we have offerings across the globe and we figure out what the sort of highest watermark level of adherence we need to hit. And then we standardize across that. And by shipping to S3, it allows us to enforce that governance really easily and right to Tom's point you know, we manage the data, which is very important to us and we don't have to be worried about a third party or if we want to change providers years down the road. Although I don't think anyone's coming out with 81% compression anytime soon (laughs). But yeah, so that's, for us, it's about meeting those high standards and having the technologies that enable us to do it. And Chaos Search is a very big part of that right now. >> All right let me ask you a question, for the folks watching that are like really interested in this topic, what would you say to them when evaluating Chaos Search obviously, your use case is complex, but so are others as enterprises start to have an edge, obviously the security posture shifts, everything shifts. There's no more perimeter and the data problem becomes acute to them. So the enterprises are going to start seeing what you've been living for in your world. What's your advice to people watching? >> My advice would be to give them a try. You know, it's it's has been really quite impressive. The customer service has been hands-on and we've been getting, you know, they've been under-promising and over-delivering, which when you have the kind of requirements to manage solutions in these very complex environment, cloud local, you know various data centers and such, you know that kind of customer service is very important, right? It enables us to continue to deliver those high quality solutions. >> So Thomas give us the, the overview of the secret sauce. You've got a great testimonial here. You got people watching, what's different now in the world that you're going after, what wave are you on? Talk to the people who are watching this and saying, okay why Chaos Search? Why are you relevant? Obviously there's some cool things you're doing. I love that. What's cool, and what's relevant and why what's in it for them if they work with you? >> Yeah. So you know, that that whole Silicon Valley reference actually got that from my patent attorney when we were talking. But yeah, no, we, we, you know, focus on if we can crack this code of making data, one a face small, store small, moves small, process small. But then make it multimodal access make it virtual transformation. If we could do that, and we could transform cloud outer storage into a high-performance medical database all these heavy, heavy problems, all that complexity that scaffolding that you build to do these type of scales would be solved. Now what we had to focus on and this has been my, I guess you say life passion is working on a new data representation. And that's our secret sauce that enables a new architecture a new service that where the customer folks on their tooling, their APIs, their visualizations that they know and love, what we focus is on taking that data lake, and again, to transform it into an analytical database, both for log analytics think of like elastic search replacement, as well as a BI replacement for your SQL warehousing database. And coming out later this year into 2022, ML support on one representation. You don't have the silo your information you don't have to re index your data, both. So elastic search CQL and actually ML TensorFlow actions on the exact same representation. So think about the data retention, doing some post analysis on all those logs of data, months, years, and then maybe set up some triggers if you see some anomaly that's happening within your service. So you think about it, the hunt with BI reporting, with predictive analysis on one platform. Again, it sounds a little unicorn, I agree with Jeremy, maybe it didn't sound true but it's been a life's work. So it didn't happen overnight. And you know, it's eight years, at least in the in the making, but I guess the life journey in the end. >> Well, you know, the timing is great. You know, all the database geeks out there who have been following the data industry know that, you know there's a good point for structured data but when you start getting into mechanisms and they become a bottleneck or a blocker to innovation, you know you starting to see this idea of a data lake being let the data kind of form, let it be. You know, I hate the word control plane but more of a, a connective tissue between systems is become an interesting thing. So now you can store everything so you know, no worries there, no blind spots and then let the magic of machine learning in the future, come around. So Jeremy, with that, I got to ask you since you're the bad boy of data analytics at BAI communications head of data analytics, what does that, what do you look for in the future as you start to set this up because I can almost imagine and connecting the dots here in the interview, you got the data lake you're storing everything, which is good. Now you have to create more insights and get ahead of the curve and provide some prescriptive and automated ways to do things better. What's your vision? >> First I would just like to say that, you know when astrophysicists talk about, you know, dark dark energy, dark matter, I'm convinced that's where Thomas is hiding the ones and zeros to get that compression, right? I don't don't know that to be fact but I know it to be true. And then in terms of machine learning and these sort of future technologies, which are becoming available you know, starting from scratch and trying to build out you know, models that have value, you know that takes a fair amount of work. And that landscape keeps changing, right? Being able to push our data into an S3 bucket and then you know, retain that data and then get anomaly detection on top of it. That's, I mean, that's something special and that unlocks a lot of ability for you know, our teams to very easily deliver anomaly detection, machine learning to our customers, without having to take on a lot of work to understand the latest and greatest in machine learning. So, I mean, it's really empowering to our team, right? And, and a tool that we're going to. >> Yeah, I love and I love the name, Chaos Search, Thomas. I got to say, you know it brings up the inside baseball around chaos monkey which everyone knows was a DevOps tool to create kind of day two simulate day two operations and disruptions in DevOps. But what you're really getting at is your whole new architecture that's beyond DevOps movement, it's like next gen architecture. Talk about that to the people watching who have a lot of legacy and want to transform over to a more enabling platform that's going to give them some headroom for their data. What, what do you say to them? How do they get started? What, how should they, how what's their mindset? What they, what are some first principles you can share? >> Well, you know, I always start with first principles but you know, I like to say we're the next next gen. The key thing with the Chaos Search offering is you can start today with B, without even Chaos Search. Stream your data to S3. We're going to make hip and cool data lakes again. And actually it's a, Google it now, data lakes are hip and cool. So start streaming now, start managing your data in a well-formed centralized viewpoint with security governance and cost effectiveness. Then call Chaos Search shop, and we'll make access to it easily, simply to ultimately solve your problems. The bug whether your security issue, the bug, whether it's more performance issues at scale, right? And so when workloads can be added instantaneously in your data lake it's, it's game changing it's mind changing. So from the DevOps folks where, you know, you're up all night trying to say, how am I going to scale from terabyte, you know one today to 50 terabytes, don't. Stream it to S3. We'll take over, we'll worry about that scale pain. You worry about your job of security, performance, operations, integrity. >> That really highlights the cloud scale the value proposition as, as apps start to be using data as an input, not just as a a part of a repo repo, so great stuff. Thomas, thanks for sharing your life's work and your technology magic. Jeremy, thanks for coming on and sharing your use cases with us and how you are making it all work. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> My pleasure. >> Okay. This is The Cubes, coverage and presenting AWS this time showcase the next big thing here with Chaos Search. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021 brought to you by EDB. >> Well, hi everybody John Walls here on theCUBE and we're now welcoming Jeremy Wilmot who is the chief product officer at ACI Worldwide part of the Postgres movement, you might say or certainly benefiting from the great value that Postgres is providing a number of enterprises across the globe. Jeremy good to see you today and first off, congratulations you are the first guest I've talked to maybe in a year and a half in their office. So good for you. >> Thanks (chuckles) John that's very kind of you John and great to see you and thanks for having me here. Yeah, it's great to be in the office, it really is. I'm here in Miami in South Florida and getting some sort of normalcy back is great for all of us and I'm certainly enjoying it. So thank you before (indistinct) has been. >> I'm sure you are, yeah, congratulations on that front. First off, let's talk about ACI Worldwide for the folks in our audience who aren't familiar with the payments, your role in terms of that payment ecosystem. Tell us a little bit about ACI Worldwide. >> Sure, well, primarily we're a software company. That's ACI, we started 1975 in Omaha, Nebraska built the first debit card system and ATM system for first National Bank of Omaha and over the last 45 years, we've globalized ourselves, we have, we are delivering mission-critical real-time payment systems across the world to banks to merchants to billers, we help them meet the payment needs of their consumers and their corporates. So we process, manage digital payments, we power omni-commerce and e-commerce payments, we present and process bill payments, we manage fraud, we manage the risk all within that and as I said on a global basis 13 of the G20 countries with a leading DDA account or current account payment processing software in those countries and have been for many years. >> So, as the CPO then quite obviously in the financial space your plate is quite full these days in terms of providing for your client base. How would you characterize maybe the evolution in terms of product development that you've been through in the financial world here over the past say, three to five years, where were you back then to where you are now and what role has Postgres played in that journey? >> Sure, yeah. So, specific to the Postgres part of the ecosystem, previously five-plus years ago our previous database solution was complex, it was expensive, it was hard to change and maintain and we leveraged multiple pieces of software from multiple vendors as a result of that. So at that time we looked for an alternative that was simpler and better and we went through a very comprehensive due diligence process, we explored both open source and license models of database to support our solution and when we looked at all of the options we determined that 2ndQuadrant Postgres was the one that provided the most comprehensive solution we were looking for. It had the right mix of capabilities and performance at the right total cost of ownership that we were looking for. And in the payments world as you can imagine, you've got to to be 24/7 365. And we also required a lower cost of ownership than we had before. But we also wanted a greater flexibility and time to market that we could pass on to our customers. And then the last thing I'd say that we were looking for was a multi-deployment capability. And what I mean by that is that we would be able to use this new platform, Postgres platform in our own data centers in our own private cloud, but we could also deploy it in the public cloud, whether we would run it or whether our customers would run it. We wanted that ability to mix and match between these different deployment options. >> So you've talked about a lot of key elements here attributes in terms of availability, accessibility reliability, security obviously. Walk us through those in terms of why you think 2ndQuadrant was addressing your needs in those particular areas or any others for that matter but what it was that checked the box specifically about what Postgres was offering you as opposed to what these other possible solutions and services were that you were looking at. >> Yeah, I think, we're very focused on being able to identify what our customers need and when they're offering services to consumers and to their corporates what is it that they require that's going to enable them to win and compete. And payments industry has a lot of cost pressures within it. It has regulation, it has consumer convenience and the whole movement of digitalization that puts a lot of downward pressure on the cost space. And those who are going to win in the payment space need to be able to address that. So, that is relevant for our banks, for our merchants, for the billers. They all come under very similar regulatory pressure and market pressure and as a result, the ability to reduce dramatically in a very significant way, the total cost of ownership upon which the payment software was going to be operating that was one of the key elements that was very important to us as we made that decision. The second one I think was to enable us to be able to do what we are good at and what our customers expect us to do. And that in turn enables them to focus on their core competencies. We're a software company, we own our own IP we manage our own software for the needs of the 24/7 365 payment requirements and therefore the merchant or the biller or the bank can really focus in on the digital experience for their customers, focusing on their core competencies and what they need to do to win. That was a second key factor for us. I think the third one for us was as well speed to market. Speed to market for ourselves and being competitive to the alternative to ACI, but also more importantly a speed to market for our customers. And there are, the payment world is highly regulated requires significant certification in order to launch new services that's often the long pole in the tent. So we want to be able to get to that point as quickly as possible. And being able to have a public cloud deployment open systems capabilities that would really allow us to pass on that speed to market to those customers. So for example, an acquirer, a payment acquirer moving into a new geographical country they want to compete in they can (indistinct) on their competitors by launching minimum viable products in six to nine months that is five years ago, that could have been a 24 to 30 months endeavor for them to take on. So I, those were important considerations for us as we were choosing a longterm partner for the Postgres world and the public cloud world. >> Obviously, so you've talked a lot about your relationship with your clients and I know you have a really keen awareness of the need to ensure that trust, to ensure that reliability to ensure the collaboration. How about your relationship on the other side with EDB and in terms of all those elements so how has that evolved over a period of time and what kind of service and what kind of value do you think are you deriving from that relationship now? >> So with EDB, first of all, our journey started with 2ndQuadrant and now EDB. And we were specifically looking at the, one area was at the Bi-Directional Replication BDR that we were wanting to support with our solutions particularly in the public cloud. And that was going to enable us to replace multiple pieces of software from multiple vendors. And so we were to create that solution that was right for ACI, it was right for our customers from a functionality and agility and a cost perspective. So technologically with the non-functional requirements and the reliability, availability, serviceability aspects that we were looking for that was in partnership with 2ndQuadrant and EDB, that was a key element. I think the second piece of it is we worked really well with 2ndQuadrant EDB in terms of partnering to meet the needs of the market. It's great to have the right technology in place but then you need your partners really to be able to work with you tactically real-time in order to win in the market and make it work. And I found that they'd been a great partner for us to be able to do that and to be able to react quickly, do the right thing and really enable us to be a great partner to our customers as we deliver real-time payments, as we deliver the acquiring capabilities, as we deliver a modernization for the big banks that we work with as well. >> Now, before I let you go, I'm going to give you a two-part question here. That's always one way to squeeze a little more info (laughing) to the guest. First off advice. You've been through this transformation obviously you're very happy with all that has transpired, so your advice to others who are considering this journey. And then secondly, what can they and you do you think expect in terms of future challenges, opportunities how we might want to frame that with Postgres? Like, where are we going from here, basically? So, two parts, advice and then where do you think this is headed? >> So advice, I certainly learnings from us versus advice is number one, be very thorough in the due diligence that you do and be very clear on what you want and what are your goals that you're looking for. So from an AGI perspective, we were clear that total cost of ownership in terms of the stack that we were going to be providing to our customers. That was very important, number one number two, nonfunctional requirements. So I've talked about the mission criticality of payments 24/7 365. That was a key second piece. And then the third one, ease of deployment. I talked about that, multi-cloud deployment that we were looking for. So we were clear what we wanted and we we took our time from a due diligence point of view. It's a multi-year decision being made so it's not something specifically I think we want to rush into. In terms of looking forward and where do we go from here? Performance is critical so further up performance enhancements, ability for rapid failover availability, near 100% availability that we're looking for five-nines and above, working together with Postgres in order to make those failovers more seamless because they will happen, particularly in the real-time payments world, where we're now seeing billions of transactions happening in a week and soon that will be in a day, they will need to be able to deal with. And for all of this to happen in a public cloud environment, we, I think all understand a lot of the benefits of public cloud and we need to be able to provide this failover availability capability in the public cloud but also in a hybrid cloud environments we're in a multi-cloud environment, so we need to keep working that and make that happen that will make Postgres a payment-grade infrastructure that could power the world's real-time payments and we would love to be able to do that into the future. >> Well, Jeremy thanks for the insights, we appreciate that and once again, congratulations on getting back in that office. I know it's probably a pretty welcomed addition to your regimen now. >> Yeah, John, thank you very much and thanks to everyone who's dialed in for this and John I look forward to welcoming you in the office soon. >> Very good sir, I look forward to that as well. I'll take you up on that in Miami for sure. John Walls here on theCUBE talking with Jeremy Wilmot is the chief product officer at ACI Worldwide. part of our Postgres Vision 2021 coverage. (upbeat music)

[Music] hello welcome to this cube conversation i'm john furrier the palo alto studios for the cube i'm your host here with jeremy burton who's the ceo of observe inc just launched their product they launched their company before that they're doing great jeremy great to see you oh no thanks uh always great to be back on yeah there's there's certainly a lot going on the start of my day job which is running observing my night job which is uh obviously working with uh snowflake and it's not great to see both going on at the same time you've done very well with the snowflake relationship being a board member and all and being in that ecosystem and a lot of people are doing well in this shift you're part of it again you're on the inside but also now on the outside building a business and it's exciting because it's highly competitive it's a big category and it's really moving fast so give us a quick update on what's going on in the landscape and your recent launch you just had yeah i mean i i think most businesses be the you know new businesses cloud native businesses as we call it upon in the cloud businesses are old um that they're really uh trying to deliver like new services to reach customers and it's harder for an incumbent business because they've got to do a lot of reinvention or modernization or i guess the term de jure is digitization um and ultimately a lot of that means writing they've got to start writing software again you know it comes naturally maybe to the newer companies uh the sas companies uh but the biggest of the big have got you know really got to start riding software again and and as they push a new code into production every day they've got to make sure it works and so this new market for observability i think really uh helps people troubleshoot problems with this you know these new applications um and the goal obviously is to make sure that you know you avoid customer churn and any kind of a bad experience which um i think is what every sas company dreads um you know it's a big problem you know getting all these metrics in one place is really key i want to get into your launch 2.0 yeah we could bring in dave vellante my co-host was thecube always a favorite to bring on the analysis i know dave dug in heavily on the launch dave good to see you we'll get you hey guys how are you doing how are you doing jeremy good to see you yeah john i mean jeremy your your first launch was was really a company launch right and now now you're given the the product update so what do we need to know yeah so we i mean you're right when we first went out it was sort of like this is observing this is what observability um is we we sort of glossed over a lot of product details because i think like a lot of startups we you know we had a chunk of initial functionality but we knew there was a lot missing and so so previously you know in the last six months since we did that announcement we're now trying to you know fill out the product and a couple of the big features that we knew we needed um i mean one was metrics um and although we've always been able to ingest metrics uh most people maybe know you know time series type data we hadn't built all of the functionality you know in our language or in the user interface for the user to be able to manipulate them um so that was a big lift um which we got done and then and very closely related once you've got metrics the next thing people want to do is they want to start alerting on things hey tell me when this metric is is out of whack and one of our sort of big differentiators are one of the things that we always bring to bear on any kind of data we manage is to link data together so we're always trying to provide more context for the data that the user's looking at so metrics and alerts they sort of tie into our core value prop of being able to relate data jeremy if i don't mind you don't mind ask answering i'd like to get your take on this because one question i ask all these analytics companies is yeah data's great data lakes and it's all good about getting the data in this kind of environment but most people just want to shape the data and they want to just get insights out of it fast they don't want to they don't want to do a lot of prep they want to have it in position whether it's querying it or just having it available and sometimes it's not always there so they're constantly reshaping it and so the idea of just shaping it and making getting some insights which is basically quickly distill out of it turns into i got to reshape i got to go back to the well if you will or the lake in this case and pull out the data how are you guys solving that because this is like the um the simple construct make it easy yeah it's funny i mean even going right back to data warehouse in days of old the big frustration is is etl right it was so painful to transform the data into the right shape to get into the database i mean some of these projects i mean i think like 70 of those projects never even completed um the the big big difference now and certainly a lot of the data we deal with is it's unstructured inherently it's generated by machines we we just sort of dump it all into observe and then we let users pause it on the fly and so it can be one shape one day in a different shape the next and then we'll we'll backfill all of the data automatically into the new shape that the users define so these systems have really got to be set up to do um like ad hoc analysis you know when if you only did a couple of updates to your application uh a year the the environment wasn't that dynamic it didn't change very much and most of the problems you saw you you've seen before and now with code changing every day the application looks different every day so the issues that you see look different every day so it's really really important that these systems are incredibly dynamic and don't get locked into one particular shape from the get-go jeremy you you took a somewhat different approach i mean a lot of companies in this space will choose to do like a purpose-built database specifically for observability and metrics and so forth and that that's talking about a heavy lift that could take take many years you're choosing to put your emphasis do your heavy lift elsewhere yeah that obviously gives you a time to market advantage can you talk a little bit about that philosophy and what that gets you yeah it was probably one of the biggest decisions that we made when we founded observe was was do we build our own database like almost everyone who'd gone before um or do we go with a commercial offering and when we first started building against snowflake three years ago we we did we