>>Hi everyone. Welcome to the cubes coverage of eight of his public sector summit live in Washington D. C, where it's a face to face real event. I'm johN for a year host but virtual events. Hybrid events were hybrid event as well. We've got a great remote interview. Got a guest here in person, Jon Stankovic, president of cloud solutions. Smartronix and Britain was the VP of eight of his managed services, also known as A M. S with amazon web services, jOHN and jOHN and three johns here. Welcome to the cube remote >>in person. >>Hybrid. >>Thanks. Thank you. Great to be on the cube longtime viewer and I really appreciate what you >>do for fun to be here remotely but I feel like it right there. >>Yeah, I love the hybrid if it's only gonna get better next time will be in the metaverse soon. But uh, jOHn on the line there, I want to ask you with AWS managed services, take us through what you guys are doing with Smart Trust because this is an interesting service you guys are working together. How's that relates at the table for us. >>Yeah, well, you know, we're really excited about this announcement, We've been working with Smartronix since we launched A. M S 4.5 years ago. So we've been able to build up working with them, you know, a huge library of automation capabilities and this really just formalised as that in an offer for our joint customers where we can bring the expertise from AWS and Smartronix and offer a full solution that's highly integrated to help help our customers jointly accelerate their cloud adoption as well as their operating model transformation as they start to move to a more devops motion and they need help. We're there together to provide our expertise and make that simple for them. >>Well I appreciate the call. You john b john s over here. Js john Stankevich. Um tell me about Smart trust because you heard what's going on with devoPS to point a whole revolutions going on in devops, you're starting to see a highly accelerated modern application development environment which means that the software developers are setting the pace there, the pace car of the innovation, right? And so other teams like security or I. T. Become blockers. Blockers a drag and anchor. So the shift left on security for instance is causing a lot of problems on the security team. So all this is going on like right now so still the speed is the game. What's your take? >>Sure so absolutely. I think that's where this partnership really really excels. You know, we want customers to focus on their mission, you know, national security, health care outcomes. Um we want them to kind of take the rest off their plate. So when you say some of the quote unquote blockers around security uh Smartronix has invested heavily in a federally authorized platform that sits on top of what a WS has done from a Fed ramp and so right off the bat speed agility. We don't want our customers spending time replicating things that we've done at scale and leveraging what AWS has and so by kind of utilizing this, this joint offer all of a sudden a big part of that compliance is taken care of. Uh, and then things like devoPS, things like SRE models that you hear a lot about, we fold all that into this uh, combined service offering. >>I know a little about what you guys are doing. You mentioned SRE is very cool, but let's take a minute to explain what you guys are doing because you guys are on the cutting edge of solving a lot of problems from infrastructure fools around the deVOPS stack. What are you guys doing in the cloud services? >>Sure. So I think jOHN hit a little bit on it. But you know, we look at AMS as best in breed at scale managing core parts of the U. S. Infrastructure. What Smartronix does is many times customers have some unique requirements and we take that core kind of powered by aims and we try and fill in those kind of complementary skill sets and complementary requirements. And so something like the devops, which is basically making sure that those people developing that software, they have also the ability to manage it and on an ongoing basis. Kind of run it. We develop all the frameworks and that's part of this offering to enable that. >>What's the solution jOHN B because I think you guys don't, this is people have challenges. I want to understand those challenges. And then when they go to the external managed service, what's involved, you walk us through that? Because I think that's important. >>Yeah, sure. You know, it turns out jOHN nailed this one. That moving to the cloud can be, can be a big transformation for many, many enterprises and government teams. Right. They worked for many years and have an ecosystem in their traditional data center. But when they move to the cloud, there's a lot of moving pieces and so what we like to focus on is helping them with the undifferentiated aspects of safely and automating cloud operations. So working with, with Smartronix allows us to take what we're doing across the infrastructure services, around security, around automation, around patching instance management, container management, all of those uh, undifferentiated, heavy lifting passed by now with Smartronix and expertise across the application layer across customers, unique environments across federal and moderate the various government standards and compliance is, and we think we're able to get, take a customer um, from kind of really early stage cloud experience and rapidly deploy configure and get them into a very stable scalable posture operationally on the cloud so that they can start to invest in their people, their skills and their differentiated application on the cloud that really drive the differentiation in their business and not have to worry about best practice configurations and operational run books and, and and automation is and and and the latest dep sec ops capabilities that will pick up for them while they're training and getting, they're getting their emotions in place, >>jOHn is on the Smartronix side. Talk about the difference between scale okay. Which is a big issue with cloud these customers want to have with AMS but then you also have some scale, maybe some scale to but highly compliant environments, regulated industries, for instance, this