weren't actually sure it could do what we wanted to do and so it was one of the biggest areas of technical risk um but certainly at this point we've got ourselves very comfortable that it's going to be able to do what we need it to and it saves us building a database and uh i mean like this week at the snowflake summit i think snowflake just announced an additional 30 compression on data it's like okay so we did nothing and now you know all of those folks who are sending terabytes a day to us they get an extra 30 compression and and so that's the value of building on a commercial platform you know snowflake has got 300 engineers working away on on their database and they deliver benefits to us and we focus on the application so we know obviously frank we talk to him all the time and he's unequivocal about your cloud we're not doing a halfway house we're not doing on-prem but you're i'm sure familiar with the uh the a16z narrative from from an uh from from martin casado and sarah wong basically the premise for those of you don't know is you know for startups and as you're growing cloud is a no-brainer but at scale it becomes fifty percent of your cost of revenue it becomes uh an albatross to your operating leverage what do you think about that do you buy that uh do you ever see like a snowflake going going back on prem what's your thoughts on that i mean i feel like yeah i mean we used to put wells in our back gardens and generators in our basement and you know they're cheaper too right but the problem is i've got to dig a freaking well right and and then what am i not doing while i'm digging my well and and so i i don't know i i mean i get the general premise but i don't want half the company going and building not just like a database all of the infrastructure that's underneath why because it's not what our customers pay for like if we can add more value on top of that platform we can charge more so it's sort of like well if all those companies had actually started out building their own infrastructure and everything would they have would they have built the application experience that made them successful i mean you so the the i mean i i get the paper i think it's very very well written i'm just i'm just not sure it's a big distraction like we don't care about the underlying infrastructure we just want it to be there you know and you know and if we were doing that then we might observe might not be as good as it currently is you know well i think it's a question to me john is where's the customer value is the customer value in you know the valuation of the company or is it in what you can deliver and how fast you can hold on let me just put context to martin casado's little thing there it's the paradox um paper so there's a paradox there and his thesis is do you focus on cost of goods sold or do you drive more revenue and his whole part point was at some point you got to look at the cost right and and i then weaved into i hit him up on twitter immediately and i said oh so you must have a bunch of companies who aren't growing right so so because if you look at what's going on the mckinsey paper we covered this at our last startup event startup event is that the companies that are driving new revenue it's coming from a lot of re-platforming and refactoring but also net new use cases so a lot of clients are making more money by introducing new products so so that's a new revenue so you you are either going to be on one side of the paradox you're going to be inside of i'd rather refactor for new revenue yeah then save money by reducing costs so i still think we haven't cleared the runway on this growth so i think there's plenty of trillions left to create so i'm on the side of i'm on the side of you know if you're worried about pennies in the cloud to the well point that jeremy mentioned then you might either look at other things yeah it's about growth i mean i feel certainly younger companies and and observe and i mean also snowflake that we were just talking about i mean uh the snowpack announcement this week of going and running spark jobs well yeah they could do that or they could go build a data center i mean to reduce costs and to me um the right call is to do more with customers data um and and the the i don't know the somewhat um i mean the counterpoint to that would be well let's make it a more profitable business but you know to me that doesn't add up for the majority of new companies jeremy how should we look uh i'm gonna ask how should we think about this space because you have you got guys like splunk that have been doing log analytics for a while now you got you got the elk stack coming in with an open source and you know it's it's open source but it also brings complexity you've got big players now like cisco who's made you know the apple the acquisition of appd you've got kind of who's now a legacy a new relic we talked about purpose-built databases before so everybody's coming at this from all different sides how do you think about it look at it and where do you fit yeah i think you've got the big players i mean you've you've named quite a few of them then and and look most of my career i've i've been on that side right and and typically what you do as a big company is it's harder to innovate and so you use your balance sheet for innovation you go buy innovation and and then you try and integrate and um that that i mean it's very very doable and um but it just takes a long time and the risk is that as you integrate you're never really getting your architecture on a solid foot and you're sort of band-aiding things together and we're selling multiple things to the same customer versus really coming back to first principles and saying well how should this really have been built so i actually tend to worry a little bit less about the bigger companies um and then look there's a set of startups that have from like observed from first principles thought well if we were to build a system to to look at all the telemetry data that applications and infrastructure generate then then how would we do it um so you know we certainly uh banking on the fact that the more modern architecture um as time goes by because i still think we're you know we're in in baseball terms we're probably in the first inning still of observability um that that modern architecture will will come to bear over time we'll be able to do things that the other guys won't be able to do and and one of those is actually the simple task of relating data you know why because all of our data is in one place and it's in a relational database you know it's it's that simple i think one of the things that's worth calling out and it's pointing out is that you guys are also on the snowflake so you you're riding that wave to your point about i which i agree with by the way you're in you're focusing on innovation not kind of moving the deck chairs around on stuff but i want to get a question about this event you had because one of the things that you guys are becoming known for is to eliminate the headaches for sres and devops engineers who have been conditioned to accept you know the old ways of kind of handcrafting and the people who do it first tend to be the most bloody when they when they come out of it but as it becomes easier right and we discovered this at the red hat summit dave and jeremy is that this notion of an sre is becoming more prominent in engineering schools and computer science programs as kind of replacement for it i don't mean like i t is dead but like it's turning into ai ops git ups whatever people want to call it it's cloud native so the notion of an sre is on the teams of these modern development teams so you're seeing this end-to-end workflow visibility so so that means that if they're going to have that they're going to have these new team members sres and dev and sec together and they need the data so this is where you guys are and i think you guys hit this and correct me if i'm wrong if you don't mind explaining how does that the observability equation change when the teams change because teams are changing in the modern architecture yeah i mean it's it's it's probably a cliche but the the you know there's tooling and then this process change and as as as people move to things like continuous delivery um they get maniacally focused on uh delivery of of new features and new capabilities to the customer and then focused on the experience that the customers have in and i think the you know the role of the sre becomes critical because they try and understand not just what the customer is doing with the application but the problems that the customer is experiencing and that's going to work hand in glove you know with the engineering team who ultimately is going to implement the new features that the customers want and one of our sort of big missions here is to is to lessen the burden on the devops team which has been providing essentially infrastructure and tooling for for the sre and engineering teams to use right now they're overwhelmed to deliver just the basics and candidly the engineering and sre teams are not not happy with what's been delivered so we if we can lighten the burden on the devops team you should then get a richer experience for the sre and engineering teams for them to do ultimately what they want to do which is customer satisfaction and and engage their customers uh in in new ways and and there's just the quality of what is surface to those teams right now is just not very good because it's hard so jeremy you mentioned the first innings your uniforms are still white you you got the starting picture how's it how's it feeling how's the arm feel what's the early customer interactions like where are you getting traction yeah it's it's been interesting because um you know when you start with no customers i mean obviously we've been on the wall here at work our first customer 2500 bucks and i've never been so thrilled to get a sales order for twenty five hundred dollars um but no it it it's we we've targeted largely sas companies uh or tech tech centric companies and and one of the guys that we're going to be highlighting is uh topgolf which um i'm sure anyone who's been there and and you know enjoys going and hitting a golf ball around and playing angry birds but um look they're a tech centric company um customer experience for them is everything they're not in the in the it business per se but it enables them to deliver these amazing customer experiences and so you know when they've got issues when they need to troubleshoot problems they need to do it quickly and and so we tend to you know help those kind of companies um improve the experience they're providing um but yeah we've got about 20 paying customers so far um it's it's it's very different actually getting a customer paying you money versus a sort of friend a family member said yeah i'll give that a whirl um you know it certainly should happens the point on the feedback and and really that's what we need right now i mean i think every startup strives to get to what we call market fit which is can we sell this product repeatedly to thousands of customers um i don't think we're quite there yet but we certainly have got the volume of customers and the feedback coming back to engineering that that you know can get we know what to bill put it that way to get us to that point well smart what you do when you're starting with the sas companies the service providers you so you're not you know you're not jumping off the cliff into the enterprise for every custom deal you know get the product market fit and then understand the retention and then expand your tam from there yeah yeah you try and build a solid foundation and you know when you go to the enterprise you're going to need features like role-based access control and more of the manageability capabilities but you know if you were to build all of that out first then you wouldn't know whether you've got a compelling experience for an sre or an engineering team and so what you tend to do is is defer a lot of the management type capabilities try and build compelling features when you see the features are compelling then you sort of build out the supporting infrastructure that allows you to go to bigger companies so it's uh i mean it it the enterprise is what i've always dealt in sort of enterprise software is it's it's not easy um and and my old boss joe tucci had a great saying on this like you know if you're in a hurry take a bit more time and i think that that's sort of our mantra right now we're in a hurry everyone wants to go but like if we don't get the product right it'll it'll bite us later yeah the other expression in the enterprise is everyone makes it all complicated and everything it's all too complicated um which is the enterprise if it's not complicated they make it more complicated right so uh welcome to the edge too now there's every huge there's every edge case you can think of which is why you've got to be careful early on because we we can't afford we don't have time to deal with edge cases we've got to deal with you know what's up the power alley and then once we've got that going then you can start to deal with more of the edge cases yeah we're in the same boat on our end too jeremy i'd like to get uh to end the segment here by giving a quick update and recap of uh the event real quick and what you guys are doing as a company and and what you did at the launch and where your sweet spot is what are you looking for the what's the type of customers that you're looking for right now what is that power alley that you're focused on yeah three to four thousand sas companies in in north america is where we're after um and we tend to help folks on more efficient troubleshooting of applications we help them with tool consolidation um and we help them with security audit and compliance so there if you like the the key use cases that our initial customers have brought us into and um yeah we started off really focusing on on logging and log analytics and then you know yesterday we added to that you know the metrics the time series data analysis um and also the alerting and and we've also got really running in-house the the more apm-like visualizations around tracing so maybe a little bit of a hint at what's coming up later this year yeah i want to get your thoughts too there's been some commentary on twitter like you know we want to get things simpler a little bit more calmer i think there's a comment like it's not the mid we want more of the midwest vibe not so much that the coastal elite silicon valley shiny new toy yeah what's your take on that because it's culturally the shift people want to reduce the tools i mean they got the tool shed of you know every single tool that's been shipped every company comes out is selling a tool don't be the don't be a fool with a tool as the as the expression says no no if we're not careful observability we can define it to be this nichey thing and and you know in silicon valley out here it's probably the worst because there's almost this attitude of well i'm not sure you're smart enough to do observability you're doing it all wrong and our approach i think and i think the market in general wants like they've got issues and our approach needs to be well give show us what you're doing today give us the data that you're generating today we'll make that better and then we'll show you where the blind spots are and so you can have a much more iterative approach to getting to that desired end goal but we've got to stop defining observability as almost this this niche that silicon valley companies uh use i mean i i always joke that we want more of our customers watching netflix not listening to engineers from netflix explain observability yeah david call the flyover enterprise now it's a new category of enterprise yeah i i i i want to encourage people to go check out the the launch it's i presume it's up on your website jeremy so not the typical mumbo jumbo you guys have a lot of fun you started off you're like what and it's it's just it's pretty hilarious and then you know you get into the meat of it but so good job on that yeah thanks yeah we had a local san francisco comedian uh and that helped us out she was awesome i think and i think it's been a software engineer at uh surveymonkey back in the days right right always great stuff jeremy thanks for coming on thecube thanks for the update and uh we'll see you around see you in real life soon very soon great thanks guys always a pleasure to be on okay it's thecube conversation i'm john furrier dave vellante on analysis on this cube conversation segment soon we'll be in real life we'll be at mobile world congress for our first physical event in a long long time first event since 2019 for mobile world congress a lot has changed since that time and we'll be on there for the first hybrid event and then we have two more hybrid events coming up as well adf's reinforced as well as ada's reinvent cube virtual and cube physical all together stay with us thanks for watching [Music] you

(upbeat music) >> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Postgres Vision 2021 brought to you by EDB. >> Well, hi everybody John Walls here on theCUBE and we're now welcoming Jeremy Wilmot who is the chief product officer at ACI Worldwide part of the Postgres movement, you might say or certainly benefiting from the great value that Postgres is providing a number of enterprises across the globe. Jeremy good to see you today and first off, congratulations you are the first guest I've talked to maybe in a year and a half in their office. So good for you. >> Thanks (chuckles) John that's very kind of you John and great to see you and thanks for having me here. Yeah, it's great to be in the office, it really is. I'm here in Miami in South Florida and getting some sort of normalcy back is great for all of us and I'm certainly enjoying it. So thank you before (indistinct) has been. >> I'm sure you are, yeah, congratulations on that front. First off, let's talk about ACI Worldwide for the folks in our audience who aren't familiar with the payments, your role in terms of that payment ecosystem. Tell us a little bit about ACI Worldwide. >> Sure, well, primarily we're a software company. That's ACI, we started 1975 in Omaha, Nebraska built the first debit card system and ATM system for first National Bank of Omaha and over the last 45 years, we've globalized ourselves, we have, we are delivering mission-critical real-time payment systems across the world to banks to merchants to billers, we help them meet the payment needs of their consumers and their corporates. So we process, manage digital payments, we power omni-commerce and e-commerce payments, we present and process bill payments, we manage fraud, we manage the risk all within that and as I said on a global basis 13 of the G20 countries with a leading DDA account or current account payment processing software in those countries and have been for many years. >> So, as the CPO then quite obviously in the financial space your plate is quite full these days in terms of providing for your client base. How would you characterize maybe the evolution in terms of product development that you've been through in the financial world here over the past say, three to five years, where were you back then to where you are now and what role has Postgres played in that journey? >> Sure, yeah. So, specific to the Postgres part of the ecosystem, previously five-plus years ago our previous database solution was complex, it was expensive, it was hard to change and maintain and we leveraged multiple pieces of software from multiple vendors as a result of that. So at that time we looked for an alternative that was simpler and better and we went through a very comprehensive due diligence process, we explored both open source and license models of database to support our solution and when we looked at all of the options we determined that 2ndQuadrant Postgres was the one that provided the most comprehensive solution we were looking for. It had the right mix of capabilities and performance at the right total cost of ownership that we were looking for. And in the payments world as you can imagine, you've got to to be 24/7 365. And we also required a lower cost of ownership than we had before. But we also wanted a greater flexibility and time to market that we could pass on to our customers. And then the last thing I'd say that we were looking for was a multi-deployment capability. And what I mean by that is that we would be able to use this new platform, Postgres platform in our own data centers in our own private cloud, but we could also deploy it in the public cloud, whether we would run it or whether our customers would run it. We wanted that ability to mix and match between these different deployment options. >> So you've talked about a lot of key elements here attributes in terms of availability, accessibility reliability, security obviously. Walk us through those in terms of why you think 2ndQuadrant was addressing your needs in those particular areas or any others for that matter but what it was that checked the box specifically about what Postgres was offering you as opposed to what these other possible solutions and services were that you were looking at. >> Yeah, I think, we're very focused on being able to identify what our customers need and when they're offering services to consumers and to their corporates what is it that they require that's going to enable them to win and compete. And payments industry has a lot of cost pressures within it. It has regulation, it has consumer convenience and the whole movement of digitalization that puts a lot of downward pressure on the cost space. And those who are going to win in the payment space need to be able to address that. So, that is relevant for our banks, for our merchants, for the billers. They all come under very similar regulatory pressure and market pressure and as a result, the ability to reduce dramatically in a very significant way, the total cost of ownership upon which the payment software was going to be operating that was one of the key elements that was very important to us as we made that decision. The second one I think was to enable us to be able to do what we are good at and what our customers expect us to do. And that in turn enables them to focus on their core competencies. We're a software company, we own our own IP we manage our own software for the needs of the 24/7 365 payment requirements and therefore the merchant or the biller or the bank can really focus in on the digital experience for their customers, focusing on their core competencies and what they need to do to win. That was a second key factor for us. I think the third one for us was as well speed to market. Speed to market for ourselves and being competitive to the alternative to ACI, but also more importantly a speed to market for our customers. And there are, the payment world is highly regulated requires significant certification in order to launch new services that's often the long pole in the tent. So we want to be able to get to that point as quickly as possible. And being able to have a public cloud deployment open systems capabilities that would really allow us to pass on that speed to market to those customers. So for example, an acquirer, a payment acquirer moving into a new geographical country they want to compete in they can (indistinct) on their competitors by launching minimum viable products in six to nine months that is five years ago, that could have been a 24 to 30 months endeavor for them to take on. So I, those were important considerations for us as we were choosing a longterm partner for the Postgres world and the public cloud world. >> Obviously, so you've talked a lot about your relationship with your clients and I know you have a really keen awareness of the need to ensure that trust, to ensure that reliability to ensure the collaboration. How about your relationship on the other side with EDB and in terms of all those elements so how has that evolved over a period of time and what kind of service and what kind of value do you think are you deriving from that relationship now? >> So with EDB, first of all, our journey started with 2ndQuadrant and now EDB. And we were specifically looking at the, one area was at the Bi-Directional Replication BDR that we were wanting to support with our solutions particularly in the public cloud. And that was going to enable us to replace multiple pieces of software from multiple vendors. And so we were to create that solution that was right for ACI, it was right for our customers from a functionality and agility and a cost perspective. So technologically with the non-functional requirements and the reliability, availability, serviceability aspects that we were looking for that was in partnership with 2ndQuadrant and EDB, that was a key element. I think the second piece of it is we worked really well with 2ndQuadrant EDB in terms of partnering to meet the needs of the market. It's great to have the right technology in place but then you need your partners really to be able to work with you tactically real-time in order to win in the market and make it work. And I found that they'd been a great partner for us to be able to do that and to be able to react quickly, do the right thing and really enable us to be a great partner to our customers as we deliver real-time payments, as we deliver the acquiring capabilities, as we deliver a modernization for the big banks that we work with as well. >> Now, before I let you go, I'm going to give you a two-part question here. That's always one way to squeeze a little more info (laughing) to the guest. First off advice. You've been through this transformation obviously you're very happy with all that has transpired, so your advice to others who are considering this journey. And then secondly, what can they and you do you think expect in terms of future challenges, opportunities how we might want to frame that with Postgres? Like, where are we going from here, basically? So, two parts, advice and then where do you think this is headed? >> So advice, I certainly learnings from us versus advice is number one, be very thorough in the due diligence that you do and be very clear on what you want and what are your goals that you're looking for. So from an AGI perspective, we were clear that total cost of ownership in terms of the stack that we were going to be providing to our customers. That was very important, number one number two, nonfunctional requirements. So I've talked about the mission criticality of payments 24/7 365. That was a key second piece. And then the third one, ease of deployment. I talked about that, multi-cloud deployment that we were looking for. So we were clear what we wanted and we we took our time from a due diligence point of view. It's a multi-year decision being made so it's not something specifically I think we want to rush into. In terms of looking forward and where do we go from here? Performance is critical so further up performance enhancements, ability for rapid failover availability, near 100% availability that we're looking for five-nines and above, working together with Postgres in order to make those failovers more seamless because they will happen, particularly in the real-time payments world, where we're now seeing billions of transactions happening in a week and soon that will be in a day, they will need to be able to deal with. And for all of this to happen in a public cloud environment, we, I think all understand a lot of the benefits of public cloud and we need to be able to provide this failover availability capability in the public cloud but also in a hybrid cloud environments we're in a multi-cloud environment, so we need to keep working that and make that happen that will make Postgres a payment-grade infrastructure that could power the world's real-time payments and we would love to be able to do that into the future. >> Well, Jeremy thanks for the insights, we appreciate that and once again, congratulations on getting back in that office. I know it's probably a pretty welcomed addition to your regimen now. >> Yeah, John, thank you very much and thanks to everyone who's dialed in for this and John I look forward to welcoming you in the office soon. >> Very good sir, I look forward to that as well. I'll take you up on that in Miami for sure. John Walls here on theCUBE talking with Jeremy Wilmot is the chief product officer at ACI Worldwide. part of our Postgres Vision 2021 coverage. (upbeat music)

(soft music begins) >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, I'm joined by Jeremy Swift, the CEO and co-founder of Cordial. Jeremy, welcome to theCUBE, it's great to have you on the program. >> Hey, thanks so much Lisa, it's great to be here with you. >> Making this conversation's work very socially distanced, but I'd love to understand a little bit about Cordial. What do you offer and how do you help customers? >> Yeah, yeah, I appreciate the question. I guess for starters Cordial is a cross-channel messaging and data platform. Our clients, let me tell you a little bit about what that actually means. But I would say our clients can collect all of their unstructured, kind of disparate customer and business data from wherever it lives within their tech stack. And then ultimately use that data to build audience segments, gather insights about that data and about their customers. Kind of discover some trends on that too and then ultimately automate and orchestrate hyper-personalized customer experiences at enterprise scale. And when I say experiences too, to define that a little bit. I really am talking about, frankly, kind of a wealth of interactions that a customer might have with a brand. So, that could be things like transforming your promotional, your triggered and your transactional email, communications to your SMS and your MMS messages, to your push in your in-app messages, targeted direct mail, all the way, actually, frankly, to things like in-store devices like clienteling experiences and things like that when you're physically going into the store, whenever we can get back into that, a little bit more consistently, I would say. And then even things like sending targeted audiences to third-party social platforms like a Google Adwords or a Facebook or whatnot. So, in short, I would say we're the underlying data platform and the activation layer that helps brands better communicate with their customers because they ultimately understand their customers better. Um, yeah, go ahead. >> You mentioned hyper-personalized and we've been talking about personalization for a long time. And especially as the more demanding we consumers get, we expect brands to know who we are, offer us the right things that are in sequence and offer me something I've already purchased. But define hyper-personalized customer experiences. >> Yeah, yeah, it's a really good question. You know, I think this is a significant piece that when we think about kind of the marketing language or lingo that gets used out there, this is probably one that gets used a little bit flippantly. It really is this idea of taking the individualized behaviors of you, Lisa, of me, Jeremy, and looking at those in a full view, not just what I did in this moment but what is my history with your brand tell me? And how do also some of those behaviors now also, maybe predict future behaviors as well. And using that data to ultimately drive and derive the content that is being put into the message. So, hyper-personalized meaning truly, one-to-one, like very, very discreet or descriptive pieces of data that ultimately tie to unique pieces of content that are going to drive a great experience or a particular behavior. So, some examples of maybe how we deploy that with folks, we work with brands like Backcountry or Revolve Clothing, Eddie Bauer, 1-800 contacts, we work with brands like that to help them drive revenue growth through things like, again, hyper-personalized messages drives higher revenue per message. It helps them significantly increase their customer lifetime value, again because the experience that they're creating for them is very tailored, very unique to that individual. So, some things that we measure ourselves on with respect to that and things where we're really proud of are things like our clients are generating a 250 X ROI. And typically they're achieving triple digit revenue growth within their first 30 days using Cordial, our platform, because of the data layer that we have there, we built a transformations product to that just last year alone for our clients transformed and activated over 110 billion customer data records, again for our clients there. And probably the thing that I think excites me the most and frankly kind of gets back to some of my roots in my history of why we started this business too, but, it really is our implementation process as well. So, brands want to hyper-personalize, they want to do all these things that we talk about. But often they think, man, the process to get there is going to take me a really long time. Again, one of the things we really pride ourselves on is that implementation process. It's 90% faster than the legacy marketing clouds out there within the market. To give you an idea of how incredibly fast that is. Our enterprise clients are up in sending typically in less than seven days. That really is unheard of to nearly all enterprise brands but we really pride ourselves on the flexibility of cordless technology coupled with our incredibly talented services team that really helps unlock that for many of our brands and customers. >> So, big numbers that you mentioned, customers achieving impressive metrics-based business outcomes. You talked about the 250 X ROI, triple digit revenue growth very quickly. You also talked about your implementation process being 90% faster than legacy marketing clouds. Talk to me about the actual data platform. And I'd like to kind of unpack that into some of the things that differentiate it. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I guess first and foremost, on the data platform side of things, that really is a significant differentiator. And I guess even before I jump into that though, too. I would be remissed actually if... I think that's natural to probably jump right into product as being the key differentiator at the end of the day. But when I really do honestly think about what differentiates Cordial in the market and what are the things that we really hang our hat on, I can honestly say Lisa, like first and foremost it really is our people. Again, I know it's really natural to go straight to product and talk about the features and the functions or how you thought about building a particular thing. And again, those things are highly important in this kind of digital transformation era that we're in. But I would say in a market that is incredibly saturated with a lot of players across it, within marketing technology and brands, trying to differentiate who does what and who they should work with, at the end of the day we really do believe that creating and enabling a culture of world-class human beings that live out for succinct values. Those for us are things like communicate better than the rest, being tenacious about our clients and the problems we solve for them, acting like owners and then really being kind of on-mission, if you will, to be Cordial, we think that those things are differentiated and frankly really necessary, especially in today's society and culture that we're in. I'm happy to talk about some of the product side of things there though, too. But I'll pause in there for a second-- >> I love that you've said that about one of the key differentiators is the corporate culture. That's one of the things that a lot of companies, legacy companies struggle with. Especially in dynamic times like this, but I would always thought for all the tech shows I've been to, over the many, many years that the customer experience is dependent and inextricably linked to the employee experience. It sounds like you've kind of built the company with that in mind. >> I think you have to. Again, robots have not taken over the world yet, right? And so, this really is still about people combined with technology and how those two things married together. Not just on our side, in terms of what we're bringing to bear for our clients but the experiences our clients are having too, you know. Our clients are working with their IT department or with their engineers and their marketing teams, and they have to figure out how do you make all those things very harmonious together. I just think that at the end of the day, the experience that your people are bringing, the empathy that you're bringing to people, especially in this environment where we've been virtual and you don't get that face-to-face contact, you don't get to maybe delve deep into understanding people, relationally. I just think it's really important. And we, as a business, again, I have this said to me often, and in turn, I said often too, is you can't name your company Cordial and be a jerk at the end of the day. So, there really is a level of empathy that I think needs to be brought through in everything that we do. We're not just out to be, you know, a world-class technology company for our clients. We know our clients expect that from us but we really want to be great human beings at the end of the day, which I think that's really the kind of the link that creates really great partnerships at the end of the day. >> I completely agree and I think especially now more than ever, that infusion of empathy is so critical for businesses in any industry. I do want to unpack the data architecture. You talked about customers being able to get to unstructured customer business data from wherever it lives in the stack. How do you enable that? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Again, that product side is from a differentiators perspective, it's significant. I would say we purposely built Cordial with a data architecture to accommodate just that, to accommodate any number of channels but also an infinite amount of data sources. And then in turn I alluded to this earlier but the ability to manipulate and restructure or transform that data coming in, or going out of Cordial to maybe other systems within a client's tech stack. This differentiation really is significant compared to the legacy clouds, but it is also significant, I would say relative to other kind of next gen options within the market. Investing in Cordial for a brand is... it's a huge step forward in terms of digital kind of future-proofing themselves and how they're setting themselves up to meet the needs of a really rapid evolving consumer and the experience the consumer expects to have with the brands. So, brands collect daily more and more information about users' behaviors and patterns, and we've frankly just see an incredible opportunity for our clients to learn from their customers and the massive amount of data that that client is kind of showing or exhibiting to them. And then putting that to action, putting that to work in terms of the experience that they're creating for their customer, you know, this kind of ties that word of empathy back to it as well. Even though we're talking about digital communications for a brand, it's still a human interaction, it's still a relationship. And so, if we can help brands really understand their data, again through a data architecture that's really purpose-built to really ingest all of that in and then activate that in terms, of their messaging that they're sending out to folks. That can create a level of empathy, that might sound altruistic, I don't believe it is. I think we as human beings, as a professional, if my job is to communicate my brand or my products to my end customer, I would want to do that with a level of empathy, with a level of sincerity, with a level of understanding and knowledge that tells that end customer I know who you are, I'm paying attention. I'm not being creepy and big brother-ish about it, but I'm paying attention. I want to show that I understand you, no differently, frankly than the relationships that we all have as human beings. I mean, if I walked into a conversation with you, Lisa, and I've known you for two years but I started asking you all the same boilerplate questions of like, hey, can you tell me your name again? And who are you? And where did you come from? And what school did you go to? You would kind of think that's so odd. You don't... I thought you knew me but you're not acting like you know me. I think we're all about creating an opportunity for brands to be able to do that with their customers and do it with a level that the customer goes, you know me, you get me, you understand what my desires, wishes, or patterns are with your business. >> Right? No, I think that's so interesting. And I agree with you. The opportunity is just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. It's not just more data is born and created, more data sources are born and created. The consumer demand is only increasing. So you mentioned, I want to talk about customer tech. You talked about, you mentioned Eddie Bauer being a customer. Eddie Bauer is a legacy organization which has been around for a long time. But I also know you guys work with, with younger, fresher, maybe more cloud native companies. I wonder, though, how an Eddie Bauer goes about fast implementation, you said 90% faster than legacy data platforms. I wonder how an Eddie Bauer goes through that. 'Cause I imagine they replaced a legacy marketing platform with Cordial? >> They did, they did. They actually replaced a handful of kind of legacy platforms and systems that they had in place. And Eddie Bauer is just like, I would say, many other kind of mainstay brands that you and I grew up with to where if they want to compete, if they want to really be on the cutting edge, they need to innovate quickly. They need to evolve from maybe legacy systems to newer systems. Like you said, maybe what more digital native or digital first brands are starting out with, when they launched their business. Eddie Bauer is a really cool story though. Again, it's kind of an iconic brand at the end of the day but they came to us with a really clear set of challenges. And the first and foremost, again, kind of goes back to the point we were talking about, which was Cordial help us consolidate our data from multiple sources that we have. Online, offline order data, loyalty information that they had, a disparate unique customer IDs that they had across all the different databases they had. They had geolocation data, they had product data, customer behavior data, a lot of data all sitting in different places. So first and foremost, like help us get that organized in one central place, being within Cordial's data platform. And then from there they wanted to use those data sources, right? It's not just about bringing it together. It's about now, what do you do with it? How do you activate that? And in the case with Eddie Bauer, they used Cordial to dynamically render... This is a cool example actually, dynamically render a message to each individual customer containing their rewards balance, the expiration date of that reward, a unique bar code specific to that individual to eliminate fraud there... what was it? Nearest store address that they had as well as a map of the store location. All within the message that they were receiving. And by clicking on that message it immediately activated kind of an API sequence behind the scenes, transparent to the user, but something that Eddie Bauer had never been able to do before. And that API sequence that initiated, generated a personalized pass for that particular customer that loaded directly into their wallet, on their device for them to be able to redeem in store. By doing that, it actually then enabled the ability for, if I'm near an Eddie Bauer store, let's say within a mile of it, Eddie Bauer can immediately push a notification to my phone without even having a branded app on the phone, saying, Hey you have a $20 rewards certificate in your wallet, it expires in seven days. You're a mile away from your closest store. Click here and we'll navigate you to that store. Some really cool use cases that really helped them kind of take some big steps forward in that digital transformation for them as a brand. And I would just say kind of going back to even the AWS piece of this too. All of that might sound easy at the end of the day. It's incredibly difficult to do that across millions of customers in minutes, it's very difficult. And I can genuinely say that our experiences and the work that we've done with AWS cloud services is a huge piece of making all of that a reality. And oddly enough, Eddie Bauer actually is an AWS customer as well. And some of those synergies in terms of how we're able to sync up data via Kinesis Streams and S3 buckets and things like that, and be able to make that data very operable was a huge advantage, I think for us, especially in terms of speed to market and the ability to get these kind of programs up and live for a brand like them. >> So, when you were looking at building Cordial and co-founding it back in 2014. Were you drawn to AWS right away? Because you just had this sense that we have to go this direction to enable this complexity to be achieved at scale? >> I mean, yes. I mean, unequivocally 2014 feels like eons ago. It's not really, I guess at the end of the day, but there was... I mean there was no other even remotely viable competitive option at the time to even consider. There are obviously are plenty of cloud services out there now, but I mean that was probably the shortest negotiation we had as co-founders about what we should do with respect to that. It was immediately, I mean that was part of our thesis, was all of the legacy clouds were in co-lo centers and trying to figure out migration plans to even get some of their infrastructure into the cloud. And we said, let's just start straight in the cloud right from day one, it's a huge competitive advantage. It gives us speed, it gives us scale. It gives us all sorts of things that we can immediately start unlocking value with. And so, yeah, when we started Cordial, AWS was, I mean that was day one. We initiated that and they've been an incredibly strategic partner for us ever since then. >> One of the things that are wrapping up here that I always find interesting when you're looking at new technologies like yours, you're right. 2014 does seem like eons ago, but it really wasn't. But you working with legacy, iconic brands like an Eddie Bauer that was probably at one point all paper-based transactions, having to digitize and digitally transform to meet their customers where they are now that need to marry online and offline behaviors to deliver that hyper-personalized experience. I know you guys also work with companies like Revolve as well. So, this is the technology that any type of business, historic, new, can use and implement, sounds like fairly quickly to make big impacts. And I think nowadays being able to deliver information in real-time that's hyper-personalized, it's going to be a make or break for companies that survive this new era that we're living in. >> Yeah, it, it really is. And again, for us, fundamentally goes back to again, why we set out to build Cordial? My co-founders and I actually had history in building one of the first gen, what I characterize as kind of a legacy platform now in this space. And frankly, after seeing or 15 years of seeing marketers struggle to get those platforms to scale to the level of data and sophistication out there, we knew there was a better way for marketers and technologists to work together. And we intimately then knew the way that this should be architected. So, as you said, in 2014, I mean, we set out to build Cordial to really transform the way marketers and technologists, you know, how they collaborated to fundamentally change the experiences their customers were having with their brands. Again, it was very, I guess, heart-centered on some level as the way that I would put that, this was never monetarily driven for us. It was all around, I think our own personal frustrations of not being able to meet those needs of our customers. And it wasn't a fault of the previous kind of legacy platforms. It was just technology had evolved and frankly consumers and digital devices had evolved enough to where there needed to be somebody and some brand or some companies who said, let's rethink this, let's rebuild this from the ground up. You mentioned Revolve, which Revolve Clothing is just a really cool example. They've been a Cordial client now for four years, they're going on their fifth year with Cordial. And they really are an incredible success story. One of the stories that I just, it's kind of like a crown jewel that we take a lot of pride in. I know our teams do with respect to Revolve is, when they came to us, they had, gosh! Two automations in place that it took them roughly about two years working with the legacy cloud, even to get those in place. And in a matter of their first eight months with Cordial they had nearly 30 new automations live using Cordial. And those 30 automations had generated eight times more revenue than they had previously generated with automations. It was an incremental at the time roughly almost $12 million in net new revenue that was unrealized for the business prior to that. And, you know, that's something we take a lot of pride in. We take a lot of pride in again, the speed of how quickly we can help a brand be able to do this, but it's not just a matter of getting something up and running. It's about the results that we can drive for them. We hold ourselves accountable to that and we expect our clients to hold us accountable to that as well. Next gen technology or new technology or modern technology for the sake of just new is uninteresting, unless it is actually... not just incrementally moving things forward for your business but I would say it needs to be an outsized set of results that you're driving for them to frankly make that even just the mental hurdle to get over that, make that worth it at the end of the day. >> Yeah. I was looking at some of the customer stories on your website and was very impressed seeing those metrics-based business outcomes. 