is the hot areas because scale is unwieldy, but if you don't want get rain it in, it can be chaotic. Right? So also regulations and compliance is a huge issue. >>Yeah. What what we found is um, at times customers look at it and they just get frustrated because it can be kind of intimidating and we as a combined team really have spent a lot of time we have accelerators to walk customers through that process and a really flexible model. If they feel that they have a lot of domain expertise in it, then we'll just kind of be almost a supporter other customers look at it and say, you know, we'd like you to take the entire patch of that compliance and so highly regulated environments. Both commercial D. O. D. National Security, um federal civilian agencies, state and local, they're all looking to this and saying we really want someone that's been through things like the U. S. Audited managed service provider, things like they're managed security service provider, things like fed ramp or D. O. D. Ill four and five. And I think to be honest Smartronix has just invested heavily in that with the goal of reducing all that complexity and it's it's really been taken off and we really appreciate the partnership specifically with jOHn and uh the A. W. S. A. M. S. Team. >>All right so you guys were going together, what's the ultimate benefit to the customer? >>I can I'll give my thing right off the bat all this innovation coming out of A. W. S. Um It's fantastic but only if you have the ability to take advantage of it. And so thousands of new services being rolled out. We really want customers to be able to take advantage of that and let at times us do what we do best and let them focus on their mission. And I think that's what really AWS is all about and we just feel very fortunate to be an enabler of that >>john be talking about talking about the staffing issues too because one of the problems that we have been reporting and this has come up at every reinvest on the max. Peterson about this as well. He's promised last year was gonna train 29 million people. See how that comes out of reinvent when the report card comes back. I was kinda busting his chops a little bit there but he had a smile on his face I think is gonna hit the numbers a lot of times, Maybe people don't have an SRE they don't have a devout person or they have some staff that they're in transition or transforming this is a huge factor. What's your take on this, >>you know, that that is so important, you know, as john mentioned, it's all about helping the customers focused and and their their cloud talent is scarce and it's a scarce resource and you you want to make sure that your cloud talent is working on the cool stuff or they're going to leave and and as you train and skill, these folks, they want to focus on what really impacts the business, what's really differentiating doing, you know, doing the cloud and the necessities on operations and operational tasks and sec ops and things like that, sometimes, that's not the sexiest part of the work that the customer really wants to focus their team on. So again, I think together we're able to help drive high levels of automation and really do that day in and day out work that is not necessarily the differentiator of their business and that's going to attract and keep the best and brightest minds in these in these customers um which allows us to help them with the undifferentiated aspects of of the heavy lifting. >>Not only is availability of people, it's keeping the people, I love that great call out there, Okay, where does this go? Where's the relationship. So you guys are partnering, you have the M. S. Is going on? Strong managed services not gonna go away mormon people were using managed services. It's part of the ecosystem within the ecosystem. What's next in the relationship? >>Well, I think, you know, I'll speak first, john, I'm sure you've got some thoughts to, but you know, we've got so many things on our plate around predictive operations and the predictive capabilities that we're excited about tackling together. Obviously there's all sorts of unique applications that require even deeper capabilities and working with Smartronix to help us, you know, provide even greater insight into the application layer. So I kind of see us expanding um both horizontally as well as well as vertically and horizontally. We've got customers looking at the edge with the outpost solutions and we can snap into those capabilities as well. So there's a tremendous amount of kind of, I'd say vertical and horizontal opportunity that we can continue to expand it together, >>john your reaction, That's >>pretty right on Absolutely. I think john Berger really hit it and I think really machine learning, you know, that's a big area of focus, if you look at all this data is being collected, predictive modeling and so we have this kind of transition from a model where people were basically watching screens reacting and what the AWS MSP offer and what you know, AmS offers is really predicting, so you you're not doing that, you're not reacting, you're proactively ahead of things. And that's the honest truth is AWS is such a well run service. It just doesn't break, you know, it doesn't break like what you see in the traditional kind of legacy infrastructure. And so at times we're just continuing to climb that stack. As, as john mentioned, >>it's really interesting as you guys are, as you're talking, I'm thinking myself just go back a couple of years ago, eight years ago or so. DevoPS is a bad word. Dev's dominate up. So I was through them now, operational leverage is a huge part of this ai operations, um, the entire I. T service management being disrupted heavily by cloud operations that also facilitate rapid development models. Right? So, again, this is like under reported, but it's a really nuanced point hardened operations for security and not holding back the developers is the cloud scale. What's your guys reaction to that? >>Yeah, I completely agree. I think, you know, the automation piece of things and I think customers are still going through transitions. You know, traditionally managed services means a big staff and it's like I said, sitting there watching