'Cause that's what it's about. It's about that and delivering that at speed and with agility. Jeremy, I wish we had more time 'cause I know we could keep talking, but I really enjoyed understanding more about Cordial and what you guys do. And I look forward to seeing what's to come. >> So good, thanks so much, Lisa. It was wonderful. >> My pleasure, for Jeremy Swift, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (soft music ends)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. >>Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 I'm John Farrow, your hosts. We've got the cube virtual. We're not there in person with remote this year, and we're excited to cover three weeks of wall-to-wall coverage. It's virtual events, so they don't over three weeks. We're in week three, day two. Um, and if you're watching this live on the platform tomorrow, Thursday at two o'clock Andy Jassy, we'll be live here on the cube with one-on-one with me to address all the hard questions, but here we're doing a day two of week three analysis with Jeremy Burton industry legend entrepreneur. Now the CEO of observe Inc, um, formerly the CMO of Dell technologies before that EMC has done a variety of ventures, seeing many ways of innovation, friend of the cube. Jeremy, thank you for coming on. >>Yeah, my pleasure. Great. Always great to be on the cube. >>Uh, great to have you on in particularly because, um, yesterday Verner, Vogel's talked a lot about observability and I noticed you got your observed shirt on, uh, observe Inc is your company's name, which is one of the many, uh, hot startups around observability, where you're making a business out of basically what he talked about yesterday. Um, and today's keynote. You had the extended cloud, uh, edge applications. You had bill Vass who leads up both edge and quantum. And then you had Rudy Valdez who, who talked a lot about, uh, evolution of cloud architecture. And of course you finally had, um, David Richardson, who is the VP of serverless. So you got edge. Quantum serverless architecture speaks to the sea change, Jeremy, and you have a good read on these big waves. When you look at serverless and then quantum, you look at, uh, edge, which is data, and you look at, um, all this coming together and on their architecture, Verner's keynote yesterday kind of makes sense. It's a systems architecture and this new observability trend, isn't like a point product. It's a broader concepts. You have a complete rethinking of distributed computing in the cloud. This is kinda what this Amazon feels like. What's your, what's your take? >>Yeah, it's a, it's a good observation. You know, the, the, the, the sort of punchline is, is that people are building applications differently. Um, so the, the, the, the, the technologies that people are using to build apps are different, um, the way in which they build applications is different. Um, the way folks released codes into production is different, and it stands to reason. Therefore, you're going to need a different approach, uh, when you want to troubleshoot these applications. So, uh, when you find, uh, you know, w w what is show when you want to find out what issues customers are having? So what, what we fell a couple of three years ago when we started to observe was that, um, uh, a new approach was required, what you're going to need to monitor your application. And, you know, 2020 is not the same as what you needed in 2015 or 2010. >>And we felt very strongly that this new wave was, was going to be called observability. It, it brings a tear to my eye to hear a Verner, talk about it, because as much as we observe, you know, believe that we can do big things in future. It's the big vendors today that can move markets. And so the Amazon and vulnerable particular talk about observability, I think it lends more credence to the topic. Um, we think that organizations should have observability teams. We think there should be a head of observability. And again, you know, Amazon and Dawson this, uh, I think means that there's a much stronger chance that that's going to happen. And they're going to start, start to shine a light on, I think, a topic that almost everybody needs to pay attention to as they build their next generation of applications. >>When you guys, I know you guys are launched and you have couple of campaign customers now and growing rapidly, um, well-funded, um, uh, get some great investors have found that the investors of snowflake also, um, invested in you guys. So they see this cloud trend LC snowflake when public, and I know you're on the board of snowflake as well. So, uh, you, you, you know, a little bit about what's going on with Amazon and the opportunity when you look at observability, okay, you're building a business around it. And again, you think about head of observability. That's not like a small thing when you make, put someone in charge of something. So why do you say that? I mean, what, I mean, you know, some would say, you know, Hey, it's a feature, not a company. I mean, this is two mindsets that are different. How do you address that? >>Yeah, the, the, the, the thing I'd say is, look, the number one job in America is, um, is a software engineer is writing code. The number two job is fixing it. And so, you know, th th the job think about that for a second. The job of fixing our applications is almost as big as the job of creating our applications. Uh, something has to change, right? I know the job of fixing cars is not as big as the auto industry. Why, because over time that industry has matured and there are better tools to diagnose cars. Uh, and so they're, they, they become easy to fix over time. We've, we've not made that leap with our applications. Um, the tools that the engineering team use to debug and troubleshoot their application are often still very different to what the dev ops team is using, um, which is very different to what maybe the SRE team is using. >>And so it's a huge problem in our industry. Um, really not being able to diagnose troubleshoot issues when they arise. It, it costs the industry, a fortune, it costs, you know, sort of in indirect wasted productivity of development teams, but it also costs in terms of customer experience. Um, I mean, you know, you and I both know is, look, if we're, if we're having a bad experience with maybe a new service that we're trying out online, w w we're probably going to go somewhere else. And so the there's never been like a more important time for people to invest in observing the entire environment, the entire customer experience, not only will you have happier customers, you might actually reduce the costs and improve the productivity in your engineering team as well. So I feel like the opportunity there is, is, is, is, is vast. Um, I also think longer term, um, it doesn't just apply to troubleshooting distributed applications. >>Um, I think the security systems are very related to the way we build software. Um, I mean, I think in, in, in the news in recent days, we've, we've come attuned, uh, uh, to, to software defects, um, or malware in software causing breaches and government agencies. Um, Hey, that, that could be anybody's software right there. Yeah. And so security has got a role to play in observability and the customer experience. It doesn't stop when they have a bad experience on the website. What if they complain? You know, what if a help desk ticket get, how do you track that? >>Yeah, I'm going to, I have a lot of questions for chassis tomorrow. One of them I'm going to ask him, and I want to get your thoughts on it. Cause you brought that up. And I think it's a key point, you know, building applications and supporting them and fixing them. It kind of reminds me of the old adage of, um, you know, you know, you gotta run it running the operation, 70% of the budget using to running it. If you look at what's happening and if you talk to customers and this is what I'm going to ask chassis tomorrow, Verner actually talked about, I on day two operations in his keynote. Yeah. I mean, this is Amazon they're, they're targeting builders. And so I talked to, um, a few other entrepreneurs, um, who were growing companies and some CIA CIOs and CEOs and the basic enterprises. >>They don't want to be building things like they, that's not their DNA. They don't build things like, that's not what they do. I mean, first of all, I love the builder mentality and with Amazon. Um, but they might be at a time where there might not be enough builders, Jeremy right out there. So you've got skill shortages and then ultimately are enterprises really builders. Yeah. They'll build something, but then they just run it it's. So, so at what point do they stop building or they build their own thing in the cloud and then they got to run it. So I think Amazon is going to shift quickly to day two operations, get bill, bill, bill run, run, run. >>Yeah. That's a great topic of conversation. I think what you sort of poking out is, is sort of the maturation of this digital age in the state that we're at. Um, I mean, if you, if you go back, you, you know, to, you know, 10, 10, 20 years, um, I mean, look at the mid nineties, um, there were a lot of people building custom applications, right? I mean, you know, it was innovation, it was all about building custom apps. And I think that golden era of application development whack that now, um, and, and customers in order to get competitive advantage, they are building their own applications. When you talk about digital transformation, what does that mean? Well, it means, you know, often a traditional company building a new digital experience for services that they've potentially offered in a physical way, uh, in the past. So make no mistake, P people are builders or they are writing code, they are becoming digital. >>I think what you'll find at some point as the industry's mature, some of these digital experience is become packaged. And so you can buy those off the shelf. And so there's less building required. But I think as we sit today, um, that there's probably more code been written in anger by more organizations that at any point in the last 30 years. And, and I think this is another reason why observability is so important, um, as you're building that code and as you're developing that customer experience, you want to be able to understand, um, where the issues are and, and, um, uh, like along the way, you don't want to wait until there's a, a big customer disaster on the day of you roll that, something to production before you start investigate. And you want to do that as you go. >>Yeah. And I think that's a kill. I do agree with you, by the way. I think the, there is a builder mentality, but it's probably right. But remember those days back in it, if you want to put our, our time machine hat on and go through the time machine is, you know, that was during the mainframe client server transition. And it was called spaghetti code. You know, it's like the monoliths were built and then it had to be supported and that became legacy. So I kind of see that happening today, where, um, people are moving to the cloud, they are building, but at some point you got to build your thing in the cloud. If I'm a company. And again, this isn't some dots trying to connect in real time. I got serverless, which is totally cool. I'm gonna have quantum has headroom for compute. >>I'm going to have, um, kind of a S a SOA service oriented architecture with web services, with observability. I'm gonna have all these modern apps great that, or run them. And I'm now I'm gonna shift them. Multiple clouds is so, you know, maybe the private cloud waves coming back, you're seeing telco clouds. You start to see these new tier. I won't say tier two clouds, but I mean, people will build their own cloud environment. There's no doubt as going to the cloud. And Steve Malania, Aviatrix kind of made this point yesterday in his analysis where he's like, he thinks private cloud will be back. I was just, it'll just be public cloud. People will build their own clouds and run them. >>Yeah. I feel well, what happens over time is, is the, the sort of line above which you would add value rises. So I kind of feel like, look, cloud is just going to the infrastructure. We can debate, you know, private cloud, public cloud. Is it a public cloud, or is it a private cloud served up by a public cloud provider? My view is, is look, all of that is, is, um, just going to be commodity, right? Um, it's going to be served up for an ever decreasing cost. And so then it's incumbent on organizations to innovate above that line. And, you know, 20 years ago, you know, we, we built our own data centers. Um, and now increasingly that, that seeming like a crazy idea. Um, and you know, now you can get almost all of your infrastructure from the cloud. The great thing is, I mean, look at observe. >>We have no people running data center operations, none, right? We have no people building a database, non, you know, we use snowflake in the cloud. It runs on AWS. We have, we have one dev ops, uh, engineer. And so all the people in the company right now, we're focused on adding value, helping people understand and analyze data, uh, above that line. And we just pay for a service level and, and look, uh, as time goes by, there's going to be more and more services and that line's going to rise. And so, you know, what, what I care about and what I think a lot of CEOs care about is are most of my resources innovating above that sort of value creation line, um, because that's what people are going to pay for in our business. And I think that's, what's going to represent you, you know, sort of value add for you, you know, organizations big and small. >>Yeah. That's a good point. I want to shift to the next topic and then we'll get into some observability questions I have for you and update on your company. Um, complexity has been a big theme. That's come out of all the conversations with analysts that have come on the cube, as you hear it with Amazon, a lot of undifferentiated, heavy lifting, being extracted away to your point about value layers and competing on value. Amazon continues to do that all great stuff, but some are saying, and we had said on the cube, yes, two days ago you put them complexity behind the curtain. It's still complexity, right? So, so complexity with the edge is highlighted. Uh, even though they got green, uh, I, um, edge core Greengrass, which has core thing, IOT core, a lot of cool things happening, but it's still not yet super easy. So complexity tends to slow things down became striction, what's your view on this? Because taming, the complexity seems to be a post COVID pandemic mandate for cloud journeys. What's your thing. >>Yeah, I totally agree. I think, I think in certainly you look organizations that have been in existence, but you know, 30, 40 years, or maybe even 10 years look at there's an amount of technical debt and complexity that you build up over time. Um, but even newer companies, um, the way that people are building modern distributed applications and in some respects is, is more complex than in days gone by, you know, microservices. Um, some of which maybe you own some of which maybe you don't, and what you've gotta be able to do is, is see the big picture, you know, w w when, when there's something in my code, but then when am I making a call out to maybe a third party microservice and, and that microservices bailing out on me, like people have got to see the big picture. And I think what hasn't been available as people have changed the architecture and their applications, there hasn't been an equivalent set of innovation or evolution in the tools that they use to manage that environment. And so you, you, you, you've got this sort of dichotomy of, uh, a better way for software developers to write code and deploy it into production microservices. But at the same time, you don't have good information and good tools to make sense of that complexity. >>That's great stuff. Jeremy Burton is here. He's the CEO of observe Inc cube, alumni, VIP cube alumni, by the way, has been on the cube every year, since the Q has been around 2010, when he took the new job as the CMO of EMC prior to being bought by Dell, Jeremy, you're a legend in the industry, certainly on as an executive and a marketer. And as an entrepreneur, um, I gotta ask you observe Inc, your company now, um, you're right in the middle of all this, you, you got a big bet going on. Could you share, in your opinion, your words, what is the big bet that you're making with observing? Uh, what are you betting on? How do you see the preferred future unfolding and where are you guys going to capture that value? >>Yes, I I'll big bat. Hey, uh, really is to take a new approach, um, in, in, in, in terms of enabling people to observe their systems, that the term observability actually goes back, uh, to a guy in control systems theory in the sixties. And then it's got quite a simple definition, which is, you know, being able to determine the, uh, I've been able to diagnose a system by the telemetry data that it emits. So let's look at the external outputs. And then based on that, can I determine the internal state of the application? And so from the get-go, we felt like observability was not about building another tool, right? We're not, you know, it's not about building another monitoring tool, a logging tool. Um, it's about analyzing data. And I, I was struck many years ago. Uh, I spent a bit of time with, with Andy McAfee, uh, from the sea sail lab at MIT. >>And he made a statement that I thought at the time was quite profound, which he said, look, everything's a matter of data. If you have enough data, you can solve any problem. And that stuck with me for a long time. And, um, you know, observe really what we do is we ingest vast quantities of telemetry data. We treat everything as events and we try and make sense of it. And the economics of the infrastructure now is such, that is you truly can ingest all the Alltel telemetry data and it's affordable, right? I mean, one of the wonderful things that Amazon has done is they've brought you, you know, very cheap, affordable storage. You can ingest all your data and keep it forever. Um, but, but now can you make sense of it? Well, you know, compute is pretty cheap these days and you've got amazing processing engines like snowflake. >>And so I was sense was that if we could allow folks to ingest all of this telemetry data process, that data and help people easily analyze that data, then they could find almost any problem that existed, uh, in their applications or in their infrastructure. So we really set out to create a data company, which I think is fundamentally different to, to really what everybody else is doing. And today we're troubleshooting distributed applications, but I think in future, we, my hope is that we can, we can help people analyze almost anything around their applications or infrastructure. >>And what's the use case problem statement that you're entering the market on? Is it just making sure microservices can be deployed as a Kubernetes? Is it managing containers? Is there a specific, um, customer adoption use case that you're focused on right now? >>Yeah, we've tried to target our ideal customer if you like has been the three or 4,000, uh, uh, SAS companies. Uh, we're, we're really focused on the U S right now, but three to 5,000 SAS companies, um, predominantly, uh, obviously running on AWS often, uh, Kubernetes infrastructure, but, you know, people who, uh, having a hard time, uh, understanding the complexity of the application that they've created, and they're having a hard time understanding, uh, the experience that their customers are having and tracking that back to root cause. So, you know, really helping those SAS companies troubleshoot their applications and having a better customer experience that's where the early customers are. And if we can do a good job in that area, I think we can, you know, over time, you know, start to take on some of the bigger companies and maybe some of the more established companies that are moving in this, this digital direction. >>Jeremy, thanks for sharing that. And I got one last set of questions for you around the industry, but before I get there, give a quick plug for observe. What are you guys looking to do hire, I mean, give a quick, uh, a PSA on what's going on with observed. >>Yeah, so we're, uh, the company is now what a rough and tough. About three years old, we got about 40 people. Uh we're well-funded by sort of Hill ventures. Uh, they were the original investors in, in snowflake. Um, and, um, yeah, I mean, we we've, we've well, more than doubled in size since the COVID lockdown began. We had about 15 people when that began. We've got almost 40 now. Um, and I would anticipate in the next year we're, we're probably going to double in size again, but, um, yeah, really the core focus in the company is, is understanding and analyzing vast quantities of data. And so anybody who is interested in, uh, that space look us up >>Mainly any areas, obviously engineering and the other areas okay. >>Near in all over. I mean, we, you know, w w w as you'll see, if you go to observing.com, we've got a pretty slick front end. Uh, we invested very early on in design and UX design. So we believe that you are, can be a differentiator. So we've got some amazing engineers on the front end. Uh, so going to can always do with the help there, but obviously, um, you know, there's a data processing platform here as well. Um, we, uh, we do run on top of snowflake. We, we do have a number of folks here who are very familiar, uh, you know, with the snowflake database and, and how to write efficiency equals. So, so front and backend. Um, we very soon, I think we'll be starting to expand the sales team. Um, we're really starting to get our initial set of customers and the feedback loop rule in rolling into engineering. And my hope would be, you know, probably early part of next year, we re we really start to nail the product market fit. Um, and we've got a huge release coming in the early part of next year where that the metrics and alerting functionality will be in the product. So, yeah, it's, it's sort of all systems go right now. >>Congratulations. Love to see the entrepreneurial journey. We'll keep an eye out for you and you're in a hot space. So we'll be riding, you'll be riding that wave, uh, question for you on the, um, just kind of the industry, uh, you're in the heart of Silicon Valley. Like I am honestly, I'm fellow Alto, you're up in the Hillsborough area. Um, I think you're in Hillsborough, right? That's where you, where you live. Um, San Francisco, the Valley, the pandemic pretty hard hit right now. People are sheltering in place, but still a lot of activity. Um, what are you hearing in, um, in, in the VC circles, startup circles, as everyone looks at coming out of the pandemic and you look at Amazon and you look at what snowflake has done. I mean, snowflake was built on top of Amazon competing against Redshift. Um, okay. They were hugely successful at doing that. So there's kind of this new playbook emerging. What are, what are people talking about? What's the scuttlebutt. >>Yeah. I mean, clearly TAC has done very well throughout what has been, you know, like just a terrible environment. Um, I think both kind of socially and economically, and I think what's going on in the stock market right now is probably not reflective of the, of the economic situation. And I think a lot of the indices are dominated by tech companies. So you, if you're not careful, you can get a little bit of a false read. Um, but look, what is undisputed is, is that the world is going to become more digital, more tech centric than, than less. Um, so I think there is a very, very bright future, you know, for tech, um, that there is certainly plenty of VC money, um, available. Um, you know, that is not really changed materially in the last year. Um, so if you have a good idea, if you're on one of these major trends, I think that there is a very good chance that you can get the company funded. >>Um, and you know, our, our expectation is that, you know, next year, obviously industries are going to return to work that have been dominant maybe for the last six, nine months. And so some parts of the economy should pick up again, but I would also tell you, I think certain, uh, sort of habits are not going to die. I mean, I think more things are going to be done online and we've gotten used to that way of working and, and you know, what, not, some of it is measurable. I don't know about cocktails over zoom, but working with customers, um, in some respects is easier because they're not traveling, we're not traveling. So we both have more time. Uh, it's sometimes easy to get meetings with people that you would never get. Now. Now, can you do an efficient sales process, education proof of concept? You know, those processes maybe have to grow up a little bit to be taken online, but I think the certain parts of the last, maybe six to nine months that we don't want to throw away and go back to the way we were doing it, because I think, you know, maybe this way of doing it is, is more efficient. >>What do you think about the, uh, entrepreneurial journeys out there? Obviously, um, Amazon we're here covering re-invent is really kind of, you know, building a massive compute engine. They've got higher level services and, you know, I've been speculating for years. I think snowflake is the first kind of big sign. That points to kind of what I said five years ago, which is there's going to be an opportunity for these other clouds as specialty clouds. I called them might be the wrong word, but snowflake basically built on top of Amazon, you know, most valuable company ever on wall street, uh, IPO on someone else's cloud. So is that a playbook? I mean, is that a move? I mean, this is kind of like a new thing. >>Yeah. I mean, that's, I mean, I, I feel like on databases, I've got a lot of history on management, Oracle almost 10 years. And you know, what snowflake does they did was they, they rearchitected the database explicitly for the cloud. I mean, you can run Oracle on the cloud, but, but it, but it doesn't do things the way that snowflake does it. Right. I mean, snowflake uses commodity storage. It uses S3 it's elastic. And so when you're not using it, you're not paying it. And these things sound very simple and very obvious now, which is I think what, what, what the genius of the founders, you know, Ben Warren and Tre, uh, work, and, and I think there will be other costs, you know, categories of infrastructure that will get rearchitected and reinvented for the cloud. And, you know, I've got equally big opportunities. Um, and so, yeah, I mean, I think the model, I believe firmly that the model is if you're a startup, you don't need to waste a lot of time, like reinventing the wheel on data center, infrastructure and databases, and a lot of the services that you would use to construct an application. >>You, you, you can start, you know, if, if the building that you're trying to build is like 12 floors, you can start at the eighth or ninth floor. Um, you know, I've, I've got like what three or 400 quality engineers at snowflake that are building our database. I don't, I don't need to do that. I can just piggyback on top of what they've done and add value. And, you know, the, the, the beautiful thing, you know, now, if you're a business out there thinking of, of, of, of becoming digital and reinventing yourself, or you're a startup just getting going, there's a lot of stuff you just don't have to build anymore. You just don't even have to think about it. >>Yeah. This is the new program of bull internet. It's internet, truly 2.0 or 3.0, whatever 4.0, a complete reset of online. And I think the pandemic, as you pointed out on many cube interviews and Andy Jassy send his keynote is on full display right now. And I think the smart money and smart entrepreneurs are going to see the opportunities. Okay. >>Yeah. It comes back to ideas and a great, I mean, I've always been a product person. Um, but look at great idea, a great product idea and a great product idea that, that capitalizes on the big trends in the industry. I think there's always going to be funding for those kinds of things. I don't know a lot about the consumer world I've always worked in, in B2B, but, um, you know, the kind of things that you're going to be able to do in future. I mean, think about it. If storage is essentially free and compute is essentially free. Just imagine what you could do, right. Jeremy, >>This is the new consumer. Get out. Let's understand that. Finally, B2B is the new consumer enterprise is hot. I was, again, it was riffing on this all week. All the things going on in enterprise is complex is now the new consumers now all connected. It's all one thing. The consumerization of it, the condition of computing has happened. It's going on. So you're a leader. Thank you for coming on. Great to see you as always, um, say hi to your family and stay safe. >>Yeah, you too. Thanks for the invite. Always, always a pleasure. >>Jeremy Burton breaking down the analysis of day two of week three of re-invent coverage. I'm John furry with the cube virtual. We're not in person anymore. Virtualization has allowed us to do more interviews over 110 interviews so far for re-invent and tomorrow, Thursday at two o'clock, Andy Jassy will spend 30 minutes with me here on the cube, looking back at re-invent the highs, the lows, and what's next for Amazon web services. I'm chef Aria. Thanks for watching.

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Alright, welcome back. Jeff Frick here. And we're excited for this next segment. We're joined by Jeremy Raider. He is the GM digital transformation and scale solutions for Intel Corporation. Jeremy, great to see you. Hey, thanks for having me. I love I love the flowers in the backyard. I thought maybe you ran over to the Japanese, the Japanese garden or the Rose Garden. Right To very beautiful places to visit in Portland. >>Yeah. You know, you only get for a couple Ah, couple weeks here, so we get the timing just right. >>Excellent. All right, so let's jump into it. Really? And in this conversation really is all about making Ai Riel. Um, and you guys are working with Dell and you're working with not only Dell, right? There's the hardware and software, but a lot of these smaller a solution provider. So what is some of the key attributes that that needs to make ai riel for your customers out there? >>Yeah. So you know, it's a It's a complex space. So when you can bring the best of the Intel portfolio, which is which is expanding a lot. You know, it's not just the few anymore you're getting into memory technologies, network technologies and kind of a little less known as how many resources we have focused on the software side of things optimizing frameworks and optimizing and in these key ingredients and libraries that you can stitch into that portfolio to really get more performance in value, out of your machine learning and deep learning space. And so you know what we've really done here with Dell? It has started to bring a bunch of that portfolio together with Dell's capabilities, and then bring in that ai's V partner, that software vendor where we can really take and stitch and bring the most value out of a broad portfolio. Ultimately using using the complexity of what it takes to deploy an AI capability. So a lot going on. They're bringing kind of the three legged stool of the software vendor hardware vendor dental into the mix, and you get a really strong outcome, >>right? So before we get to the solutions piece, let's stick a little bit into the intel world, and I don't know if a lot of people are aware that obviously you guys make CPUs and you've been making great CPS forever. But there's a whole lot more stuff that you've added, you know, kind of around the core CPU, if you will. In terms of of actual libraries and ways to really optimize the seond processors to operate in an AI world. I wonder if you can kind of take us a little bit below the surface on how that works. What are some of the examples of things you can do to get more from your Gambira Intel processors for AI specific applications of workloads? >>Yeah, well, you know, there's a ton of software optimization that goes into this. You know that having the great CPU is definitely step one. But ultimately you want to get down into the libraries like tensor flow. We have data analytics, acceleration libraries. You know, that really allows you to get kind of again under the covers a little bit and look at how do we have to get the most out of the kinds of capabilities that are ultimately used in machine learning in deep learning capabilities, and then bring that forward and trying and enable that with our software vendors so that they can take advantage of those acceleration components and ultimately, you know, move from, you know, less training time or could be a cost factor, right? Those are the kind of capabilities we want to expose to software vendors do these kinds of partnerships >>on, and that's terrific. And I do think that's a big part of the story that a lot of people are probably not as aware of that. There are a lot of these optimization opportunities that you guys have been leveraging for a while. So shifting gears a little bit right AI and machine learning is all about the data. And in doing a little research for this, I found actually you on stage talking about some company that had, like, 350 of road off 315 petabytes of of data, 140,000 sources of those data, and I think probably not great quote of six months access time to get it right and actually work with it. And the company you're referencing was intel. So you guys know a lot about debt data, managing data, everything from your manufacturing and and obviously supporting a global organization for I, t and Brian and, ah, a lot of complexity and secrets and good stuff. So you know what have you guys leveraged as intel in the way you work with data and getting a good data pipeline that's enabling you to kind of put that into these other solutions that you're providing to the customers, >>right? Well is, you know, it's absolutely a journey, and it doesn't happen overnight, and that's what we've you know. We've seen it at Intel on We see it with many of our customers that are on the same journey that we've been on. And so you know, this idea of building that pipeline it really starts with what kind of problems that you're trying to solve. What are the big issues that are holding you back that company where you see that competitive advantage that you're trying to get to? And then ultimately, how do you build the structure to enable the right kind of pipeline of that data? Because that's that's what machine learning and deep learning is that data journey. So really a lot of focus around you know how we can understand those business challenges bring forward those kinds of capabilities along the way through to where we structure our entire company around those assets. And then ultimately, some of the partnerships that we're gonna be talking about these companies that are out there to help us really squeeze the most out of that data as quickly as possible because otherwise it goes stale real fast, sits on the shelf, and you're not getting that value out of right. So, yeah, we've been on the journey. It's ah, it's a long journey. But ultimately we could take a lot of those those kind of learnings and we can apply them to our silicon technology. The software optimization is that we're doing and ultimately, how we talk to our enterprise customers about how they can solve overcome some of the same challenges that we did. >>Well, let's talk about some of those challenges specifically because, you know, I think part of the the challenge is that kind of knocked big data, if you will in Hadoop, if you will kind of off the rails. Little bit was, there's a whole lot that goes into it. Besides just doing the analysis There's a lot of data practice data collection, data organization, a whole bunch of things that have to happen before You can actually start to do the sexy stuff of AI. So you know, what are some of those challenges? How are you helping people get over kind of these baby steps before they can really get into the deep end of the pool? >>Yeah, well, you know, one is you have to have the resource is so you know, do you even have the resource is if you can acquire those Resource is can you keep them interested in that kind of work that you're doing? So that's a big challenge on and actually will talk about how that fits into some of the partnerships that we've been establishing in the ecosystem. It's also you get stuck in this poc do loop, right? You finally get those resource is and they start to get access to that data that we talked about. They start to play out some scenarios a theorize a little bit. Maybe they show you some really interesting value, but it never seems to make its way into a full production mode. And I think that is a challenge that is facing so many enterprises that are stuck in that loop. And so that's where we look at who's out there in the ecosystem That can help more readily move through that whole process of the evaluation that proved they are a why the POC and ultimately move that thing that capability into production mode as quickly as possible that you know that to me is one of those fundamental aspects of if you're stuck in the POC. Nothing's happening from this. This is not helping your company. We want to move things more quickly, >>right? Right. And let's just talk about some of these companies that you guys are working with that you've got some reference architectures is data robot a Grid Dynamics H 20 just down the road in Antigua. So a lot of the companies we've worked with with Cube and I think you know another part that's interesting. It again we can learn from kind of old days of big data is kind of generalized. Ai versus solution specific. Ai and I think you know where there's a real opportunity is not AI for a sake, but really it's got to be applied to a specific solution. A specific problem so that you have, you know, better chatbots. Better customer service experience, you know, better something. So when you were working with these folks and trying to design solutions or some of the opportunities that you saw to work with, some of these folks to now have an applied a application slash solution versus just kind of AI for ai's sake, >>Yeah. I mean, that could be anything from fraud, detection and financial services, or even taking a step back and looking more horizontally like back to that data challenge. If if you're stuck at the AI built a fantastic data lake, but I haven't been able to pull anything back out of it, who are some of the companies that are out there that can help overcome some of those big data challenges and ultimately get you to where you know, you don't have a data scientist spending 60% of their time on data acquisition pre processing? That's not where we want them, right? We want them on building out that next theory. We want them on looking at the next business challenge. We want them on selecting the right models, but ultimately they have to do that as quickly as possible so that they can move that that capability forward into the next phase. So, really, it's about that that connection of looking at those those problems or challenges in the whole pipeline. And these companies like Data robot in H 20 because you know, they're all addressing specific challenges in the end to end. That's why they've kind of bubbled up as ones that we want to continue to collaborate with, because it can help enterprises overcome those issues more fast. You know more readily. >>Great. Well, Jeremy, thanks for taking a few minutes and giving us the Intel side of the story. Um, it's a great company. Has been around forever. I worked there many, many moons ago. That's Ah, that's a story for another time. But really appreciate it and >>I'll interview you >>will go there. Alright, So super Thanks a lot. So he's Jeremy. I'm Jeff Frick. So now it's time to go ahead and jump into the crowd chat. It's crowdchat dot net slash make ai Really, Um, we'll see you in the chat. And thanks for watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios where we have a quarantine crew and we're doing remote interviews with thought leaders in the industry and people who have been around the block, beat it through three industry cycles but also can share their perspectives on the COVID-19 situation that we're in, the challenges and the opportunities. And I have with me, Jeremy Burton, a good friend of theCUBE. Have been a CUBE alumni now for 10 years, now the CEO of Observe, it's a stealth startup. I got a little taste of it, it's a Cloud thing. It's going to be part of this whole new guard. Jeremy, great to see you. You're sheltering in place, we're sheltering in the studio. Thanks for joining me. >> No, thanks for the offer. I mean, it's funny these days I welcome chance to actually speak to somebody and particularly, somebody that's not at Observe. So this is a rare treat in the last three weeks. >> Telling the wife and kids, "Hey, I'm going to go talk to theCUBE guy." So you know, I'm going to have some fun for a while. Look, I want to just have a candid fun conversation 'cause I think one of the things that's interesting to me in one, things that we're spending a lot of time doing media on is getting the word out about some of the things that are going on. People do have anxiety, they're sheltering in place for the folks that've been in the tech industry, working at home and being virtual has been part of the thing. It's not a big thing but from some of the people it's like a first time thing. And also it's also highlighting a disruption that kind of is off the books if you will, the classic continuous operations and disaster recovery was also confined to power outages or hurricanes or all those things that we people are protected against. But this is just a surge of the herd of the people going home. It's causing an at scale problem and showing these challenges, but there's also opportunities. What's your take on this? How do you see this evolving? What's your view of the current situation and some of the comments? >> Yeah, I think for most of us we're in a little bit unchartered territory. I don't really know a whole lot about medicine or the details of the virus or how pandemics happen. But we obviously have to, we deal with the consequences of it. And so I think right now although, I think it's a fairly bad situation for a lot of people, just having been through a couple of recessions where we all went through 9/11. The world does turn around and you come out the other side. And so the key thing is you start like a very much as a cliche, but you've got to live in the moment, "What can I do right now? "What can I affect right now? "How can I make sure that what I'm working on "is a value for when we come out the other side "and when more curveballs come along?" I think you've got a reason about that with the best information you have at the time. So I almost feel like you very much, you've got to just live solid like day to day, week to week, listen to the data and adapt based on that. But it's certainly starting to reinvent how work is done. I think we've all worked from home at some point. We've all worked using our equipment at home. But the prospect of working that way for months on end and it maybe been the new way of working, is a whole new ballgame. So I'm a big believer that this will fundamentally change the way we work. I don't think we're going to go 100% back to the way that we were, and there's going to be quite a lot of readjustments, and I think in that world, there's going to be some new companies come along that are big winners. And by definition, there's going to be some big losers as well. >> Well, people who know theCUBE know that I'm a big fan of you as an executive. I've seen the vision, you have also great technical shops and product shops, but also a good operational view. You've always been a fan of digital. And I think if you look at video conferencing, for instance, WebEx as a Cisco thing, great bulletproof of the enterprise, but Zoom has come across the scene. I've never seen so many Zoom parties. I did one with my family that they actually liked it. They were having fun. We had cocktails raising the wineglasses up. So people are Zooming their CUBE in, we're doing interviews. So video now is not just a corporate thing. You're seeing the engagement of digital taking on a new life and this is a whole new roles and responsibilities that we might reimagine how people do their business because with the events being canceled that are going on, whether they're concerts or just industry or tech events or any event, that physical space is gone, now it's going to digital. So how do you replicate the business value or personal value from physical face to face to digital? It's a whole new venue, there's new roles. It's complicated, it's a complex system. What's your thought on that? >> It is though, but what I have been pleasantly surprised by, I'd love it going in the office. I love the engagement with people and hanging out in the office. And so I was not really a big fan of remote working and virtually working, but I have to say, not only now where we virtually work in and we do the Zoom meetings and that's all well and good. It's a big cultural thing with at Observe to do a game night. And so we thought, "Well, why can't we do a virtual game night "and lending some trade secrets here? "But our favorite game was Secret Hitler." >> Yeah, that's a great game. One of my family's favorite. >> Turns out there's an online Secret Hitler. And you know what? The first time we played it, one of the nice thing is we've got less than 20 people in the company. So you got 12 or 14 people online. It's actually manageable. But I have to say, I'm almost embarrassed to say, it was almost as good sitting there with a drink playing virtual Secret Hitler as it was sitting around the desk. And so now I'm thinking when we go back to work, maybe we don't need to leave our desks and go have a drink together. We can just sit there on Zoom and play the secret Hitler online. Then you start looking around, "Well, what are the games can I play online?" Not like for one or two players or five players and I'm not talking about playing kind of Halo or something like that, but good collaborative games for tens of people to play at once. There's not as many as you think. So I feel like the social aspect of it, I mean, online gaming I think is huge. But even the video conferencing software, you would have thought that we would be done WebEx by now, right? I mean Skype and WebEx, we've had those for years, right? And so how does Zoom, which does guess what, video conferencing come along and start to clear up. And Zoom is not perfect by the way, but this is almost the crisis that they needed to make a fabulous business. I do believe as we start to come out the other side, I think there's going to be much, much investment in the VC world, on improving that remote work experience Because as much as me and you can talk to a video session, we can't collaborate and work together. The tools for doing that, I think still are relatively poor. >> I think you're onto something. Zoom by the way, had 10 million active dailies in December. This month was 200 million rocket ship. They got 90,000 universities. They essentially made some good moves. I think that's going to be good, but you bring up a good point about these new kinds of opportunities that are going to come out the other side, which is, think about Secret Hitler. For the folks who don't know, is a great game that you play with people, in your family or in friend group like Cards Against Me. And if you know that game, it's a similar thing concept, but you have different games. It's really fun, you should get it. Check it out online. But think about that online gaming or just what engagement means socially. I mean the old web days or just like a couple of months ago was individual engagement, "Did you like my tweet? "Did you like my Facebook post?" You're getting at something that's little bit more of a social organizational construct of group engagement, intimacy. >> Right, and the thing is we would do game night once a month and we'd get videos in and get the teamed together. Once a month was good when everybody had their own life to deal with. Now people are craving like, "Hey can we do this like every week?" And I wouldn't be surprised if the frequency increases from that, but I think that just almost speaks to human beings and that we crave social interaction. And even though most of the people at Observe are engineers and by definition should not enjoy as much social interaction, they do. They love it, right? And to me, that gaming and social direction, that's part of work. And so you have to have a virtual environment that can reproduce that. >> I mean, it's very interesting to see some of the entrepreneurial exercises or pitches that come out of this because I think it's going to be a Renaissance, it's not Renaissance 'cause it's going to come back. It's always been there. But the new kind of entrepreneurial products coming out are going to address these things. And the question I want to ask you, 'cause you've been on the big company, you've done extremely well in your career, than you get back down to your roots to doing startup, you're launching, you haven't yet launched. So you got hit right here, you're working at home sheltering in place. I was talking to a couple of VC buddies, venture capitalists, and they're saying, "I'm reading books and I'm doing research "but I really can't meet people." So their work has changed. How do you see the investment community reacting to this? Certainly valuations might come down. Obviously, their limited partners are being hit with the stock market. You're seeing a disruption. What do you see going on in the VC world around this cold hard time? >> I mean certainly all VCs are not created equal. So I think there's going to be different perspectives based on the background of the DNA of the VC involved. I think certainly at Observe, I feel very fortunate that we've got a sort of Hill Ventures. So these guys were the investors behind Snowflake and behind Pure Storage and many other good companies but they're very longterm investors and their advice to me has been, "Well look, "some of the most innovative times if you like, "have been during and after a major crisis. "And so if you make short term decisions "to get you through those crisis, "they're all terrible but they don't last forever "and there will be another side. "And so make good business decisions "and good investment decisions through this "because there will be winners "that emerge on the other side." And that's really what I try and get the team focused on is, "Guys for now, we're sort of hunkered down "and it feels bad, "but we're probably more privileged than most. "And we have an opportunity maybe on the other side, "to take advantage, we don't have a revenue stream, "we don't have existing customers. "We can sort of take this Greenfield business "that we've got and you go on the offensive "when things returned to assemblance of normal." So The Hill had been fantastic. And I would hope that most VCs retain that perspective, which is if it was a good company three weeks ago, it's probably still a good company today. And the best way to create value is to sort of empower I think the CEOs and executive teams to make the right sort of longer term decisions. Try and capitalize when you come out the other side because there will be losers as well. And I think the wrong decisions now can put you on the losing end of that equation in three, four, five months time. >> Yeah, that's a good point. If you are a good company just a few months ago or even weeks ago or a year ago, you're still a good company. That's really going to be a tell sign to what happens in some of these companies. If I got to ask you a more focused question on this whole, which side of the street are you on? Are you riding the wave or are you going to get taken away and washed away with it? Because there are bets and well, I want to get into Observe in a minute, but you mentioned Snowflake there in the Cloud wave. Obviously, that's pretty bullish. We're still bullish on that. Obviously, it's going to be game changer. But is there a tell sign for the kind of bets that those good management teams need to make now? Because I agree with you, when the Dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and really 2004 kicked back up again. 