screens and you flip that model where you have developers actually deploying code and infrastructure to support it. It's, you know, it's very transitional and very transformative and I think that's where an offering, like what we've really partnered on really, really helps because at times it can be overwhelming for customers and we just want to simplify that. And as I've said, let them focus on their mission. >>Amen one last question before we break, because I was talking to another partner, a big part of AWS. Um, and we're talking about SAS versus solutions and sometimes if you're too Sassy, you're not really building a custom solution, but you can have the best of both worlds. A little professional services, maybe some headroom on the stack, if you will your building solutions. So the next question is, as you guys put this cutting edge innovative innovative solution together, how are your customers consuming it? Like what's the consumption? I'm assuming there must be happy because a lot of heavy lifting being taken away, they don't have to deal with house the contract process. >>Well, you know, I think, you know, we have the opportunity, we support customers and kind of all modes of their application stack. So, you know, a full stacks solution. You know, even a legacy architecture moving to the cloud requires a high degree of automation to support it. And then as those applications become modernized over time, they become much more cloud native at some point, they might even become a full stack Starzz offer. So many of our customers actually run their SAAS platform leveraging our capability as well. So, you know, I think it gives the customer a lot of optionality uh, and future kind of growth as they modernize their application stack. >>Yeah, john your reaction. Absolutely. >>I think one of the greatest benefits is it's freeing up funds to do mission work. And so instead of spending time procuring hardware and managing it and leasing data center space, they literally have more funding. And so we've seen customers literally transform their business because this piece of it's done more efficiently and they have really excess and really additional funding to do their mission. >>We love the business model innovation, faster um, higher quality, easy and inexpensive. That's the flywheel gentlemen, Thank you for coming on and get the three. John john thank you. Vice President Cloud Solutions. That Smartronix, thank you for coming on. John Barrington BP of amazon websites managed. There is a also known as AWS and A M. S. A W. S got upside down. W. M. Looks the same. Thank you guys for coming. I appreciate it. Thank you. We appreciate great great Cube covers here. eight of us summit we're live on the ground and were remote. It's a hybrid event. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Quantcast Industry Summit on the demise of third-party cookies, The Cookie Conundrum, A Recipe for Success. We're here with Peter Day, the CTO, Quantcast and Shruti Koparkar, Head of Product Marketing Quancast. Thanks for coming on. Talk about the changing advertising landscape. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> So we've been hearing the story out to the big players, want to keep the data, make that centralized, control all the leverage, and then you've got the other end. You've got the open internet that still wants to be free and valuable for everyone. What's what are you guys doing to solve this problem? Because if cookies go away, what's going to happen there? How do people track things? You guys are in this business? First question, what is Quancast strategy to adapt to third-party cookies going away? What's going to be the answer? >> Yeah, so very rightly said, John. The mission, the Quancast mission is to champion of free and open internet. And with that in mind, our approach to this a world without third party cookies is really grounded in three fundamental things. First is industry standards. We think it's really important to participate and to work with organizations who are defining the standards that will guide the future of advertising. So with that in mind we've been participating with IAB Tech Lab, We've been part of their project, we are same thing with Prebid, who's kind of trying to figure out the pipes of identity the ID pipes of the future. And then also is W3C which is the World Wide Web Consortium. And our engineers and our engineering team are participating in their weekly meetings, trying to figure out what's happening with the browsers and keeping up with the progress there on things such as Google's FLoC. The second sort of thing is interoperability. As you've mentioned that a lots of different ID solutions that are emerging. You have UID 2.0, you have LiveRamp, you have Google's FLoC, and there will be more, there are more, and they will continue to be more. We really think it is important to build a platform that can ingest all of these signals. And so that's what we've done. The reason really is to meet our customers where they are at. Today our customers use multiple Data Management Platforms, DMPs. And that's why we support multiple of those. This is not going to be much different than that. We have to meet our customers where we are, or where they are at. And then finally, of course, which is at the very heart of who Quancast is, is innovation. As you can imagine being able to take all of these multiple signals in, including the IDs and the cohorts, but also others like contextual first party consent is becoming more and more important. And then there are many other signals like time, language, geolocation. So all of these signals can help us understand user behavior, intent and interests. In absence of third party cookies. However there's something to note about these. They're very raw, they're complex, they're messy, all of these different signals. They are changing all the time, their real time. And those incomplete in information isolation, just one of these signals can not help you build up true and complete picture. So what you really need is a technology like AI and Machine Learning, to really bring all of these signals together, combine them statistically, and get an understanding of user behavior