2008, we saw that post and a lot of great companies were created. So what's your advice on which side of history do you need to be on here? I'll say Cloud is one. What is your view on that? >> Yeah, I mean we felt for many years, it's not just since I went to the startup, but I am a huge believer in this transition to digital businesses. Frictionless interactions, automation, yes, obviously people are required to run a business, but if you could run a business remotely, or the businesses automated in a way such that it doesn't require hands-on operation, then that's a beautiful thing. And my belief is that, this terrible situation will force people to really think seriously about what the digital business looks like. If you don't have one, then that you may not be able to be in business in a year, two, three years down the line, right? There'll be some carryover, but I think the smart businesses are going to be able to function in an environment such as this. >> Yeah, I think that's great. >> That's going to be playing on everybody's minds. Now more than ever, I think that the digital business is a necessity. >> Yeah, I was just talking to a colleague and we were just talking about how all of the events got canceled and you've had the history running some of those best events ever in the industry at EMC. And we participated in those and you know your staff when it comes to events, there's economic value in these physical events as a venue, Science Convention Center in Moscone here in San Francisco. I mean there's a lot of things that go on, a lot of decision-making that's been standardized over the years and there's an economic value that comes out of those events. Now that's gone, and then these little digital teams, some companies have like five people, two people, sometimes maybe if you're lucky you have 10 or more or a department. And then you've got demand generation. All these guys are being told now, "You have to make up for the shortfall "in not just leads but value." And this just has been a big burden for some of my friends out there who are like, "Wait a minute, you want to take that and move it over here?" It's been kind of a challenge. What is your view on this? Because a lot of people are trying to figure this particular problem out on how to make digital work today and have some extensibility and get success. What's your take? >> Well, I'm still a huge believer I mean, whereas sort of like we just saw digital marketing content is still very much King, right? If you can produce a compelling piece of content online, TV quality with a depth of knowledge that you're going to attract an audience, now can you then make that experience interactive? Can you engage the audience in a deeper way? Yeah, you're probably not going to have something which lasts for a full day or for three days online, but I think it's really going to force the creativity on the content side to another level, right? It can't just be talking heads and PowerPoint pictures. So that rethinking from first principles, what an online conference or an online experience actually looks like in a way that it engages the people who are watching. To me, those folks are going to go do very, very well. And the economics, I know how much it costs to put on a conference for 10 or 15,000 people. And by the way, I know how much it costs to put on a virtual event for 10 or 15,000 people. And the economics are astounding in that difference. Now if you're physically somewhere, you can feel things that you can't feel online. Come on though, this is a problem that requires some innovation to solve, right? We've talked about virtual reality and augmented reality, but it's still pretty clunky and relegated to sort of niche use cases and bad games. But at some point, that technology has to reach the point where it can be useful and engage in a new. You can approximate to that physical experience. But I think that is going to be critical but many businesses even beyond sort of marketing and virtual events and that kind of thing, many businesses are just going to have to reinvent how they engage and interact with their customers and the automation of their operations and how do you get by when you don't have as many people physically in an office or operating machines? Everybody's going to have to think through that. >> Yeah, I think that's great insight and that's going to be a great clip that I'll share and I think that's going to be inspirational for the folks trying to solve that problem. The things that we're focused in on, as you know, and this is something that we're doing a lot of work on, is the engagement with groups and you mentioned The Secret Hitler as the game, they're going to see some new clever things go on. And I think the group dynamic and having people in whether it's virtual and physical spaces exchanging credible things, ideas or jokes or whatever is going to be a new kind of dynamic. >> Yeah. >> Because that's going to have to fill the void. >> Yeah, I mean I've got a small company so we can play these individual games, but just think about some of these board type games where I want to have three teams and I want to divide the company up into three. The logistics of actually figuring that out is ridiculous and it shouldn't be that way, right? And so these are basics of human social interactions. We want to play a game together, we want to divide up into teams. But that sounds like a relatively trivial thing, but try and find the number of games available that allow you to easily do that and each team interaction independently of the others, it's almost impossible. >> It's going to be fun to watch and I think and I hope we're going to learn. Well, thanks for the device. Let's get back to your startup. Let's get a plug in for that, I want to get the plug in. I've seen you in stealth so you can't really go into great detail, but you have been talking to customers. You are obviously related, that's related to Snowflake, but you were going to do some things with Snowflake. You're in the Cloud. Can you just take a minute to give a plug for what you guys are doing for the people who want to know what you guys are leaning towards in terms of the value proposition? >> Yeah well, when I look back in my career, one of the times I enjoyed the most was the time at Oracle and working with data. And I've been fortunate enough for the last four and a half years or so to be on the board of Snowflake. Couple of ex Oracle guys, Benoit and Thierry founded the company and they've reinvented the database. And I felt like I've sat for 20 years looking for the second coming of the database and we all were sort of had fake thinking it was Hadoop. And turns out it wasn't. But I think Snowflake and the separation of storage and compute that allows them to sort of scale and have a usage-based pricing model, I just think is absolutely revolutionary and I think it's going to be one of the great companies of the new era. And so when I was there when I looked at Observe, really the thesis was that using a platform like Snowflake, you could potentially reason about unstructured log data. It's all like Splunk. You could reason about time series data, a little bit like Datadog or tracing data like AppDynamics or in fact any data, you could reason about it together. And today, if you look at the world, it's like if you want to do something with logs, you go get one product. If you want to do something with relational data, you get another, if you want to do time series data, you get another, you want to do tracing, you get an APM tool. And nobody has the big picture, right? Everybody's got their own little piece of data and their own perspective on where the issue might be in your company. But nobody really knows and it's usually put together in the brain of, of the smartest guy in the room. And so I thought it was quite simple. At Snowflake, you've got this commercial database that can do instruction data and time series data and relational data. And what if we could collect all data within an organization together, structure it, relate it, and then imagine what you could find out about your infrastructure, your applications, your business? >> Sort of unification? Does it have like unification kind of concept for users or IT? >> Yeah, I think the emerging category would be observability but it really is a collapsing of log analytics, metrics monitoring and tracing into this new category of observability. We don't necessarily just view that though as sort of data coming out of Kubernetes clusters or out of AWS or wherever. We actually could ingest security data. We could ingest data from people surfing using your app or surfing your website. We could take logs coming out of machines on a factory floor. So the way we built the product, it can be literally any kind of data. And we try and structure it and relate it and make sense of it and then make it very easy for people to navigate through it and determine issues and problems. So yeah, we're pretty excited about it. And like I said, we could not have built this even a couple of years ago because I don't think Snowflake would have been there. And in fact, that was one of the big risks when we started the company. Can we build it on Snowflake? And so here we are two years later and we think we can. Well, we're sure we can do it. >> Yeah, they've had a good run too. I mean, look at the growth of Snowflake. >> Yeah, it's crazy. I've never seen anything like it and in the last 20 years and B2B, I've never seen anything like it. So just like I felt in the mid 90s when I was at Oracle, people were making decisions to go with Oracle and then saying, "Hey, help me get all of my other data in that, "my mainframe data, my this, my that." I think Snowflake are going to go through the same sort of growth phase and hopefully with Observe, we can be like, "Hey, if you want to put "your unstructured data or time series data, "we can help you do that very easily." >> Well, this is exactly the current wave that you want to be on the right side of because like you said, just a year or so ago or a couple of years ago, it wasn't available. This is kind of the new capabilities. >> Yeah, I feel like there's going to be a lot of businesses, grow ridiculously. You talked about the Zoom numbers. These are ridiculous growth numbers and there are going to be companies come out the other side that take advantage of the new environment. And as they're growing, as they're scaling, as they build these new microservice-based applications, they're going to run into issues and we hope at least that it's products with our kind of architecture, that's going to be able to help these fast-growing businesses. So yeah, as I said, we're somewhat fortunate in that we don't have a product yet, but certainly on the other side of this, we think there's going to be plenty of opportunity to help a few folks. >> We know you got to do a launch and we're looking forward to hearing more and getting the briefing, and looking forward to hearing more about it when you go public. And yeah, thanks for coming on and taking the time today. I know you got your daughter's birthday party there and you're going to have some celebration. Thank you for sharing the insights on your vision of digital. I thought that was very compelling and great to see you and stay safe. >> Great to see you. Yeah, my 18-year-old, it's got a birthday party and she like always would worry, "What if no one shows up?" Well, today she knows no one's going to show up. >> Except for her family, yeah. >> It's going to be down in the family, yeah. So thanks for that and you guys stay safe and been great the last 10 years knowing theCUBE been that long but hopefully, here is the next 10 years after this current situation is over. >> Yeah, looking forward to it, it's going to be a lot of fun rye and get the content out there. And again, thanks for coming on during this important time and sharing your insights and also just making some entertainment here. We're getting some conversations so people can fill the void and play some games and have some fun. Jeremy, thanks. Great to see you. Jeremy Burton, senior executive in the industry. I've known him for years, been a CUBE alumni since theCUBE was formed. Now the CEO of Observe, sharing his insights on the industry but more importantly, how to be successful, how to come out the other side. Don't be too optimistic. Be focused on today and get through it. That's his advice. Of course, we're theCUBE bringing you all the data as we can now with remote interviews during this time. Thanks for watching, I'm John furrier. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios where we have a quarantine crew and we're doing remote interviews with thought leaders in the industry and people who have been around the block, beat it through three industry cycles but also can share their perspectives on the COVID-19 situation that we're in, the challenges and the opportunities. And I have with me, Jeremy Burton, a good friend of theCUBE. Have been a CUBE alumni now for 10 years, now the CEO of Observe, it's a stealth startup. I got a little taste of it, it's a Cloud thing. It's going to be part of this whole new guard. Jeremy, great to see you. You're sheltering in place, we're sheltering in the studio. Thanks for joining me. >> No, thanks for the offer. I mean, it's funny these days I welcome chance to actually speak to somebody and particularly, somebody that's not at Observe. So this is a rare treat in the last three weeks. >> Telling the wife and kids, "Hey, I'm going to go talk to theCUBE guy." So you know, I'm going to have some fun for a while. Look, I want to just have a candid fun conversation 'cause I think one of the things that's interesting to me in one, things that we're spending a lot of time doing media on is getting the word out about some of the things that are going on. People do have anxiety, they're sheltering in place for the folks that've been in the tech industry, working at home and being virtual has been part of the thing. It's not a big thing but from some of the people it's like a first time thing. And also it's also highlighting a disruption that kind of is off the books if you will, the classic continuous operations and disaster recovery was also confined to power outages or hurricanes or all those things that we people are protected against. But this is just a surge of the herd of the people going home. It's causing an at scale problem and showing these challenges, but there's also opportunities. What's your take on this? How do you see this evolving? What's your view of the current situation and some of the comments? >> Yeah, I think for most of us we're in a little bit unchartered territory. I don't really know a whole lot about medicine or the details of the virus or how pandemics happen. But we obviously have to, we deal with the consequences of it. And so I think right now although, I think it's a fairly bad situation for a lot of people, just having been through a couple of recessions where we all went through 9/11. The world does turn around and you come out the other side. And so the key thing is you start like a very much as a cliche, but you've got to live in the moment, "What can I do right now? "What can I affect right now? "How can I make sure that what I'm working on "is a value for when we come out the other side "and when more curveballs come along?" I think you've got a reason about that with the best information you have at the time. So I almost feel like you very much, you've got to just live solid like day to day, week to week, listen to the data and adapt based on that. But it's certainly starting to reinvent how work is done. I think we've all worked from home at some point. We've all worked using our equipment at home. But the prospect of working that way for months on end and it maybe been the new way of working, is a whole new ballgame. So I'm a big believer that this will fundamentally change the way we work. I don't think we're going to go 100% back to the way that we were, and there's going to be quite a lot of readjustments, and I think in that world, there's going to be some new companies come along that are big winners. And by definition, there's going to be some big losers as well. >> Well, people who know theCUBE know that I'm a big fan of you as an executive. I've seen the vision, you have also great technical shops and product shops, but also a good operational view. You've always been a fan of digital. And I think if you look at video conferencing, for instance, WebEx as a Cisco thing, great bulletproof of the enterprise, but Zoom has come across the scene. I've never seen so many Zoom parties. I did one with my family that they actually liked it. They were having fun. We had cocktails raising the wineglasses up. So people are Zooming their CUBE in, we're doing interviews. So video now is not just a corporate thing. You're seeing the engagement of digital taking on a new life and this is a whole new roles and responsibilities that we might reimagine how people do their business because with the events being canceled that are going on, whether they're concerts or just industry or tech events or any event, that physical space is gone, now it's going to digital. So how do you replicate the business value or personal value from physical face to face to digital? It's a whole new venue, there's new roles. It's complicated, it's a complex system. What's your thought on that? >> It is though, but what I have been pleasantly surprised by, I'd love it going in the office. I love the engagement with people and hanging out in the office. And so I was not really a big fan of remote working and virtually working, but I have to say, not only now where we virtually work in and we do the Zoom meetings and that's all well and good. It's a big cultural thing with at Observe to do a game night. And so we thought, "Well, why can't we do a virtual game night "and lending some trade secrets here? "But our favorite game was Secret Hitler." >> Yeah, that's a great game. One of my family's favorite. >> Turns out there's an online Secret Hitler. And you know what? The first time we played it, one of the nice thing is we've got less than 20 people in the company. So you got 12 or 14 people online. It's actually manageable. But I have to say, I'm almost embarrassed to say, it was almost as good sitting there with a drink playing virtual Secret Hitler as it was sitting around the desk. And so now I'm thinking when we go back to work, maybe we don't need to leave our desks and go have a drink together. We can just sit there on Zoom and play the secret Hitler online. Then you start looking around, "Well, what are the games can I play online?" Not like for one or two players or five players and I'm not talking about playing kind of Halo or something like that, but good collaborative games for tens of people to play at once. There's not as many as you think. So I feel like the social aspect of it, I mean, online gaming I think is huge. But even the video conferencing software, you would have thought that we would be done WebEx by now, right? I mean Skype and WebEx, we've had those for years, right? And so how does Zoom, which does guess what, video conferencing come along and start to clear up. And Zoom is not perfect by the way, but this is almost the crisis that they needed to make a fabulous business. I do believe as we start to come out the other side, I think there's going to be much, much investment in the VC world, on improving that remote work experience Because as much as me and you can talk to a video session, we can't collaborate and work together. The tools for doing that, I think still are relatively poor. >> I think you're onto something. Zoom by the way, had 10 million active dailies in December. This month was 200 million rocket ship. They got 90,000 universities. They essentially made some good moves. I think that's going to be good, but you bring up a good point about these new kinds of opportunities that are going to come out the other side, which is, think about Secret Hitler. For the folks who don't know, is a great game that you play with people, in your family or in friend group like Cards Against Me. And if you know that game, it's a similar thing concept, but you have different games. It's really fun, you should get it. Check it out online. But think about that online gaming or just what engagement means socially. I mean the old web days or just like a couple of months ago was individual engagement, "Did you like my tweet? "Did you like my Facebook post?" You're getting at something that's little bit more of a social organizational construct of group engagement, intimacy. >> Right, and the thing is we would do game night once a month and we'd get videos in and get the teamed together. Once a month was good when everybody had their own life to deal with. Now people are craving like, "Hey can we do this like every week?" And I wouldn't be surprised if the frequency increases from that, but I think that just almost speaks to human beings and that we crave social interaction. And even though most of the people at Observe are engineers and by definition should not enjoy as much social interaction, they do. They love it, right? And to me, that gaming and social direction, that's part of work. And so you have to have a virtual environment that can reproduce that. >> I mean, it's very interesting to see some of the entrepreneurial exercises or pitches that come out of this because I think it's going to be a Renaissance, it's not Renaissance 'cause it's going to come back. It's always been there. But the new kind of entrepreneurial products coming out are going to address these things. And the question I want to ask you, 'cause you've been on the big company, you've done extremely well in your career, than you get back down to your roots to doing startup, you're launching, you haven't yet launched. So you got hit right here, you're working at home sheltering in place. I was talking to a couple of VC buddies, venture capitalists, and they're saying, "I'm reading books and I'm doing research "but I really can't meet people." So their work has changed. How do you see the investment community reacting to this? Certainly valuations might come down. Obviously, their limited partners are being hit with the stock market. You're seeing a disruption. What do you see going on in the VC world around this cold hard time? >> I mean certainly all VCs are not created equal. So I think there's going to be different perspectives based on the background of the DNA of the VC involved. I think certainly at Observe, I feel very fortunate that we've got a sort of Hill Ventures. So these guys were the investors behind Snowflake and behind Pure Storage and many other good companies but they're very longterm investors and their advice to me has been, "Well look, "some of the most innovative times if you like, "have been during and after a major crisis. "And so if you make short term decisions "to get you through those crisis, "they're all terrible but they don't last forever "and there will be another side. "And so make good business decisions "and good investment decisions through this "because there will be winners "that emerge on the other side." And that's really what I try and get the team focused on is, "Guys for now, we're sort of hunkered down "and it feels bad, "but we're probably more privileged than most. "And we have an opportunity maybe on the other side, "to take advantage, we don't have a revenue stream, "we don't have existing customers. "We can sort of take this Greenfield business "that we've got and you go on the offensive "when things returned to assemblance of normal." So The Hill had been fantastic. And I would hope that most VCs retain that perspective, which is if it was a good company three weeks ago, it's probably still a good company today. And the best way to create value is to sort of empower I think the CEOs and executive teams to make the right sort of longer term decisions. Try and capitalize when you come out the other side because there will be losers as well. And I think the wrong decisions now can put you on the losing end of that equation in three, four, five months time. >> Yeah, that's a good point. If you are a good company just a few months ago or even weeks ago or a year ago, you're still a good company. That's really going to be a tell sign to what happens in some of these companies. If I got to ask you a more focused question on this whole, which side of the street are you on? Are you riding the wave or are you going to get taken away and washed away with it? Because there are bets and well, I want to get into Observe in a minute, but you mentioned Snowflake there in the Cloud wave. Obviously, that's pretty bullish. We're still bullish on that. Obviously, it's going to be game changer. But is there a tell sign for the kind of bets that those good management teams need to make now? Because I agree with you, when the Dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and really 2004 kicked back up again. 2008, we saw that post and a lot of great companies were created. So what's your advice on which side of history do you need to be on here? I'll say Cloud is one. What is your view on that? >> Yeah, I mean we felt for many years, it's not just since I went to the startup, but I am a huge believer in this transition to digital businesses. Frictionless interactions, automation, yes, obviously people are required to run a business, but if you could run a business remotely, or the businesses automated in a way such that it doesn't require hands-on operation, then that's a beautiful thing. And my belief is that, this terrible situation will force people to really think seriously about what the digital business looks like. If you don't have one, then that you may not be able to be in business in a year, two, three years down the line, right? There'll be some carryover, but I think the smart businesses are going to be able to function in an environment such as this. >> Yeah, I think that's great. >> That's going to be playing on everybody's minds. Now more than ever, I think that the digital business is a necessity. >> Yeah, I was just talking to a colleague and we were just talking about how all of the events got canceled and you've had the history running some of those best events ever in the industry at EMC. And we participated in those and you know your staff when it comes to events, there's economic value in these physical events as a venue, Science Convention Center in Moscone here in San Francisco. I mean there's a lot of things that go on, a lot of decision-making that's been standardized over the years and there's an economic value that comes out of those events. Now that's gone, and then these little digital teams, some companies have like five people, two people, sometimes maybe if you're lucky you have 10 or more or a department. And then you've got demand generation. All these guys are being told now, "You have to make up for the shortfall "in not just leads but value." And this just has been a big burden for some of my friends out there who are like, "Wait a minute, you want to take that and move it over here?" It's been kind of a challenge. What is your view on this? Because a lot of people are trying to figure this particular problem out on how to make digital work today and have some extensibility and get success. What's your take? >> Well, I'm still a huge believer I mean, whereas sort of like we just saw digital marketing content is still very much King, right? If you can produce a compelling piece of content online, TV quality with a depth of knowledge that you're going to attract an audience, now can you then make that experience interactive? Can you engage the audience in a deeper way? Yeah, you're probably not going to have something which lasts for a full day or for three days online, but I think it's really going to force the creativity on the content side to another level, right? It can't just be talking heads and PowerPoint pictures. So that rethinking from first principles, what an online conference or an online experience actually looks like in a way that it engages the people who are watching. To me, those folks are going to go do very, very well. And the economics, I know how much it costs to put on a conference for 10 or 15,000 people. And by the way, I know how much it costs to put on a virtual event for 10 or 15,000 people. And the economics are astounding in that difference. Now if you're physically somewhere, you can feel things that you can't feel online. Come on though, this is a problem that requires some innovation to solve, right? We've talked about virtual reality and augmented reality, but it's still pretty clunky and relegated to sort of niche use cases and bad games. But at some point, that technology has to reach the point where it can be useful and engage in a new. You can approximate to that physical experience. But I think that is going to be critical but many businesses even beyond sort of marketing and virtual events and that kind of thing, many businesses are just going to have to reinvent how they engage and interact with their customers and the automation of their operations and how do you get by when you don't have as many people physically in an office or operating machines? Everybody's going to have to think through that. >> Yeah, I think that's great insight and that's going to be a great clip that I'll share and I think that's going to be inspirational for the folks trying to solve that problem. The things that we're focused in on, as you know, and this is something that we're doing a lot of work on, is the engagement with groups and you mentioned The Secret Hitler as the game, they're going to see some new clever things go on. And I think the group dynamic and having people in whether it's virtual and physical spaces exchanging credible things, ideas or jokes or whatever is going to be a new kind of dynamic. >> Yeah. >> Because that's going to have to fill the void. >> Yeah, I mean I've got a small company so we can play these individual games, but just think about some of these board type games where I want to have three teams and I want to divide the company up into three. The logistics of actually figuring that out is ridiculous and it shouldn't be that way, right? And so these are basics of human social interactions. We want to play a game together, we want to divide up into teams. But that sounds like a relatively trivial thing, but try and find the number of games available that allow you to easily do that and each team interaction independently of the others, it's almost impossible. >> It's going to be fun to watch and I think and I hope we're going to learn. Well, thanks for the device. Let's get back to your startup. Let's get a plug in for that, I want to get the plug in. I've seen you in stealth so you can't really go into great detail, but you have been talking to customers. You are obviously related, that's related to Snowflake, but you were going to do some things with Snowflake. You're in the Cloud. Can you just take a minute to give a plug for what you guys are doing for the people who want to know what you guys are leaning towards in terms of the value proposition? >> Yeah well, when I look back in my career, one of the times I enjoyed the most was the time at Oracle and working with data. And I've been fortunate enough for the last four and a half years or so to be on the board of Snowflake. Couple of ex Oracle guys, Benoit and Thierry founded the company and they've reinvented the database. And I felt like I've sat for 20 years looking for the second coming of the database and we all were sort of had fake thinking it was Hadoop. And turns out it wasn't. But I think Snowflake and the separation of storage and compute that allows them to sort of scale and have a usage-based pricing model, I just think is absolutely revolutionary and I think it's going to be one of the great companies of the new era. And so when I was there when I looked at Observe, really the thesis was that using a platform like Snowflake, you could potentially reason about unstructured log data. It's all like Splunk. You could reason about time series data, a little bit like Datadog or tracing data like AppDynamics or in fact any data, you could reason about it together. And today, if you look at the world, it's like if you want to do something with logs, you go get one product. If you want to do something with relational data, you get another, if you want to do time series data, you get another, you want to do tracing, you get an APM tool. And nobody has the big picture, right? Everybody's got their own little piece of data and their own perspective on where the issue might be in your company. But nobody really knows and it's usually put together in the brain of, of the smartest guy in the room. And so I thought it was quite simple. At Snowflake, you've got this commercial database that can do instruction data and time series data and relational data. And what if we could collect all data within an organization together, structure it, relate it, and then imagine what you could find out about your infrastructure, your applications, your business? >> Sort of unification? Does it have like unification kind of concept for users or IT? >> Yeah, I think the emerging category would be observability but it really is a collapsing of log analytics, metrics monitoring and tracing into this new category of observability. We don't necessarily just view that though as sort of data coming out of Kubernetes clusters or out of AWS or wherever. We actually could ingest security data. We could ingest data from people surfing using your app or surfing your website. We could take logs coming out of machines on a factory floor. So the way we built the product, it can be literally any kind of data. And we try and structure it and relate it and make sense of it and then make it very easy for people to navigate through it and determine issues and problems. So yeah, we're pretty excited about it. And like I said, we could not have built this even a couple of years ago because I don't think Snowflake would have been there. And in fact, that was one of the big risks when we started the company. Can we build it on Snowflake? And so here we are two years later and we think we can. Well, we're sure we can do it. >> Yeah, they've had a good run too. I mean, look at the growth of Snowflake. >> Yeah, it's crazy. I've never seen anything like it and in the last 20 years and B2B, I've never seen anything like it. So just like I felt in the mid 90s when I was at Oracle, people were making decisions to go with Oracle and then saying, "Hey, help me get all of my other data in that, "my mainframe data, my this, my that." I think Snowflake are going to go through the same sort of growth phase and hopefully with Observe, we can be like, "Hey, if you want to put "your unstructured data or time series data, "we can help you do that very easily." >> Well, this is exactly the current wave that you want to be on the right side of because like you said, just a year or so ago or a couple of years ago, it wasn't available. This is kind of the new capabilities. >> Yeah, I feel like there's going to be a lot of businesses, grow ridiculously. You talked about the Zoom numbers. These are ridiculous growth numbers and there are going to be companies come out the other side that take advantage of the new environment. And as they're growing, as they're scaling, as they build these new microservice-based applications, they're going to run into issues and we hope at least that it's products with our kind of architecture, that's going to be able to help these fast-growing businesses. So yeah, as I said, we're somewhat fortunate in that we don't have a product yet, but certainly on the other side of this, we think there's going to be plenty of opportunity to help a few folks. >> We know you got to do a launch and we're looking forward to hearing more and getting the briefing, and looking forward to hearing more about it when you go public. And yeah, thanks for coming on and taking the time today. I know you got your daughter's birthday party there and you're going to have some celebration. Thank you for sharing the insights on your vision of digital. I thought that was very compelling and great to see you and stay safe. >> Great to see you. Yeah, my 18-year-old, it's got a birthday party and she like always would worry, "What if no one shows up?" Well, today she knows no one's going to show up. >> Except for her family, yeah. >> It's going to be down in the family, yeah. So thanks for that and you guys stay safe and been great the last 10 years knowing theCUBE been that long but hopefully, here is the next 10 years after this current situation is over. >> Yeah, looking forward to it, it's going to be a lot of fun rye and get the content out there. And again, thanks for coming on during this important time and sharing your insights and also just making some entertainment here. We're getting some conversations so people can fill the void and play some games and have some fun. Jeremy, thanks. Great to see you. Jeremy Burton, senior executive in the industry. I've known him for years, been a CUBE alumni since theCUBE was formed. Now the CEO of Observe, sharing his insights on the industry but more importantly, how to be successful, how to come out the other side. Don't be too optimistic. Be focused on today and get through it. That's his advice. Of course, we're theCUBE bringing you all the data as we can now with remote interviews during this time. Thanks for watching, I'm John furrier. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> From the Silicon Angle Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to the first interview of theCube in our Boston area studio for 2020. And to help me kick it off, Jeremy Daly who is the host of Serverless Chats as well as runs the Serverless Day Boston. Jeremy, saw you at reInvent, way back in 2019, and we'd actually had some of the people in the community that were like hey, "I think you guys like actually live and work right near each other." >> Right. >> And you're only about 20 minutes away from our office here, so thanks so much for making the long journey here, and not having to get on a plane to join us here. >> Well, thank you for having me. >> All right, so as Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes says, "It's a new decade, but we don't have any base on the moon, "we don't have flying cars that general people can use, "but we do have serverless." >> And our robot vacuum cleaners. >> We do have robot vacuum cleaners. >> Which are run by serverless, as a matter of fact. >> A CUBE alum on the program would be happy that we do get to mention there. So yeah, you know serverless there are things like the iRobot, as well as Alexa, or some of the things that people, you know usually when I'm explaining to people what this is, and they don't understand it, it's like, Oh, you've used Alexa, well those are the functions underneath, and you think about how these things turn on, and off, a little bit like that. But maybe, we don't need to get into the long ontological discussion or everything, but you know you're a serverless hero, so you know give us a little bit, what your hearing from people, what are some of the exciting use cases out there, and you know where serverless is being used in that maturity today. >> Yeah, I mean well, so the funny thing about serverless and the term serverless itself, and I do not want to get into a long discussion about this, obviously. I actually wrote a post last year that was called stop calling everything serverless, because basically people are calling everything serverless. So it really, what it, what I look at it as, is something where, it just makes it really easy for developers to abstract away that back end infrastructure, and not having to worry about setting up Kubernetes, or going through the process of setting up virtual machines and installing software is just, a lot of that stuff is kind of handled for you. And I think that is enabled, a lot of companies, especially start-ups is a huge market for serverless, but also enterprises. Enabled them to give more power to their developers, and be able to look at new products that they want to build, new services they want to tackle or even old services that they need to, you know that may have some stability issues or things like long running ETL tasks, and other things like that, that they found a way to sort of find the preferal edges of these monolithic applications or these mainframes that they are using and find ways to run very small jobs, you know using functions as a server, something like that. And so, I see a lot of that, I think that is a big use case. You see a lot of large companies doing. Obviously, people are building full fledged applications. So, yes, the web facing user application, certainly a thing. People are building API's, you got API Gateway, they just released the new HEDP API which makes it even faster. To run those sort of things, this idea of cold starts, you know in AWS trying to get rid of all that stuff, with the new VPC networking, and some of the things they are doing there. So you have a lot of those type of applications that people are building as well. But it really runs the gambit, there are things all across the board that you can do, and pretty much anything you can do with the traditional computing environment, you can do with a serverless computing environment. And obviously that's focusing quite a bit on the functions as a service side of things, which is a very tiny part of serverless, if you want to look at it, you know sort of the broader picture, this service full or managed services, type approach. And so, that's another thing that you see, where you used to have companies setting up you know, mySQL databases and clusters trying to run these things, or even worse, Cassandra rings, right. Trying to do these things and manage this massive amount of infrastructure, just so that they could write a few records to a database and read them back for their application. And that would take months sometimes, for them to get it setup and even more time to try to keep running them. So this sort of revolution of managed services and all these things we get now, whether that the things like managed elastic search or elastic search cloud doing that stuff for you, or Big Table and Dynamo DB, and Manage Cassandra, whatever those things are. I'm just thinking a lot easier for developers to just say hey, I need a database, and okay, here it is, and I don't have to worry about the infrastructure at all. So, I think you see a lot of people, and a lot of companies that are utilizing all of these different services now, and essentially are no longer trying to re-invent the wheel. >> So, a couple of years ago, I was talking to Andy Jassy, at an interview with theCube, and he said, "If I was to build AWS today, "I would've built it on serverless." And from what I've seen over the last two or three years or so, Amazon is rebuilding a lot of there servers underneath. It's very interesting to watch that platform changing. I think it's had some ripple effect dynamics inside the company 'cause Amazon is very well known for their two pizza teams and for all of their products are there, but I think it was actually in a conversation with you, we're talking about in some ways this new way of building things is, you know a connecting fabric between the various groups inside of Amazon. So, I love your view point that we shouldn't just call everything serverless, but in many ways, this is a revolution and a new way of thinking about building things and therefore, you know there are some organizational and dynamical changes that happen, for an Amazon, but for other people that start using it. >> Yeah, well I mean I actually was having a conversation with a Jay Anear, whose one of the product owners for Lambda, and he was saying to me, well how do we sell serverless. How do we tell people you know this is what the next way to do things. I said, just, it's the way, right. And Amazon is realized this, and part of the great thing about dog fooding your own product is that you say, okay I don't like the taste of this bit, so we're going to change it to make it work. And that's what Amazon has continued to do, so they run into limitations with serverless, just like us early adopters, run into limitations, and they say, we'll how do we make it better, how do we fix it. And they have always been really great to listening to customers. I complain all the time, there's other people that complain all the time, that say, "Hey, I can't do this." And they say, "Well what if we did it this way, and out of that you get things like Lambda Destinations and all different types of ways, you get Event Bridge, you get different ways that you can solve those problems and that comes out of them using their own services. So I think that's a huge piece of it, but that helps enable other teams to get past those barriers as well. >> Jeremy, I'm going to be really disappointed if in 2020, I don't see a T-shirt from one of the Serverless Days, with the Mandalorian on it, saying, "Serverless, this is the way." Great, great, great marketing opportunity, and I do love that, because some of the other spaces, you know we're not talking about a point product, or a simple thing we do, it is more the way of doing things, it's just like I think about Cybersecurity. Yes, there are lots of products involved here but, you know this is more of you know it's a methodology, it needs to be fully thought of across the board. You know, as to how you do things, so, let's dig in a little bit. At reInvent, there was, when I went to the serverless gathering, it was serverless for everyone. >> Serverless for everyone, yes. >> And there was you know, hey, serverless isn't getting talked, you know serverless isn't as front and center as some people might think. They're some people on the outside look at this and they say, "Oh, serverless, you know those people "they have a religion, and they go so deep on this." But I thought Tim Wagner had a really good blog post, that came out right after reInvent, and what we saw is not only Amazon changing underneath the way things are done, but it feel that there's a bridging between what's happening in Kubernetes, you see where Fargate is, Firecracker, and serverless and you know. Help us squint through that, and understand a little bit, what your seeing, what your take was at reInvent, what you like, what you were hoping to see and how does that whole containerization, and Kubernetes wave intersect with what we're doing with serverless? >> Yeah, well I mean for some reason people like Kubernetes. And I honestly, I don't think there is anything wrong with it, I think it's a great container orchestration system, I think containers are still a very important part of the workloads that we are putting into a cloud, I don't know if I would call them cloud native, exactly, but I think what we're seeing or at least what I'm seeing that I think Amazon is seeing, is they're saying people are embracing Kubernetes, and they are embracing containers. And whether or not containers are ephemeral or long running, which I read a statistic at some point, that was 63% of containers, so even running on Kubernetes, or whatever, run for less than 10 minutes. So basically, most computing that's happening now, is fairly ephemeral. And as you go up, I think it's 15 minutes or something like that, I think it's 70% or 90% or whatever that number is, I totally got that wrong. But I think what Amazon is doing is they're trying to basically say, look we were trying to sell serverless to everyone. We're trying to sell this idea of look managed services, managed compute, the idea that we can run even containers as close to the metal as possible with something like Fargate which is what Firecracker is all about, being able to run virtual machines basically, almost you know right on the metal, right. I mean it's so close that there's no level of abstraction that get in the way and slow things down, and even though we're talking about milliseconds or microseconds, it's still something and there's efficiencies there. But I think what they looked at is, they said look at we are not Apple, we can't kill Flash, just because we say we're not going to support it anymore, and I think you mention this to me in the past where the majority of Kubernetes clusters that were running in the Public Cloud, we're running in Amazon anyways. And so, you had using virtual machines, which are great technology, but are 15 years old at this point. Even containerization, there's more problems to solve there, getting to the point where we say, look you want to take this container, this little bit of code, or this small service and you want to just run this somewhere. Why are we spinning up virtual containers. Why are we using 15 or 10 year old technology to do that. And Amazon is just getting smarter about it. So Amazon says hay, if we can run a Lambda function on Firecracker, and we can run a Fargate container on Firecracker, why can't we run, you know can we create some pods and run some pods for Kubernetes on it. They can do that. And so, I think for me, I was disappointed in the keynotes, because I don't think there was enough serverless talk. But I think what they're trying to do, is there trying to and this is if I put my analyst hat on for a minute. I think they're trying to say, the world is at Kubernetes right now. And we need to embrace that in a way, that says we can run your Kubernetes for you, a lot more efficiently and without you having to worry about it than if you use Google or if you use some other cloud provider, or if you run on-prem. Which I think is the biggest competitor to Amazon is still on-prem, especially in the enterprise world. So I see them as saying, look we're going to focus on Kubernetes, but as a way that we can run it our way. And I think that's why, Fargate and Kubernetes, or the Kubernetes for Fargate, or whatever that new product is. Too many product names at AWS. But I think that's what they are trying to do and I think that was the point of this, is to say, "Listen you can run your Kubernetes." And Claire Legore who showed that piece at the keynote, Vernor's keynote that was you know basically how quickly Fargate can scale up Kubernetes, you know individual containers, Kubernetes, as opposed to you know launching new VM's or EC2 instances. So I thought that was really interesting. But that was my overall take is just that they're embracing that, because they think that's where the market is right now, and they just haven't yet been able to sell this idea of serverless even though you are probably using it with a bunch of things anyways, at least what they would consider serverless. >> Yeah, to part a little bit from the serverless for a second. Talk about multi-cloud, it was one of the biggest discussions, we had in 2019. When I talk to customers that are using Kubernetes, one of the reasons that they tell me they're doing it, "Well, I love Amazon, I really like what I'm doing, "but if I needed to move something, it makes it easier." Yes, there are some underlying services I would have to re-write, and I'm looking at all those. I've talked to customers that started with Kubernetes, somewhere other than Amazon, and moved it to Amazon, and they said it did make my life easier to be able to do that fundamental, you know the container piece was easy move that piece of it, but you know the discussion of multi-cloud gets very convoluted, very easily. Most customers run it when I talk to them, it's I have an application that I run, in a cloud, sometimes, there's certain, you know large financials will choose two of everything, because that's the way they've always done things for regulation. And therefore they might be running the same application, mirrored in two different clouds. But it is not follow the sun, it is not I wake up and I look at the price of things, and deploy it to that. And that environment it is a little bit tougher, there's data gravity, there's all these other concerns. But multi-cloud is just lots of pieces today, more than a comprehensive strategy. The vision that I saw, is if multi-cloud is to be a successful strategy, it should be more valuable than the sum of its pieces. And I don't see many examples of that yet. What do you see when it comes to multi-cloud and how does that serverless discussion fit in there? >> I think your point about data gravity is the most important thing. I mean honestly compute is commoditized, so whether your running it in a container, and that container runs in Fargate or orchestrated by Kubernetes, or runs on its own somewhere, or something's happening there, or it's a fast product and it's running on top of K-native or it's running in a Lambda function or in an Azure function or something like that. Compute itself is fairly commoditized, and yes there's wiring that's required for each individual cloud, but even if you were going to move your Kubernetes cluster, like you said, there's re-writes, you have to change the way you do things underneath. So I look at multi-cloud and I think for a large enterprise that has a massive amount of compliance, regulations and things like that they have to deal with, yeah maybe that's a strategy they have to embrace, and hopefully they have the money and tech staff to do that. I think the vast majority of companies are going to find that multi-cloud is going to be a completely wasteful and useless exercise that is essentially going to waste time and money. It's so hard right now, keeping up with everything new that comes out of one cloud right, try keeping up with everything that comes out of three clouds, or more. And I think that's something that doesn't make a lot of sense, and I don't think you're going to see this price gauging like we would see with something. Probably the wrong term to use, but something that we would see, sort of lock-in that you would see with Oracle or with Microsoft SQL, some of those things where the licensing became an issue. I don't think you're going to see that with cloud. And so, what I'm interested in though in terms of the term multi-cloud, is the fact that for me, multi-cloud really where it would be beneficial, or is beneficial is we're talking about SaaS vendors. And I look at it and I say, look it you know Oracle has it's own cloud, and Google has it's own cloud, and all these other companies have their own cloud, but so does Salesforce, when you think about it. So does Twilio, even though Twilio runs inside AWS, really its I'm using that service and the AWS piece of it is abstracted, that to me is a third party service. Stripe is a third-party service. These are multi-cloud structure or SaaS products that I'm using, and I'm going to be integrating with all those different things via API's like we've done for quite some time now. So, to me, this idea of multi-cloud is simply going to be, you know it's about interacting with other products, using the right service for the right job. And if your duplicating your compute or you're trying to write database services or something like that that you can somehow share with multiple clouds, again, I don't see there being a huge value, except for a very specific group of customers. >> Yeah, you mentioned the term cloud-native earlier, and you need to understand are you truly being cloud-native or are you kind of cloud adjacent, are you leveraging a couple of things, but you're really, you haven't taken advantage of the services and the promise of what these cloud options can offer. All right, Jeremy, 2020 we've turned the calendar. What are you looking at, you know you're planning, you got serverless conference, Serverless Days-- >> Serverless Days Boston. >> Boston, coming up-- >> April 6th in Cambridge. >> So give us a little views to kind of your view point for the year, the event itself, you got your podcast, you got a lot going on. >> Yeah, so my podcast, Serverless Chats. You know I talk to people that are in the space, and we usually get really really technical. So if you're a serverless geek or you like that kind of stuff definitely listen to that. But yeah, but 2020 for me though, this is where I see what is happened to serverless, and this goes back to my "Stop calling everything serverless" post, was this idea that we keep making serverless harder. And so, as a someone whose a serverless purist, I think at this point. I recognize and it frustrates me that it is so difficult now to even though we're abstracting away running that infrastructure, we still have to be very aware of what pieces of the infrastructure we are using. Still have setup the SQS Queue, still have to setup Event Bridge. We still have to setup the Lambda function and API gateways and there's services that make it easier for us, right like we can use a