intent and interest, and then act on it. Be it in terms of providing audience insights, or responding to bid requests and so on and so forth. So those are sort of the three fundamentals that our approach is grounded in which is industry standards, interoperability, and innovation. And you know, you have Peter here >> Yeah. who is the expert so you can dive much deeper into it. >> So Peter is CTO. You've got to tell us, how is this going to actually work? What are you guys doing from a technology standpoint to help with data-driven advertising and a third-party cookieless world? >> Well, we've been this is not a shock. You know, I think anyone who's been close to this space has known that the third party cookie has been reducing in quality in terms of its pervasiveness and its longevity for many years now. And the kind of death knell is really Google Chrome, making the changes that, they're going to be making. So we've been embarrassing in this space for many years and we've had to make a number of hugely diverse investments. So one of them is in how to, as a marketer how do I tell it my marketing still working in a world without (indistinct). The majority of marketers, completely relying on third party cookies today. It's tell them if their marketing is working or not. And so we've had to invest heavily and statistical techniques, which are closer to kind of echo metric models that marketers are used to have things like out of home advertising. It's going to be establishing whether their advertising is working or not in a digital environment. And actually this as with often the case in these kind of times of massive disruption, there's always opportunity to make things better. And we really think that's true. And you know, digital measurement is often mistaken precision for accuracy and there's a real opportunity to kind of see the wood for the trees if you'd like. And start to come up with better methods of measuring the effectiveness of advertising without third party cookies. And we've had to make countless other investments in areas like contextual modeling, and targeting that third-party cookies and connecting directly to publishers rather than going through this kind of loom escape that's going to tied together third party cookies. So I could, if I was to enumerate all the investments we've made I think it would be here till midnight, but we've had to make a number of investments over a number years. And that level investments only increasing at the moment. >> Peter, on that contextual, can you just double click on that and tell us more? >> Yeah, I mean, contextual it is, unfortunately when I think this is really poorly defined. It can mean everything from a publisher saying, Hey trust us this page is about SUV's, it's a what's possible now. And it's only really been possible the last couple of years which is to build statistical models of the entire internet based on the content that people are actually consuming. And this type of technology requires massive data processing capabilities, it's able to take advantage of the latest innovations in areas like natural language processing. And really gives computers, that kind of much deeper and richer understanding of the internet, which ultimately makes it possible to kind of organize the internet, in terms of the types of content of pages. So this type of technology has only been possible for the last few years. And, but we've been using contextual signals since our inception. Had always been massively predictive in terms of audience behaviors, in terms of where advertising is likely to work. And so we've been very fortunate to keep that investment going and take advantage of many of these innovations that are happening in academia and in kind of an adjacent areas >> On the AI and Machine Learning aspect. That seems to be a great differentiator in this day and age for getting the most out of the data. How is machine learning and AI factoring into your platform? >> I think it's how we've always operated, right from our inception. When we started as a measurement company. The way that we were giving our customers at the time we were just publishers, just the publisher side of our business. Insights into who their audience was, which was using Machine Learning techniques. And that's never really changed. The foundation of our platform has always been Machine Learning from before it was cool. A lot of our, kind of a lot of our co-teams have backgrounds in Machine Learning, and the PhDs in statistics and Machine Learning. And that really drives our decision-making. I mean, data is only useful if you can make sense of it and if you can organize it, and if you can take action on it, and to do that at this kind of scale it's absolutely necessary to use Machine Learning technology. >> So you mentioned contextual also, you know, in advertising we have everyone knows and that world that you got the contextual and behavioral dynamics. The behavior that's kind of generally can everyone's believing is happening. The consensus is undeniable is that, people are wanting to expect an environment where there's trust, there's truth, but also they want to be locked in. They don't want to get walled into a walled garden. Nobody wants to be in a wall garden. They want to be free to pop around and visit sites. It's more horizontal scalability than ever before yet. The bigger players are becoming walled garden vertical platforms. So with future of AI, the experience is going to come from this data. So the behaviors out there. How do you get >> Yeah. that contextual relevance and provide the horizontal scale that users expect? >> Yeah, I think it's a really good point and we're definitely at this kind of tipping point, we think in the broader industry. I think, you know, every publisher, right? We're really blessed to work with the biggest publishers in the world. All the way through to my mom's blog, right? So we get to hear the perspectives of the publishers at every scale. And they consistently tell us the same thing. Which is they want some more directly connect to consumers. They don't want to be tied into these walled gardens, which dictate how they must present their content. And in some cases what