serverless framework, or the SAM framework, or ARCH code or architect framework. There's a bunch of these different ones that we can use. But the problem is that it's still very very tough, to understand how to stitch all this stuff together. So for me, what I think we're going to see in 2020, and I know there is hints for this serverless framework just launched their components. There's other companies that are doing similar things in the space, and that's basically creating, I guess what I would call an abstraction as a service, where essentially it's another layer of abstraction, on top of the DSL's like Terraform or Cloud Formation, and essentially what it's doing is it's saying, "I want to launch an API that does X-Y-Z." And that's the outcome that I want. Understanding all the best practices, am I supposed to use Lambda Destinations, do I use DLQ's, what should I throttle it at? All these different settings and configurations and knobs, even though they say that there's not a lot of knobs, there's a lot of knobs that you can turn. Encapsulating that and being able to share that so that other people can use it. That in and of itself would be very powerful, but where it becomes even more important and I think definitely from an enterprise standpoint, is to say, listen we have a team that is working on these serverless components or abstractions or whatever they are, and I want Team X to be able to use, I want them to be able to launch an API. Well you've got security concerns, you've got all kinds of things around compliance, you have what are the vetting process for third-party libraries, all that kind of stuff. If you could say to Team X, hey listen we've got this component, or this piece of, this abstracted piece of code for you, that you can take and now you can just launch an API, serverless API, and you don't have to worry about any of the regulations, you don't have to go to the attorneys, you don't have to do any of that stuff. That is going to be an extremely powerful vehicle for companies to adopt things quickly. So, I think that you have teams now that are experimenting with all of these little knobs. That gets very confusing, it gets very frustrating, I read articles all the time, that come out and I read through it, and this is all out of date, because things have changed so quickly and so if you have a way that your teams, you know and somebody who stays on top of the learning this can keep these things up to date, follow the most, you know leading practices or the best practices, whatever you want to call them. I think that's going to be hugely important step from making it to the teams that can adopt serverless more quickly. And I don't think the major cloud vendors are doing anything in this space. And I think SAM is a good idea, but basically SAM is just a re-write of the serverless framework. Whereas, I think that there's a couple of companies who are looking at it now, how do we take this, you know whatever, this 1500 line Cloud Formation template, how do we boil that down into two or three lines of configuration, and then a little bit of business logic. Because that's where we really want to get to. It's just we're writing business logic, we're no where near there right now. There's still a lot of stuff that has to be done, around configuration and so even though it's nice to say, hey we can just write some business logic and all the infrastructure is handled for us. The infrastructure is handled for us, if we configure it correctly. >> Yeah, really remind me some of the general thread we've been talking about, Cloud for a number of years is, remember back in the early days, is cloud is supposed to be inexpensive and easy to use, and of course in today's world, it isn't either of those things. So serverless needs to follow those threads, you know love some of those view points Jeremy. I want to give you the final word, you've got your Serverless Day Boston, you got your podcast, best way to get in touch with you, and keep up with all you're doing in 2020. >> Yeah, so @Jeremy_daly on Twitter. I'm pretty active on Twitter, and I put all my stuff out there. Serverless Chats podcast, you can just find, serverlesschats.com or any of the Pod catchers that you use. I also publish a newsletter that basically talks about what I'm talking about now, every week called Off by None, which is, collects a bunch of serverless links and gives them some IoPine on some of them, so you can go to offbynone.io and find that. My website is jeremydaly.com and I blog and keep up to date on all the kind of stuff that I do with serverless there. >> Jeremy, great content, thanks so much for joining us on theCube. Really glad and always love to shine a spotlight here in the Boston area too. >> Appreciate it. >> I'm Stu Miniman. You can find me on the Twitter's, I'm just @Stu thecube.net is of course where all our videos will be, we'll be at some of the events for 2020. Look for me, look for our co-hosts, reach out to us if there's an event that we should be at, and as always, thank you for watching theCube. (upbeat music)

>> From the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Accenture Tech Vision 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco in the Salesforce Tower. Accenture's taken over five floors of the Salesforce Tower, and they're opening their brand new Innovation Hub. It's pretty cool, formal ribbon cutting earlier today. We're excited to be here. It's three floors of cool innovation, then a couple work floors, so if you get a chance come check it out. A lot co-creation, a lot of neat technology happening. But we're here to talk about something a little bit different, that's championship basketball. So we're excited to be joined by Jeremy Thum, he's the senior director of digital experience from the Golden State Warriors, Jeremy, great to see you. >> Great to see you, thank you. >> And he's accompanied by Greg Jensen managing director from Accenture. Welcome. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> So digital experience, you guys are getting ready to embark on a big new adventure, a big construction project just south of, I was going to say AT&T Park, Oracle Park now at the new Chase Center. >> Yeah. >> A lot of talk, really excitement, tell us about what is going on at the Chase Center. >> There's never a dull moment at the offices these days as the Golden State Warriors organization is going through a pretty big transition. A transformation from basketball team that leases a building 50 nights a year into an entertainment company that owns and operates a world-class facility. And so all eyes are pointing to this project. All thought is going onto the project, and it's a really exciting time in the organization. >> It's really an amazing story of how much impact leadership really has. I mean, you had a perennial doormat franchise, right, that hadn't been to the playoffs for a long time. And David Lee shows up as the first all-star in Lord knows how long, and they have completely transformed their franchise on the basketball side. And now you see the same kind of energy vision, vision, probably, is really the best word, and now moving from Oracle Arena, one of the most beloved basketball home courts into the new Chase Center. So I what if you can just share some insight on what it is like to work for these guys? You know, what is the passion? How do they drive it down through the whole organization? >> It's incredible. I say that on a daily basis there is an energy level and an excitement about taking this organization to the next level, and there is no rest. We know that sports is cyclical, and the performance on the court is going to be cyclical, but the business can operate in a way, and create an environment that a business can succeed and thrive. And that's part of the move into Chase Center is the organization is expanding. The business is expanding into different areas, that we've never been in before, so it's exciting. >> Right. So how long have you been working with the Warriors? >> About 18 months. >> 18 months? And why did they bring you in? What are you helping them with? >> So we are the Warriors' official technology innovation partner. And as Jeremy and the team were thinking through the fan experience, they where assembling a really great team of partners, and one of those partners is Accenture. And so the reason that I'm here is because I spent about 3 1/2 years working with other media companies on transformations, doing sort of similar fan experience design. And it's really my job to bring the best of Accenture to the Warriors and make sure that as they're innovating on the fan experience, that we're helping them and that we're there as great partners to support them along the way. >> So what are some of the things that win the new fan experience besides just being the loudest arena in the NBA? >> Well, I think the most exciting thing that I'm working on with Greg and the Accenture team is the mobile application of the future. We have a Warriors App that exists now that serves a very specific purpose. As we move into a new building in a new district that surrounds the building and have a variety of events, we need a new mobile experience, also, so we will be building this new mobile experience as an application built specifically for the local fan. Anyone that can, or should, or will be coming to the district to enjoy an event at Chase Center. And of course, as we have a global fan base, there will still be content and interesting things to bring in a global audience to the mobile app. But this is really designed for the local fan to say how can we help you if you have a ticket to an upcoming event, or if you don't have a ticket to an event but just kind of want to see what's happening on the district, how can we help that experience along the way? And all the different touchpoints that go along with a game or an event experience. >> Right. So how much of the mobile app is kind of a launching point into the other things that are happening at the Chase Center versus being kind of its self-contained experience in it of itself? >> I'd love for your opinion on this, too. >> Yeah, I think the thing that the Warriors have done really well is they've positioned technology as enabler of the overall end-to-end experience. And so think of the mobile app as sort of the gateway that ties a lot of that experience together. But certainly there are other exciting activations that will happen within the Chase Center throughout the district, and the Warriors know how to put on a great show, both on the court and off. And so it's really that blend of sort of that background technology that's orchestrating this in concert along with that front, in-your-face, exciting Warrior brand and anthem that is really going to get folks excited. >> Yeah, we talk an awful lot about how we don't want technology to be the story. We want it to live in the background and help enhance the fan experience rather than being the headline. >> Right, I was going to say I'm sure the purists are like, I want to come watch a basketball game. It's a beautiful game, this is why I'm paying a big ticket price because this is what I want to watch. I don't need all these distractions of all these other things. So when you think about the experience and integrating it, as you said, as an amplification of watching the basketball game versus a distraction or something that takes away from the core. How do you kind of balance those priorities? How do you kind of level set a new feature request or a new workflow request? Versus, you know, don't forget at the end of the day, it's still about the basketball game first. >> It is, and in addition to the basketball game, it's all about the 200 other events that will be there. Think of all the concerts and family shows that could be coming to a facility that San Francisco has never had before. So the mobile experience is supposed to get enhanced, and I think were spending a lot of time thinking through. The moment you think about coming to an event, is when that sort of experience begins, and the mobile app should be a conduit to help and not get in the way of the experience, which is that thing that's on the stage or on the court. >> Right. A really good friend of mine is Bill Schlough, he's the CIO of the Giants, right, and every year they go through some big huge technology play, whether it's a new jumbo tron or it's new wifi under the seats. It's this really cool, like you said, this delicate balance where you want to bring in the tech, and people are expected to have tech. They want their Instagram to work when they send a picture with the kids. But, again, it's got to be, I don't want to say secondary, but it is secondary or a little bit behind the scenes. >> And I think the Warriors have been really thoughtful around using the application to help coming to the district and Chase Center become an experience. And what I mean by that is, your ability to do wayfinding from your home to get to your seat. Your ability to book a car service if you choose to leave the district or after a game. The ability to just sort of make your life more simplistic around the game, so that getting to and getting from the event is much simpler and much more streamlined for the fan. But when your in that experience, sure, you can pull up the stats to see that Stephs hit 11 three pointers in a row and broken Clay's most recent record. Or you certainly can just enjoy the game for what it is. >> Right, right. All right, before I let you go, thanks for bringing the trophy, too, Jeremy. Very nice. What's one or two totally unique nuggets that you can share at the Chase Center that are completely new and maybe kind of fall below the radar that you think are pretty cool? >> Well, I don't know if I want to give too many secrets away, but I will say that I think the experience will be something that cannot miss. From the visuals and where it's placed, I think just the visuals when you see the aesthetics is going to blow everyone away. And I think, hopefully, if we do it right, the technology and the mobile experience will be an element to it, but won't be the leading story. >> All right. Well, thanks for stopping by. Congrats on all the rings. And I look forward to one more season, right? We have one more season to go? >> Here we go! >> All right, thanks a lot. >> Thank you. >> All right he's Greg, he's Jeremy, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Accenture Innovation Hub in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back here to Las Vegas. We're in the Sands expo, we're in Hall D. If you happen to be at the show or dropping in just to watch, come on by and say hi to us. Love to see you here on theCUBE, as we continue our coverage, day two. And along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls. And now we're joined by a couple of gents from HUB International, Seth Morrell, who's the vice president of enterprise, architecture and design. Seth, good morning to you. >> Good morning. >> And Jeremy Embalabala, who is the director of security architecture and engineering, also at HUB International. Good morning, Jeremy. >> Good morning. >> Seth, by the way, playing hurt, broken finger with a snowblower in Chicago on Monday. >> On Monday. >> Yeah, good luck though with the winter. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, it started off well. >> Sorry to see that, but thanks for coming regardless. >> No problem. >> All right, tell us about HUB International a little bit, about primary mission and then the two of you, what you're doing for them primarily. >> Right, right, so HUB International is an insurance brokerage. Personal, commercial, we do employee benefits, retirement as well. We're based in the US in Chicago, operate in US and Canada. 500 plus locations, 12,000 employees. >> Okay, and then primary responsibilities between the two of you? >> Well, I'm the director of security architecture. I'm responsible for all things technical with regards to security, both on the architecture side, engineering and operations. >> All right, so yesterday we were talking about this early, you did a session, you're big Splunk guys, right? So let's talk about what you're doing with that, how that's working for you in general, if you would. >> Yeah, yeah, go ahead. >> Yeah, the reason Splunk Enterprise Security, the on-premise version we actually, people always ask me, are you using Splunk Cloud or Splunk On Prem? And I always joke, well we're using Splunk On Prem in the cloud in AWS. But for us, we're really focused on Splunk as a SIEM, to enable our security operations center to provide insights into our environment and help us detect and understand threats that are going on in the environment. So we have a manage partner that runs our security operations center for us. They also manage our Splunk environment. It helps us keep an eye on both our AWS environment that we have, our Azure environment, and our on-premise data center as well. >> A few people have sort of gotten wary of the idea of a SIEM. People have tried to use SIEMs and they haven't been very successful and they go, "Oh SIEM's a bit of a dirty word." But it sounds like SIEM's actually working for you really well. >> Yeah, I really view a SIEM as a cornerstone of security program. Specifically if you have a mature security operation center, it's really hard to operate that without a SIEM. SIEMs are tricky, they're tricky to implement, they're generally very costly and they require a lot of tuning, a lot of love, care, and feeding in order to be effective. Quite frankly, if you don't get that right, it can actually be detrimental to your security program. But if you put the proper care and feeding into a SIEM, it will be very beneficial to your organization. >> Okay, so what's some of the things that you've been able to do now that you've got Splunk in there and it's helping you manage the security? Because I saw some statistics earlier this morning, where security is basically the second biggest, most popular term here at AWS and at re:Invent. It's clearly front of mind for a lot of enterprises. So what is it that Splunk in helping you to achieve that you wouldn't have been able to go otherwise? >> The biggest thing for us is the aggregation of all of our logs, our data sources in AWS, data sources on prem, our Windows file servers, our network traffic flow data, all of that's aggregated into Splunk. And that allows us to do some correlation with third-party threat intelligence feeds. Take indicators of compromise that are streamed, that are observed out there in the real world, and apply those to data that we're seeing on our actual data sources in our environment. It allows us to detect threats that we wouldn't have been able to detect otherwise. >> Right, how does that translate through to what you're actually doing as a business? I mean, this is a very sort of technology-centric thing, but you're an insurance agent. So how does this investment in security translate into the business value? >> One, it just gives us visibility into the environment, and we can proactively identify potential threats and remediate them before they actually cause an impact to the business. Without these tools and without these capabilities, it'd be a much riskier endeavor. And so it's helped us throughout, and we've been good partners with Splunk, they're been good partners with us. And coupled with all the other things that we're doing in the security space and in the cloud space, we're able to build a nice secure environment for our customers and ourselves. >> We're also a very highly regulated industry, so we have regulations that we have to comply with for security. And our customers also care about security very, very deeply. So it allows us to be able to protect our customers' data and really assure our customers that their data is safe with us, whether that data is hosted on-prem or it's in the cloud. >> What about that battle? There's often a battle between private enterprise and regulation, just in general, right? It's making sure the policy makers understand capabilities and real threats as opposed to maybe perceptions or whatever. What do you see in terms of the federal regulatory environment and what you deal with in a Balkanized system where you're dealing with 50 states and Canada. So you've got your hands full, I assume. >> So at HUB, we view security and compliance a little differently. Instead of trying to build security programs and achieve compliance by abiding by all the regulations, we do the right thing from a security perspective. We make the right investments. We put the right controls into our environment. When those new regulations come out for provincial law in Canada or different states or GDPR in Europe, that we'll be 95% of the way there, by just building the right controls into our environment at a foundational level. Then we have to just spend our efforts just kind of aligning ourselves with the other 5% that vary from regulation to regulation. >> Was that a shift in management philosophy at all? Because quite often or maybe in the past, it's like, I'm only going to do something. I'm not saying HUB, but in general, when I have to. As opposed to you appear to be preemptive. Right, you're doing things because you should. So there's a different mindset there, right? >> It sounds like a much more strategic view of security rather than a tactical reactive kind of security. How long has that been the philosophy at HUB? >> So we really built out our a security program starting the beginning of last year. There's all new leadership that came in, Seth came in, myself came in, all new leadership across the organization. And that's really where that mindset came from. And the need and recognition to make an investment in security. We view security as a driver of business, not just a cost center. It's a way we can add to the bottom line and be able to generate revenue for the business by being able to show our customers that we really care about their data, and we're going to do our best to take of them. So with that mindset, we can actually help market, and use that as a marketing tool to be able to help drive business. >> So what are some of the things that you've seen here at the show that you're thinking about, well actually that will support my strategy? Some of the more longer term things. Is there anything that's sort of stuck out to you as sort of going, ooh, that's something that we should actually take back? >> Yeah, well, there's some tactical announcements that are very important to us. The announcement of Windows File Server support. File Server support is big deal for us. We're a heavy File Server organization. And having that native within AWS is very interesting. There's been some other announcements with SFTP. Other items that we're going to be trying to take advantage of in a fairly quick fashion. And we're excited about that. We've been on our journey to cloud since essentially the summer of 2017 through now. And we're kind of ready for the next steps, the next set of capabilities. And so, a conference like this and all these announcements, we're excited to take a look at the menu and start picking out what we want to eat. >> It's a great buffet. >> Yeah, yeah. >> In a city that's famous for it. >> That's true, that's true. >> All you can eat. >> Yeah. >> All right, so let's talk about the journey then. You said 2017, so it's been a year, year plus into that. And you're excited about what's coming, but what do you need? So I know you got this great buffet that you're looking at, but maybe you don't want the pork. Maybe you want the turkey. What do you need, what do you want the most, you think, to service your clients? >> Right, so, we spent most of our migration just essentially moving what we had over to the cloud. And so, what our next steps are, let's really understand our workloads, let's be smarter about how we're running them, let's take advantage of the appropriate technology, the menu items that are out there, per work load, just to be smarter. We're going to be spending much more time this year looking at more automation, orchestration, and basically maturing our cloud capabilities so that we're ready for the next big thing. And as we acquire another company or there's a new business need, we're working to be more proactive and being able to anticipate those needs with building a platform that we can really extend and build upon. >> I'm sorry, go ahead. >> I have a question on the choosing of workloads then. So are you going to be moving everything to the cloud? Or do you think that there'll be some things that will actually remain on-prem or is it going to be a hybrid cloud? >> Our goal is to go from a data center to a network closet. >> Right. >> So we have moved almost all of our application workloads out of our data center right now. We have a large VDI environment we're looking to move as well. Once that's done, we'll be down to our phone system and a couple other legacy applications that we're trying to determine what we actually want to do with strategically. >> Right, okay. That's a pretty common sort of story. There's a lot of people who are moving as much as they possibly can, and then there's a few little bits that just sort of sit there that you need to decide, do we rewrite this, do we actually need this at all, maybe we just turn it off. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> Are there any capabilities specific to your industry that you need or that you'd like to have refined? Something that would allow you to do your job, specifically in the insurance space, that would be unique to you? Anything floating out there that you say, if we had that, that'll fine-tune this to a better degree or a greater degree? >> So for us, it's all about flexibility. We grow very, very rapidly through our mergers and acquisitions. We bought 52 companies last year and we're on pace to do almost 70 companies this year. So for us, the cloud really enables us to be able to absorb those organizations that we acquire, bring them in much, much faster. Part of the story of our cloud migration, we were able to move the integration time for mergers and acquisitions from six months down to under 90 days. Because we're now able to move those workloads in much, much quicker with the clouds. For us that's really a key capability. >> Well you guys are used to writing checks, dinner's on them tonight, right? >> Definitely. >> Seth, Jeremy, thanks for being with us. >> Thank you. >> Glad to be here. >> We appreciate the time. Good luck with the winter, I think you might need it. >> Yeah, yeah, exactly. >> All right, we'll be back with more from AWS re:Invent. You're watching theCUBE from Las Vegas. (snappy techno music)