content they're allowed to present. And so, you know, our job as a company is to really provide level the playing field a little bit. Provide them the same capabilities they're only used to in the walled gardens, but let, give them more choice. In terms of how they structure their content, how they organize their content, how they organize their audiences, but make sure that they can fund that effectively. By making their audiences and their environments discoverable by marketers, measurable by marketers, and connect them as directly as possible to make that kind of ad funded economic model, as effective in the open internet as it is in social. And so a lot of the investments we've made over recent years have been really to kind of realize that vision, which is, it should be as easy for a marketer to be able to understand people on the open internet, as it is in social media. It should be as effective for them to reach people in that environment, is really high quality content as it is on Facebook. And so we've invested a lot of our R&D dollars in making that true. And we're now live with the Quantcast Platform which does exactly that. And as third party cookies go away, it only kind of exaggerate all kind of further emphasizes the need for direct connections between brands and publishers. And so we just want to build a technology that helps make that true, and gives the kind of technology to these marketers and publishers to connect, and to deliver great experiences without relying on these kind of walled gardens. >> Yeah. The direct to consumer, direct to audience is a new trend. You're seeing it everywhere. How do you guys support this new kind of signaling from for that's happening in these new world? How do you ingest the content, ingest this consent signaling? >> We were really fortunate to have an amazing an amazing R&D team. And, you know, we've had to do all sorts to make this, you know, to realize our vision. This has meant things like we, you know we have crawlers which stand the entire internet at this point, extract the content of the pages, and kind of make sense of it, and organize it. And organize it for publishers so that they can understand how their audiences overlap with potentially their competitors or collaborators, but more importantly, organize it for marketers. So they can understand what kind of high-impact opportunities are there for them there. So, you know, we've had to build a lot of technology. We've had to build analytics engines which can get answers back in seconds, so that, you know marketers and publishers can kind of interact with it with their own data and make sense of it and present it in a way that is compelling and then help them drive their strategy as well as their execution. We've had to invest in areas like consent management. Because we believe that a free and open internet is absolutely reliant on trust. And therefore we spend a lot of our time thinking about how do we make it easy for end-users to understand who has access to that data and easy friendly and users to be able to opt out. And as a result of that, we've now got the world's most widely adopted consent management platform. So it's hard to tackle one of these problems without tackling all of them. And we're fortunate enough to have had a large enough R&D budget over the last four or five years, make a number of investments, everything from consent and identity, through to contextual signals, through to measurement technologies, which really bring advertisers and publishers closer together. >> Great insight there. Shruti last word for you. What's the customer view here as you bring these new capabilities of the platform. What's what are you guys seeing as the highlight from a platform perspective? >> So the initial response that we've seen from our customers has been very encouraging. Both on the publisher side, as well as the marketer side. I think, you know, one of the things we hear quite a lot is you guys are at least putting forth a solution and action solution for us to test. Peter mentioned measurement. That really is where we started because you cannot optimize what you cannot measure. So that is where his team has started. And we have some measurement, very very initial capabilities still in alpha, but they are available in the platform for marketers to test out today. So the initial response has been very encouraging. People want to engage with us. Of course, our, you know, our fundamental value proposition which is that the Quantcast platform was never built to be reliant on third party data, these stale segments. Like we operate we've always operated on real time live data. The second thing is our premium publisher relationships. We have had the privilege of working like Peter served with some of the biggest publishers but we also have a very wide footprint. We have first party tags across over a hundred million plus web and mobile destinations. And, you know, as you must've heard like that sort of first party footprint, is going to come in really handy in a world without third party cookies. We are encouraging all of our customers, publishers and marketers to grow their first party data. And so that's something that's a strong point that customers love about us and lean into it quite a bit. So, yeah, the initial response has been great. Of course it doesn't hurt that we've made all these R&D investments. We can talk about consent, and, you know, I often say that consent it sounds simple, but it isn't, there's a lot of technology involved. But there's lots of legal work involved as it as well. We have a very strong legal team who has expertise built in. So yeah, a very good response initially. >> Democratization, everyone's a publisher, everyone's a media company. They have to think about being a platform. You guys provide that. So congratulations Peter, thanks for dropping the gems there. Shruti thanks for sharing the product highlights. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you. >> Okay, this is the Quancast Industry Summit on the demise of third-party cookies and what's next The Cookie Conundrum, the Recipe for success with Quancast I'm John Berger with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)